#other times it just bogs down or worse completely collapses the narrative

[memento-mariii]

There should be writing classes on how to recognize when trying to fix plot holes creates more problems in the pacing and the narrative itself in general, and therefore it's better to just slap on a sticker that says "it's just the genre convention 🤷‍♀️" and let it be.

[greatwyrmgold]

Development Hell and Worm

On one hand, that sounds like a bunch of fun high-concept video game ideas. On the same hand, because it's the same thing, it sounds like a complete trainwreck of a game that either dies in development purgatory or, worse, gets released.

When a book stews for a decade before being written, you can get Worm. When a video game stews for a decade before being released, you'll almost certainly be stuck with Duke Nukem Forever. You get the odd Dwarf Fortress, a true auteur project whose development lasts for ages but goes smoothly, but only with very small development teams and the limited scope that implies.

Yes, even Dwarf Fortress! First off, obviously the ASCII cell-based presentation lets ToadyOne cut a lot of corners with regards to graphics and physics (no Havok needed). Second, it simulates a lot of things, but all on a very crude level—just enough to interface with other systems and be visible to the player. Which is a good thing! It stops adding complexity to any individual aspect before the costs of adding more complexity (in dev time, CPU cycles, and player comprehensibility) mount too high.

And Dwarf Fortress is the exception that proves the rule. For every DF, there are dozens of passion projects that collapse under the weight of their own ambition—even when that ambition is far humbler than what DF has become. Hell, there are more sandbox video games which sold themselves on a wide galaxy of neat procedurally-animated alien creatures where the ultimate goal was to reach the center of the galaxy, where other players' games had a small impact on the stuff you came across, which were bogged down by how samey everything felt, than there are DFs. (I'm thinking of Spore and No Man's Sky.)

Video games are hard, and they become harder the more you add onto them. You're describing a Bioware RPG with a Noita-esque physics system driving its SRPG combat, plus XCOM-style squad and resource management, with the narratives being at least somewhat procedurally generated, with wildly branching paths (some of which branch before the player has a chance to do anything about it). That does sound kinda cool, but also, that's a lot of systems to create, let alone to polish, let alone to work together and create a cohesive experience.

"Just give it more time"? Look at Duke Nukem Forever. Limbo of the Lost. Aliens: Colonial Marines. Brutal Legend. Too Human. L.A. Noire. Daikatana! It's possible for games to survive long development cycles, but there's a lot working against them. Some of this can theoretically be overcome with a combination of good management, a strong creative vision, and luck, but A. none of that is easy and B. none of that can relieve the tension between core software coded in year 1 and the technical demands of year 10 software.

Either your game is bogged down by ten years of hacks meant to keep everything working in a constantly-shifting technological environment, or you have to completely scrap and rebuild your engine multiple times during development. Game design suffers this problem; theoretically a game initially designed within a 2012 design paradigm could release fine in 2022, but in practice a combination of changing tastes, genre-shaking releases, and random cultural events mean that you'd need to change course. Especially with big, complicated games.

And then there's the big question: Why bother?

Why bother creating a voxel-based physics system for your parahumans tactical combat? Some parahumans have material-based powers, but most don't. In most fights, those systems would barely matter. This is the most egregiously pointless thing suggested, but the others have similar problems.

What is the focus of the game? Is it finding fun exploits in the combat system? Creating a cape team and maintaining relationships between them? Managing resources in a crumbling city? What is this game doing, and why does connecting it to the Parahumans universe help with that?

Personally, I don't think Worm's power system lends itself to video game mechanics at all. It works, but not exceptionally well, and forcing everything to fit in video game terms makes the powers feel less like themselves. Plus, focusing on cape fights and cool superpowers feels ill at ease with the text of Worm and Ward, where cape fights are rarely cool or exciting. There's a place for fun tactical superhero combat, but I don't think that place is Earth Bet.

So what should it be?

