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At the intersection of video games and pedantic over-analysis.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/a-few-reasons-you-should-pick-up-hellblade-right-now/
A Few Reasons You Should Pick Up Hellblade Right Now
By Wesley Scott
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is one heck of a game. Hailing from the underappreciated artists at Ninja Theory – known primarily for their work on the PS3 launch title Heavenly Sword and the all but forgotten Enslaved: Odyssey to the West – it is a tale of vengeance, redemption, and (it’s right there in the title) sacrifice that is well paced, breathtakingly visualized, and expertly told. I mean, some of the writing here, guys? It’s poetry. Gods honest poetry. Good poetry. That’s a rarity in gaming.
While Hellblade’s general quality is its own argument to be made for immediate purchase (and if you’re into character action/adventure games I’d argue it’s a sufficient one at that) I think there’s a larger point that can and should be made for its place within the economic structure of the industry as an unabashedly pro-consumer offering.
Hellblade is an independent title both developed and published by Ninja Theory itself. This has given them a tremendous amount of latitude in choosing the business model that best represents their game to their audience. It’s to their credit, then, that every decision they’ve made reveals a studio interested in getting their title in the hands of as many players as possible with minimal fuss and zero haggling.
By all accounts, Hellblade was developed on a modest budget comparative to other AAA titles in its weight class. With this in mind, Ninja Theory identified a suggested retail price of $29.99 for their game, a price tag entirely at odds with the industry’s monolithic insistence that a top-tier title be delivered at $59.99 or more. Even at roughly half the price of a standard AAA title from other publishing houses Ninja Theory has reported that Hellblade will break even at 300,000 units sold. That’s a lesson in budgeting that this industry should take note of as my next point is considered.
Hellblade has no micro transactions or announced DLC
It’s being delivered as-is with no intention of milking its audience for so much as a solitary penny after its initial sale. Can a game make enough money to be successful without season passes, microtransactions, and months of drip-fed content slowly draining its audience’s bank accounts? Can a studio really just make a game and move on to their next project in this new age of endless development cycles? Only time will tell but with a target of 300,000 units, it’s pretty damn likely.
Hellblade doesn’t waste your money or your time
By today’s standards, Hellblade is a relatively short game. It’s a compact, self-contained narrative that takes less than ten hours to beat and offers practically nothing in terms of replayability. Most major publishers would likely fear-shit themselves at that prospect because they know it makes their phantasmal $59.99 price tag that much harder to defend. EA or Warner Brothers would demand some tacked-on multiplayer or an endless battle mode or some other bit of unnecessary filler to make consumers feel good about that extra $30 they’re dropping. Instead, Ninja Theory did something that seems almost radical by comparison. They stopped spending money when they were finished and charged what they thought their game was actually worth. So instead of grinding through hours of half-hearted development in order to justify your purchase you can pay your $30, enjoy what’s there, and move on.
Ninja Theory doesn’t think you’re a lazy, feckless criminal
Hellblade released on CD Projekt Red’s Good Old Games service day and date with its release on Steam. That means Hellblade isn’t defended by any sort of DRM and is probably getting passed around several major warez sites as this article is written. Regardless, Ninja Theory seems pretty confident that their game will do just fine without slowing down pirating efforts by a day or two and inconveniencing actual paying customers who just want to pay them for their product.
In brief, Ninja Theory has done everything right when it comes to their first solo publishing effort and I hope the market rewards them for it. If Hellblade looks like your sort of thing then please don’t wait for a sale or grab this one off a CD key exchange. Let publishers know that a good game is always worth the price of admission and the good will of their consumers is what sets that price.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/its-a-matter-of-perspective/
It's A Matter Of Perspective
By Wesley Scott
Every new entertainment medium has its own strengths to offer a potential audience. Literature allows us to explore inner monologue and focus on granular details in a way that stage plays simply can’t. Theatre gives us an opportunity to draw on our own observations and infer intent between the lines of an actor’s performance. Film allows us to draw on spectacle and create meaning through the juxtaposition of images in a way that was unimaginable a few decades ago.
While each of these disciplines draws on the successes of the others, the greatest expressions of their form, the masterpieces of the medium, play directly to the strengths inherent within the mechanics of their form. Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions has long been considered unfilmable, and for good reason. It’s a novel of ideas that relies not so much on the interplay between its characters but on the existential meditation on the death of the American dream constructed by Vonnegut’s brilliant prose. Anton Chekov’s The Seagull requires an ensemble cast of players to enact a kind of double-blind performance on the audience, simultaneously playing the earnest intent of each character’s motivation while retaining a feel for the absurdist nature of the events unfolding. Orson Well’s Citizen Kane altered the course of an entire industry when film makers suddenly realized that a camera could have an opinion all its own instead of simply framing a playwright’s work in static proscenium.
Filmmaking is now in its golden age and while it will continue to develop, as all art does, it’s facing a future of diminishing returns where innovation is concerned. Video games, on the other hand, are in their infancy and if they’re going to mature its time to step out from the shadow of Papa filmmaking and learn what makes games unique as an art form.
I’m going to pick on Naughty Dog for a second here. It’s not that I hate Naughty Dog or its incredible portfolio of games at all, quite the contrary. Naughty Dog has produced some of the best arguments for narrative depth that gaming has ever produced. But all that depth was clearly plumbed from a tremendous love and respect for cinema. And that seems to be where the industry wants to take itself as incredible experiences like The Last of Us gain near universal critical and popular acclaim. The cinematic experience is the thing now. Videogames should be beautifully choreographed, interactive movies. There’s just one problem with that: movies are better at delivering a linear narrative than games are. The industry will never beat film at its own game, just ask theatre how futile that struggle is.
The disconnect the audience feels from the protagonist of a cinematic drama allows us to relinquish control and cede our disbelief to the story being told. We have no effect on the action taking place so we have no say in the outcome. It’s an important contract between writers and their audience at the outset of a new work: “let me tell you about the characters so that you’ll accept their actions going forward”. The problem with games is that a player is ostensibly free to take whatever action they see fit and, when that action is at odds with the character of their established avatar, they feel a dissonance between action and intent, pulling them from this suspension.
The problem here is that the true strength of video games as a narrative art form doesn’t lie in the first or even third-person narrative style most commonly found in storytelling. No, video games are, perhaps, the first medium to feel entirely at home within the second-person. Instead of I, me, he, she, they, games should start exploring the artistic merit of you.
Let’s use the incomparable Portal 2 as an example, as I think it might be the best use case for second-person narrative in all of gaming. Sure, there is a character named Chell who exists in some of Valve’s marketing material but as far as the game world is concerned Chell is nothing more than a cipher who is never seen, heard from, nor accurately described by any other character in the game. Chell is not a clearly defined protagonist with thoughts, feelings, goals, or interests, she is a phantasm inhabited by the player throught your journey to Aperture Science. In most games, Chell would become an avatar from which a first or third person perspective on the narrative would derive. In the third person, you, the player, would be asked to identify with the object that is Chell as she goes on her journey. In the first person, you would be placed in Chell’s shoes and asked to act as a passenger within her psyche. In either case, the player is a step or two removed from a direct relationship with the events unfolding before them. However, by reducing Chell to a cipher, a blank slate that carries nothing but what the player brings with them, the player is afforded the opportunity to directly interact with the world in a way that’s transformational.
Suddenly the player is not a semi-active observer watching the other but is, instead, a willing participant invested in everything happening on the screen. This all but eliminates ludo-narrative dissonance as there is no longer an established history separate from that of the player to draw upon in order to contextualize the actions they choose to take. Everything the player does is done because they do it and requires no further analysis. It also increases immersion as the narrative is now directly addressing the player as the agent of change in its world instead of placing the responsibility on a detached personality the player is merely asked to identify with.
No other artistic medium has ever possessed the kind of potential for a second-person address that video games have. Sure, it’s been attempted in literature and film before but it’s of limited utility in a non-interactive art form. Without the ability to direct the action to some degree you’re still only accepting the actions dictated by the narrator upon the protagonist no matter the pronoun in use.
