theemceebee

[theemceebee]

Vidya = Art???

It’s team art. It’s the creative output of numerous individuals to bring story, illustrative creations, and many other aspects of media to life for a player to directly interact with. 

That said, the more developers there are, the more diluted the game’s vision becomes. Internal disagreements can threaten a game years before it’s even given a release date, exasperated by a legion of contractors, external studios, and inter-studio factions *cough* Halo Infinite. 

The fewer the people, the more clearly a visions can be maintained, and the easier it is to reach a vision consensus in the first place. Video games CAN be art, but if you’re going to argue that Madden 22 is some form of great artistic expression, I got more paint fumes you can huff. It’s in the back; that dark room there? It’s where I keep Far Cry 12, The 24th Last of Us remaster, and basically every mainline sports game for the last 10 years.  Some games are marketing bait. They serve a monetary purpose almost exclusively, and in the case of some of the worst offenders, it is their ONLY objective.

[theemceebee]

Destiny 2: Making It’s Multiplayer ACTUALLY Competitive

Bungie had a plan: constantly make allusions to Destiny 2 being at all relevant in the e-sports scene, because sweet, sweet pro team contracts awaited them. It turns out, however, that just saying your game will be an e-sport doesn’t make it so. Destiny 2 made essentially no splash at all. No pro scene formed whatsoever, because if you don’t understand what makes a game compatible with a competitive scene simply saying it will be an e-sport won’t make it a reality.  No company should be doing that anyway. If a game has a good PvP design, e-sports will emerge naturally from that. There’s no need to target the professional scene, that can be done after your game catches on and one actually forms around the game in the first place. Nonetheless, Destiny, nor it’s sequel, are remotely prepared for that anyway. OH, you want to know why? You got it, purely hypothetical reader, I will rant on this topic for the make-believe audience in my brain. 

LOADOUT

The chief problem with Destiny 2 is that weapon balance is a pipedream when you have hundreds of weapons to choose from, each with their own perk rolls, stat rolls, and in some cases outrageously powerful abilities. How do you fix that? By first acknowledging you’re about to piss off the entire player base - or at least those in competitive play. 

Remove custom loadouts, and exclude exotic weapons and armor from initial weapon selections. Choose a few weapons from each archetype, and allow only those weapons to be used in any given match. First, this equalizes the playing field significantly, allowing weapons to be balanced for their role rather than having dozens of weapons competing for the same purpose. Second, players have a lot more information on exactly what other players are utilizing because the weapon pool would be a few dozen guns, rather than 500.

“BUT MUH BUILD REEE” Calm down, I hear you, and it’s pretty simple - and in fact there’s more than one option to solving the “exotics in multiplayer” problem as well. 

Solution 1, for deathmatch and control objectives:  Weapon archetype icons spawn on the map, representative of a small selection of weapons from any given archetype (pulse rifles, auto-rifles, etc). Players select which weapons they want when they pick up an archetype weapon icon. If they collect a shotgun weapon icon, they’ll get the shotgun they choose from the list of competitive multiplayer weapons. Exotic charms now spawn on the map as well. A player picks them up from the map, enabling them to spawn with their selected exotic weapon/armor combo for the rest of the round

Solution 2, ideal for bomb type modes: If we’re going to ape objectives from Counter-Strike, why not import one of the most important facets of it’s design while you’re at it? Players start with simple weapon loadouts and purchase weapons with points they earn throughout the rounds. The better your team does, the more diverse your loadouts can get.

These systems add something important to Destiny 2: gradual power scaling as the game continues, rewarding the players who control the map, and tightening down early game chaos. 

POWERS

REMOVE ALL POWERS. Well, no, nevermind. We do need something to remain of Destiny’s core game identity, and the powers are a big part of that. “Supers,” however, need some serious tuning. Being able to wipe out the map in less than 10 seconds is fun for exactly one person, and a cheap gimmick to everyone else. Not to mention, when teams fight to establish a position, and a player can remove all that effort by holding forward on the left joystick and mashing the right trigger, there’s a serious wrench in a game’s design. 

Supers are often a free, easy team wipe, although Bungie’s removal of their incredible damage resistance years ago did make their activation timing a lot more important. If it were me, I’d remove super activation from competitive game modes entirely. There are already high-AoE weapons, the grenade abilities, chaining melee attacks, one-shot kill capable weapons, MGs can mow down whole teams with accurate fire, and were almost singularly responsible for breaking Gambit.  Titans can already practically teleport kill with their shoulder charge. Why also have these super abilities in play? 

