#Thess plays MMOs

[thessalian]

Thess vs the Betrayer of Felassan

I ... don't think I was supposed to do that yet.

Look, one of my things when I play basically any game that involves a fast travel system is to go a little out of my way when I'm travelling to a quest point in basically any area, so I can pick up useful fast travel points for later. The end result is generally not only making later area traversal easier, but ending up overlevelled right to hell for basically everything. Which is about what I need most of the time, especially these days. Anyway, end result was that I tripped over Desmal in Treviso at, like, level ten or something (which is hilarious when you consider that the walkthrough I read later when trying to figure out what the fuck I just did said something about waiting until level twenty, but that's the beauty of Storyteller mode) and ended up being able to unlock the Gate of Deep Sorrows. So I decided to make a detour in the Crossroads and get that off my quest list. That seemed like a good idea.

However, taking on what I later discovered was a level 30 boss at level 14 was ... probably ill-advised. In my defense, I had no idea what I was chasing down and what level we were looking at. Then again, I probably should have had an idea that I was out of my depth when the "trash mobs" were conning level 24. But by that point, I thought, "I'm on Storyteller mode; how bad could this be?"

Here's how bad that could be:

Massive health bar

Armour that needed to be chipped away first

Shield so head-on attacks were generally useless

Strong against ice and I brought Neve

Ranged attacks

Unblockable attacks

UNBLOCKABLE RANGED ATTACKS

Adds - again, with ranged attacks

All of these literally follow Rook around the arena

AoE damage in places

The arena is not large and it's easy to dodge right into a corner and get pummelled

REGENERATING HEALTH. TWICE

And, best of all, his health regen involved an arena-wide unblockable knock-down attack. TWICE

AND THIS WAS ON STORYTELLER MODE

I haven't had a fight like that since I stopped playing MMOs. I started that fight with one health potion, and I was pretty sure I was going to die. However, apparently that whole thing about dealing with fights like this in MMOs have taught me a few things - or at the very least the bloody-minded stubbornness to be, "NO. WE ARE NOT WIPING OR RUNNING. HOLD MY BEER".

(Or, well, coffee mug.)

On the bright side, this did teach me a few things. I learn best by doing, and - in video games, at least - better still out of sheer desperation. So I figured out a fair few things I probably should have sooner. Like ... Harding's healing mechanic. Swapping weapons and why it's a good idea. Charged attacks. How to dodge in a specific direction instead of just hitting space and hoping to get lucky. How to make your companions drop a combo on a motherfucker. How to swap weapons for best advantage in terms of what an enemy's weak to. And even how to do that "Press E To Commit Mortal Kombat-Style FATALITY" thing (granted, that was one of the adds, but still). And in the end, with zero health potions, everything on cool-down, and about two-thirds health, I beat the motherfucker.

You have no idea how much my arms hurt. Everything from the shoulders down. And across my upper back. So much tension and button-mashing and AAAAAAAAA. Yeah. See, this is why I thought I was going to have problems playing this game. But at least fights like that are only once in awhile, and I can see them coming now. And who knows? Maybe the things I learned in the process of that will make other fights easier.

For now, though, quick trip to the corner shop because I think I deserve cola. And possibly chocolate. Hopefully the ibuprofen will have kicked in by the time I get back, but I'm going to wander a bit more around Minrathous either way. Either the ibuprofen will have kicked in and I'll feel better, or it won't have had much effect and I'll hyperfocus past it by running around Minrathous with Neve.

It occurs to me that Varric must have met Neve and gone, "You literally stepped out of one of my novels, didn't you?"

[thessalian]

Thess vs TLOVM S3, Ep 10

I was thinking about some more Silent Hill 2, but by the time I was ready to settle and maybe play, it felt like a bad idea. I have work tomorrow and playing until midnight is probably a surefire way to fuck up my sleep patterns entirely. So I'm going to watch more TLOVM instead. Not sure that'll be any better, but we shall see.

Ah, tiny rewind.

Yeah, our sentiments exactly, Grog.

Keyleth... I get it, I do, but what the fuck could they have done differently? Even you were doubting your own thoughts on the matter at the end. I mean, if they hadn't trusted Raishan at the beginning ... what would have happened? Apart from Raishan probably kicking their asses right then and there, I mean.

Oof. Greyskull Keep looks rough.

...And so does Scanlan.

Vax, are you eating yourself alive with guilt some more?

Oh, Vex. Not sure if Percy'd be up for that.

Heh. This is kind of what Vax thought would happen before the dragons attacked. In the campaign, I mean. Vax was all, "What's our purpose now, as a team?" and Matt was inwardly bouncing up and down squeaking, "Just wait ten more minutes..."

"I GOT BOOZE! AND NAKED LADIES! AND NAKED LADIES COVERED IN BOOZE!" I do like how they do very occasionally remember that Scanlan and Grog did the brothel circuit together. (Well, not together-together. I don't think Grog swings that way and there are some size-related logistics and... Okay. Mind. Gutter. EVICT.)

Huh. Interesting take on Scanlan's resurrection in the campaign, and why Kaylie had to be involved.

Pike ... you know Grog by now. PLEASE come back and tell him you didn't mean literally...

...There ... are ... worse things to find suddenly coming into your bedroom while you're in nothing but a towel? Maybe? Still wanna know why they didn't teleport direct to Kaylie, but ... I'm sure there's a reason.

ALLURA OMG.

Oh, Pike.

Okay, where're you off to, Kiki? Oh. Home!

Fred Tatasciore - who you? Anything I've seen? ...THAT'S Soldier 76?!? BENZO was Soldier 76?!? .........MASTER GNOST-DURAL?!? Wait - what happened to Lance Henriksen?!? He's still alive and hasn't retired, so ... wait. They got the voice actor for TANNO VIK to do MASTER GNOST-DURAL?!?!? ...Also Dr Ogurrobb and I am learning so much about one of the last MMOs I ever played seriously... *ahem* Beyond that, a lot of Star Wars in general (including Vader a few times, and Qui-Gon in Clone Wars), he's done the Hulk in a lot of things, seems to specialise in "creature vocals" ... including a lot of zombie voices in Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 ... also apparently fluent in Simlish. And some Bioware - Jade Empire and Mass Effect 2 and DA2 and... HE WAS THE FUCKING POETRY TREE?!?

Sorry, this deserves a blip all its own for all you Bioware fans out there. Saren Arterius voiced the fucking DA:O poetry tree.

Well. I did not mean to go that far down the rabbit hole. Just to say that Fred Tatasciore has been voice acting a long time - probably longer than most of you have been alive. (I'd feel really old now, but I was only like five when he started.) Now, OFF IMDB, THESS.

Heh. I feel you, Korrin. Gardens ... are a learning experience.

Korrin, you know she's gonna.

Oof. I forgot what a shithole Stilben is.

Wait, the Ashari did that?!? I forgot that.

Ooh! Hi Matt, and hi TABAXIIIIII!

Tabaxi with a pepperbox.

Nobody ever looks up.

So ... where'd Vax get the money? Did I blink and misss it?

Huh. So she's going to get the ritual from the wind?

That ... was ominous, Matt-baxi...

Ah. No, she's going to make someone listen.

She has not earned?!? Lady, you're an ass.

Ah. That's where that line in the trailer come from.

YES. LISTEN TO THE EARTH ASHARI; IT'S THEIR FUCKING RITUAL.

Lady, what is up your ass?!?

Vex. You are a ranger. You know from stalking. Patience is a huge part of a hunt. I get it, but chill the fuck out?!?

Aaaaand that's all the people who didn't make it-- yep.

Waitwut?!? Oh...

Veeeeeeex ... chiiiiill... Oh fuck no.

That looks ... strategically precarious.

Yeeeep.

Ohfuck.

KENKUUUUUU! Also OFUCK.

C'mon, Keyleth...

Cmooooooooooooon, Keyleeeeeeeeth...

Nonononononono...

Hi, Vax.

Well. If they ever do the vow renewal, this'll be a bad flashback for her...

N'awwwwww, Veeeeex...

OW OW OW...

Niiiice shot. Also, sorry, Vex.

C'moooooooon...

YES!

Whooooooooa.

Hold on to yourself, Keyleeeeeth...

She's seeing Ripley. She's seeing the twins OMG. She's too tied to Vax!

NEVER TRUST "IT LOOKS CLEAR"-- Yeah there we go.

...I. Will feed. The writer(s). BEEEEEEEES. So I must identify the writer(s). Well, Meredith I-cannot-prounce-that is staff writer, but lead writer iiiiiiiiiis ... Suzanne Keilly. And IMBD saaaaays... Warrior Nun, Ash vs the Evil Dead, and some horror stuff like Slumber Party Massacre and ... Leperchaun Returns?!? They made a sequel of fucking Leperchaun?!? Or, sorry -- another sequel of fucking Leperchaun?!?

(Side note: they're fucking rebooting Leperchaun at some point in the future?!? Gods, some things really do not need that many sequels. Leperchaun is, like, eight of them.)

Okay, I won't feed Suzanne Keilly bees. She wrote a Leperchaun sequel. She's suffered enough.

Yeah. Should've known that one episode of TLOVM was still going to fill me with adrenaline. Still, probably not as much as a first turn-around in Woodside Apartments.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Next Fest 2024

Well, once again I have put a variety of things on hold to examine the offerings available in the Steam Next Fest this year. These days, checking out the indie offerings is more important than ever for me, at least if I want to play new games. So many of the AAA companies are going into the action RPG space, and I have a very hard time playing those for accessibility reasons. So if I want new games, most of the time I'm relying on the indie companies who are happy to ... you know, not chase The Next Big Thing.