In order for video games to take those first, fleeting step into their artistic renaissance I think it’s important for developers to begin taking advantage of this unique ability to place an audience at the center of the narrative and utilize their own personality and experiences instead of merely cribbing the shorthand that has made other visual mediums so successful. Until that happens games will remain little more than the envious siblings of film and television, hoping to outshine their brethren by following in their footsteps instead striking out on a path all their own.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/destiny-2-beta-welcome-to-year-one-all-over-again/
Destiny 2 Beta: Welcome to Year One All Over Again
By Wesley Scott
I remember playing the original Destiny beta back in 2014. I had watched some trailers and promotional content and kept up with all the regular news up until that point but I was skeptical. I didn’t think Bungie could deliver all the promises they’d made about their “shared world shooter” (read MMO without the massive part). But when I sat down with that beta for the first time and started playing I was immediately hooked. “Wow,” I thought to myself “once I get into the main game and these areas open up this is going to be something truly special”. Destiny year one was, as a result, one of the most disappointing games I’ve ever experienced.
But I stuck with it. I saw it through the pathetic excuse for an expansion that was The Dark Below, the slightly better content drop that was The House of Wolves, the very welcome near-reboot that was The Taken King, and the last, pathetic fart that was The Rise of Iron. In that time I’ve grown to truly dislike Destiny. Every time I boot it up with the desire to go on a fun loot grind I run smack-dab into the slow, boring, punishing, tedious, poorly designed game that makes up its bones, then I go and boot up Diablo III instead. Still, in the back of my mind, I’ve wondered if it was just too late for Destiny’s first iteration. If the game that Bungie had produced would require more work than a few patches could reasonably deliver. So I waited for Destiny 2 and hoped they’d get it right this time.
It’s 2014 all over again and this is year one. Welcome.
The beta starts with a first impression that makes you wonder if you booted up the wrong game. The menus and prompts are nearly identical to those found in its predecessor. The first mission, while thrilling, is filled with desperate Disney theme park setpieces and Whedonesque quippy dialogue that strains the very definition of a one-liner. The action kicks off with a poorly delivered joke from your ghost about flying too fast and ends with the big-bad delivering the line “I give you a world without light” in total po-faced earnestness. This isn’t the game that will fix Destiny’s storytelling woes. There’s a chance that there will be more story but little chance that there will be a marked improvement in its quality.
The same goes for gameplay. After the opening set piece, you’re dropped into orbit – Christ almighty! I hoped and prayed that we were done with fucking orbit! – and presented with a flat menu of two PvP arenas and one PvE strike to select from. I played the strike, of course, because I’m an idiot for returning to Destiny after all this time, not a fucking masochist. Fuck the crucible. It was… well, it was a Destiny strike. I’ve seen some pundits praising it for its overall length and variation compared to the strikes in the first game and its expansions but I honestly have no idea what they’re seeing. It’s paced a little better. There’s more rapid traversal and less sitting inside of monster closets for minutes at a time but that’s hardly a pro if the end results are the same. The mobs are from two of the three alien races that Bungie will ever put in these games, there’s some awkward first-person platforming, and there’s a final boss that requires an eternity of circling in an enclosed space to finally defeat. There are no branching objectives or cleaver puzzles or even any new enemies to defeat. All the bosses are still just oversized versions of the regular mobs. Fucking seriously.
There is a new loadout system but it actually serves as more of an annoyance that hinders your ability to deal efficiently with threats instead of an empowering statement of everything Bungie has learned in the last three years. Instead of the primary, secondary, heavy loadout from Destiny 1 you’re now locked into two primaries and one “power weapon”. That power weapon can be anything from a rocket launcher to a sniper rifle to a fusion rifle or heavy machine gun but the overall effect is a decreased damage output over Destiny 1 and a diminished capacity to improvise from situation to situation. Now you just unload on your enemies with whatever you have on hand and reserve your power ammunition for overpowered minions or bosses that require the extra pain. It slows things down and makes you feel feeble in comparison to a kitted-out Destiny 1 exotic freak.
I don’t know what the Destiny community at large will think, having not visited the forums in over a year. Perhaps the player base will be thankful for the adjustments to PvE that slow down the grind even more or the increased emphasis on PvP. Personally, I was hoping that Bungie would make good on some of the promises that were made years ago when Destiny was first announced and touted as an enormous MMO with literal mountains of dynamic content and immersive discovery. Instead, players will be running the same old strikes against the same old enemies and listening to the same old lines of dialogue for three more years until Bungie does it all over again.
You may think I’m getting ahead of myself, that the beta is only a tiny sliver of what Bungie has to offer and it’s unfair to judge the finished product before the whole thing opens up, and I would ordinarily agree with you. But I was there for the first beta. I had those thoughts myself at the very beginning and I’m certain that what we all just played is all there is to Destiny 2. That may be enough for you, but for me, it’s too little too late. I’ll just be over here waiting for Anthem.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/no/
No. Absolutely not.
By Wesley Scott
I’m not doing this again, Nintendo. I did it twice this year. First, when you produced and sold a handful of budget emulator boxes and retroactively branded it a limited-run collector’s item, then, when you announced the Nintendo Switch.
You’re a bunch of liars, there’s no other word for it. The Switch is still suffering from shortages that benefit only scalpers and retailers looking to make a quick buck off moving some additional inventory through “bundle packs” that limit consumer flexibility. The NES classic is selling for four to five times its MSRP on Amazon and Ebay. You could continue to blame it all on supply chain and production line issues or misinterpreting demand but you announced a brand new 3DS model two months ago, didn’t you? And that terrifying brute you call President here in the States has said it won’t suffer the same fate.
Stop it! Just stop it, you dicks! You want people to believe there’s a constant state of runaway demand surrounding all your physical products. You want consumers to walk into their local electronics store and walk out disappointed because you know it will make them feel that much more special on the day their hunt for your latest Faberge Easter egg finally ends. You want scalpers to dominate the sales chain. You want people taking the day off work to stand in line to get a ticket to maybe purchase something you ostensibly want them to have! It’s not an issue you can learn from or work through it’s intentional psychological warfare.
And, yes, I get why you can’t say all that out loud and must instead confine such discussions to the candle-lit ritual chamber of your shareholder boardroom, because this whole thing only works if your consumers can actually grasp that shit-rope you’re feeding them with full confidence that it’ll get them to the top of the hill. And, yeah, it must be hilarious to watch them fail every time.
You’re building a theme park, for Christ’s sake! You’re capable of competing in the stock market with the entirety of Sony electronics. You once owned the Seattle Mariners.
Now you want me to believe you’ve got this whole thing under control and it’s time for me to get excited for the SNES Mini which I will definitely, absolutely, positively, no kidsies this time, be able to get my hands on this holiday season… Or, you know, maybe I should just go to Amazon right now and start clicking refresh until that two-minute pre-order window pops, yeah? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
Bite me, you nest of vipers.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/lets-talk-the-hopeful-nihilism-of-breath-of-the-wild/
The Beautiful Nihilism of Breath of the Wild
By Wesley Scott
Breath of the Wild is a tremendous achievement, not just in its ability to effortlessly blend its systems and design choices in ways that feel like they should have been obvious to developers for years, but in its incredible storytelling which relies more on the density and variety of Hyrule and its people than it does on overproduced cutscenes and dialogue.
The story of Courage and Wisdom’s never ending struggle with Power has always been the centerpiece of Zelda’s narrative; a hero’s journey worthy of Joseph Campbell’s ridiculous cult of the monomyth. Breath of the Wild doesn’t do much to tamper with this formula –though it offers some compelling alterations that make Princess Zelda the most formidable and self-reliant she has ever been and placed Ganon at the peak of his menace — but it expands upon established mythos by an insight into Hyrule and its people, the downtrodden populace of a world constantly beset upon by the literal embodiment of calamity. Hyrule should be a world of constant sorrow and depression and yet there is so much hope.
