#and some minor characters were mentioned to have died from exposure to the elements so there's that

[krys-loves-otome]

🪄💎🌈🕯

Let's Get REAL Fanfic Writer Asks

Putting part of this under a read more as I do talk about IkePri spoilers (specifically for Leon's route) as well as some potentially upsetting material.

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🪄: what is your post-writing/sharing aftercare? How do you take care of yourself or celebrate yourself when you’ve finished a fic?

Sleep or find something distracting to do to let the fic sink in. I know, I know, I preach 'don't look at the numbers, it's not a measure of your skill as a writer, they don't even matter that much in the grand scheme of things.'

And yet… I'll still refresh the page to watch the numbers go up. Yep, I'll confess to doing it. Thus why I try to make it a habit to post later in the day (sometimes before bed time) so that I can stop myself from letting those numbers get to me.

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💎: why is writing important to you?

Because, without it, I wouldn't have a voice.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always struggled with verbal communication. I don't talk a lot verbally and, though it has gotten better with time and practice, it still doesn’t feel like it's where I would want it to be. With writing, I don't have to worry about verbal ticks, volume, diction, or word stumbling. With writing, I can be as clear and concise as I want to be, plus the added bonus of creating stories.

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🌈: is there a fic that you worked *really fucking hard on* that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

A New Resident was hard because it was the first time I'd done a birthing scene, plus trying to balance vampire lore and having 4 characters interacting at the same time without trying to leave out anyone. Sebastian was originally going to be in it too, as a sort of mouthpiece to figure out the vampire lore, but I switched him out for Arthur more for his experience as a doctor and I felt bad for just using Sebas as a prop and not giving him much to do. All he would have been doing was be a receiving piece for Comte and Leonardo, so his role got significantly cut down to make Arthur more the one asking questions.

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🕯: was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn’t think it would take you?

Name ended up in a different place than where it started, mostly due to time constraints (it was originally a Fictober entry from last year). At first, I wanted to expand upon Leon's interactions with the original Fourth Prince (and to put my own spin on it by changing the Fourth Prince's gender), but though I did make some attempts to write what happened between the two of them, again, due to time constraints, I ended up going with Leon telling the story to his daughter, which, admittedly, is a bit more of a boring approach, but I still think it's a cute little story as is.

[ninjabachelorparty]

OPEN WORLD VIDEOGAMES: A LOVE STORY

My first exposure to video games, a beginning that set into motion a life of love and sometimes obsession, was not a typical one. I was no NES kid at the start, back when Nintendo ruled the world, and the hearts of children. Neither was I a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 convert. My gaming education began with one of Commodore’s more obscure machines, the 16 + 4. This was a machine aimed more toward the business market (the + 4 referring to a package of office tools that came with the machine). But it played games also, and so it was that I received a battered and mysterious cardboard box, filled with a loose collection of tapes and wires. The origins of this box and who it came from is lost to time, but that stranger played an essential part in shaping my life and my interests.

TREASURE ISLAND

Two games stand out from this formative time in my gaming life. The first was Fire Ant, a fairly simple single screen maze game. A slower-paced Pacman with insects, that has the honour of being the first game I ever completed.  But another game, despite being one that I could never finish, cemented within me a love of open-world games that persists to this day. It was a game called Treasure Island. The gameplay was simple, still involving walking through some type of maze, this time however on multiple interconnected screens. Standing in place were pirates, who would throw swords at you if you ventured too close to them. Avoid the throw, and you could pick the swords up and throw them back. Fairly simple stuff indeed, with one caveat; after the initial screen, the choice of progression was handed to you– do you go to the left screen, or the right? A simply choice to be sure, but it was my choice. For Fire Ant, there was only one correct route to finish a level, with minor variations on the way. Treasure Island gave the impression of a much deeper and mysterious choice. One way might lead to a dead end, requiring a retracing of steps to find a new path that allowed progress. Sound familiar? The same roadblocks inhibit every open world game. “Go where you like, but this door is locked until the main quest gives you the key”. Exploration is the allure, and finding a working sequence to progress is the result of this exploration (and still in 2016, the newest Hitman gives me essentially the same feeling. Here’s a huge open level with so many possibilities, now to find the perfect sequence of execution within). Going back to Treasure Island now, it seems a very simple game, and maybe not as open as I once thought. But to an 8-year old seeing the possibilities of the medium laid before them for the first time, it was a revelation.  