If I was gonna pitch a Worm game, I can think of two directions to take, which would be both practical to develop and actually build on the strengths of...for lack of a better term, the Parahumans IP.

First: A visual novel. Possibly a VN/management or VN/tactics hybrid, but with the focus being firmly on characters and narrative rather than mechanics. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain why I think a very prosaic book like Worm has aspects that work better in a visual novel than a less literary video game genre, so I'll just assume you guys understand that powers designed for prose fit more comfortably in prose than in a skill hotbar and move onto other perks.

The biggest one is that visual novels are unusually well-suited to extended development cycles, because at heart, they're novels. Novels don't suffer from obsolete game design or changing technological constraints. Even if you need to change engines, a substantial chunk of work can be simply ctl-c/ctl-v'd from one to the other, because it's just text. It's still a ton of work, but you don't have to rebuild basically everything from the ground up.

Also, in my opinion, visual novels put the focus on what makes Wildbow's writing stand out: Worldbuilding, characterization, and plot. Worm's power system is interesting, but mostly not because of how it manifests in combat; mostly, the characters punch and laser like their counterparts in any superhero or superhero-adjacent setting. It's interesting because of how it intersects with Worm's world, characters, and plot.

I know some people think visual novels aren't real video games, but they're wrong.

Second: A management sim. Perhaps the player taking the role of a PRT director, trying to manage a city's heroes under constant stress from politics, supervillains, and economic crises. Something like Idol Manager, but with a tone closer to Coldpunk. Maybe have a tactical minigame, but nothing as detailed or attention-grabbing as XCOM's.

The thing about Earth Bet that most easily translates into video game mechanics is the sense that the world is falling apart. A management sim would center that, forcing the player to reckon with scarce resources and compounding obstacles.

Of course, this could be combined with the first pitch. Plenty of visual novels have management sim aspects and vise versa; the intersection is mostly composed of raising sims, but that's because more people want to raise digital daughters than manage the interpersonal relationships of a couple dozen PTSD-addled superhumans. There's no reason you couldn't have a game along the lines of Long Live the Queen, Cute Bites, or Princess Maker which juggled multiple characters.

Actually, along those lines...I have a third idea.

Have you ever played Black Closet? It's a visual novel set in a Machiavellian boarding school, where you run the student council. The core gameplay loop involves sending your fellow student councilors to accomplish various missions. While this aspect of the game isn't focused on, you can (and probably should) raise their stats. And there are visual novel bits, of course, mostly focused on the player character's relationship with the councilors.

So. Take from that the cast of characters you need to manage, and the core gameplay mechanic of "pick appropriate characters to send on a given mission". But put less emphasis on skills and relationships between PC and subordinates, and more on relationships between subordinates and the general state of the city. Comparable mechanics, but a completely different narrative (obviously). The increasing pressure on the player as things ramp up isn't caused by [conspiratorial spoilers], but by the city deteriorating from superhuman pressure and human neglect.

There's plenty of room to expand the scope of this game. Complicated simulations of the city outside your team, tons of potential recruitable characters, branching storylines, etc. But it also fits comfortably in a scope that a Worm fangame could plausibly fit within.

The parahumans power creation system is a good fit for TTRPGs and a horrid fit for video games. It’s dependent on human pattern-matching and metaphor literacy to carry every character concept over the finish line; it would be difficult bordering on impossible, I think, to try and implement a mix-and-match version of the system where you create your parahumans PC from pre-selected trigger components and then play in a sandbox, which is what I’ve seen advanced as a proposal for how a parahumans RPG would handle character creation.