The thing that struck me most about the world that Breath of the Wild takes place in is that all of its citizens seem to be aware of the cross-dimensional struggle between the three aspects of the triforce throughout time and space. They know there’s has always been a Ganon, that a hero of time will always rise to oppose him, and that victory for the hero is never assured. One day the hero will fail, calamity Ganon will win, and the world will be destroyed. It is inevitable.
Breath of the Wild’s vast, beautiful wilderness filled with signs and wonders is an allegory for the nihilistic futility present in all that is temporal, only its monsters and heroic trials have no tendency towards the symbolic. Hyrule is a place that constantly threatens an untimely death at the hands of some grotesque horror or natural wonder that you are ill-equipped to manage. You could fall to your death or freeze solid in some far-flung tundra, cross the path of a savage Lyonel or overextend a trip to the border of Death Mountain; and above it all the threat of Calamity Ganon looms large, ready to swallow the light in yawning darkness should your feet make their carriage too slow.
But then this has all happened before. In another time, another place, the light of courage and wisdom was snuffed out by overwhelming power and yet the hero has returned, reborn each once again.
And that’s what I love about Breath of the Wild’s lovely cast of background talent. Think about the world they live in. They’re meager pawns born into the humdrum sideline of a battle between the fates; a battle which was almost lost a century before; a battle with consequences that have already begun to manifest in the blight of their flora and the corruption of their fauna. These stalwart pedants have lived in the shadow of encroaching oblivion for one hundred years as monsters and titans have roamed their lands, threatening their children for at least a generation. Yet they persist. Even as their princess has leveled ceaseless single combat against the object of their disillusionment they have gone about their day to day, not with somber resignation but, in many cases, with cheerful enthusiasm that borders on child-like ignorance.
Because what else can they do? What can any of us do?
We are born to die. The world that breathes life into our stardust bones will one day take its gift away and leave us in the ground without a thought. The citizens of Hyrule know this better than we because they’ve lived with Damocles’ sword perched high atop their capital for one hundred years. But they still love, they still seek out their life’s great purpose, and arrow girl still just wants to get nocked so, so bad.
We could all learn a thing or two from them. Keep calm. Carry on. Every ending informs the next. Play the game, man. Play the game.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/stop-saying-additictive-please/
Don't Call It Addictive
By Wesley Scott
We’ve all made offhand comments about our addictive relationship with this or that game, our inability to put it down and the fact that sometimes “one more round” can turn into “Jesus, it’s 3 am? I need to go to bed.”
And while the positive feedback loops built into a well-designed game — the kind that simply feels good for some inexplicable reason — can certainly bring out the compulsive nature in even the most disciplined mind I think we’ve slipped into a habit of citing addiction as a positive characteristic of our entertainment that’s opening a backdoor to a breed of highly damaging Orwellian doublespeak.
I’ve lost myself in certain video games for days before. I’ve woken up in the morning, picked up a controller, and played until it was time to go to bed, stopping only to feed and bathe myself. I’ve pushed the number of minutes I could wring out of a gaming session until it butted right up against the last available second prior to leaving for my train to work. I’ve delayed my arrival at parties and procrastinated on writing projects and sometimes ignored casual phone calls all at the service of a game I was really enjoying. But I’m not an addict, and you likely aren’t either.
Addiction is chronic, not acute; it damages or destroys relationships, ruins careers, bankrupts individuals, threatens their health and well-being, and, at it’s most extreme, ends lives. I’m not being facetious, go to a Las Vegas casino sometime and look out for one of the many unwashed desperados with a less than passing awareness of the reality before them feeding their financial security into a one-armed bandit from dusk ’till dawn.
You might remember a story a few years back about a Korean couple who let their child die while they played an MMO called Prius.
Or this story from 2011 about a woman who let her child starve while she disappeared into World of Warcraft.
Or this story from as early as 2012 where a Taiwanese man died while playing League of Legends for 23 hours straight.
I know the usual dismissal will persist: “these people were sick and a danger to themselves anyway.” But my point isn’t that video games, specifically, ruined their lives but that we are testing the outer limits of insensitivity when we use the word “addictive” to reference a desirable quality in our games.
There have been many conflicting studies done on the actual addictive potential of video games but the truth is those studies are ultimately useless because addictive behavior isn’t created by a particular stimulus, it’s simply triggered by it. Addicts are addicts and, for some, video games are their particular poison.
And we know for a fact that certain games trigger addictive behavior. How? Well, publishing companies and developers freely admit it. They call them Whales.
Now, obviously, not all Whales are the textbook definition of addicts as many maintain a healthy social balance in their daily lives and keep sight of their goals outside of the game. But ripping off your employer to the tune of $4.8 million in order to finance your habit IS textbook addiction and that’s just what Kevin Lee Co did in 2016.
Are these all isolated incidents motivated by abnormal human behavior? Sure. Why should you let this change the way you choose to talk about video games? Well, because if you don’t then the marketing departments of the world win and you shouldn’t want those assholes to win.
You see, game publishers have a vested interest in pushing a narrative that disguises any negative aspect of their product as an intentional and beneficial feature. Marketing spin is the lifeblood of whole divisions within the offices of Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision, Zynga and every other worldwide powerhouse publisher looking to reinforce your certainty in your purchase. When they put “addictive” on the back of the package they’re trying to get you to accept the idea that the Skinner Box they built, the perpetual motion machine that rewards your trained response with a rush of endorphins, is the whole point of your purchase. Not the emotional evolvement of the story or the artistic mastery of its design, but the simple connection your basil ganglia makes between “press button” and “receive reward.” In this narrative the odd player that looses their very identity within this device isn’t a terrible loss but, in fact, the best possible outcome for that consumer.
And when we parrot that word on our couches and in our offices and in every single podcast about gaming I’ve ever heard we willing accept that narrative. Video games should be engaging, they should be compelling, they should teach us something about ourselves and our perspective on the world, and, above all, they should be so much goddamn fun. But something they should never, ever be is addictive. Addiction is a bottomless pit and if you believe you’re staring into it from behind that controller then I am begging you to please, please, please put it down and get some help immediately. But if you aren’t (which is far more likely) then I will instead beg you to please, please, please, please, please stop saying you’d like to be.
Now go play that game you love, safe in the knowledge that you are free from a crippling disability that could potentially collapse your entire world.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/nioh-takes-sledgehammer-dark-souls-brick-wall/
Nioh Takes A Sledgehammer To Dark Souls' Brick Wall
By Wesley Scott
Let us all take a break from playing a game so good it only comes along once in a generation (note I could be talking about any one of a number of staggeringly entertaining first quarter releases) and reflect on a game that I’ve had to place on the back burner until the hits stop coming… It was Zelda I was taking about! Zelda is that one game in a generation! It’s so! Fucking! Good!
Anywho, Nioh is one hell of a game in its own right and one that I still think about from time to time even as I blissfully careen through Nintendo’s demonstration of their industry humiliating mastery of the craft of game development. This is kind of an amazing feat as Nioh is a game that wears its Souls inspiration on its chest and Dark Souls is a series I would like to drown slowly in a shallow bathtub, letting it know that (as it so often demonstrated to me) it could save its own life if it only it had the strength, if only it had the will. But it doesn’t. I could spare it but I will not because to do so would be to deny my responsibility as its God. Everything must end and Dark Souls will be the effigy I place upon the world’s cross so that all will know their savior is not a mortal man of mercy but a dark harbinger of their deliberate fate! Ahahahahahahaha! AAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
Ahem.
I hate Dark Souls. I hate Bloodborne. Please don’t mistake me, I don’t believe either series to be of poor quality, on the contrary, they’re amazing accomplishments that deserve the success they’ve found. But I hate them, I do, I hate them so damn much. Of course, that should come as no surprise because they want me to. They go out of their way to be hated. They are ugly, vile, brutal, terrifying, unforgiving experiences and, in my case, they’re just a bit too effective in their nihilistic disdain for my attempts to engage with them.