Perhaps super generation is objective dependent? Perhaps it should be something that can be retrieved from the map? If they MUST remain in competitive play, various methods of their implementation would need to be rigorously tested. 

The grenades and most melee abilities are suitable for power spikes when attempting various strategies. Supers aren’t guaranteed “I win” buttons anymore, unless you’re a smashing titan or a gunslinger. Or a bladedancer. 

Ah, you know, maybe remove supers from competitive altogether, nevermind. 

CONCLUSION

Destiny 2 isn’t an e-sport and was never going to be an e-sport. It’s multiplayer is there as a formality - something that allows players to fight each other but not something ever intended to be a deep, meaningful experience. No significant effort has ever been put into the balance of multiplayer, and if you were to truly prioritize game balance, the current community wouldn’t want it anyway, because Destiny has always allowed free-form build creation. Any change of the scale discussed here wouldn’t likely be received well. 

I could go on and on about the specifics of what powers need which changes, what weapons I’d keep, etc. But I’d have to still be playing Destiny 2 to have updated knowledge on that, and further, I’d have to play the PvP. Since that’s not happening, I can’t speak much more than on the core concepts.

But it was a fun thought experiment to perform at 5 AM, so hey. 

[theemceebee]

Design Rules: FPS/RTS Concept

First, understand that it is quite difficult to master this hybrid genre from both angles. In general, you’re going to want to focus your efforts are making one or the other fun first, and adding the other as a secondary genre.  FPS Primary, RTS Secondary: The ability to control units, and potentially even build bases, from the FPS perspective is the best move to make here. Building is a key component of many RTS games, but if one is going to be fighting on the front lines with a following squad, then building needs to be either automated entirely, controllable from the front (giving build orders and allowing the AI to determine where it needs to be built), or only moderately key to victory. Ultimately, the game lives or dies on it’s first person combat first and foremost, and unit pathfinding and control isn’t as necessary since its most likely that the player will have their units following them MOST of the time.  Alternative: mini-map commands. Using box select, control groups, and queued orders on a mini-map from the cockpit of a vehicle on the front would make advanced tactics much more usable. 

Since it’s an FPS first, the greatest punishment and reward should emerge from the skill of the fighters rather than the perfection of build orders or higher strategy.

RTS Primary, FPS Secondary: The trickier of the two to make. If RTS is the primary component of the game, then unit responses, pathfinding, and extremely precise unit control is key to success. Generally speaking, the commander interface should resemble a classical RTS as much as possible, with all the typical expected hotkeys that come with it. Locating idle utility units, control groups, smart box selection, hotkeying production facilities, rally points, everything you might expect from a generic RTS should be here.  If officers exist (a unit which functions as both a hero unit and rally point for grunt units), those positions are useful for occupation by players. The FPS doesn’t need to be perfect, merely functional, as the commander position is the most vital position to success. The commander gives objectives, builds the base, manages primary resources, calls in support, and should be able to control non-player units directly. These units should prioritize commander orders at all times. A bad officer unit probably won’t throw the game. A bad commander will ALWAYS throw the game. Pathfinding, pathfinding, pathfinding. Units need to respond immediately, accurately, and quickly. They should not run off on their own; another way to put this - leave AI for your hero units. Otherwise, they need to obey the commander or the officers to the absolute letter. At the most, they should fire while moving, and only seek cover nearby if there are no outstanding orders to fill. They should not move outside of a short range from their stopping point.  In an ideal world, we would have an FPS with the combat of Halo 3, Insurgency: Sandstorm, or other top shooters, with the RTS perfection of Age of Empires 2 or Starcraft 2. Development resources, however, are limited. Remember that there often won’t be time to devote to a flawless execution of both at the same time, and focus your resources hard on one facet of it.  Besides, if you release a game with several great components but a few missteps, players are often much more patient in waiting for a game to iron out other problems.