This year, though, I'm going to avoid talking about the ones I couldn't get my head around and just stick with the ones I liked, especially the ones that went almost immediately to the top of my wish list.

Once Human: This one's going to be a MMO, looks like. A lot of PVE, some PVP (someone was asking about that in the group chat but I'll be giving that a swift NOPE). The set-up is ... take The Secret World but if the Filth was winning, toss in some elements of Control, and then add survival and crafting elements. This? This makes it my jam and I MUST HAVE IT YES.

Tavern Talk: This one's just cute. You're basically an innkeeper - you make drinks for adventurers and manage the quest board, collecting rumours and hints and putting them together to form coherent quests to send those adventurers out to deal with. That's another must-have from me. I could do with some cute.

Simple Trains: This is one of those Zen ones. You basically set up little rail lines for trains to use, buying new cars and station upgrades as you go, until passenger traffic outweighs what you can cope with. As long as you get a certain number of passengers through, you progress to the next level. I could do with a bit more Zen, so I WANT IT.

Polyoshapes: More Zen, because Zen is my deal most of the time. This one's a little Tetris-esque, sort of, but less frenetic - you get a border and a collection of Tetris-block shapes, and you have to fit the latter into the former with no overlap. It's one of the ones I'm keeping as a demo until the game officially comes out, just because it's got replayability even in demo form.

So To Speak: This one's neat because it's a language-learning game. I did a fair bit on Duolingo until Duolingo went way more competitive than I wanted it to be. Apparently I remember enough to go through the demo reasonably well, so that's nice, but I still want to learn more and this game seems a fun way to do it, so... Yeah, it goes on the list.

Neko Odyssey: More Zen, and this one's just cute. Basically you run around getting pictures of cats for your social media. The demo's really basic, but it's the kind of basic where I can see what the other mechanics will be in the full game - buying treats and toys to lure cats down from places you can't photograph them, stuff like that. Another one I'm looking forward to.

Urban Jungle: Plant-keeping sim. Can't really say "gardening sim" because you don't really garden. What you do is pick up plants and look at their care notes, then arrange your room to keep them healthy, which gives you more points for more plants, etc. Another fun little Zen game when it arrives.

Haunted House Renovator: Think House Flipper with a Ghostbusters vibe, sort of. You inherit this big haunted house and you not only have to fix it up, but also placate or vacate the ghosts and gremlins and everything living in the place. There's even a "play nice with the ghosts vs be mean to the ghosts" sort of set-up. This one still needs work, because the demo controls are a little janky, but the premise is interesting and its release date is still TBA, but that just gives me confidence that it'll get the work it needs.

Blue Prince: I struggle to properly describe this one. Another "you inherit this house but..." game, but with an entirely different premise. You build the house layout as you go, day by day, and you have to arrange your build in such a way as to get to a secret room at the very back of the grid. There's a lot of trickiness about it, and I think they need to dial the difficulty back a little bit, but it's another TBA release date so I figure they're probably getting enough input to tone that shit down. Either way, it's cool. That's the kind of "beating your head against the mechanics" I don't mind so much. Well, at least it doesn't cause me physical pain...

Projected Dreams: Physics puzzle sort of game. You have a projector and have to arrange objects to fit a certain silhouette.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: This isn't so much from the Next Fest as a recommendation from @fauxfire76 but I did the demo for Little Hope anyway. First thing I thought was, "This looks like Until Dawn", and then saw that yeah, their developer Supermassive is the same developer that made Until Dawn, which just goes to show that I'm getting pretty savvy about developers (that or Supermassive is just making the same basic game over and over again). I honestly thought about adding Until Dawn to the wishlist (it's getting a PC release soon) but then I saw that I'd have to sign on to the PSN to play it and realised I probably didn't want to play a game that went Like That about the wendigo anyway, so I'll stick with the ones that ... aren't that.

Tiny Glade: Little Zen sandbox builder. It's cute and I love it.

I've got a few more demos to go through, and will dig around for more before Monday, but that's the ones I've played so far that didn't immediately get thrown down a hole. Yes, I still need to finish Forbidden West, and I will, but Next Fest doesn't come around that often and I like to take advantage of it.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Game Mood

Sometimes Reddit is nice. Sometimes Reddit is ridiculous.

Y’know DREDGE, right? The eldtrich fishing simulator which has taken up the same space as Stray in the "Surprise Indie Game Phenomenon”? Well, Reddit’s where I heard the good news - three free QOL updates (photo mode, an easy mode where nothing will attack you if all you want to do is fish, and being able to customise your ship) and one paid DLC to be out at the end of the year. Which, y’know, hype. The DLC content looks like it could still fit the themes of DREDGE by nudging it slightly towards a The Secret World place - creepy corporation (attached to the place that the Researcher in Stellar Basin studied) that you can do some Pursuits for and learn about. Which means new zone. And the photo mode and ship customisations aren’t just being thrown in - even that free content will involve new quests, new NPCs, and new fish.

So I’m reading some people squee, and others bitching about having to pay for the DLC, and some bringing in the “high” price of the base game with someone else thankfully flagging up, “Look, I’ve spent 20 hours on this, and I paid $20 or so for this, so that’s paying $1 per hour of entertainment, and that’s cheap when you look at, like, a movie ticket”. Which is frankly true and honestly, I’d rather pay £20-plus-a-bit to an indie dev bringing out an exciting new game than pay £50-or-more to a AAA publisher bringing out a same-old market-standard game whose run time is padded out with grind and whose developers were overworked, underpaid, and mistreated.

On the subject of “same old market-standard games” ... then there was the one individual who went, “Yay new content! But I really think there’s an opportunity here for a full MMO experience; online co-op, PVP, so much potential!”

To which I was blinking and going, “You ... did play the game ... right?”

The whole point is you being on your own in a big empty sea. It’s the loneliness and borderline helplessness and seeing how big the world is and wondering what’s lurking under that peaceful-looking water and sometimes unexpectedly finding out and... It’s a game in which you need to be alone and unable to really fight anything.

So ... online co-op? PVP? MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER? What the fuck? I mean, yeah, there’s a place for “competitive fishing simulator” but DREDGE is not that place. This is what I mean when I talk about how some people are bullied into accepting “some games just aren’t for you” out of ableist bullshit by the same people who try to turn everything into the kind of games they personally like and won’t take, “some games just aren’t for you either” as a response. Entitled neckbeard bullshit.

I may have made a comment to the effect of, “I think it’d ruin the lonely eldritch vibe if you had several dozen boats camping the same rare fish spawn point”. Didn’t get a reply, which is probably just as well.

Right. The work week begins. Ugh.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Group Content

I’ve been watching MMO filk-parody stuff on YouTube today. Since it’s been a reminiscence-themed week, it seems only fitting that today be devoted to reminiscing about MMO dungeon stuff.

I think the one I still remember best, admittedly, was the time my dinky-ass White Mage finished off that one stupid demon wall in Amdapor Keep. I mean, I say ‘dinky-ass’ in the sense that I played a lalafell, since I was pretty well-geared at the time, but ... well, you know. Lalafell with the height slider down to its fullest extent. Jallira the lalafell was as tiny as every other version of that character. Small and red-haired and unbelievably adorable.

Anyway, we’d hit that stupid demon-wall at Amdapor Keep and our DPS was ... erm ... well, it was unfortunate that we had melee DPS almost entirely, because that knockback the wall does is a bitch and if you’re not positioned just right, it’ll punt you right into the Murder Hole on either side of the room. Which is what happened - both to the DPS and then, eventually, the tank as well. At which point I thought to myself, “I’m not going through this again; we are not wiping this”. The wall had maybe 1/6 of its health left, my damage rating as White Mage was negligible... The only thing I had going for me was that my heal numbers were excellent, I knew the enemy’s attack patterns and given my HoT numbers, it was almost impossible for me to die. So while the DPS are going, “Sorry. Wipe!”, I was turning around to @true0neutral (who was in group with me, though I don’t remember whether tank or DPS) and saying, “I am not going through this again; we are not wiping this fight!”. And, with liberal application of the few damage spells in a WHM’s arsenal, managed to finish the damn thing off.

As I recall, that entire group barring @true0neutral was made of absolute stupid and I was well within my rights to kill a giantic demon wall out of pure spite.

Unfortunately, healers do not always prosper when trying to tackle a boss alone. This I learned to my intense dismay in The Secret World, particularly that time when the group I called the Motley (comprised of @true0neutral, @fauxfire76, @generalmaximus (haven’t seen you around much, man; how’re you doing?), and @maitai-ippai (similarly haven’t seen you around in awhile) tried Nightmare Mode Hell Raised and managed to make it as far as the final boss - the Machine Tyrant. I honestly qualify that entire nightmare of a ... did we spend like an hour trying to get past that fight? Felt like at least that long ... anyway, I’m pretty sure trying to survive that fight and keep everyone else alive is why I’m so good at dodge-rolling in GW2 these days. I mean, we did eventually give up on that one entirely because it just got too frustrating (especially for @generalmaximus, who was tanking for us) but I recall there being screenshots of me being the last meep standing, running for my life as the Machine Tyrant chased me around, mostly because it goes against my nature to just stand there and let something cream me.