No, parahumans screams out for a roster-based RPG system; some combination of Disco Elysium, This is the Police, Sunless Sea and X-Com, in which you play as a PRT director (or aspirant crime boss, or corporate cape team manager, or terrorist, probably you’d pull from the disposition doc here) who pulls together and manages a small squad of parahumans that you can pull from a potential pool of, probably, 30-40 free-floating, fleshed out pre-written capes who exist throughout the game world, each with their own trigger event, unique moveset, personal foibles, pre-existing relationship to the city, and subplots that you can pursue via some expenditure of resources.  You can only plausibly get 10+ at a time, and most capes have an alternate faction they’ll fall in with if you don’t recruit them; to accommodate this, you might take the DE route of having the game take place over a short timeframe in a crisis situation in order to maximize your ability to replay it with different rosters, or you might just make the player suck it up and commit to a long session with their chosen team, but either way I’m picturing all players starting from the same Day-zero world conditions, dominoes falling differently based on their actions. I’m picturing semi-turn-based combat but in a fairly-well-realized physics-based/voxel-based world (in no small part due to the number of powers that have interactions with specific materials). I’m also picturing a sunless-sea/skies-style “designate your own personal win condition” mechanic, where the “main quest” is just one more plot thread bouncing off whatever major turning point acts as the game’s inciting incident. Would this require an idiot amount of pre-writing, game triggers, worldbuilding, and pre-determined character relationships to function correctly? Yes. There’s a reason I cited Disco Elysium in the “some combination” section. But I genuinely think that a Worm game would need basically the same decade of pre-writing that Worm received, in order to get anywhere close to capturing why Worm was good.

[the-desolated-quill]

Mummy On The Orient Express - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Here I go, stepping into the unknown. I’ve never seen any episodes past Kill The Moon and I really didn’t know what to expect. It couldn’t possibly get any worse than that surely?

So this came as a rather pleasant surprise.

You’d think an episode titled Mummy On The Orient Express would be destined for failure. It just sounds too gimmicky for words. There’s a mummy on the Orient Express... in space! And yet somehow it works. It fact it works better than the majority of Series 8 has done until now. So kudos to Jamie Mathieson for doing such a stellar job.

Okay, so it’s set on the Orient Express... in space, and there’s a mummy onboard called the Foretold that only certain people can see, and when you clap eyes on it, you only have 66 seconds left to live. That’s an immensely creepy idea and they use it to great effect. Whoever designed that mummy deserves a fucking pay rise. It’s without a doubt the scariest thing ever to come out of New Who. When it first showed up, I actually screamed! The attention to detail is extraordinary, from the old bandages to the rotting, decomposing flesh. The gangly height of the actor playing him helps too. A lot of the shots are from a first person perspective, so when it reached out to the camera, I found myself instinctively leaning away from my TV. Even the Orient Express setting contributes to the horror. The tight, claustrophobic corridors of the train really bumps up the fear factor even further.

A lot of Mummy On The Orient Express has quite a classic series vibe to it. Obviously there’s the whole base under siege stuff, which has been a staple of Doctor Who since the beginning of recorded time, but there’s other things too like the mystery angle, the Doctor and the companion splitting up so that the story ends up becoming a two pronged narrative, the Doctor being suspected of being behind the killings (although thankfully it doesn’t last long), and the episode actually jumping straight to the heart of the action rather than wasting time on angsty ruminating like previous episode have done this series. There’s even a moment where the Doctor offers jelly babies. There are a few elements of New Who in here too, most notably the Evil Capitalist villain who wants to control the monster, but this really feels like a well executed homage to Classic Who. I could imagine Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith feeling right at home here.

But we don’t have Tom Baker. We have Peter Capaldi. How does he do?

I feel what’s really been letting Capaldi down is the scripts. The writers just can’t seem to make up their minds what direction they want to take this Doctor. Moffat keeps saying he’s darker and more serious, but then we get episodes like Robot Of Sherwood and The Caretaker where they try to incorporate quirky humour that just doesn’t suit this type of Doctor at all. It’s like putting a party hat on top of a skeleton. Thankfully Jamie Mathieson seems to have a better grip on what kind of Doctor he’s writing for here. The humour is a lot better here and while the Doctor is still eccentric, it’s been toned down quite a bit. For instance the way he offers the jelly babies is more casual and nonchalant. It’s noticeably strange, but at the same time it’s not so goofy it’s distracting. And there are some genuinely funny lines, which Capaldi delivers perfectly. My favourite is probably when he confronts the mummy at the end:

“Hello! I’m the Doctor and I’ll be your victim for this evening. Are you my mummy?”