[theemceebee]

Objectivism in Game Reviews

I LOVE Deadly Premonition. It’s a trainwreck, piece of shit game though, with a production value that reaches BELOW even most indie titles of it’s day. My enjoyment of the IP means nothing in terms of the game’s objectively measurable quality. If someone said, “hey, by every metric imaginable, Dragon’s Dogma really isn’t a very good game,” I might ask for a description of their grievances but I wouldn’t disagree. The game has fundamental problems in it’s design. That it’s my personal favorite RPG of all time doesn’t change that.  Objectivity is a dirty word in reviews. To most people, “I enjoyed it, and my friends enjoyed it, therefore it is good.” Sure! It’s good to you, it’s bad to me, therefore it’s all subjective.  Right? No. It’s not all subjective. In fact, all that’s required to leave subjectivity behind is that we establish an agreed upon criteria. Case in point, is the fact that Beyond Light (a Destiny 2 DLC) ends the primary mission chain with a gaping plothole objectively good? Since most storytellers would agree that there needs to be a viable cause for an effect to occur, and there’s no reason whatsoever the Guardian doesn’t kill Eramis when she loses control of her powers and freezes in place, then no. It’s objectively bad, in fact.  Let’s reference another facet of Beyond Light since it’s my most recent review. Can it’s encounter design be objectively bad because there are levels in which I not only do not have to engage the enemy, but in some cases didn’t have to MOVE even one inch to defeat all enemies in the area without even using defensive abilities like healing or shields, or offensive abilities like my grenade?  What are the criteria? Destiny is a highly mobile first person shooter. An encounter that forces the player to move serves that purpose. There are defensive abilities in place that the player can use. An encounter that forces the player to deploy a shield or healing ability serves that purpose. There are offensive abilities the player can use for high degrees of battlefield control, or burst damage. An encounter that encourages it’s use at least a few times in battle would serve that purpose. Not every encounter will use all these criteria, but it’s not unreasonable to factor that each encounter should probably satisfy at least two of those, else the player isn’t engaging with a majority of the game’s combat mechanics.  If those are the metrics we’re measuring, and we CAN measure them, then we can say the encounter design in several of Beyond Light’s levels are objectively bad. Your enjoyment of the levels is irrelevant, because enjoyment of something IS inherently subjective and cannot be used as criteria for objective measurement.  If the criteria for a square table being good is that it should be as stable as possible, thus requiring four legs at the corners, each of even length, then an identical table that’s missing a leg is objectively inferior. You might find some sort of Avant Garde appreciation of it, for some reason, but that doesn’t make the table superior by the established criteria.  This is not arguable. A good game reviewer will view each game with their own list of criteria, and whether a writer chooses to state those criteria outright or not, a reader should probably make a good faith attempt to ascertain what those criteria are by what is being considered good or bad.  If I told you Fusion Frenzy 2 is fun, and I also said “this game is one of the worst games ever made,” both of those statements can be true but if you have your own criteria of judgement you might think I’m out of my mind. 

OBJECTION.

“Doesn’t that mean that whatever the established criteria are for what makes a game good is also subjective? You fool! You imbecile! You have stumbled into your own trap!”

Good design convention rarely changes. Game to game, there are certain things that if they’re of poor quality, they will be recognized, no matter the title, genre, or consensus. This isn’t because it’s tradition, it’s because there’s something about that design convention that, when it’s undermined, most or all people would agree that it is a less desirable state or outcome than some other outcome. 

Beyond Light had ways to avoid ending the fight with Eramis on a plothole. It didn’t take them. There is nobody that could make the argument, in good faith, that the state of that level’s ending is objectively better than one where the plothole is never made in the first place. Therefore, it’s reasonable to consider THAT particular criteria (avoiding plotholes in storytelling) an objective quality that spans every genre and style. 

Some creators may subvert these with clever strategies or creations, but the exception to the rule doesn’t become the rule just because that exception exists. In the ways of purist subjectivism, however, every sacred cow can remain unsullied.

Every outgroup that opposes you can be opposed without concern for what is right or wrong, because what is right is whatever you feel about it, rather than “right” being ascertained by the patterns of conflict and creation, across the many tens of  thousands of years of human existence.I don’t get to decide for you what you enjoy and don’t enjoy. 

But I do get to tell you something is shit with specific reasons why, and if you have no counterargument to those reasons, then you have no place in any contest of objective thought.

[theemceebee]