I admit, mostly I remember in generalities. I remember the tank in TSW that said “What’s a builder?” and obliged @fauxfire76 to pick up his tank build mid-dungeon to get us through it despite wanting to go DPS that time around. I recall the first time I hit Lost City of Amdapor as healer and when we got to Diabolos and his stupid-ass door mechanics, having the tank say, “Screw the doors; we just burn him”, obliging me to heal through the insane damage and debuffs (and finding out how good being a bubble-healer can actually be, which is why I tended to go Selene rather than Eos when I hit Astrologian). I recall Ops in TOR - I didn’t get to play DPS much once I had my Consular levelled and could reclaim the mantle of Healbabe (no matter how much I wanted to just wreck shit up, but never mind), but when I did get to bring my Saboteur Smuggler out to play, I recall basically being added to the guild lexicon so that “to pull a Mychae” meant “to instantly attract every trash mob on a pull no matter how good the tank is because your AoE damage numbers are that fucking insane”.

Mostly I remember learning to tank. I was sure I was going to be shit at tanking. I was not shit at tanking. This is kind of gratifying. Of course, GW2 doesn’t really have that kind of role, so that’s a bit of a shame, but hey. I mean, I’d maybe ponder WoW again if I ... y’know, had a job to ensure I could keep my sub up (not to mention afford the expansions I missed), and if the concept of keeping up with that much fucking lore didn’t scare me rigid, and if I had a guild that would be patient with me, and...

Yeah, no, no more WoW for me.

Anyway, there’s my little MMO reminiscence, at least in terms of group content. Whether this stuff is something you shared with me or it just sparks off memories of your own MMO experiences, hope it brought a smile.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Video Game Romance

Random Googling to identify a place name in Horizon Zero Dawn that I’d tripped over but couldn’t pinpoint to a location ended with me tripping over something that I really didn’t expect. I mean, I probably should have expected the thing, but I did not expect the thing.

Basically, for some reason, asking where “the Cut” is in HZD will get related queries about romances in this game, and more to the point, complaints about there not being any. I also found a top ten list of games that people wish had romances in them, HZD being one of them. Other items on that list included “remaster Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3 to let us have romances”, Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World (”Because we’re allowed to have a house; why not a spouse?” was the theory) ... and fucking Dark Souls - something about, “Why not a tiny bit of light to shine in the darkness of the world?”

How about because “that’s not the point”?

Now, I like a good video game romance as much as the next person. This is a lot of why I play Bioware games. But let’s be fair here: the romance - not just a particular romance, but the entire concept of romance - needs to fit into the game’s structure from both the narrative and gameplay perspectives, or it’s just going to feel shoehorned in and distract from the game’s themes. Some games just aren’t built to have a romance in them. Does that leave the option for fanfic romance later? Yes. Yes, it does. Like, @galleywinter has an entire fic series sort of thing that covers exactly that, in an AU sort of way. That’s pretty awesome, as it goes - means that the NPC is developed enough to want to have an IC relationship with and that there’s scope within the game to make a character with thoughts and feelings rather than just an avatar to hit things and get loot. But trying to shoehorn an in-game romance like that into the structure of a MMO like World of Warcraft? Nope. The only MMO I’ve seen that’s successfully done in-game NPC romance is, again, Bioware - with Star Wars: The Old Republic. And even that’s kind of kept off to the side somewhat, and is a lot to do with Bioware’s attempt at keeping the single-player experience and the multiplayer experience very separate. TOR has you there for your character’s story, whichever one you happen to be playing at the time (at least until the Makeb thing and beyond broke off from the “each class gets its own story” thing the game had going on). That works ... moderately.

By ‘the structure of the game’, what I mean is ... well, companions. Bioware games have you taking at least one companion around. TOR gives you one. Mass Effect gives you two. Dragon Age? Three. Thus it’s pretty easy to have your NPC love interest tagging along with you, which is what you want when you’re in love, right? Skyrim and Fallout 4 also have that, with Skyrim having the added advantage of “You have a house and if your spouse isn’t the adventuring type, they can stay home and you can come back to them to tell stories of what you’ve been up to and just Be With Your Partner”. That works fine. The thing is, the game’s mechanics and world set-up allow for that. A lot of the other games ... not so much.

Horizon Zero Dawn, for instance. Aloy is a Seeker. She hasn’t considered herself to have a permanent home since the Hero’s Journey thing kicked off in usual Dead Mentor style with the mess at the Proving. She’s been nominally alone for most of her life and she’s pretty clearly still not sure whether to trust people being nice to her. Flirtation is not something she necessarily recognises and it’s clear from when Erend does it that she’s just like, “What the fuck?” and it takes awhile to get past that. That’s character stuff, but there’s also logistical issues. Without a permanent living space, she doesn’t have anyplace for a spouse to just ... stay. And having an AI companion following her around would get really problematic for some of the stealth stuff that people enjoy in this game because either the companion’s AI would have to be incredibly good (which ... we just aren’t there yet) or the enemies’ AI would have to be programmed not to notice your companion, like in TLOU1. So it’s theoretically possible, but awkward and would distract from that feeling of quiet discovery that makes this game what it is. (Plus if you went for Varl, you’d have issues where you’re going into ancient ruins all the time and he’d be exiled for that.)

Do I support writing fanfic of Aloy figuring out romance with whichever NPC a player chooses? Hell yes. Do I support it being crammed into the actual game? Hell no.

Final Fantasy XIV ... it’s a MMO. I’ve already discussed why that kind of thing doesn’t normally work in MMOs. Plus there are too many NPCs, no voiced PC dialogue, and too much else to do without having to stop mid-quest to head wherever in the world your NPC crush is. If they’re not doing something rash, getting possessed and/or getting themselves killed, anyway. Again, I totally get it and at least one of my Warriors of Light had quite the crush on Thancred (largely while he was still being voiced by Taliesin Jaffe). But I can write that quite happily, if I want to, without actually having it acted out for me by little computer avatars.

Dark Souls ... I mean, come on, don’t even start. There’s hardly any human beings in that game. And one female-presenting ... being ... deciding to not kill you does not a romance make. Unless someone’s seriously suggesting shoehorning in a love interest from ... like, where? You’re an undead deciding the fate of the world; where the hell does getting smoochy with someone come in? “Let’s have a bit of light in the darkness of that world” my arse; I don’t even play Dark Souls and I know that’s not the point. Same situation as Horizon Zero Dawn, really - why do we need romance when there’s so much else to do and explore? When are we going to find time for it in between hunts? Is it supposed to happen during the hunting and exploration and awe-inspiring discoveries? Isn’t that going to break the ‘contemplative solitude’ mood that adds to this game’s richness and depth?

There’s an issue, I think, where the line between “a game should be accessible to everyone” and “a game needs to appeal to everyone” has been either erased or is so mobile that it becomes just a lump of, “a game should be accessible to me personally, all the time, and cater to my every whim”. I would personally love to play Dark Souls for the whole “the world tells the story” bit but I know that the mechanics would piss me off and the lack of a story mode is a deal-breaker for me from a health perspective as much as anything else. It’s FromSoftware’s prerogative to refuse to add a story mode. I may complain, but that’s on a sheer accessibility level.

The other place I may complain - and even then only a little - is when a game that does allow romances doesn’t allow the romance I would personally like. That’s only a minor annoyance, though, because romance is part of the structure of the narrative and the gameplay, and there’s this character that matches up perfectly with my own and the game says I can’t romance them. But again, that’s what fanfic’s for, and the only reason I sulk a little is that feeling of, “I can romance someone else but it’s just not the same”.

What I won’t do is demand that the structure and narrative mood of a game be substantially altered to shoehorn in a romance that I can create far, far better in fanfic. Not everything needs to happen on the screen. Video games are supposed to fire the imagination, not take its place. If you want your character to have any romance, with any NPC in any video game ever? That is exactly what fanfic’s for. And no writer, no matter how good a writer they are, will ever tailor romantic dialogue so exactly to your tastes as you will. So instead of demanding they try ... do so yourself. Or play a game whose structure allows romance.

Basically there’s a difference between demanding concessions for the disabled and demanding unnecessary shoehorned narrative elements because of personal preference. Honestly, things like that fall under the “Be careful what you wish for” category for me - I understand why they’re asking, to a point, but I think what they’d get if their dreams of romances in these games came true would probably be far less satisfying than they think for those specific games that weren’t designed to fit romance into their themes, plot and mechanics. It’s fair if all they want is a dating sim, but there are some perfectly good dating sims with combat! That’s kind of what Bioware does now (sorry, guys, but it’s true).

[thessalian]

Thess vs Games With Meaning

There’s a meme going around that’s all about “top 5 games that were important to you as a child / in your teens” and I’m sitting here going “...well, fuck”.

Because games were not ... like ... that when I was a kid.

Please understand that I was born in the same year as a lot of things. The one most cited is Star Wars: I was born about three months before A New Hope premiered in North America. The other thing? The one that doesn’t get mentioned so much?

The launch of the Atari 2600 console.

While it wasn’t the first video game console (the first was apparently the Magnavox Odyssey), it was the second, and it basically ruled right up until Nintendo got involved in this stuff in the mid-80s. Now, thing is ... when that thing came out, I was literally an infant. I was not really able for the playing of the video games. And when I was older, that wasn’t really a thing. I mean, I had something that approximated a console, but if I remember right, it was basically a glorified tape player and it was probably way cheaper than an Atari system even in the early 80s. We were not an overly wealthy family in the early 80s.

Not to say that video games weren’t a part of my life back then. My mother was into a bowling league when I was little and while she’d bowl, I’d go dump quarters into Pac-Man and Dig Dug and Bubble Bobble and Space Invaders. I had an older half-brother who’d go to the store ostensibly for snacks but we’d blow the change on the Street Fighter game in the local depanneur (corner store). I also had a friend who a) went to the arcade with me from time to time and b) actually had a PC (it was not common in the 80s) and showed me Lemmings.