But Nioh is different. No, Nioh wants me to play it, it calls to me, it makes promises of untold riches to be had if only I will go another round, complete another quest, slay one more demon. Dark Souls has no such siren song with which to tempt me. I don’t want to fight its unforgiving stygian nightmares. They will kill me the first time we meet, guaranteed, no exceptions. The first time I encounter something I’ve never seen before and wade in to test the waters I’ll be killed and Dark Souls will laugh because it wanted me to fail and it takes pleasure in that failure.
You see, Dark Souls constantly feels as if it’s telling me “go no further. This way lies madness and shattered controllers.” Nioh, on the other hand, says to me “you got this. One more try and you’ll come out on top.”
It’s difficult to quantify in concrete terms. It’s a feeling, a state of mind it leaves me in. I’m empowered in Nioh in a way that Dark Souls ignores. Not overpowered, mind you, but given just enough rope so that when I’m hoist I know it was by my own petard and not that of the developers. Whether it’s the nearly infinite variety of skills and spells at my disposal, or the blessed lifeline that a carefully conserved living weapon can offer, or the comfort that an easily invited co-op partner provides; I never feel overwhelmed, I never feel outmatched, and I never feel like I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing. There are so many ways to approach every encounter and so many options for dealing with your foes that every defeat leads to a new strategy and every new strategy leads to a little extra ground.
Where Dark Souls presents a brick wall that I’m instructed to climb over or risk being crushed, Nioh hands me a sledgehammer and says “go to town, friend.”
So, is Nioh better than Dark Souls? I’m not equipped to make that judgment for everyone but as far as I’m concerned I’ll take a game that seeks to strengthen my resolve over one that seeks to crush my spirit any day of the week and I can’t wait to get back to it… as soon as I check out that plume of smoke over the next hill in Zelda.
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New Post has been published on Ludonarrative Assonance
http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/just-sold-nintendo-switch-100-profit-nintendo-wanted/
I Just Sold A Nintendo Switch for a $100 Profit Because Nintendo Wanted Me to Have It
By Wesley Scott
My brother has more foresight than I do and decided to put no less than three Nintendo Switch consoles on layaway at Walmart immediately following the big Nintendo Direct presentation. “Nintendo can’t possibly pull their usual manufactured scarcity bullshit this time.” I thought to myself, and Reggie Fils-Aime put my mind at further ease when he announced in an interview with Wired “Our focus is making sure that the consumer who wants to buy a Nintendo Switch can buy a Nintendo Switch.” This, of course, (as is always the case with Nintendo) turned out to be total and utter bullshit.
So my brother, being the great guy he is, has one of those three Switches he purchased on its way to my home in Chicago as we speak. The other? Well, we sold it on Amazon for $420. Now, you might find that reprehensible, scalping a high-tech toy that another gamer could have enjoyed without having to pay the premium, and (under ordinary circumstances) I would be inclined to agree with you. The problem is that Nintendo isn’t an ordinary company and, frankly, they’re outright encouraging this kind of behavior.
It’s a well-known trope in the industry, by now, that if you want a Nintendo product on day one you have to place an order months in advance. This has been true for everything they have produced since the Gamecube but I think it was right around the time of the Wii that everyone began to suspect they might be doing it on purpose. There were long lines at game stores during the winter months, whole websites dedicated to tracking inventory, and article after article was written about how Nintendo’s new console was in higher demand than expected and production simply couldn’t keep up. This went on for months and months and the Wii eventually went on to be one of the best selling home consoles of all time, beating its predecessors (the Xbox One and PlayStation 3) by a handy margin.
And you know what? Fair enough. The Wii was underpowered from a hardware standpoint and contained a central gimmick that Nintendo may have been unsure would resonate with consumers, so maybe it undercut supply to keep from having to discount product too quickly. The problem is that in the last 10 years Nintendo has released three new consoles (one handheld and two home units) along with multiple re-designs of existing systems and every single time their supply chain has run well short of demand. Even their ridiculous little Amiibos proved to be far too commercially successful for Nintendo to keep pace, not to mention the NES Classic which has been out of stock since its release in November.
A company as old and storied as Nintendo shouldn’t be getting worse at targeting the center of a supply/demand curve but that’s certainly the impression they’re giving the general public.
This is stupid, it’s just stupid. And this isn’t me speaking as a consumer advocate either; manufactured scarcity is a dumb, dumb, stupid-head thing for a company to do from an economic standpoint. Why on Earth would you want to willfully create a parallel market where scalpers have control of your supply chain and set their own price well in excess of the MSRP? I mean, sure, it can drive word of mouth in the short-term but Nintendo just came off a well-publicized commercial failure in the Wii U so assuming that consumers will stick around for the three to six months it will take for stock to actually begin appearing on shelves while scalpers eat up hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have lined Nintendo’s pockets betrays either a total lack of business acumen or a confidence that simply should not be on display yet.
Or maybe, just maybe, Nintendo understands that we’re all a little strapped for cash right now and it’s willing to take the hit (both financially and in the court of public opinion) so that a bunch of rando arm-chair e-scalpers can make a few extra bucks moving their intellectual property from a store shelf to someone’s PO box, and if that’s the case I have just one thing to say: thanks, Nintendo. You keep on screwing up those business fundamentals and maybe we can get this sagging global economy back on track.
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Review: Resident Evil 7
By Wesley Scott
I knew you’d be fine if you landed on your butt.
The history of the Resident Evil franchise (much like it’s fictional universe) is a thing plagued by the missteps of a corporation unwilling to recognize a bad idea when it presents itself. For the last decade since RE 4 was released on the GameCube the Resident Evil franchise has limped along like one of its virally induced necrophages, hobbling about in the skin of its predecessors with an eye locked firmly on the limitless payday that every AAA publisher believes it deserves by divine right.
Well, Capcom finally cut that shit out and, while I’m skeptical as to just how long it will take them to start repeating the same mistakes all over again, Resident Evil 7 stands as a shining example of reboot by homage in the best way possible.
Ethan Winters has misplaced his wife. She left home for a long-distance babysitting gig that should in no way arouse any sort of suspicion and didn’t return for three years. Now, most stable minds would report the disappearance to the proper authorities, take whatever time they needed to mourn, and move on with their life. And, well, that’s just what Ethan Winters did until his wife, Mia, contacted him again three years later, under further mysterious circumstances, and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay the fuck away.
Ethan didn’t, of course. He called the police and had them reopen the cold case file using the concrete evidence of his missing wife’s whereabouts he just obtained and- of course he didn’t! This is a Resident Evil game and Ethan Winters is a fucking idiot and he went to investigate a collapsing Louisiana farmhouse in the middle of a fucking swamp all by himself!
So, of course, shit gets out of hand in a hurry (pun intended, you’ll see). Mia has been taken captive by a family of deranged hillbillies called the Bakers, every door and window is either barred or guarded by a ludicrously ostentatious and complex lock, and (in the most disturbing twist of all) the most up to date video recording technology available to you is VHS! The scan lines! Oh, dear God, the scan lines!
Evasion and survival is the name of the game now. The Bakers are relentless adversaries and seemingly immortal. They will stalk, chase, and outmaneuver you at every turn should you give them an opening, so don’t. Stay low. Keep an eye on them. Find cover and wait for an opportunity to move on. Should you be sighted, run for your life but expect the unexpected. The Bakers have a few tricks up their sleeves that might catch you off guard should you make the mistake of feeling at ease anywhere beyond a safe room where you can save, plan, and freely resupply yourself from a small cache of constantly dwindling resources.
Most of this might sound familiar to you if you’ve played some more modern examples of survival horror such as Outlast or Amnesia. Indeed, Resident Evil 7 bears a striking resemblance to these games in its opening hours as it builds tension through a series of closed corridors and scripted story events. Once it opens up, though, you’ll see the Resident Evil in its DNA and it’s a cool refreshing drink of water that’s not at all a tortured metaphor I failed to properly unify.
