#but the npcs of this game do not get nearly enough love. from the devs. let alone the fandom

[ratcandy]

i've decided that the only cotl art i will rb ever will be of npcs that don't matter and that's IT!!!!!! idon't WANT to see main characters anymore I want to see those guys

[dyzzythedemon]

My thoughts so far on Octopath Traveler 2, a game I've been binging for 3 days straight:

Overall, it's an improvement in every way.

In the original's story(not that I'm done with all the stories in the sequel yet,) there wasn't really anything tying the characters together. They all had separate paths, and the "travel banter" was laughable at best. That stays true in this game, apart from the addition of Side Quests, where two of the 8 will pair for a sort of mini-joint story, and though there are only four thus far, I really wish there were more. I like seeing our protags interact.

The battle mechanics are improved as well, adding a new fun gauge for super moves, and individual weapon sprites, which as McBeanss pointed out, is very well done. I do feel the difficulty spike is exhausting once you get to the level 45-55 range, as nearly everything will OHKO you immediately if you're not careful. For this reason I have Throne AND Ochette(multiclassed into thief) in my party, and I suggest others do the same.

As for jobs, it's strange to me that shrines no longer give you jobs, as now you'll have to hunt NPCs down for "Job Lisences", but it's not too big an issue for me. I like that there are new secret jobs, though am a bit confused as to why they're so hidden. The inventor in particular is easy to find, hard to actually get skills for, as it requires you to search for random items in the world to progress the class. Haven't gotten any others yet.

This game thrives in it's new,(better, in my opinion,) characters, it's soundtrack, and it's ability to show real growth since OT1. I sincerely hope we get a third entry in this franchise, and I hope beyond all hope for 3 that they will WEAVE PEOPLE'S STORIES INTO EACH OTHER. I cannot stress enough how they can come up with really great individual character arcs, but all the side convos amount to is "can I touch your tail."

As for the characters themselves, I started with Ochette and thank god. she doesn't talk like jar jar binks. I love her sincerely, massive improvement for the Hunter rep. I like that you gain monsters along her route that don't leave you, as well. Temenos has to be my favorite, given that he's a WELL-WRITTEN CLERIC??? He's snarky. He's a bastard. He's hyperintelligent. He can go into the Sacred Flame Shadow Realm and Investigate your ass without even going into the building. He's written like a danganronpa trickster wasn't stuck in a franchise written by Kodaka and GOD it shows. Can't gush enough about Temenos.

For the other two whose stories I've... actually played(I'm playing this in halves.), Throne's story was a TRIP, and legit as uncomfortable as I think it was meant to be, and I haven't finished Osvald's yet, but I've done chapter 4 and it's shaping up to be something truly terrifying in the final entry.

I like Partitio, but I wish the acquisition of a ship wasn't A. locked behind a paywall and B. Locked behind him. As for the guy himself, he's great! has to be one of my favorite voices so far(except temenos, obviously.). Hikari is shaping up to have HUGE ramifications later down the line, which I'm excited for. Agnea... I'm gonna be real, she's adorable, but I don't really see what she adds? I'm sure hers will be the spiritual successor to Tressa OT1's route; sweet as sugar and spice and... pretty low on stakes, but who knows! they could easily subvert my expectaions. And as for Cassti, she's gay! I hope she finds her girlfriend soon, and I like that you can find her in another town simply labeled "Apothecary" in Partitio's route. really helps make the game feel like home.

But yeah, this game has been quite a ride. Can't wait to see how it ends! A few stories seem to be lining up lore-wise, like how Temenos' deity and the inciting force behind Ochette's story is the same; a large blue flame. I'm crossing my fingers for a big final boss including everyone once all 8 stories have been completed, but I'm not holding my breath, seeing as how the octopath devs don't really want to write ONE story, as opposed to eight(or more, if you count side missions.) I respect the style but the characters are too good not to use together. Solid 9/10 game for me so far. Idk WHAT'S up with that boy in Gravell though.

[slade-neko]

Dead Island Appreciation Post?

Hmm, weird writing that. After the Back 4 Blood Beta ended, I was left wanting more zombie games. Left 4 Dead is the obvious choice, but I wanted to revisit the Dead Island games. I played them years ago on Xbox 360. They were fun, but I always remember them being very "headache inducing" for some reason. Remembered why now, it's from the forced heavy motion blur, very narrow FOV, and odd character movement that feels like I'm constantly sliding. Great thing is I'm playing PC this time around, so all my problems were tweaked and fixed, easy-peasy lemon squeezy! I was able to enjoy Dead Island without a migraine and the game was actually pretty fun!

Why do Remasters make bad changes?!