The thing was ... I didn’t own any of those. As a result, I didn’t get attached. They were things I played when I had quarters to burn - more quarters every time I turned around, in fact. Then I moved to suburban New Jersey and our corner stores didn’t have arcade machines. Hell, even when I got a NES in the late 80s/early 90s, I didn’t get attached and they weren’t overly important to me. Hell, most of them were pretty standard skill challenges - Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Paperboy ... I could say the original Final Fantasy, but honestly, my mother basically co-opted that one before I could get really invested. FF1 was the only one of my games that really had a story to any degree.

Games didn’t become important to me until they had more story. I don’t know if people understand how few games had story back then. We didn’t have the processor power. We didn’t have the technology. Things are so very different now and while I grant that some people might have found the skill challenges important to them ... I’m a girl who likes her story. When I got back into video games, I did love me some Sims, and there was Final Fantasy 11, Baby’s First MMO ... but those weren’t important to me. They didn’t matter.

Games that mattered to me? Dragon Age: Origins - release date 2009, one of the few games I played within a few months of launch. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - release date 2003, I didn’t play it until 2012 (totally spoiler-free, I might add), but that one rocked my world. Mass Effect 1 - release date 2007, another one I didn’t play until 2012. The Secret World, gone but not forgotten (DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT SECRET WORLD: LEGENDS - THAT GAME DOES NOT EXIST TO ME), which hit its stride for me in 2015. Star Wars: The Old Republic - mattered more to me because of the people I shared it with than for the game itself but never mind, probably started it in 2013 or so.

For some people, that is their childhood and teens. For me, it was well into my adulthood. Doesn’t make them matter any less.

Questions like that? They’re pretty age-dependent. For me, the few times I had games at all as a child or teen, they were a good way to hide from angry and/or disappointed parents. Like books, but with less story and more looking busy. Games didn’t start to matter to me until very recently. I guess that’s important, but it was the fact that there was a game to hide behind that was important, not what game it was. They only started mattering to me when there was more to it than Save Princess.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Book!Revan

So now on top of everything else with KOTOR (the movie / TV series ... thing Disney wants to do), EA wants to remake KOTOR and KOTOR 2 to “better fit in with the established canon”.

...There is not enough FUCK YOU in the world.

Look, I came to KOTOR late. Very late. Like, nearly a decade late. And somehow, I still managed to avoid spoilers. I had no idea what was coming. I had no idea where that particular dramatic climax was going to go. And it blew my fucking mind, I swear. I mean, I loved my Revan. My Revan loved her new life so much and leaned into it with everything she had, and finding out it was all a lie was a blow and it stayed with me for the entire rest of the game and beyond - way, way beyond.

I think it was because I got to customise my Revan, that I identified so strongly with the character. I picked her new name, how she looked ... hell, I picked the fact that she was a she. And the game looked at it and went, “Okay, cool, all dialogue options will have Revan with she/her pronouns; no problem”.

Then I heard about the book. Peripherally. I ignored it, because I ignore most ancillary media of that type. I stopped being able to ignore it when they dragged Book!Revan into the SW:TOR MMO. I mean, there was Revan, large as life and very very dudely. I could still ignore him for awhile, though, because I didn’t run flashpoints very much and that was the only place you actually saw him. ...Okay, I did some serious mental gymnastics about Satele Shan, ignoring the fact that she was directly descended from Revan and Bastila. That was a thing that I did.

Then Theron turned up and so did Revan in all his dual-natured glory and being-a-pawn-of-Vitiate-ness and fucked that right in the ear. The entire damn plot was about chasing Book!Revan around Yavin IV. While some of the content was fun, the premise was one I hated. I had my Revan. More to the point, so did everyone else I knew. Everyone got very attached to their Revans because they got to shape their Revans from the ground up, gender and all, and run them through the kind of identity crisis that really sticks with a body. I mean, you run around for most of a game as some foot soldier graduated to the big leagues because it turned out you were Force-sensitive, and you built your entire approach to the game on that, and then it turns out that you’re the ultimate evil whose apprentice you need to keep from finishing your own handiwork. Or, you know, kill him and take his place with Bastila ruling at your side as your new apprentice, whatever. That was the whole point: the choice was yours, always.

How is that going to work when we’re all having to play Book!Revan?

I can see how Disney is trying to consolidate canon. It’s trying to erase the Legends-era stuff by incorporating it where it can and hoping that the hype for the stuff they could allows them to forget the bits that couldn’t be incorporated into ... well, Disney-canon. My issue becomes that not so long ago - around about the point of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 coming out, if memory serves - Disney didn’t give much of a shit. Disney didn’t care that the single-player campaign of that game was weak as hell, nor even about the loot box controversy directly; just that it made them look bad. But now we have Fallen Order and Disney seems to be going, “Okay, that finally went well; let’s look for ways to exploit this... Say, I know! Didn’t Bioware have that hit with Knights of the Old Republic? We can turn it into a MOVIE and a TV show and a NEW GAME and-- Oh, you got a character customisation screen in KOTOR? Fuck that; they made a canon Revan, so we’ll go with that”.

I know that hearing about a remake of something that we love is great. And you know something? If it kept to the spirit of the original, I’d be right there with you. A new KOTOR with better graphics, better UI, better combat mechanics? It’d be great. Unfortunately, I’d argue that it’s the very fact that you got to customise your player character that made the reveal that you were playing Revan all along as shocking as it was. You don’t expect that from a character you got to customise. Take that away and ... well, you’re piloting around a character you’re learning about as you go anyway. How much more shocking is it that you were playing an amnesiac Sith Lord all along from there?

And therefore I have this to say:

Dear Disney,

Thank you for Rogue One. For The Mandalorian (even if I can’t watch it because Disney+ doesn’t happen in the UK; do you want pirates? That’s how you get pirates). For Clone Wars and Rebels. For the reassurances about the Obi-Wan series. For the sequel trilogy, as controversial as it seems to have been.

But for the KOTOR movie/TV series to ‘consolidate canon’ around that sack of meeble I met in a Sith bunker someplace in a Flashpoint in SW:TOR? You can get fucked.

Also: dear EA

...Despite Fallen Order, you have fallen so far from grace that you deserve very little in the way of thanks. The things you have done to your customers, the things you have done to the properties you own - the shit you did to Bioware, you assholes (though a lot of that is probably on them too - never trust a company that believes in their own hype too much).

For you, for even thinking about a remake of a beloved Bioware game in which you had zero part to make it ‘canon compliant’ YAGWD garbage? You can get fucked twice. Right in the ear. WIth cacti. SIDEWAYS.

[thessalian]

Thess vs MMOs

Over the years, I’ve played a number of MMORPGs. They’ve come. They’ve gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I thought I’d give myself a tiny bit of a retrospective here just to see if I actually miss them.

Final Fantasy XI: This one was my first. At the time, I wanted to try a MMO and had been weighing the relative merits and flaws of this, World of Warcraft and Everquest. In the end, I weighted it on art style and I just really preferred FFXI. That ... in retrospect, was probably a mistake. The levelling ‘system’ was frankly garbage in FFXI, at least in part because there were fairly few quests, even fewer of which you could solo. What it was, right, was ... you went out to a zone pretty far above your level, you put up your LFG flag, and you waited. Or you started a group of your own, whichever. Either way, you ended up in a six-man party, staking out a specific spot on one of the quasi-designated ‘farming’ maps, and you sent out your puller (usually a thief or a beastmaster; someone with range, anyway) to bring monsters to your ‘camp’ for you to gang up on. It was the only way to get a decent amount of XP in one go, particularly given that there were bonuses for chaining mobs. Which in and of itself was a problem when you had overzealous pullers dragging in a new monster before people had finished killing the first one, never giving the casters time to so much as breathe, never mind regen mana. Plus if a zone was overcamped, you ended up fighting over mobs, fighting over campsites, and in general just getting pissed off at other players. Every time a new class got added to the roster, groups ground to a screeching halt for some classes because everyone wanted the new class in their party and that left people still trying to level older classes entirely out in the cold. Endgame content was more or less out unless you had a dedicated guild. Basically, it was meant for the hardcore MMO player. I ... was not the hardcore MMO player. I did manage to level a fair bit in at least one class (White Mage, because healers always prosper, but even they started getting locked out when Scholar became a thing, despite them being neither fish nor fowl until the level 30s or so), but mostly ended up farming low-level stuff for crafting mats until I eventually got bored and stopped paying my damn sub. I don’t miss it. It was pants.