A Two-Year-Late Review of Destiny 2: Beyond Light

Pray tell, why am I writing this? Can you guess? This expansion for Destiny 2 dropped like a warhead onto Destiny 2 in November of 2020, not because it blew everyone's mind, but because it took 65% of the game's previous content with it. If you don't know what I mean, it's because you probably have at least 50 IQ, so it doesn't make any sense that an expansion would take a bunch of content AWAY from a game. So, almost two years late, what's the point of the review? The newest expansion Lightfall is coming up, and Bungie made the game, and all expansions, free to play until August 30th. I stopped playing Destiny 2 about a week after the Shadowkeep expansion (released Oct 2019). Having not played in years at this point, I figured I'd give it a try. Once I was done, which was about two hours ago at this time, I thought it might be healthier to write this review, instead of perform an occult ritual to wipe my memory back to 2015. Back then, The Taken King expansion was either coming, or already out. I had optimism then. Had. Pretty ballsy for Bungie to lead off any returning players with Beyond Light, an expansion I would say ranks among the worst of Destiny's expansions. I wouldn't say it quite hits the depths of Warmind and Curse of Osiris, but when the bar's at rock-bottom you'd have to start putting real physical effort into putting it any lower. I would've sunset that nonsense, automatically granted returning players the Stasis subclass, and pretended like the game ACTUALLY started with Witch Queen. This is Bungie, though, and the only time "Bungie" and "good decision" belongs together in one sentence is when it involves not playing their game anymore. Beyond Light's plot is a reconfiguration of the Forsaken expansion. In it, a Fallen captain has vague, poorly defined ambitions about using the "Darkness," also poorly defined to date, to unite the Fallen houses. In the mean time, the gray area of morality and the line between Light and Dark is constantly spoken about. That's right, the same premise as Forsaken, but now instead of the Gambit gametype, which was great for PvP, we get the Stasis subclass, which destroyed it. Now that I think about it, Forsaken was just a successfully implemented mulligan of Destiny 1's House of Wolves DLC too, so I guess they're really stuck on rehashing the Fallen unification concept until the game dies. It's a fair gamble, because Destiny fans only have memory that stretches back to the beginning of the current DLC cycle or season. Forsaken had some personality, added to the lore in substantial ways, had a enjoyable story (though it doesn't hold up to scrutiny) and also had a ground breaking PvPvE mode Gambit, which was my favorite thing to play at the time. SPOILERS ARE COMING. YOU ARE WARNED. CHARACTER FOR THIS PLAYTHROUGH: WARLOCK, primarily using solar and lightning subclasses. Beyond Light does none of these things. It exists solely as a vehicle to give the Darkness subclass to the player. You can skip the dialogue! No, I mean it. Skip it. You will learn basically nothing that you didn’t already know about any character, and all that happens is you neutralize the villain after killing her entire cadre. At the end of the final fight, the third generation Kel of Kels is Stasis-frozen after...losing control of her powers? I think? It's never actually explained why it happens, or why your character doesn't blow her up after she's frozen. See, Stasis freezes enemies in place on contact with it's abilities. Killing them while frozen is not only possible, it detonates them violently, which can chain to other frozen enemies. Your character could just permanently neutralize the Kel right there, which would not be any different than the rampage through her ranks you already committed, included her entire chain of command. But if your character did that, Bungie wouldn't have a returning foe for the Season of Plunder, in which Eramis (the Fallen Kel that's frozen) breaks out of her icy prison. Stasis is ill-suited to the game's high mobility and high enemy counts. Typically speaking, raw lethality through either directed damage or AoE is more important, because mob enemies are not that threatening without their numbers. Its not that Stasis can't neutralize groups, it's that it does nothing that other subclasses don't already do better. The most interesting facet of it, the creation of physical barriers, is not fully explored, even though it would have allowed for some interesting abilities. For instance, imagine creating a platform sniper post that generates damage resistance to whoever is standing on it, as well as giving Cold status effects to their shots. Is that potential team synergy I see? A tool for boss nuking? No. It's a mirage. Come back to reality, this is a modern triple-A game after all. All of these things could be forgiven, and will be, because at it's core Destiny's combat is what people play it for anyway. They'll even tell you as much the instant you make a complain on anything that isn't battle-related. That's fine, and in fact if the combat is good enough, even I'll overlook all of it's worst aspects if I at least have fun shooting things. After all, I played all of Destiny 1, and Destiny 2 up until Shadowkeep. My standards for Destiny aren't high. Is running through levels with no threat to your well-being fun? Is standing on top of a box while enemies come at you, from long range, from one direction, for three waves before doing the exact same thing from the opposite direction fun? Where's the encounter design here? Linear hallways with no verticality transition you from two-level arena to two-level arena, and they mix this formula up by having you fight no less than a dozen engagements in an open, mostly flat area with no cover or obstacles at all. In many cases, I spotted parts of the arenas that weren’t being effectively used at all, in the middle of a fight. Sometimes, the enemy types thrown at the player during a fight were so basic it required little more than standing in one spot and sequentially gunning them all down as they all spawned, in front of me, with none of the support enemies that might otherwise make the fight interesting. At least force me to MOVE AROUND THE MAP. It’s like catching a plot hole of a movie at the very moment it happens. It’s jarring, and it removed me from any sense of immersion in the action.  I'm not exaggerating when I say this is one of the most braindead series of levels any FPS has ever put out. There is virtually no effort put into either the level design, or the encounters. I don't expect REAL difficulty out of normal-difficulty Destiny. It's never been a hard game, raids and nightfalls aside, but between set-piece battles and reasonably decent design of each fight, I've never thought it could be this utterly uninspired. Has Destiny always been this way? Perhaps it has, and I've just been too tuned-out to really think objectively about most of what I was playing. How can one focus on the game's core problems when you've got content sunsetting, overly aggressive pricing, and constant extra monetization (with in-game benefits by the way) in the Silver shop? Why would level design be my first thought instead of the obviously broken plot and vacant world-building? It's only now that I'm thinking that Destiny's combat might not even be THAT good, and that maybe the combat aesthetics were enough to convince me the combat was the only thing Destiny could do right. In reality, Beyond Light is the most obvious example of a problem Destiny is consistently plagued with in it's normal campaign missions. In any case, I won't be continuing my playthrough of Destiny during it's free period, because I'm reminded starkly of the core problems this game has. These problems won't be resolved just because the directors of the story can competently put together some A-to-B plotpoints for an expansion or two. Lightfall is coming, and just like with the Witch Queen, there's a big bad of the year to get hyped beyond reason for. There's the promise of some mildly interesting gimmick, there are changes that have been requested for years and only now acted on, and there are features that should have been in the game at launch that will come with Lightfall. Is the game improving? Putting a fancy saddle on a horse doesn't magically make your neglect of it's health go away. For some, however, they'll be too distracted by the saddle to see the thing's ribs clearly visible through it's dirty skin. Lucky you, Bungie, that you don't need a good game to make money - just a popular one.