Played through all of Dead Island Riptide nearly 4 times now... twice on the Definitive "Remaster" and 1 and ½ on the original Riptide enough to 100% both versions with all achievements. Gotta say the Remaster is weird. From what I saw the new high-res textures are great, new lighting and shader effects are lovely, and gameplay is buttery smooth, BUT why on Earth did they alter some of the NPC's designs like eye color and clothing colors?! Then there's the fact the "Remaster" COMPLETELY lacks the dynamic weather system! A big part of the original Riptide was it could have rain and storms, a feature that was new to Riptide and not present in the first Dead Island game, but for some odd reason it’s absent in the Riptide Remaster. My guess is the devs couldn't get it to work with the new graphic shaders, so they simply cut it out instead of fixing it. And randomly a few fast travel locations are missing in the Remaster. Last big thing I wanted to touch on is the Remaster overhauled the whole Weapon Force system (or maybe the physics engine) which now sucks. I don't know if this change was deliberate or not, but Zombies don't go flying anymore when hit with high force weapons and attacks like Charge and John Morgan's uppercut and powered kick attacks. Where in the original game those attacks would send zombies hurling through the air, in the Remaster it almost looks like they tripped and gently fell over. The force changes also affects thrown weapon damage. Original Riptide I got a lot of 1-hit kills with throwing weapons, Remaster it takes 2-3 throws to kill a normal walker. R.I.P. Logan who's whole character is based on THROWING weapons. That little physics update they just had to make inadvertently changed a lot of the gameplay.

Here’s some quick comparison gifs of force physics between the two games. First is the original game John Morgan's Uppercut attack, which sends 'em flying.

Then Remaster's Uppercut which just falls flat. BORING!

Then there's John Morgan's powered sprint kicks in the classic. Bye, bye zombie!

Compared to Remaster where they just fall backwards... "yay."

TL:DR Yeah, so basically I hate it when video game remasters change things that didn't need to be changed... when a game is fine, just give it new graphics and leave it at that, dang, it ain't hard.

Oh, and the original point of this post was to say that Dead Island games are actually kinda fun once you patch out the headaches! And while they're impossible to buy through Steam now, I recommend the classics over the remasters.

[sage-nebula]

Game Review — Paper Mario: The Origami King

It’s not a secret that I’m not a huge fan of Mario. Though I’ve played various Mario games almost since I first started playing video games in general (though never with dedication, and my first actual video game was the very first Sonic the Hedgehog), for me Mario games have always been okay, or decent, but not something I’d play at length aside from spin-offs like Mario Kart or Party. The exceptions were 64 and Odyssey, and the only one of those I actually liked and didn’t play just because I was bored out of my skull was 64. Needless to say, I tend to keep scrolling when I see an announcement dedicated to Mario.

Nonetheless, the newest Mario—or rather, Paper Mario—piqued my interest.

Overall Score: 8/10

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this game. It wasn’t one that I was dying to get back to every single day, but it was one that I enjoyed playing every day that I did play it nonetheless, and I was actually a little sad when it ended and almost went for 100% completion just to keep playing it. I didn’t end up doing that (though maybe I’ll go back at some point, who knows), but I did enjoy what time I had with it nonetheless. More details beneath the cut, better viewed on my blog due to ugly dash formatting.

The Pros:

The dialogue was probably the most enjoyable part to me. Everything was coated with a glib tone that made it clear the writers weren’t taking this too seriously, which is precisely what Mario games need. Games like Odyssey that clearly take themselves seriously (or at least more seriously than not) tend to fall flat to me. Mario is a bright, colorful fantasy series that is at its best when it’s clearly having fun and being silly, and that’s what the dialogue in this game was. Even the unnamed NPCs had personality and were fun to talk to, to the point where I didn’t even mind rescuing Toads the same way I did Koroks in my favorite game of all time, Breath of the Wild. I even outright laughed at points, such as when some Goombas said they had to “take the L” because they were saved by Mario. The dialogue really enhanced the whole experience.

To that end, the characters themselves were pretty great. I LOVE Olivia, and did pretty much right from the start, but I was surprised at how even characters that I felt were annoying at first wormed their way into my heart (BOBBY). While not all of the partners were memorable (looking at you, Toad partners), there were more memorable ones than not, and while the characterization wasn’t super deep, this is a Mario game. They don’t need to be super deep. They were good for what they were.

I really love the Paper Mario art style and how much work goes into showing how much of the world is just that—paper. I also love bright colors in games, so of course that was a plus as well. On top of which, each of the different areas had a distinct style, so the world didn’t ever feel same-y at any point, which was another plus in its favor.

Some of the music was really good! I’d even venture to say that most of it was. Again, it’s not something I’d necessarily buy an OST of, but there were some definite bops that I enjoyed while playing, which is another departure from other Mario games (such as Odyssey) that I didn’t enjoy nearly as much.