World of Warcraft: It was a good long while before I tried a MMO again, and the next one I went for was WoW, at least in part because I was starting to hear as how you could largely power through it on your own. So I had a good time with that for awhile, and actually started getting invested in at least one of my characters (Blood Elf Paladin who hated undead with the passion of a thousand burning suns because she lost family at the Wrathgate and then had a minor nervous breakdown when forced to serve on the Forsaken Front and basically told the Horde to go fuck itself and, after a brief stint of piracy in Booty Bay, stuck to doing things like repairing Deathwing’s bullshit). Then Mists of Pandaria came out and I just kind of lost interest. I don’t really miss it overmuch. Particularly since it was the first and worst experience of trying a dungeon that I’ve ever had - basically I was unaware when I started playing it that your DPS rating was everything and so I went in as a tank and trying to hold hate when everyone else (including the healer) is spamming damage like it’s going out of style is a nightmare and they eventually booted me out of the party in the middle of fucking Gnomergan because I wasn’t doing enough damage (THAT IS NOT MY JOB, YOU DIPSHITS; I AM HERE TO KEEP YOU FROM TAKING DAMAGE; NOT TO DO MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF IT MYSELF) and let me get eaten by respawns. I swore to myself, never again. ...I lied, by the way. Anyway, I miss it sometimes (well, I miss Missandei the Belf Paladin, really), but not enough to try to throw myself into it again.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: This is where ‘never again’ went wrong, though it took awhile. I had fun in this game for a good long while, actually. Had great fun on my smuggler, and discovered actual roleplaying in a MMO, which led to my trying new things and meeting new friends and generally having a pretty good time. I even started doing group content and dungeons (Ops, really, but hey) ... though I did kind of get locked into healer-mode no matter how much I wanted to DPS every now and then, because I was marginally more good-natured about healing than the other healer-classes in our guild. Then some personal stuff happened and, more to the point, the Zakuul thing started. I disliked being a bit player in my own story, I hated the plot, sticking us with a mechanics-heavy boss fight at the end that we had to solo and which was truly ruinous for some classes was a dick move, and I basically gave up. I don’t miss it. All the parts of it I liked (namely, some of the people I met) are still in my life, and that’s the important thing.

The Secret World: I liked this one, for all I had a year’s break from it because I missed a fairly key benefit to the game - namely being able to skip certain missions. Ironically, I did manage to get that mission completed in the end, but not after I dropped the game for nearly a year because it kept blowing me up (increased movement speed was the key to that fucking mining museum basement, it turns out). But once that was explained to me, I fell comprehensively in love with that fucking game. I ran around in it daily not because I wanted to get my money’s worth out of my subscription (which I didn’t have) but because I was having fun. I loved the story, I loved the setting, I loved not having levels, I loved the ability and skill wheels, I loved customisable builds (and exploited them mercilessly), I loved the dungeons, I loved the cosmetics ... I loved everything about this game. ...Then they turned it into an ARG with reticle targeting that pushed every single migraine button I have and I couldn’t play it anymore. I miss this one. I miss this one so fucking much you have no idea.

Final Fantasy XIV: Honestly, the only reason I got into this was because I needed a new MMO after fucking Secret World: Legends broke my heart, and it wasn’t FFXI ... though I could still play a tiny adorable bringer of destruction if I so chose. But of course, by this time, I was so heavily locked into Healbabe Mode that I just pretty much immediately went White Mage (though Astrologian was always my default once I got the class sufficiently levelled). I liked this one okay but the story left me cold a lot of the time. Loved the crafting, loved some of the dungeon challenge ... actively kind of hated the story. Especially that spot between Stormblood and Shadowbringers where I wanted Fabio von ShampooCommercial to just fucking stay dead already. I did not go through the absolute nightmare hell that was the Shinryu fight to have that fuck-knuckle turn back up again. I don’t miss it. Take your bargan basement Sepiroth and go screw, Squeenix.

Guild Wars 2: I’d actually had this for awhile but hadn’t done much with it. It was another Secret World situation - I went in, I got fed up, I got out, I got dragged back in by ... the same friend, actually (looking at you here, @true0neutral), and enjoyed it a lot more. It’s not as good as TSW was. I don’t love it as much. But it’s sufficiently enjoyable for something I’m not paying a sub for, I can get my Zen crafting on perfectly fine, and that’s all I’m really asking of a MMO at this point. I’d miss it if it vanished. That’s enough.

I did kind of poke at Elder Scrolls Online on one of their beta weekends, if memory serves, but that one was a hard nope from me. Wasn’t into it, found the combat clunky.

So that’s me and MMOs. I had one I truly, truly loved and it was taken away from me and now I have my GW2 popcorn while pining for my One True MMO. Woe.

[thessalian]

Thess vs First-Person Perspective

So ... Far Cry 3 I died in the tutorial. I did not expect to be thrown directly into stealthing and instadeath if they catch you right out of the gate.

Borderlands went a little better but I’m trying to figure out how to kill Nine-Toes. I’m sure I did this at some point but I don’t for the life of me remember how. I think the key might be ‘being overleveled’.

However, there is another problem - first-person perspective.

I’ve been playing FPS games for the last couple of hours and now I have a massive screaming headache and it’s Sunday so there are no mallet meds to be had.

I think this may put a bit of the kibosh on ... well, most of FML Gaming. If I can’t play a single-player game without a massive screaming migraine... Well, I guess that’s an essay in and of itself. I mean, I managed with Overwatch because regular breaks, but that doesn’t work so well in a story-driven game. So what is the appeal of first-person and why is it so prevalent that I can’t get my shooting on without having to deal with the headache-inducing view mode. At least Fallout and Skyrim let me swap.

...I guess I could do those...

Well, I think I’m going to window-shop for games while focusing the first month of FML Gaming on The Life and Times of the Utility MMO Player. Read: “I Tank And Heal Almost Exclusively Because I Don’t Trust Any Of Those Dogfuckers; Here’s Why”.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Organisation

Didn’t get to sleep until really really late, and woke up way earlier than I meant to. But fuck it; today is the day I get shit DONE. I have ideas, but to make them a reality, I need to start making workable action plans. I think I know myself well enough to understand that while I can get things done by the seat of my pants, it’s probably better for my sanity if I look at it as a series of bite-sized chunks.

The Dodecronomicon

This was fun, but I wasn’t as organised about it as I should have been. That’s going to change, because I have things to share. So I’m going to look at it as if I was writing a sourcebooks ... or maybe more a series of smaller sourcebooks. ‘Chapters’ as follows.

The Drowning Deep: All my water-based homebrew tweaks - both things I have already used to the dismay of my players or things they still have yet to face. (Yes, you get to meet the Ur-Draug.)

The Screaming Sands: Desert-based creatures. For when you’re maybe tromping through corrupted war zones. (*waves at her players and griiiiiiiins*)

Eroded Into Nightmare: Corrupted versions of good-aligned creatures. This is largely a home for my corrupted pixie idea (man, I look forward to using those) but I have a few other ideas not only of stuff that’s already in the sourcebooks but other creatures of myth.

The Wicked & the Divine: Given the premise that clerics don’t have to gain their power from a God, exactly, and also given that warlocks can have celestial servants of the gods as their patrons, the line between warlock and cleric has become increasingly blurred. So why can’t someone like the Traveller have the equivalent of Devas and Solars ... or demon servants? Basically expanding the range of angels and demons available to the average player. Because I need way more servants of the Great Old Ones. Hee. Hee. Heeheehee.

Spell variants (title in progress): This is where things like Hedge Maze will go. Basically the spells are great? Especially given some of the stuff in Xanathar’s? But duuuuuuuude I have ideas.

Maps (title in progress): I have a good collection of maps now, and a much better handle on how to use my Dungeon Painter Studio software (I cannot call it DPS. I don’t care if that’s the abbreviation Steam uses - I have played too many MMOs to see DPS as meaning anything but Damage Per Second). This segment is going to have subdivisions, obviously - inns, caverns, temples, woodland, Other... You get the idea.

Other stuff as I think of it, but the basic principle is that I see a wide vista of campaign spreading out before me and the books aren’t giving me what I need. Or at least not the variety I’d like in what I need. If I’m going to remedy that for myself, I may as well share.

(I need more creatures suited to the cold. Because Reasons.)

FML Gaming

As previously stated, I’m looking at Let’s Plays. This is going to be some time in the making, obviously, since I need to actually pick a game and then play it (I’m thinking Bioshock? Mostly because I also want to show that there’s nothing wrong with being behind the curve in terms of title releases, and that a good story is sometimes a better reward than New Shiny Graphics, but then there’s the issue where I have problems with first-person perspective at the best of times so maybe I’ll start with something easier on my head. Maybe I could make “pick my game for me!” a patron reward, I dunno; I’ve seen it done), but I’ve gone over the premise there.

Single-Point Perspective

Reviews and essays. This time I am going to write a whole bunch way in advance, and ponder ideas beforehand. There are probably going to be some unpopular opinions in there, but I guess people can guess what those are. But there are also going to be book recommendations from all over the genre spectrum, movie reviews, and probably ‘evolving reviews’ of the games I’m playing in FML.

HIPPIE

I am committed to doing the audiobook thing. A lot of people find listening to audiobooks on the commute easier than reading the damn thing on whatever method they use for the whole reading thing, so why not? I had a lot of fun recording Chaos Magic the first time around, and actually have some ideas for improvement on what I did the last time, so while that is, again, going to take some time, I’m better with that kind of editing software than I was, like, nine years ago, so hey. Besides, this should hopefully give me the impetus I need to finish Access Mundi. (I owe a few sample chapters from that anyway.)

I am determined to have ‘teaser content’ and at least one major update for each section (except maybe FML, but I want to at least pick a damn game) before I relaunch my Patreon. I want to get ahead of the curve while I’m out of work, so that I’m not scrambling too hard when I have a day job again. I just need to work on some voice recording and some writing. At least I already have something more or less ready for the Dodecronomicon - The Drowning Deep has an addition. (*waves at her party again and griiiiiiiiiiins*)

[thessalian]

Thess vs Death Mechanics

‘Death systems’ in video games.

Particularly in MMO.

Basically, ‘making death meaningful’ by penalising you for it.

Okay, I get what people are trying to do with this concept - at least on an intellectual level. But it’s a fucking horrible concept on a number of levels and here, in my admittedly somewhat biased and ranty opinion, is why:

Built-In Gatekeeping

Yeah, so, maybe you’re not so great at video games. You have hand-eye coordination issues. You don’t have a raid group so you don’t have the best gear. You get lost a lot when exploring and end up running into areas several levels too high for you and get flattened by something because aggro range expands with level discrepancy ... or you fall off cliffs sometimes. So you die. A lot.