Much like its well-established predecessors, Resident Evil 7 offers you a small arsenal of small arms, rifles, close combat weapons, and a few more exotic and bizarre options should you decide to take the out that RE7 constantly dangles in front of you. Do you take a hike and hope you can make it to the next safe room where you’ll be able to save and resupply or do you take a stand and hope against hope that your hammer won’t let fall on empty chambers this time? The choice is yours and it feels like pure Spencer mansion all over again.
A few encounters you will be unable to avoid, of course. Terrible boss fights are as much a staple of Resident Evil as green herbs and ludicrous evil plans involving impossible conspiracies. But, you know what? These boss fights ain’t so terrible. In fact, a couple of them are pretty damn good. They play out more like puzzles than actual battles as you’re intended to read and adapt to your environment instead of let fly with every ounce of lead you have saved up and their outcomes are pure, gory fan service.
The Baker estate is also beautiful in its misery and decay. The engine that Capcom is using renders so much depth and fidelity in its environments that, at times, when the sun is down and the lights are out and you’re alone in your room with the beasts of this fallen home you may find yourself transported into its halls where every footfall and settling creak of its age-old lumber gives you pause for fear. Then one of the Bakers sticks their ugly mugs right in your face and spits out some poorly lip-synced dialogue and contrary to a dozen hastily written blog posts you’ll find out there you realize you’re nestled comfortably in the uncanny valley and you can relax for a bit.
That’s a minor squabble, though. The fact is that Resident Evil isn’t just an absolute return to form for the series it is also a potential standard-bearer as I’ll argue its merits over those ardent supporters of 4, 2, or even the weirdos who jizz their pants over the mere mention of Code Veronica X. Resident Evil 7 is a gem, a true gem, and one hell of a way to kick off what looks to be one hell of a year for gaming.
Recommendation: Best in class. Go from this place and purchase now. Play, play, play!
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Review: We Are Chicago
By Wesley Scott
Always do the right thing.
According to the Chicago Tribune, 4,368 people were victims of gun violence in the Chicago area during all of 2016. That same year we saw our highest murder rate in twenty years, outperforming New York city by well over 100 deaths. No small feat for a city with roughly a third of their population. As of this writing, during the first 23 days of January, another 231 people have been shot within the city limits. Chicago is an active war zone, has been for years. The police cite widespread gang violence as the overriding cause, and it’s hard to disagree, but why Chicago? Why its young men of color? What are the systemic conditions present here that are driving so much of our population into lives of violent crime?
No easy answers, of course, but the team at Culture Shock has a new game out that hopes to give players some insight into the problems of generational poverty and social inequality present in the underprivileged neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side.
Aaron Davis is a kid with a lot of problems: Graduation. College admittance. A little sister to look after. Friends that aren’t getting along. Oh, and the Gangster Disciples are at war with the other street gangs for control of his block.
We Are Chicago is ambitious, no doubt. It seeks for nothing less than to present the black experience in America as a portraiture in absolute earnest. And while it succeeds in that ambition to its most literal extent it also falls short as a piece of entertainment. That makes it a difficult subject to critique but I’m going to try anyway because that’s what Da Mayor would want. “Always do the right thing” he would say.
I got it. I’m gone.
So, I want to front load the negative stuff here. I wouldn’t ordinarily point something like that out but I want to be clear that what I’m about to write comes with some major caveats later on in my review. I truly believe that We Are Chicago may be worth the time for some but…
Well, it’s ugly as sin. The character models are bland, waxy, glassy-eyed, poorly animated, and badly lip-synched. The world they inhabit looks like something a Counter Strike modder spit out circa 1998. Loads between relatively tiny, sparsely appointed zones are oddly choppy and the graphics options might as well not even be there.
If you’re familiar with modern, dialogue heavy point and click adventure games you’ll know exactly what to expect here. The whole thing is played from a first person perspective from which you select objects and talk with people by choosing dialogue from a tilt wheel that is often time-limited to such a heavy degree that it’s nearly impossible to absorb your options and make a deliberate choice. All interactions take place using one button. There is literally no other input.
An odd stylistic choice has been made to project some dialogue on walls ala Splinter Cell Conviction but it’s inconsistent and more puzzling than affecting. This bleeds over into some other aspects of the design as well and makes a good case for the idea that sometimes less is more.
The voice acting is solid in spots but workmanlike (and the main character is unvoiced which feels jarring in context). Actually, that’s kind of the theme running through the whole presentation. It unceremoniously limps to the finish line but makes a point of dropping that checkered flag.
So, on a technical level, it’s not great. There are nothing but rough edges to cut yourself on. However, I think it’s important to criticize art based on its intent as much as its quality. Was it effective? Did it deliver the experience it intended to?
You see, We Are Chicago isn’t really a game. It’s interactive, sure, but its intent isn’t necessarily to entertain or engage through its interaction. It’s there to inform. We Are Chicago is here to show someone like me – a white, middle-class urbanite with no first-hand knowledge of this subject matter – a bit of what the black experience in America is like. Sure, not like Friday, or Barbershop, or Do The Right Thing. It doesn’t have that much style. No, it’s simpler than that. Almost subversive in a sense.
Aaron Davis and his friends and family members are all just trying to make good. Their world is one of poverty and hardship but it’s also surprisingly mundane. Character motivations are nothing more than the realities of their real-life counterparts: Graduate high school. Get into a good college. Make enough money to support a family. Make time for your friends. These are all things we can relate to but where these motivations intersect with the daily realities of the violence inherent in the local community is where the value in We Are Chicago’s narrative begins and ends.
These are people who live under the threat of injury or death on a daily basis. They all know affiliated gang members. They’ve all been threatened or had to cross the street to keep from starting something. They all know someone who’s been shot. When gunfire breaks out just down the block at dinner time it doesn’t bring the evening to a screeching halt. Life goes on. There will be more shots fired tomorrow. There is no illusion of security in this world, just the day-to-day reality of a life lived in hope of something better.
That’s where We Are Chicago spends its artistic capital and it’s where its themes resonate most. Worrying about the safety of your awesome little sister. Working an unbelievably tedious part-time job. Making time to study. This isn’t any kind of life I would want for myself and yet there are those out there who live it every day and We Are Chicago drives that point home without pointing fingers or casting shade (though, in reality, there is plenty to go around).
It’s just too bad that its production values and general lack of polish keep it from ever achieving a proper moment of emotional transcendence. It tries, in places. You can feel the spots where everything should coalesce into a slow-clap moment well earned but We Are Chicago’s aim is far too wide of the target.
It’s also short. Very, very short. And it ends so abruptly and with little to no closure. It’s frustrating because many of the characters work (especially Aaron’s little sister, Taylor, who really is a treat) and there’s enough earnest desire to show you the world through a glass darkly that We Are Chicago isn’t without value.
Recommendation: If experiencing life through unfamiliar eyes is something that interests you then you might gain a little perspective here. Just don’t expect too much in the entertainment department, We Are Chicago is more That Dragon Cancer and less Telltale Games Presents in that regard.
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What Game Hath Wrought: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Beta
By Wesley Scott
I dive into Ubisoft’s latest open world shoot ’em up during the Ubisoft Presents: A Tom Clancy Game: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands: Colon: A Closed Beta Weekend.
So I got to jump into the closed beta for Wildlands this weekend and I wanted to spit out some quick impressions before this isn’t even news anymore.
First of all: Ubisoft’s transparency, generosity, and execution in this beta should be commended. I mean, giving each beta participant three additional keys to team up with their friends is an inspired idea and completely unexpected in the current media lockdown culture of AAA game development. The beta also arrived without an NDA which is also great. It almost feels like Ubisoft is confident that they have a great game here and they want everyone to know it.
So, is that the truth?
Well, yes and no.
PC performance was pretty bad. Until I did a little research, turned off v-sync and capped the Framerate at 60 it was practically unplayable. This is a beta though and since I WAS able to get it into an acceptable state with a little bit of fuss I think it’s safe to say Ubi has the time to get it properly optimized for launch.