I also got a kick out of the whole mystery shopper scene:

“I could do with an extra pillow and I’m very disappointed with your breakfast bar, and all the dying.”

It’s quirky, but it’s not too quirky. It’s pitched at just the right level so that it works for this particular Doctor.

But what I especially like is the callousness of this Doctor. When characters are being picked off one by one by the mummy, the Doctor is more concerned with getting more information about the Foretold rather than helping or comforting the victims. He’s not in the least bit apologetic like Nine or Ten would be. He just wants to find out as much about the mummy as he can from this death in the hopes that he can prevent the next one. At one point he even goes as far as to get Clara to trick Maisie into coming to the carriage so that he can seemingly sacrifice her to the mummy for more information (later we learn this was just a ruse, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. I could imagine this Doctor doing something like that). It’s very dark indeed and Clara is clearly appalled by this, accusing him of being heartless, but that’s not really true. If the Doctor really was heartless and uncaring, then yeah, this would just be horrible, but the reason it works is because of Peter Capaldi’s performance. Just look at the scene where the kitchen staff are flushed out into space by GUS. The subtle frown on Capaldi’s face speaks volumes I think. The Doctor does care about the deaths. He’s just internalising it, choosing instead to focus on the problem at hand, which comes off as callousness, but as the Doctor himself says, there’s no time to mourn. Standing there wringing your hands isn’t going to do any good. So the Doctor just gets on with what he has to do rather than get bogged down in sentimentality.

Are there any problems with the episode? Well... the ending is a bit of an anti-climax. I suppose it can’t be helped really, but the mummy is sort of thrown away at the end (I read some reviews and people seemed really confused by the ending. Why did the mummy salute the Doctor if he surrendered? How did it die? It seemed perfectly clear to me. The alien tech was controlling the mummy, absorbing the life force of people to keep it alive, the Doctor’s surrender deactivated it and the mummy saluted the Doctor as a way of expressing gratitude before collapsing into dust). The characters are a bit limp too. They’re not bad. They serve their purpose and the actors give decent performances. They’re just not very interesting. The engineer Perkins is probably the weakest. He just felt a bit bland and nothing-y to me and I’ve never been particularly fond of Frank Skinner.

And then there’s Clara. It was a little bit jarring seeing her again and seemingly getting on with the Doctor after Kill The Moon, but the episode quickly explains this is their ‘last hurrah.’ I really have mixed feelings about all of this. I had no problem with Clara calling the Doctor out for his supposed callousness, but it’s the context that bothers me. Clearly she’s still reacting to what happened at the end of Kill The Moon, which as I’ve said before is utter bollocks because the Doctor didn’t actually do anything wrong, and yet Moffat clearly expects you to be on her side... which I’m not... because she’s chatting shit. Later she realises, in a very clunky exchange with Maisie, that she’s not ready to give up her adventures with the Doctor and is prepared to overlook his faults (which begs the question what was the fucking point of the last episode then). But then it gets even weirder toward the end when she not only lies to Danny about ending her travels with the Doctor, but also lies to the Doctor, saying that Danny was the one that said she should give it all up. I’ve never liked Clara and I’ve completely resisted any attempt of Moffat’s to convince me she’s somehow the perfect companion, but here I’m utterly confused by what I’m supposed to think of her at this point. Why is she lying? She’s got no reason to lie as far as I can see. Why can’t she just be upfront and say she wants to keep travelling? It certainly demonstrates how fucking dysfunctional her relationship with Danny is, but is that intentional or is Moffat once again being an utter twit?

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed Mummy On The Orient Express. It’s a great throwback to the classic series with a truly creepy monster at its centre. I’d say this is my favourite episode of the series so far. Please let the rest of Series 8 be as good as this.