If you have a system that penalises you on death, what do you get? People getting penalised for not being god-tier right out of the gate ... or never being able to be god-tier for one reason or another. And the hardcore gamer types will simply say “GIT GUD”.

You want to know what I hear when I read ‘GIT GUD’? I hear, “Get your ass out of my hobby; it’s not for you!” When people have issues with a game’s difficulty curve, those people whose primary senses of pride and accomplishment* are being better at killing pixellated beasties than everyone else immediately rise up and bitch about how making it easier would just let EVERYONE play it.

YES. THAT IS WHAT VIDEO GAME COMPANIES WANT. FOR EVERYONE TO PLAY IT.

But no, the industry listens to the squeaky wheels of ‘god-tier’ assholes ... or they go way too far the other way. Which we’ll get to in a minute. But all I will say is that any system that penalises death in a multiplayer game is only going to lead to ‘haves vs have-nots’ social strata for e-peen measuring dickwaffles to masturbate over and we as a society don’t need more of that shit. Particularly if we end up getting the “GIT GUD” thing yelled at us when all we want is help to NOT DIE.

Microtransact Away The Pain

So say you did have a system that reduced your stats whenever you died (hopefully at least until you got to an inn or something). You’re not seriously telling me that in this age of live service microtransaction bullshit that someone wouldn’t find a way to make a profit? Yeah, loot boxes are slowly getting phased out because the controversy’s too great, but dude, seriously, they’ll find other ways. Penalising death in MMOs is just handing them a way to do that; just make items that mitigate or cleanse the penalty you incurred by dying and only sell them with in-game currency ... or, to call it what it is, real money.

Do we want that? The industry does. I sure as fuck don’t.

In the end, just let me pay my money to repair my gear - more if I die a lot, less if I don’t. I mean, particularly in raids / dungeons / ops / whatever ... when the death’s not my fault? I don’t want to incur a penalty because the tank couldn’t hold hate, or the healer was too busy dealing damage to heal people. What the fuck kind of system is that.

Gameplay Restrictions

Okay, maybe the ‘play it your way’ thing has gone a bit too far in some games. Mostly the single-player ones. But even then, it’s not hurting anyone and you can seek out a challenge when and if you want to, so I’ll let that one go. But at the end of the day, anything that restricts your ability to go out and try things is a no-no in a game that wants you to stay playing as long as possible. But if you’re afraid to go exploring instead of following the storyline like a good little sheep, that’s a lost opportunity. Devs, don’t limit a player’s opportunities for fun by plonking in arbitrary bullshit that only serves as a potential cattle grid for ‘git gud’ assholes and/or cash cow.

At the end of the day, I get why people might want death in a video game to have some weight and meaning. On the other hand, I think they underestimate the personal investment that people who aren’t just in it for the numbers put into their characters in games like this. We don’t want them to die because we love them and we don’t want them to die. Plus at least half of us suffer from anxiety and imposter syndrome and we freak out enough when we die in a video game anyway, just because failure is THE END OF THE WORLD as far as we’re concerned. We don’t need the game rubbing our noses in it.

This is all speculative and things that devs might want to consider, all this ‘PENALISE DEATH’ crap. I just hope that game devs also take into account that:

We sometimes like to explore to alleviate the grind and we can’t do that if we’re worried about losing stats if we die

We are wary as shit of anything that someone could pin a microtransaction to

We do not want people yelling at us to ‘git gud’ when we’re just trying to unwind after a long and stressful day

We already feel invested in whether our character lives or dies without adding a mechanic to our pain

I want this whole line of conversation to just die. Give me my gear repair bill and STFU.

* Sidebar - I cannot hear these words without thinking about EA’s fuckery. I wince. Really.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Games as Service

I was chatting to @true0neutral last night and we were talking about the whole mess with EA lately. One of the things that came up a fair bit was ... well, that ‘the mess with EA lately’ is not so much ‘lately’ as ‘longstanding’. Sure, ‘games as service’ is the worst of it, with the lootbox controversy around Star Wars Battlefront 2 that was bad enough to get the government’s attention, and the delay on Anthem that they insist isn’t a delay despite the fact that they announced it coming out three months later than they originally announced. But EA has been problematic for awhile now, and while I have a soft spot for some of these games, and some of the franchises, I refuse to ignore the fact that they have significant problems. To me, at least, there seem to be enough problems to indicate that EA is prioritising entirely the wrong things to avoid one set of earnings-related woes ... only to court another, worse set of earning-related woes, in this case one that could change the entire industry.

When EA purchased Bioware, they already had two franchises up and running - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Now, story-wise, those two games were absolutely brilliant and stood apart from a lot of what else was going on with the industry at the time. The graphics were pretty good for the time as well, and the combat and UI ... well, okay, a lot of people were figuring shit out back then. Given the timeline, Bioware was probably almost entirely finished Dragon Age: Origins when EA acquired them, and I think the only place where EA really showed its hand was the one question: “How are you going to remind the players about your DLC? How about you put a NPC in their camp who’ll let you buy the DLC right then and there if you don’t already have it?” Not a small thing, for the time, but anyone who’s played a MMO, ever, knows how to ignore a quest icon. Still, the ink’s barely dry on the acquisition contract between EA and Bioware and we’re getting some intrusive shit going on.

Looking at it from the timeline perspective, story quality started to go down as EA got more involved. Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 had great stories ... but Mass Effect 2 came out in 2010, same year as Dragon Age: Origins. Which means that both those stories were more or less written before EA’s acquisition of Bioware. Dragon Age 2, for what it was, had a reasonable story but there were issues. A lot of it was entirely reliant on coincidence, though that might be an asset depending on whether or not that was what they were going for. However, its main problem was that for a franchise that insisted that it was about the world rather than the main character (as opposed to Mass Effect, which was unquestionably about Shepard) ... they did not really show a changing world particularly well. Ten years we spent in Kirkwall and very little outside change came about, or at least not anything we saw. We heard a few different comments from a few different merchants, but particularly by act 3, some physical indicators of a change in mood would have been a lot better for establishing the story they wanted to tell. Then again, that might have been asking a bit much of a game that was rushed out to capitalise on the success of the previous game and made the player spend most of its time in a single map-maze reskinned exactly two different ways. Of course, it’s also frustrating that neither Dragon Age 2 nor Dragon Age: Inquisition deals particularly well with elves, or has any changes in people’s views of elves, even if the Warden, Inquisitor or both were elves themselves and proceeded to save the damn world ... but if I was going to try to discuss Bioware’s occasionally problematic handling of things like racism, we’d be here all month.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is another situation in which we could have got a lot better with the story, and the ‘you got the DLC, right?’ intrusiveness got at once more subtle and yet more intensive. If you only played the straight-up base games (Origins and DA2 only, no bells and whistles), you were missing out on two things: a) the concept of intelligent darkspawn (DA:O’s Awakening DLC and that novel) and b) who the fuck Corypheus was and why we should care (DA2′s Legacy DLC). Now, to be fair, this is almost a good way to improve immersion, as the Inquisitor-to-be doesn’t know what’s going on either, but the explanation provided by the one character who was there for at least some of it is ... a little lacking and there’s no character who can explain Awakening from a first-person perspective. So a quick trip to Google later, and everyone who didn’t play the games, or only played the core games, realises just how much they’re missing.

Unfortunately, reliance on ancillary content is something that Bioware’s been bad at for a fairly long time, and I don’t think that’s an EA involvement situation. Or at least, I don’t see how it can be, at least not in the context of the novels. I’ve been trying to keep a rough tally, and Dragon Age is particularly bad at ‘show, don’t tell’, because a lot of what it’s doing is telling us to go where they actually showed us, if you see what I mean. Cole’s backstory and a lot of the context behind Champions of the Just is hiding in a book somewhere. The whole deal behind intelligent darkspawn and the identity of at least one character in Awakening is hiding in a book somewhere. Corypheus’ whole deal is hiding in a DLC somewhere. While I appreciate that a writer needs to find a shorthand somewhere along the line, the shorthand should probably come with a little more in the way of getting all the information someone needs into the story they’re in, as a reminder if nothing else. ...Then again, they did the same thing with Battlefront 2, apparently needing to have read one of the novels to really understand why the entire plot was happening. At least the worst thing Mass Effect 3 did in that regard was throw in the Nightwing-looking motherfucker of a secondary antagonist without any kind of context.

Honestly, Dragon Age 2, for all it did have a good story almost in spite of itself, is almost the forerunner of the primary issue I see with EA - focus on the wrong things in the arena of game development. Dragon Age: Inquisition followed that pretty much to the letter, with the addition of “Everything Is Open World Now”, and Mass Effect: Andromeda took it to whole new places. The focus seems to be as follows: ‘combat mechanics, and pretty skyboxes and scenery in which to have the fights’. This probably works in a FPS shooter, where story is so often secondary to ‘go to place, shoot the dudes’, but ... that’s not what most Bioware fans are there for. They are there to get their story on, and I honestly think that the only reason that EA has been getting a pass for this long is because so many of their fans are on the transformative end of the fandom scale and react to any gaps in story with, “If it’s not there, we’ll write it for you!” But between reliance on total recall of all ancillary content to really understand the story a player is in, an insistence on maintaining a game world status quo more reminiscent of a MMO than a single-player story experience, and a focus on high-quality graphics and combat mechanics focused more on continuous combat than tactical arrangement of teammates (which works in a co-op game when you can actually speak to your team, but less when dealing with AI), EA Bioware seems to be gradually stuffing all its properties into the co-op / MMO mode. It’s a pretty clear progression towards what they keep claiming is their ultimate goal - all of their properties following the ‘games as service’ model.