What they won’t be able to fix is the atrocious voice acting and prosaic storytelling. Like, man, the voice acting is just terrible. What accent is this? Seriously. And while I suppose you can’t expect something with the Clancy name on it to exhibit the very best that modern literature has to offer, I figured they would have moved on from “bad guy is doing bad shit and it’s up to our elite squad of military badasses to stop him”. I tuned out almost instantly. My commanding officer went all “semper fi” on the opening chopper ride (Christ, another opening helicopter briefing) and I literally felt the part of my brain that processes language flip off.
It’s a good thing, then, that the game itself has some enjoyable moments.
You can play by yourself and roll with a squad of 3 AI controlled partners who you direct through a simple command wheel or you can get together with friends and strangers in private or public matchmaking.
While public matchmaking was as easy as a single button press, setting up anything more complex than that requires you to navigate a not uncomplicated menu system multiple layers deep. This applies to other areas of the game as well, such as upgrading your skills, modifying your weapons, or even just selecting a story mission from the map. It’s just as bad, if not a little worse than, The Division’s incredibly busy menus.
Vehicles control like a set of dentures with inadequate bonding. It doesn’t help that most of the roads are made of dirt and if you’re using a keyboard and mouse GOD help you.
Combat is pretty satisfying. There’s an emphasis on stealth which is appropriate for a Ghost Recon title. And it’s objectively awesome to jump out of a helo with your friends, use binoculars and aerial drones to mark up targets, execute everyone in an encampment without so much as a peep and extract in a nearby biplane. It’s reminiscent of some of the best parts of the long neglected Mercenaries series.
Still, I’m worried about the amount of content the beta seems to suggest. Ubisoft has made a habit of building huge, empty landscapes and then filling them up with cut and paste objectives and fetch quests that funnel into the same feedback loop so many times you go numb. Well, I was numb by the end of my 5-hour workout with Wildlands and that does not bode well.
Oh, it’s also kind of an ugly game. It’s huge, sure, but from an aesthetic standpoint it’s incredibly bland and feels paper thin to boot. It’s just so insubstantial.
In all seriousness, you may want to hold out for some reviews on this one. It had its moments but considering Ubi’s track record for delivering compelling content that isn’t totally borked from the get-go, holding off until you’re sure this is your cup of tea is the smart move.
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What Game Hath Wrought: Resident Evil 7
By Wesley Scott
My initial thoughts on Capcom’s latest addition to the once great franchise fallen far from grace. Can Capcom redeem its tarnished soul or will the devil have his due? Just how much am I willing to strain this metaphor? Only Heaven knows.
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Actually, Fuck Final Fantasy XV
By Wesley Scott
Alright, this was supposed to be a straight up review of Final Fantasy XV but at the time of editing I have to admit it might be a bit too strident to be considered traditionally objective criticism. So I’m going to file it a bit differently because there is absolutely no way I’m backing down on the idea that Final Fantasy XV is 100%, too legit, no bullshit, absotivolutely garbage. Fucking GARBAGE!
Garbage.
I went back and forth on that opinion over the thirty some odd hours I spent wrapping my mind around its successes and many, many failures but by the time the credits rolled I couldn’t help but hate every moment of it. Fuck this game. Seriously. Fuck it.
Yes, I played the whole thing.
Fuck its undercooked story. At no point over the course of fourteen chapters does Final Fantasy XV come anywhere in the vicinity of making any kind of sense. Final Fantasy has always featured nonsensical fairytale worlds that challenge the imagination and demand your attention but they’ve almost always followed some kind of internal logic, no matter how outlandish. XV, on the other hand, features characters that act without identifiable motivations, a hostile wilderness that defies the industrial progress civilization has made around it, locals who don’t recognize their sovereign King when he stops in with his merry band of emo fuckboys to have dinner at their local dinner, and a cast of main characters I’m never given a chance to properly identify with. That is, I’m not given a chance until a mid-credit stinger, long after the story’s conclusion and the final dissolution of all the conflicts and portents their relationship could have drawn on for context.
Fuck these guys.
Fuck their stupid hair you never see them primping even though their mornings are dominated by hours of fussy manicuring. Fuck their Hot Topic wardrobe that I can’t fix until the closing hours of the story. Fuck their selfies. FUCK their selfies.
Fuck your vintage pentax camera you insufferable fucking hipster.
There are fucking flying cars in your world. FLYING! CARS! Take a picture on your cell phone like a normal fucking person, or use some kind of magic fucking camera, I don’t know, your largest city is powered by a God that fell to earth on a meteor!
Fuck their car. The Regalia is a mildly interactive loading screen which arrogantly stoops to offer you the opportunity to watch miles of empty space fly by on your way to playing the game you paid for instead of making you watch another 30 second loading screen that’ll cost you 10gil.
Fuck the loading screens. The non-stop 30 second loading screens. Fuck them.
Fuck the world they live in. Fuck a place where a teenage boy can fight Titans the size of skyscrapers with a fucking soul bound sword that rests in a pocket dimension but the inhabitants still rely on cell phones for communication and sleep in fucking outdoor campers. Fuck a world where the only four people of any consequence wield 99% of the power and do fuck all with it. Yeah, that sounds a lot like our world but, trust me, Eos is far less equitable. You’re either Prince Noctis or fuck you go get eaten by a Voretooth.
Fuck Voretooths.
Fuck this combat system. Fuck getting knocked down by a cloud of relentless enemies that rain down a non-stop torrent of staggering blows upon Noctis’ head as his so-called “friends” engage any target but the one that would actually assist him. Fuck the final boss fights coming down to you having enough hi-potions and phoenix downs in your inventory to Lazarus your party’s way to the win.
Fuck this goddamn train you walk around in for twenty minutes.
TWENTY! LITERAL! COCKING! MINUTES! Don’t tell me to walk around until the train reaches the station, Final Fantasy XV! This is why the entire discipline of media editing was created! Fuck you, train! Fuck you!
Fuck this American stereotype who’s completely unaware of the tension surrounding the struggle for gender equality in this country!
Fuck the dungeons that confine your camera to a space it was never designed to function in!
Fuck the fucking grocers who think I have the time to go looking for a truck of fucking turnips when I’m on a quest to rid the land of a breed of nightmare creatures terrorizing the land since the fall of mankind (I think. I fucking think.)
Fuck how beautiful this game is! Can’t you see how much I hate playing you?! Why do you tempt me to return with your incredible textures, animations, sky boxes, gargantuan monsters, and the gothic elements of your confused art design that actually work!?
Fuck the odd miniboss fight that actually feels good because it makes me forget (for one fleeting moment) how detestable the rest of the encounters are.
Fuck the fantastic soundtrack!
Fuck Aranea Highwind! She’s such a good character and she’s barely even there!
Fuck me! Fuck me for not enjoying enough of this trash fire to fall in lock step with the concesus opinion and save me from this horrible feeling that I must be loosing my fucking mind because I can’t see what you’re enjoying here! I can’t! I just fucking can’t!
But most importantly, fuck you. Yes, fuck you for congratulating Square-Enix on this mess. Have you even left Lucis? Have you experienced that boss-fight with Leviathan? Have you played Chapter 13? Have you mucked around that empty swamp and flipped two switches sitting within a few feet of each other? Why not one switch, Square? Nothing happens in between them! Why not one? Fuck your switches! FUCK YOU!
In conclusion, (in case I haven’t made myself abundantly clear) fuck Final Fantasy XI. If you still remember a single goddamn thing about this lame, pandering, incomplete artistic abortion in three years time I will eat a bag filled to the cinch with dicks.
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What Game Hath Wrought: Final Fantasy XV
By Wesley Scott
Final Fantasy XV has been met with a surprising degree of popular and critical acclaim, at least in my eyes. On this episode of What Game Hath Wrought, I lay out a few of my concerns and set the groundwork for what is almost certain to be a tremendously unpopular review of a bafflingly popular game.