The Neutrals:

The story was . . . okay. That’s the best way to put it. There wasn’t that much to it and it didn’t make too much sense (in that Olly’s villainous motivations weren’t really convincing), but it’s a Mario game so, again, I’m not exactly looking for narrative excellence here. It created a reason for Mario to go on an adventure with Olivia, and that was enough for me. I enjoyed it in that respect. That said, I will say that I enjoyed it less when the game didn’t give enough time to its emotional beats, which is particularly noticeable when the characters move on pretty quickly after a character death and barely ever speak of it again. Again, it’s a Mario game and so I wasn’t too bothered, but it still stuck out, particularly since the characters were one of the game’s strong points.

The office supplies bosses sure were something. Honestly I’m putting them here because I don’t entirely know how to feel about them. On the one hand, they had interesting and fun characterizations, and the boss fights weren’t that bad insofar as how fights in this game typically are (more on that later), Rubber Band aside. On the other, it’s never explained why these are 3D objects that aren’t made out of paper, or why they’ve decided to serve Olly instead of just, I don’t know, destroying him as well, or where they even came from. And like, it’s a Mario game, it doesn’t need to be that deep, but it’s also kind of hard not to think about. That said, props to the game devs for making the fights against them creative even when the “designs” of the bosses really were not. That did impress me.

The Cons:

BREAKABLE. WEAPONS. I—okay, I get the idea of breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild because there are so many weapons everywhere and making it so that you can fight with literally anything (or almost anything) enhances the experience. Finding a rusted sword on a battlefield from a century ago and fighting with it will help you in a pinch, but it won’t last long. That makes sense. I can also understand (even if I hate and do not agree with) tools breaking in Animal Crossing: New Horizons because they wanted to put emphasis on the DIY crafting mechanic of the game. But there is NO EXCUSE for weapons breaking in Paper Mario. NONE. You can’t craft them. They’re not littering the ground. It’s just arbitrary . . . I don’t even want to say difficulty, because it’s not hard given that you can change weapons mid-battle. It’s arbitrary annoyance. Nintendo is really stuck on this whole “weapons breaking” shtick and I do not like it at all.

To that end, honestly I didn’t enjoy the puzzle aspects of the battle system at all, either. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but the thing is, visual pattern recognition / puzzles like that aren’t my strong suit. Put with a timer, and it’s even worse. You can extend the time by paying coins, but the added pressure still got to me and made me even worse at solving the puzzles than I would have been otherwise. Couple this with the fact that it got really repetitive and boring after a while, and I just wasn’t a fan.

I won’t go into spoilers, but the ending felt kind of contrived to me, like a Diabolos Ex Machina. The relationship between Olly and Olivia is one that was made really weird due to a plot twist that didn’t need to be there, and using said twist as a reason for a character death at the end feels like cheap drama for no reason (/an excuse to never see that character again), particularly since it easily could have been worded differently so that the death didn’t happen at all. 

All in all, though, I really did enjoy it and would be interested in future Paper Mario games. If they ever decide to give us a Virtual Console on Switch (unrealistic at this point, I know), I’d like to see the older Paper Mario games put on there so I could play those, too. (Yes, I know I could either bust out old consoles and/or pirate them, but honestly, I’m not dedicated enough for either of those things.) The Nintendo of America twitter did a poll a little while ago asking which Mario people liked best, and I was said that Paper was not one of the options, because at this point, Paper Mario is definitely my favorite Mario.

[gamesception]

@retphienix​ said:

I gotta thank ya for the @ because I struggle to keep tabs on tumblr with all the updates bricking my addons etc x.x Not that I was particularly on top of things before that lol.

god, same, yeah.  no problem.

Also thank you for reminding me that Hollow exists, downloading now because I’m more or less juggling games to see which I intend to sit down and marathon a lot of and that’s a good idea for a title!

I really cannot recommend it enough.  Easily the game I’ve played the most over the last couple years, and probably the game I’ve enjoyed the most since Undertale.  That includes Dark Souls, which I first played during that period, and I *really* liked Dark Souls.

I would love to hear your take on it, when and if you end up getting around to it.  It’s also nice to recommend a game to you that isn’t, like, bad in more ways than it’s good, with the great aspects that do peek out at you through the jank only serving to taunt you with the actually great game that might have been.

I do maintain that a game that’s bad in interesting ways can be a more compelling experience, and make for more interesting analysis, than a game that’s just good, but Hollow Knight isn’t *just* good.  It’s fantastic, in a dizzying myriad of compelling ways that are all interesting to discuss, from the way it builds its tone and atmosphere to the way it highlights the best of what the classic 2d metroidvania has to offer while also sidestepping a lot of the genre’s pitfalls.