MOONSTONE

Eventually the love for my Commodore 16 faded somewhat. Being a relatively obscure machine eight or so years removed from its release, it was almost impossible to find new games for. The lustre of the games eventually went away, the few times new tapes were found being marred by incompatibility and broken software. A future obsession might have been nixed right there, if it were not for the arrival in my life of, in my humble opinion, the greatest games machine of all time: The Commodore Amiga 500. It was Christmas of 1993, and I was 12, receiving, as I am sure many were that Christmas, the Cartoon Classics pack. It was love at first sight, and a massive expanding of my gaming horizons. I could talk for days, combing over every incredible game that I played, but one stands out as a natural progression of my taste for open-world games: Moonstone.

Mention this game to most that hold it dear and they will undoubtedly mention the gore. This game was brutal, making Mortal Kombat look like child’s play.  This game is essentially a single-screen beat-em-up in execution, 2D sprites moving about a plane and fighting. You control one of four knights, battling creatures of all shapes and sizes. And you will be eviscerated, over and over again. Eaten, decapitated, hung, and splattered in to the ground, your deaths were plenty, and brutal.

However there was another aspect to this game, an openness, which despite its fairly simple presentation drew me in. The overworld, if it can be called that, was a single-screen map of what seemed to be an entire continent. Littered around were icons showing places where you could enter a gameplay screen to fight monsters and collect treasures and keys. You avatar was a simple sprite of your knight’s head. It was basically the world map for a modern open world game, but interactive, and completely open for your exploration, in whatever order you wished. Looking back, it’s a very simple set-up, with maybe two dozen places to actually enter. My imagination filled in all the blanks it needed to though, and I spent hours lost as a noble knight, venturing across fields and plains, into dark and dank swamps and beyond.

GRAND THEFT AUTO

Another game from my Amiga days was a top-down driving game called APB. In the game, you drove a police car and apprehended criminals. Any further mechanics of the game are honestly lost to me, as I simply spent my time with the game driving around the fairly open map and ignoring any real objectives. It felt like a glimpse at something truly open-world, but would not be fully realised to me until I played a game for the PlayStation known as Grand Theft Auto. Another sprite-based top down game like APB, but in this game, you were free to go anywhere and do anything. Sure there were missions and critical paths, but no game prior to this had given the option to so freely disregard them and still have a complete and satisfying experience regardless. In APB I could drive around freely, but it was an aimless driving with no purpose. In Moonstone I could move my sprite around the map as much as I wanted, but to have a gameplay experience I still needed to enter the arenas dotted around.

Grand Theft Auto changed this in a major way. Firstly, you could leave your car, and then hijack any other vehicle you wanted. Get spotted, and the police are on your trail. You can leave the car behind and just wander the map, watching the city go about its business around you. Nowadays this is the common standard for open world games, but in this simpler time it was revolutionary. Exploration, police chases, stealing random cars, all of this had no bearing on the overall path, and didn’t push the story forward, but this was the game, or at least a tangible part of it. It was something to actively participate in; instead of something that you felt you had to push yourself away from the real game to experience. Other games needed their limits pushed to experience some freedom. Grand Theft Auto removed the limits and relished in it.

Grand Theft Auto continued to impress as the series continued, especially with the transition to Grand Theft Auto 3, which felt like the true realisation of the concepts on display from the first game. The original top down view obviously gave the game some hard limits, but these were shattered with the transition to a 3D environment. It truly felt like a limitless experience, with no corner unreachable and with every option you could imagine realised. The proceeding games are all fantastic experiences, but there was nothing quite like that feeling of starting up Grand Theft Auto 3. Some special mention must however be given to Grand Theft Auto 5, as it featured a city that felt truly lived in, alive and vibrant. The addition of the first person camera made this element of the game shine through, and it was an absolute pleasure to simply take in the world as it went about its business around you.