Full text follows the video.
Square-Enix, however, will do no such thing because Square is a corporation and not a person (no matter what Mitt Romney might tell you) and corporations don’t give a fuck about dignity. If there’s a chance it has blood in it a company like Square will pulverize that stone.
Now, we might not all agree on the numeral that denotes Final Fantasy’s greatest installment (unless you believe it’s IX, in which case you’re absolutely right) but once we get past the launch window hype I hope we will all agree that Final Fantasy XV isn’t it.
Sure, I haven’t played the whole thing yet but I don’t have to finish a shit sandwich to know the parsley isn’t going to help me choke it down.
I honestly have no idea what the majority of my fellow reviewers are talking about when they reference it as a defining RPG of the generation. There’s literally no idea contained within that hasn’t appeared in another game to better effect.
That’s not to say I’m hating every moment of it, to the contrary, there are some interesting concepts at play in Square’s latest approach to an open world Final Fantasy. But every time I find something potentially enjoyable it inevitably falls just short of feeling complete in its execution.
A perfect example is the prominently featured Regalia, the conspicuously luxurious ride that no one seems to notice which carries our rich fuckboys through the world of Eos. It’s an idea I almost like. In theory, it bridges the gap between past and present Final Fantasies by turning the kingdom of Lucis into one giant world map with no loading in and out of combat zones and towns… Except there is plenty of loading in and out of towns and combat zones unless you want to waste hours of your time watching the Regalia drive from one location to the next with no content in between. The Regalia is a mildly interactive loading screen that you can only circumvent by watching an actual loading screen. And the load times in this game are long, my friend. Long.
And here, I think, is my biggest problem. An open world Final Fantasy was already attempted, to great effect, way back in FFXII and yet this entry feels as if that game never existed. It literally ignores every lesson Square learned in its last attempt and replaces everything with a mechanic or system that is slower, more obtuse, or just downright less fun.
There’s plenty more to talk about, from XV’s incomplete and staggeringly inept story (no surprise there for a Final Fantasy game), to its confusing and frustrating combat system that manages to be the worst parts of real-time and turn-based combat combined, to the inconsistent art direction that unsuccessfully attempts to fuse information age industrialism with boilerplate euro fantasy, but it will all have to wait for the full review.
In the mean time know that this is not a defining RPG of the generation unless you outright ignore The Witcher 3, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, Bloodborne, and a host of others that deserve that title long before something so incomplete and utterly tone deaf should be allowed a seat at the guest table.
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Review: Watch Dogs 2
By Wesley Scott
Hack the planet!
The original Watch Dogs was boring, dry, predictable, and played like two slices of bologna trying to write a sequel to Sneakers. The new Watch Dogs is fresh, fun, engaging, and plays like two slices of nueske bacon successfully writing a prequel to Hackers. I didn’t ask for either but one is an objectively better execution of a superior idea.
It’s for the best that Ubisoft and its team of semi-autonomous game bots trapped in perpetual crunch time abandoned Aiden Pearce, his baseball cap, and his useless family that no one cares about anyway. What we’ve got this time around is a colorful cast of misfits in skinny jeans cracking one-liners about the greatest generation’s hilarious inability to safeguard its own privacy.
Marcus Holloway and the crew at Dedsec are all demonstrably insufferable. They straddle a fine line somewhere between Generation X’s insincere detachment and the Millenials’ epidemic hyperactivity. They quip and reference and think they’re so goddamn funny when really they’re just the lamest group of nerdlingers to ever deserve the ridicule of their local chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon. But you know what? They own that shit. They like each other and they understand each other and this is their story and they belong here.
It’s an interesting thing to see an Ubisoft game nail its tone so perfectly. Most of their narrative efforts over the years have been spent borrowing from much better works of fiction, hoping to engage players in familiar territory they’ve tread a thousand times over. By comparison, the retro 80’s pre-cyberpunk vibe coming off Watch Dogs 2’s main thread is almost enough to make you forgive all its shortcomings. Almost.
Since its disastrous launch in Chicago the Blume corporation has been working hard on CTOS 2.0 and selected the San Francisco bay area for its imminent rollout. Like all popular operating systems, CTOS 2.0 is just as full of holes as its predecessor and offers nothing worth the risk in return. Within seconds of the game’s introductory sequence the largest grey-hat hacking collective in America, Dedsec, installs a backdoor in one of Blume’s servers and proceeds to unleash hell on the city’s infrastructure in the name of social justice. Again.
At least, I think that’s what they’re doing. It’s clear that Dedsec is out there trying to get a little transparency for the man on the ground but, frankly, the way in which they go about it can be… problematic. Theft, extortion, assault, murder, and generalized mayhem are all tools in your arsenal as Dedsec’s latest recruit but it’s a strange world that sides with a group of violent terrorists over a few power-hungry corporations looking to make a profit off their private data.
It’s a case of too much freedom and too little oversight, an irony I’m only just realizing as I type this sentence. As an open-world sandbox ,Watch Dogs 2 gives you leave to drive over, gun down, rob, beat, and generally dick over any poor fucker that happens to cross you at the wrong moment. This is at odds with the lighthearted nature of Marcus and his (I can’t emphasize this enough) incredibly annoying friends.
You can’t blame Haume for selling user data to insurance companies who use that data to jack up premiums when you’re out there hacking trashcan Sam’s bank account in order to nab his last hundred bucks. You can’t blame Tidis (read Boston Dynamics… admittedly not their best pun) for building a riot-control spider-tank of doom when you’re out there blasting underpaid security guards in the face with untraceable 3D printed shotguns. You can’t blame Nudle (read Google) for its total domination of the modern data-sphere when you’re out there hacking into home security systems to fuck with teenage trolls.
Dedsec doesn’t have the high ground here but that’s the fault of the game they were saddled with not the story their brilliant writers (Ethan James Petty and Madeleine Hart) were trying to tell.
Watch Dogs 2 is just more Watch Dogs.
But I actually forgot that in my first few hours. The writing was so good and the characters so sincere that I gave the clunky stealth and gunplay a pass as I hustled from mission to mission, trying to get to that next cutscene. Then the midgame sprawl set in and I started to realize that my enemies were getting bigger, badder, and more aggressive and the mechanics I’d been given to combat them weren’t improving.
Most missions will involve, at some point, a sequence where you use stealth and Marcus’ l33t h4cking ski1z to scout out a small, restricted area and plan out a route to an objective, usually a CTOS box or other device that must be hacked by hand, before extracting yourself from the same location. You’re given a pretty extensive set of tools to accomplish this including remote drones, explosive devices, guns, and hacks that will allow you to incapacitate your foes before you ever even set foot inside but eventually you’ll have to go in on foot and then God help you. Watch Dogs 2 suffers from spotty cover control, gummy targeting, and a camera that does its best to obscure situational awareness while arming your adversaries with lighting quick reflexes and the ability to alert everyone in the vicinity to your presence at the drop of a black-hat. Combine that with spotty checkpointing that can lose you ten to twenty minutes of slow, meticulous gameplay and you have a recipe for rage.
It’s not all bad, of course, as there are some memorable missions that take advantage of these shortcomings and turn them to the game’s advantage but they’re are few and far between.
The map is also filled with tons of ridiculous side content like drone races, cart challenges, and even an Uber/Crazy Taxi inspired series of missions that are… There, I guess? Really, this is a case where the fun bits are found in between the gameplay so why on Earth would you want to play more game?
It’s unfortunate because the story and world of Watch Dogs 2 are deserving of something better than its predecessor could give it. If Ubisoft had gone back to the drawing board and delivered a more finely polished experience then Watch Dogs 2 could have been something truly special. As it stands it’s just another entry in the series that is Ubisoft: The Game, albeit with a slicker coat of paint than they’ve managed in over a decade.
Recommendation: Pick it up at a discount. No doubt Watch Dogs 2 is worth playing but there’s no need to rush to this party.