[theemceebee]

Halo: Conceptual Necromancy

Halo Infinite was made by hundreds: over a thousand if you include official test engineers. Halo Infinite, in it's current state, pukes blood from the copious internal injuries it was born with. This festering fetus, barely surviving conception, is in an incubator while one nurse, a bio-tech engineer, three janitors, and a Microsoft executive look on in horror. Where's the doctor? This isn't a hospital - not officially, anyway. Mama Bungie is in the other room, currently trying to cut away and reattach limbs to a zombie child that pukes money when the right parts are assembled, only for it to fall apart moments later. No, this is not a hospital. It's a research facility for necromancy. How can you best assemble a dead body for reanimation so that people might believe it's not dead, long enough to pay for the chance to watch it shit itself, and fling that shit all over it's enclosure? The campaign is a combat sandbox, executed so well that all other parts of it's design can be easily identified as vestigial limbs attached post-creation. Where are the Spartan 4's? Where's Captain Laskey? Why does a game that starts with a compelling main villain not use that villain until a post-credits scene? If what you wanted was to be a "spiritual successor" and a "soft reboot" why not just scrap Halo 5 in it's entirety? Halo 4 happened, Cortana is dead, and the post Covenant war landscape is rife for story-telling potential. "Fuck you Bee writing is hard." Shut the hell up Dan Chosich, it's YOUR writing team, this failure is YOUR nuclear dump site. I'll strawman you until the end of days if it means getting this chip off my shoulder. Why go through the trouble of interesting level design so that I can just break it's design with a grapple hook that ensures the player never has to think about the environment as a combat tool? Instead of tank-y boss creatures, why not just an exceptionally difficult combat encounter? Take away the motion sensor, disable the player's powerups, face them with the full might of the Banished. Force them to contend with artillery, with heavy weapons, with deeply entrenched emplacements the player can't beat just by grappling around. Here's an idea: make the AI shoot straight so that maybe grappling in front of them is dangerous. These are design questions asked and answered by numerous smaller teams, with more unified visions, tighter budgets, and thankfully, little access to outsourcing. Better yet, they were asked BEFORE the game was put out, not after when there's so many technical problems that your game has become a punchline. Oh, except your in-game cash Store. That works pretty well. Nightmare Reaper was made by ONE man. Angel's Fall First was made by a small indie studio using Unreal 3. Deep Rock Galactic? 15 devs at the time of launch. No Man's Sky is the undisputed king of fixing a game long after it's out, but they didn't have 500 developers and a blank check to develop on either.