I finally figured out last night why they’re doing this, and honestly it’s depressing, because it stands to kill story-driven games entirely in the AAA market. It’s mostly greed, but it’s a really tactically focused greed, and it sums up to this: nickel-and-diming people to death is easier than dealing with sticker shock.

There have been a few people online lately saying that games should be more expensive. Games cost a lot to make, after all. (I’ll come back to that point in a minute, but it belongs here too.) However, games have been largely frozen at their current price range for quite some time, and while the pressure to pre-order and to buy the gold deluxe editions has increased, the base price has not. The reason for the price freeze seems to be that ... well, they actually want to keep pre-order culture going. After all, the economy is not in a great place right now, and the core audience has less disposable income. Sticker shock is a very real phenomenon, and there’s a certain threshold beyond which people get a lot more reluctant to spend on something that might end up not worth that money. Once you start making your product too expensive, people stop pre-ordering because they want to see the reviews first, or see how their friends like it. They start demanding unchoreographed gameplay videos, and even demos, before they’ll buy. They start expecting the game to actually be playable and bug-free on purchase. They start expecting more for their money.

This doesn’t work for AAA developers, who in the last few years have become way too used to putting out a substandard product with the promise of “We’ll patch it later”. That model works for them for a variety of reasons, the worst of them being that they can rush a game’s development despite any and all obstacles, including “We farmed out all our employees to another project and have to beat the rest like recalcitrant mules to make deadline despite being undermanned”, or “We lost our lead developer and have to go in an entirely different direction”. It’s carte blanche to mistreat employees, and also lets them farm blame onto employees when a game doesn’t perform up to standard. And they can look like the heroes when they say, “Don’t worry; we’ll make sure it gets patched” when it’s their fault it went out too fast to get all the bugs fixed in the first place.

On top of that, AAA developers know that if they increase the base price of their games, people are going to balk even more at the idea of microtransactions and loot boxes than they already are. At the moment, people are used to paying about $60 for a base game, so that’s the base at which people might not object to a business model that more closely resembles a free-to-play game than a AAA title. If they increase the base price, people are going to remember how much they’re paying for this and balk at the idea of paying even more than they already did.

The stupid part is the whole ‘games cost so much to make’ thing. Okay, let’s say that a game costs several million to make. EA in particular are looking at revenues in the several hundred millions. They’re aiming for multiple BILLIONS in revenue. Mostly they’re succeeding, edging close to a billion in microtransaction revenue alone. Even if a game somehow took five million to make - and I argue that it doesn’t, given the woefully underpaid people who make these things actually happen and the possibility of maybe throwing less money at disingenuous marketing and trademarking new ways to siphon as much money out of players’ wallets as possible before they lose interest - it’s still not making a dent in the hundreds of millions they’re already making.

I have to say it: I have little hope for Dragon Age 4. I don’t mean that I expect it to be bad. I’m saying I don’t expect it to come out at all. EA has been up-front about pinning all its hopes on Anthem, and not only is EA’s reputation in the co-op arena more or less destroyed because of what they did to Battlefront 2, but they’ve now already delayed it by at least three months. If Anthem, the game that will apparently epitomise their desire for games-as-service uber alles, doesn’t do well, I don’t imagine that EA will treat Bioware any more kindly than it did, for example, Visceral Games after Dead Space 3. I am very much worried that EA will throw the baby that is Bioware out with the bathwater, and maybe they’ll keep the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises going ... but I don’t trust what they’d do to them.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Endings

So ... here’s where I feel compelled to talk about all my old roleplaying experience. Because while I owe a lot to Critical Role, exactly what I owe to Critical Role isn’t what most people might think, and my gaming history is relevant.

While I was still living in Montreal, my mother came home with ... according to Wikipedia it was either D&D Basic Set 3rd Version or AD&D 2nd Ed, probably the former. I was a big fan of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, see, and my mother had picked it up, thinking it was a regular board game. When we realised we’d need a lot more players, the game went away and has since vanished over the course of many, many moves, two to different countries, one across a whole ocean. It wasn’t a game that my mother and I could play just the two of us really, and by that point in my life I didn’t have enough of the friends you could invite over for board games of any description to form a proper D&D campaign. I barely even knew what it was about or what it involved.

I honestly don’t remember exactly how tabletop RP came back into my life. I do remember that @dontbearuiner introduced me to a guy who I met for a Neal Stephenson reading and signing, and who then told his friends about me. And that’s when I got dragged into tabletop for the first time. And I mean literally dragged; I was living in South London (again), they were in North London, the Tube was having issues that particular day and crossing the city was going to be a bitch. But they wanted me there so much that they waited for me to travel from SE to NW - two separate buses, something like three hours - to start the game. Thus began the saga of Aidan McIntyre, Highland scholar and member in good standing of the Imperial College, and after him Alison Smith, Sophia’s daughter spy and professional ‘purveyor of lady-favours’. (No, seriously, I used the lady-favours to get them out of jail at least twice.) And then I mentioned wanting desperately to run Mage (oWoD; there was only one Mage when I started), and the rest of the group jumped on it, and that’s how I started running the Year Restart campaign. Ambitious by anyone’s standards, I revamped the setting a lot and borrowed heavily from other sources. And there were other campaigns. I played a Companion in a Firefly one-shot. I played a noblewoman in Fading Suns. I played Kayla the Zenith Solar bard-barian in Exalted, and she managed quite the character arc in just a half-dozen sessions. A Daria-esque grumpy witch in Buffy, and a shy paranoid pyrokinetic in Angel. I played a Kinfolk doctor in a one-shot Kinfolk campaign who managed to take down a Fomor with a .22 pistol. Basically one of the few things we’d never done or considered was actual Dungeons and Dragons; I guess everyone else had burned out on it or just didn’t like it. I don’t remember which.

For various reasons, none of them overly pleasant, I lost touch with that group. I was back to where I started - with not enough people in actual physical range so I could play tabletop with them. I have had lots of fun RPing in chat-and-forum, mostly old WoD, and there were the many happy years spent RPing in MMOs, but tabletop in person wasn’t happening. I didn’t have the people, I didn’t know how to meet them and I was burned enough on losing my tabletop group, several guilds and online RP groups that had crashed and burned due to drama, burnout or technical difficulties, and general just trying to live my life that I couldn’t have reached out even if I did know where to start.

Then I discovered Critical Role, mostly through gifsets. Eventually, daunting though the backlog of sessions already was, I started watching it. There was envy, I admit it. All I wanted was to be able to do that again. To see faces, to see reactions, to not have to type everything. Seriously, typing is my job, my hobby and my primary method of communication; it is nice to have a break.

...And then came the first day that they had a player Skype in.

And I thought, “Why can’t I do that?”

And that’s how the Cupcake Coterie was born, more or less. I reached out to my longtime friends and nerdy-arse Tumblr users, and while time zones and other commitments mean that we don’t play as often as I’d like, we play. I can see faces. I can hear voices. I can know without doubt that I’m doing well, that I’m not boring anyone - hell, that I’m giving them all the toys they could ever want to play with, the way people did with me when it was all going well with my other groups.

So, thank you, Vox Machina and Critical Role, for not only the entertainment, but for the inspiration. For showing me how fun Dungeons and Dragons can actually be. For showing me that geographical is an inconvenience but it doesn’t need to be a complete deal-breaker. For fulfilling the potential of that box my mother put on our table thirty years ago or so but that we only opened once.

I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I’m still not, even though it is and it’s happened. But I look forward to your next endeavours ... and more, I look forward to mine.

Thank you.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Micropayments

There’s been a lot of back-forth about Middle Earth: Shadow of War charging micropayments. Some people say we shouldn’t bitch because it’s optional and we don’t need it to beat the game. Others say it’s a disgusting cash grab. I’m in that latter camp, admittedly, but thus far I haven’t seen the reason it personally bothers me articulated very well. So I’m going to try articulating it and seeing if I can do any better.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War - just the core game, mind - is selling for £45 on Steam. Silver edition is £60. Gold edition is fucking £80. Prices for AAA titles of this magnitude are skyrocketing, and if we want all the bells and whistles, we need to pay double what I would personally consider a reasonable price for a full game. And by ‘full’, I do actually mean ‘with all the bells and whistles’. I hate this ‘special edition’ bullshit. They coded these things into the game and then they won’t unlock them unless you spend nearly as much as you did on the game on them.

Anyway, and you know full well that there’s going to be DLC down the line. There is always DLC down the line. That’s what the ‘always online’ generation of video games did; it created a market for adding to the story for additional money. Which is fine. I actually totally agree with that. Let people play the base game and enjoy it while they use the money they made on the core game to create some DLC that they can then later sell and still make money out of the game further on down the line. Of course, it does piss me off when, like with the special edition thing, they have DLC that has already been coded into and belongs in the core story and they make you pay for it, but that’s a whole other thing.

So the game is already making an absurd amount of money by artificially inflating the price of the game with the justification of “we gave you access to assets already coded into the game”, and then they make more money with DLC that may or may not be something that belonged in the base game in the first place. And now they are charging micropayments for something that, while not necessary to beat the game, are apparently fairly important for after the base game is complete. To keep the game from getting annoying, we have to pay money.