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http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/ctos-still-more-secure-and-stable-than-windows-10/
CTOS Still More Secure And Stable Than Windows 10
By Wesley Scott
Following the somewhat dubious success of Blume Corporation’s CTOS in the city of Chicago and its billion dollar rollout in San Francisco, private citizens have begun flocking to the new cloud-based operating system in droves. Smart devices, gadgets, and laptops with Blume’s unified operating architecture can barely remain on store shelves despite a series of high-profile exploits that have wreaked havoc on CTOS managed infrastructure in the windy city and its sister by the bay. Exploits that have yet to be patched by Dusan Nemic (Blume Corp. CTO) as he and his team focus instead on firmware expansion for Blume’s new “Überalles” initiative.
“The idea is to put CTOS into literally every device on the planet.” Said Dusan in a recent interview with WIRED magazine. “Your alarm clock, your bathtub. Hey, I bet you didn’t even realize your bed has a computer in it, did you?” As a coffee pot exploded nearby he added: “There are bound to be some growing pains but as soon as we can patch a few minor security exploits we’ll be well on our way to a world where you can flush your home toilet in Seattle from your office in Boston, and I think that’s a world we’d all like to live in.” At this remark his stapler leapt off the desk and attempted to pin his foot to the office floor.
Though security experts have been quick to point out CTOS’s recent exploitation by hacktivist group Dedsec as evidence of a thoughtless rush to market on Blume’s part, the average consumer remains positive.
Dusan Nemic, Blume corporation’s Chief Technology Officer.
“I just flushed a shit I left in my toilet this morning right from my cell phone. Look.” Said Gordon Remmy, a commodity broker with Koch Industries and father of six.
This reporter refused to look.
A nearby stop sign managed by CTOS spun wildly and ejected itself, like a throwing star, into a bystander’s head, killing them instantly.
“At any rate, it’s still more stable than Windows 10.” Continued Gordon. “And it doesn’t have Cortana.”
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What Game Hath Wrought: Watch Dogs 2
By Wesley Scott
Ubisoft’s second crack at making Watch Dogs a thing goes under the microscope in the freshman episode of what I hope will become a long-running series. Full text after the video below.
November of 2016 is shaping up to be the month of second chances as big-budget contenders suddenly get their shit together and release notable sequels that practically reboot their respective franchises. Titanfall 2 came out of nowhere with an entry so good it should have been its debut flanked on each side by the best Battlefield and Call of Duty games we’ve seen in years. Now Ubisoft appears to be fighting for that coveted “shows improvement” stamp as Watch Dogs 2 does more to endear itself to players in its first hour than Aiden Pearce could manage in dozens.This is in no small part due to the writing. Ethan James Petty and Madeleine Hart have done the seemingly impossible and managed to spin the insufferable narcissism of the social media age into pre-steampunk gold. Marcus Holloway and his newfound friends at Dedsec are a band of misanthropic, socially maladjusted super-nerds. But where other scripts would be content with making their meme-fueled, pop-conscious one-liners the object of a series of eye rolls from an audience seeking to laud their own superiority over the fast approaching millennial age, Petty and Hart have the unmitigated gall to actually make them kind of cool.
This is in no small part due to the writing. Ethan James Petty and Madeleine Hart have done the seemingly impossible and managed to spin the insufferable narcissism of the social media age into pre-steampunk gold. Marcus Holloway and his newfound friends at Dedsec are a band of misanthropic, socially maladjusted super-nerds. But where other scripts would be content with making their meme-fueled, pop-conscious one-liners the object of a series of eye rolls from an audience seeking to laud their own superiority over the fast approaching millennial age, Petty and Hart have the unmitigated gall to actually make them kind of cool.Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of them, they’re annoying as hell, but instead of being annoying for the sake of a joke played at their own expense, Marcus and the gang are treated with a surprising sincerity that makes sense of their tapped-in, turned-on, tuned-out lifestyle. I’m not certain their flippant attitudes towards the monumental task of taking down a near-future corporate-owned surveillance state will avoid the narrative dissonance sure to arrive when I start blasting cops in the face with 3D printed shotguns but if the writing continues at this level I probably won’t care.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of them, they’re annoying as hell, but instead of being annoying for the sake of a joke played at their own expense, Marcus and the gang are treated with a surprising sincerity that makes sense of their tapped-in, turned-on, tuned-out lifestyle. I’m not certain their flippant attitudes towards the monumental task of taking down a near-future corporate-owned surveillance state will avoid the narrative dissonance sure to arrive when I start blasting cops in the face with 3D printed shotguns but if the writing continues at this level I probably won’t care.That suspension of disbelief is helped along by a beautifully rendered and truly reactive San Francisco Bay area. Gone are the dingy, depressing, gray streets of my beloved home, Chicago (a setting that had more to offer than Ubi gave it credit for), replaced instead by a colorful, sprawling metropolis filled with modern marvels and the rich douchebags that fund them. San Francisco is a city of beautiful, million-dollar condominiums, gleaming tech campuses, and neon graffiti everywhere. It’s engaging and inventive and displays a willingness to take this franchise into a visual space uninhabited by AAA video games at this time.
That suspension of disbelief is helped along by a beautifully rendered and truly reactive San Francisco Bay area. Gone are the dingy, depressing, gray streets of my beloved home, Chicago (a setting that had more to offer than Ubi gave it credit for), replaced instead by a colorful, sprawling metropolis filled with modern marvels and the rich douchebags that fund them. San Francisco is a city of beautiful, million-dollar condominiums, gleaming tech campuses, and neon graffiti everywhere. It’s engaging and inventive and displays a willingness to take this franchise into a visual space uninhabited by AAA video games at this time.It also plays pretty great. Watch Dogs 2 drops you straight into the action and refuses to tutorials, a much-appreciated development in a day and age when the majority of gamers have a more than
It also plays pretty great. Watch Dogs 2 drops you straight into the action and refuses to tutorials, a much-appreciated development in a day and age when the majority of gamers have a more than passing knowledge of basic third-person shooter control. A simple context menu lets you hack the whole damn world with the left bumper and Ubisoft’s patented climb that shit mechanic sits or the right-hand trigger when you aren’t aiming, allowing you to get up like Marc Ecko.
Nailed that reference. Fucking nailed it!
Nailed that reference. Fucking nailed it!Driving is smooth and arcadey with your ride gripping the road tight and allowing you to focus on navigation and evasion without too much unnecessary deceleration. It feels like Ubisoft has worked at sticking to the design ethos of “make it fun, stupid” which has paid off in spades.
Driving is smooth and arcadey with your ride gripping the road tight and allowing you to focus on navigation and evasion without too much unnecessary deceleration. It feels like Ubisoft has worked at sticking to the design ethos of “make it fun, stupid” which has paid off in spades.As this is an Ubisoft game the map is absolutely polluted with a seemingly infinite number of things to collect and do. Not all of it rises to the level of content but the majority of it is optional and won’t stop you from pursuing the main storyline if that’s your desire so it remains a benign annoyance that could rise to the level of obtrusive depending on your particular position on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.
As this is an Ubisoft game the map is absolutely polluted with a seemingly infinite number of things to collect and do. Not all of it rises to the level of content but the majority of it is optional and won’t stop you from pursuing the main storyline if that’s your desire so it remains a benign annoyance that could rise to the level of obtrusive depending on your particular position on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.All in all Watch Dogs 2 is a strong contender for sleeper hit of the year. If the writing remains solid and the late-game additions provide fun over obstructive annoyance this could end up being Ubi’s best game ever.
All in all Watch Dogs 2 is a strong contender for sleeper hit of the year. If the writing remains solid and the late-game additions provide fun over obstructive annoyance this could end up being Ubi’s best game ever.Stay tuned for my full review coming soon on ludonarrativeassonance.com and be sure to like and subscribe to show your support.
Stay tuned for my full review coming soon on ludonarrativeassonance.com and be sure to like and subscribe to show your support.
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