MORROWIND

I was never a PC gamer in my youth, and so many games that provided unique and very open worlds were hidden from me. That all changed one day when reading an article online about an adored PC game that would soon be coming to Xbox, a game in which it was claimed you could literally go anywhere and do anything. That game was of course, Morrowind.

This game was a revelation to me. The early games I loved were open essentially in map and your choice of direction, but still had clear and defined paths to completion. The Grand Theft Auto games pushed this further and allowed a sandbox of toys to play with, but whose core was still comprised of the basic building blocks of randomly generated, faceless characters and disposable vehicles, with little permanent consequence for their destruction or death. Morrowind allowed an unseen (to me) level of granular interaction, with a persistent world that granted limitless options.

Steal a car in Grand Theft Auto, and at worst, you’ll get in a police chase, and either get away or be killed. That car has no permanence in the world; it’s simply one of many toys for your sandbox. Steal an item in Morrowind, and that singular, tangible thing is affected forever. You can keep it, and another won’t respawn in its place, or take it somewhere and drop it where it will remain indefinitely. You are no longer causing trouble with generic pedestrians that repeat and respawn around you. Each character in Morrowind is a crafted individual with their own place in the world. When one dies, no algorithm generates a new one in their place when you return, to the point that you can completely cut yourself off from the main quest if you murder certain NPCs.

This level of detail, coupled with a fantastic fantasy setting, and a deep and interesting lore, combined to create something truly special that hooked me for dozens upon dozens of hours. Video gaming can be a good source of escapism, and at that time Morrowind was the closest realisation of another world, that I could enter and inhabit. Countless hours were spent simply roaming the land, on an unrivalled quest of discovery and wonder. I felt part of the world, and able to affect and influence it in at my choosing. It was often the smallest of interactions that left the longest lasting impression, as these gave the world that sense of tangibility that was so enticing.

HITMAN

The idea of open world games has become an industry standard in modern video gaming. Many games utilise the concept now, and has reached a point of much eye-rolling as a new or existing franchise goes that route. Games nowadays have maps that are saturated with icons and objectives and quests to complete, which can be extremely tiring. It might be that sense of wonder and awe has abated somewhat because of this, as developers seem too eager to point out all the awesome stuff that lies before you. The excitement at simply exploring and discovering the world has been lessened somewhat by many clichés and tropes that now come baked into almost all open worlds.

The 2016 release of Hitman seemed to be the perfect antidote to the bloated world maps of many recent games. It could be argued that it does not even qualify for the genre, but I see it as an open-world game that consists of six perfectly crafted, small open worlds. Its openness and freeform nature ignited in me the same love that all the games on this list provided. It has the detail and small-scale interaction of Morrowind, not quite as granular but still persistent and permanently affected on each playthrough. Once you leave a map and then return, everything resets, allowing endless chaos with little consequence in the same way as Grand Theft Auto. It feels like a perfect amalgamation of everything that appeals so much to me in an open world game.

Each map is so well crafted, with the smaller scale allowing a level of detail not present in many games, and is testament to the games design that it is a joy to simply walk the maps, noticing the details and discovering the world you currently inhabit. The size of your sandbox may be reduced, but the sense of wonder at wandering and learning the levels is not.

This list is not presented as some ultimate reference for the best of the genre, and is far from exhaustive in its history. Many games I hold dear are not present here, such as Just Cause, Saints Row, and Deus Ex. It is simply my way of paying tribute to a genre that I love by choosing those games that had the most impact and shaped the kind of experience I look for in my games. In much the same way as music, playing video games can help soothe a troubled mind, and being able to escape for a while into some other world and roam its lands can help immensely when our world might seem a bit too much to bear.