"gUnS fEeL gOoD" mumbles the Borderlands-labeled flesh mass in the corner of the room, murmuring only when it can clear it's throat of the phlegm built up from years of gargling it's own balls. Half decent core combat gameplay doesn't make up for shortfalls in every other aspect of the game. Still no story, still no Forge, still no WORKING custom games, still no custom games browsing, still no campaign co-op, which will not have campaign scoring. No useful theater features, no useful interfacing between Waypoint and Halo, and no reason to keep playing.

[theemceebee]

Derpy Does a Bethesda Review

Bethesda, ruler of the RPG (minus the “RP”) and king of misplaced, irrational hype. If ever there was a studio that deserved fanboys to rabidly wank in jerk-circles at E3, it certainly shouldn’t be them. I suppose when your target audience has the collective IQ of a pressboard office desk then mediocrity is all you really need to induce ecstatic spasms in the millions. Woe is the janitor who has to clean up the spunk painting “ten out of ten” in slimy white lettering on the ground afterward. Ultimately we’re at the tipping point in which a massive studio slowly devolves into making cookie cutter versions of a proven formula. Eventually its creators will slowly merge with their monitors like the machines they’ve become and we’ll see The Elder Fallout: 100 Dollar Season Pass Edition. Until then, at least their games are capable of being modded into decency.   For a studio with such a “pedigree for quality” if I’m to quote malcontents who thought Fallout 4 was a “disappointment” (implying expectations were high from Skyrim of all games), one might expect that some amount of backlash is guaranteed. There will always be those who disagree with people’s opinions with a massive multi-million dollar corporation because everyone knows that opinions about powerful corporate entities matter. Then again, perhaps those trolls who grab the low hanging fruit have a point for once.   And look here, there’s an apple levitating merely three inches from the ground! Truly, life imitates art.   The Fallout series: born from the smoldering zombie of a dying studio that Bethesda failed to kill for 3 years before entropy did their job for them. The Elder Scrolls: Generic fantasy tale that’s long since needed a breath of life, and when you’re out of ideas for sidequests I suppose “kill dragon boss” is as good as another. You know if I wanted to look at an example of unfocused development I’d watch a documentary about 5-year-olds with ADHD, not tramp around generic apocalypse land #62 in search of some barely coherent plot that’s constantly interrupted by numerous comparatively unimportant objectives. Speaking of ADHD, both series have fallen into that grout of constant gimmicky distractions - good job Bethesda, well played. The best parts of Interplay’s Fallout go ignored, The Elder Scrolls improves mechanically but the only real appeal is tourism of a lovely vista, and suddenly there are cheers for days from your cardboard boxes-I mean fanboys.   “Derpy, you self-righteous indignant bastard,” you scream, frothing onto your monitor in a blind rage, no longer bound by petty things like common sense, “what about the-”   The what? The bland, repetitively voiced NPCs? Their inane habit of spewing the same three lines of dialog every time you walk by them? The enemies whose design is “deal damage in slightly different ways” because Bethesda doesn’t believe in putting any player at a real disadvantage, and thus all its hostile mobs and bosses are “large health bar and telegraphed attacks”? Seven hundred side quests which have zero impact on the overarching plot (which I forgot about 150 hours of gameplay ago)?   Fallout has evolved into Borderlands with a less hilarious script, and Skyrim satisfies every baseline bullet point for a run of the mill RPG without taking even an accidental stumble towards innovation or meaning. I don’t expect it to get any better since the parent company ZenimaxMedia has Curt Shil-I mean Cal Ripken Jr. on its board of directors and I think we all know what happens when baseball players get involved with game studios.   What’s left to judge Bethesda on? Its publishing ventures? They didn’t make Doom, Wet, Rage, Wolfenstein, or Brink (dodged that bullet ey?) They’re more effective at hostile business takeovers of smaller studios than they are making decent games, and even that is seconded by their fierce desire to shove the wirebrush of expensive DLC up the asses of their customers. What’s the matter, don’t have quite as many millions as you’d like to have?   CD Projekt Red throws enormous DLC at the player for 20 dollars a piece and damned if it isn’t practically an entirely new Witcher game in its own right, and that’s not counting the tons of small things they throw out completely for free. Bethesda is surely aware that some companies choose not to charge money for even the most tiny, meaningless add-ons. “How then,” the automatons blandly retort, ”will we make use of the human money farm?”   Same story, different logo. Another triple-A company makes a million dollars on milking a cow that’s long since expired, another million raging fantards shout for joy in unison. I wish I had ADHD myself so that maybe I wouldn’t pay more attention to the festering fungus that is Bethesda.

10/10, would learn how not to make a game again