Sorry, but this is not a free game that gives us a taste and then milks us for cash, like Candy Crush. This is a highly publicised AAA title based off a highly successful book and movie series ... not to mention being a sequel to said game. We’re already paying insane amounts for this game - most of which the devs are barely seeing. We’re paying more for the lovingly crafted special assets. We’re going to pay more for more of the story, even if it should have been in the base game in the first place. This does not sound like the sort of situation where that whole ‘whales’ thing should come into play as a marketing strategy.

At one time, a video game came onto the market with excitement on all sides. “Look at this thing we made! Look at the story! Look at the challenge! Look at the fun! We did something awesome; look!” And that really added to things for me. It gave me the impression that the people who made it really cared about delivering a fun product, and that that was how they were going to make money. They were going to make a fun product and we were going to buy it and they would use the proceeds to make more fun products and it would all be awesome.

Now, all I see is people saying, “Here is a franchise. Look at all the creative ways we’ve found to use it to beat money out of you”. I’m sorry, but this growing trend of threatening people with a difficult slog and grind unless they spend actual money is getting out of hand. I can almost forgive Secret World: Legends for doing it because it’s a F2P MMO - though I’d forgive it a lot more if the people who actually subscribe didn’t still have to pay yet more money to do anything more than slightly alleviate the grind, and if paying money actually did more than alleviate the grind itself, until all you can hope for is a moderate reduction in grind. I cannot forgive a very expensive AAA title for saying, “Here is your full game experience ... except that the full game experience beyond the story mission is going to get really annoying unless you give us cash”.

It just feels like people put more time and effort into hyping and monetising a game than they do in making it fun. They do the pretty graphics because that’s what looks good in the trailers (but gods forbid they do demos anymore, because that would let us experience how it plays and that would mean something more they’d need to put effort into), they send out games full of bugs that they insist they’ll patch later, not knowing what those patches might break, just so they can meet some arbitrary release cycle. And now they do this.

Maybe with some game companies, they need to do this to keep the lights on, but you’re not telling me that fucking Warner Brothers has to do this. But then again, maybe it’s in the name. Warner Brothers seems to expect that the game is going to make as much money as the movies did, and it doesn’t work that way, particularly at that price. However expensive movies get, it’s still cheaper to get a ticket for opening night than it is to buy a AAA game on release day. People are going to wait until it’s reasonably priced if they don’t start it there to begin with. All adding grind and micropayment is going to do is put people off when they start hearing the consequences of opting out of buying things.

I don’t think the video game industry is going to die. I just think it’s largely going to be led by people with more disposable income than sense buying things for name recognition, hype and explosions, and putting up with anything and everything the industry throws at them while justifying that choice by parroting the same justifications the industry spokespeople give. I guess I like to think that we’re less credulous as a society than this indicates, and it’s disillusioning to be this fucking wrong.

Then again, Trump.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Declines

I think the worst feeling in the whole world is missing something that no longer exists, or has degenerated into something far less ... just less than it used to be.

Reading how TOR is having to do a massive server merge right now is saddening, despite the fact that I would not go back to that game unless you paid me to do so, instead of obliging me to pay to get anything like a full gaming experience. Particularly given the nature of some of the merges, not to mention the language being used in the ‘road map’ thing they’re posting. Merge servers if you have to, Bioware, but don’t say it’s to make it easier to play with friends. Friends are already on the same server. What you’re doing is trying to make PUG queues actually contain enough people to get a decent Op or FP run, and I doubt it’s going to work. The ‘rewards’ on offer are not enough to tempt me back, and I don’t know if that game will see the end of 2018. I kind of hope it doesn’t. It’s kind of sad to see it limping along like this, with the mediocre story with the contrived ‘shock value’ crap and how it seems less and less ‘Star Wars’ every day.

Then there’s SWL, which is also haemorrhaging players. And that’s not even taking into account the people who log in for their dungeon keys and then log out again to play something else, which I know for a fact happens. I’ve been keeping up with this a little less than I have TOR stuff, mostly because it’s depressing (I was in the closed beta and had to stop playing because the reticle targeting system they insisted on throwing in to ‘make combat more exciting’ gives me a rampant migraine), but reading through the patch notes, most of what I’m seeing is, “Fixed this issue, fixed that issue, fixed this problem, whoops here have another bug fix”. I’m all for fixing bugs, but the fact that there are so many bugs that need fixing indicates a distinct lack of time and effort put into coding the things in the first place. Then again, I guess that just follows the current pattern. Whether or not the combat system is something one can deal with (and it’s a dealbreaker for me on health issues alone), the fact remains that they’re still using the same engine and most of the same code, having made just enough tweaks and overlays to the existing game to bend it into a new shape whether or not it fits, and worried about all the shit that might go wrong later. It makes the entire game one continuous open beta, and yet another reason why if they do manage to get new story content out, I’ll be watching it on YouTube.

I’m not saying my current MMO is perfect. Nothing in this world is. I know that. Just ... these things were better, once. I have a distinct mistrust of certain types of language, and in both cases, all of the language they’re using in their promotional material is just a little too ... manic and zealous in their “we’re doing this for YOU!” sentiments to be trusted, particularly when examination of the facts behind the bumph don’t quite add up. Telling us that the server merges are entirely for our benefit because “PLAY WITH YOUR FRIENDS!” doesn’t ring as true as, “We know you’re having problems finding PUGs so we’re merging the servers”. One indicates that no one is listening to the players but they really want to look like they are. The other indicates that they are actually listening and want to fix the issues.

...The problem is that then there’s a precedent set, and you have to fix the other stuff. Maybe that means you have to re-examine letting people base the entire storyline off an old RP campaign, and thus ending up making the NPCs the stars of the show way more often than the player character gets to be. Maybe that means you have to actually recode your game from the ground up to make it be the ARG you want it to be instead of lazily slapping new code on top of old code and an older graphics engine. Maybe that just means realising that you are never, ever going to make as much money as WoW and you maybe need to stop putting the quest to outdo WoW ahead of the needs of the players you actually have.

Because seriously, nothing is going to outdo WoW at this point. Those who are playing World of Warcraft and have been for any length of time are way too invested to turn back now, because Blizzard has built up to that. Thing is, one of these days, Blizzard is going to write the World of Warcraft into a corner. Some might argue that they already have, from what I’m hearing. One day - not any day soon, I don’t imagine, but one day - World of Warcraft will shut its doors. Probably. Maybe. Nothing lasts forever, anyway.

If / when that day comes, though ... something is going to have to come along to take its place at the top of the heap. I think the ones with the best chance of being that new ruler, so to speak, are the ones who build up their following now, and show their players the respect and entertainment they deserve, instead of microtransacting them to death to no appreciable benefit to the player. It’ll be a game that’s already built trust, respect, and a small but vocally pleased following. It could be ESO, in part because name recognition ... but then again, Skyrim so oversaturated the market that it might be detrimental instead of helpful, particularly given that people aren’t overly happy with Bethesda at this point anyway over the whole deal with the Fallout 4 mod shop thing. It could be Guild Wars 2, which has been quietly ambling along doing its own thing and not completely shafting its player base with micropayments while still having micropayments to offset the supposedly detrimental “buy-to-play” thing. Hell, they’ve had at least two expansions so far; they can’t be doing that badly. I doubt it’ll be FFXIV, or whatever comes after FFXIV - although at least FFXIV has more longevity than its predecessor ever had. Thing is, Final Fantasy MMOs tends to draw a more ... serious-minded crowd, I guess you could say? Yes, there’s scope for faffing about, but mostly it’s dungeons every few levels and those dungeons are serious business with serious mechanics, whereas in most games you can theoretically get by without doing a dungeon, ever.

Not that I’m in any hurry for WoW to go away. I don’t play but I know people who do, and they’re still having fun. Thing is, not everyone does play. I guess I just think other MMOs ought to consider that maybe it would be better to try to entice those who aren’t interested in WoW, or who sometimes need a secondary MMO for then they’re burned out on WoW, than to try to outdo them financially. They’ll never make as much money as WoW is doing right now. Just ... as long as you’re making at least some profit, shouldn’t that be enough? Again, it’s the issue where if a game hasn’t made ALL THE MONEY, it is considered a failure. Apparently this is a prevalent viewpoint in the industry, and it kind of needs to stop. Like with movies, sometimes there’ll be blockbusters, and sometimes there’ll just be popcorn. Not every game can be a blockbuster. People don’t work that way when it comes to their entertainment media. Just ... right now, the strain being placed on game devs to make every game a blockbuster is taking away from their ability to build on the games that actually were blockbusters. Bioware’s particularly bad about this these days, but Ubisoft has its own issues in that regard. In both cases, they’ve crammed in mechanics and modes that no one asked for and just cluttered up an otherwise good game (multiplayer in Mass Effect? Eh, I can take or leave it. Multiplayer in Dragon Age? Four player co-op in Assassin’s Creed? Not so much. And don’t even get me started on the issues with trying to maintain focus and pacing in a linear story when dealing with an open-world sandbox map because ‘everything is sandbox now’ without giving a single thought to how the setting and map should guide and serve the narrative and you can’t exactly maintain a sense of urgency about the end of the fucking world if you can put it off for several weeks to go on a full completionist ‘let’s gather every mosaic piece’ binge).

Basically, everyone needs to accept that video games are art, like books and movies - just a bit more so, because it’s an active intake rather than a passive one, thus more audience investment if that investment is going to happen. Game devs need to focus on the audience’s emotional investment, not their financial one, if they want to produce something that’s actually any good. I’d really rather they prefer that they try to produce something good than something that’s just ‘marketable’.