I don’t know what it is lately with various games I enjoy or try to keep tabs on suddenly and arbitrarily making difficulty spikes that don’t fit the game?  I mean, it’s hollowknight, it’s a souls like and all that jazz, but you’d know better than me in this scenario since YOU PLAYED IT

It’s not all that bad, since it really is quite overtly segregated from the rest of the main game, and isn’t necessary to get what otherwise feels very much like the actual canon ending.  Honestly, though, I think there was maybe an over reaction on Team Cherry’s part to what seemed to be a relatively common complaint about the base game, one that I would have shared honestly, in that it didn’t feel like there were enough difficult late game bosses to take advantage of the knights full move set.

This is something of a natural consequence of the open design of the game.  It starts out pretty linear, but once you get a couple movement abilities virtually the entire map opens up and you can go almost anywhere, finding meaningful progression pretty much wherever you go.  As a result, though, the devs are almost never sure of what upgrades you already have when you reach a boss, so they couldn’t really include any in the main game progression that required you to have particular upgrades to effectively fight them.

I think the trade off in favor of exploration is worth it, but it does leave a bit of a gap in difficulty for those who are old hats at 2d platformy action games.

But it seems like what the devs heard was “Hollow Knight is a baby game for little children”, and their response was basically

The first three content pack updates added several new and much harder endgame bosses, most of which are a ton of fun and have fantastic presentations.  They even went back and ramped up the difficulty of some of the lackluster bosses in the base game, in particular one boss in one of the few late game areas that does need more of the knight’s move set to reach now calls on the use of those abilities in the fight itself.

And people loved it!  All these expansions went over great.  People loved the Grimm Troupe in particular, in part because of the legendary difficulty of its final boss.  So it’s perhaps not surprising that the devs pushed even further in that direction for the final DLC, one that revolved entirely around bosses, and it’s not surprising that they ended up overshooting the mark for a fair portion of the audience.  And given that there are many players super invested in the lore of the game that found themselves gated out of new endings by an absolutely brutal slog of an overlong boss rush capped off by a much more difficult version of the one boss in the main game that most players already thought was impressively hard?

I really do think the Godmaster DLC is worth trying even for those who go in content that they’ll never beat it.  Some of the fights that can be accessed much earlier in the DLC are really cool and worth experiencing in their own right, but I have nothing against anyone who takes one look at it and just nopes the heck out, and I can’t disagree with those who point to it as one of the few noticeable flaws in what is otherwise a truly majestic game overall.

Some of it probably comes down to that “souls like” moniker.  Hollow Knight really isn’t a souls like.  Its a classic 2d metroidvania action-platformer, that just happens to have a similar tone, story structure, and method of lore delivery that are all heavily inspired by Dark Souls specifically.  And the game really benefits from that influence.  But where the game tries to parrot souls-like mechanics, whether in super hard bosses that the player is meant to throw themselves at repeatedly until they ‘click’, or in the corpse run mechanic, which is overly punishing in the early game when money is hard to come by and some progression paths are gated behind expensive purchases, but means nothing at all in the late game since HK doesn’t have a leveling system like DS does, so once you’ve purchased the stuff you want there really isn’t any cost to losing your cash on hand any more?  That doesn’t work so well.

Worse, it’s actively detrimental to the idea of exploring wherever you like, by pointing the player back in the same direction every time they die, when players in the early mid game might be better served by taking death as an indication that maybe they stumbled into an area that’s a bit much for them right now and they might be better served by trying another path first.

There’s one clear example early on of a particularly tough optional boss fight against multiple opponents.  If the player dies to this boss, the game even puts a friendly npc on the path back who heavily implies that the boss is maybe too tough for them, and the player should look for a way to upgrade their weapon before coming back.  But that npc shows up /before/ the player reaches their corpse, which happens much closer to the boss itself, and by the time you get there to get your money back - again, this is still relatively early game so loss of your money really stings - and by the time you reach your corpse you’re right outside the boss door, and taking another crack at it can feel less daunting than climbing all the way back out of the area.

If you do beat the boss, ... actually, no I wrote a fair bit but no, cut that.  I've got more to chatter on about that but I don’t want to spoil more than I already have.  The point is, while it’s really cool you can beat this boss and the area behind it “early”, and I love that the game lets you do that, the corpse run mechanic pushes players who are less comfortable with the game mechanics to keep throwing themselves at the fight when they might be better served by trying another progression path.

monhun

I haven’t played the the new Taroth or however that’s spelled.   Heck, I haven’t fought master rank jiva either.  The most recent thing I’ve tried is the raging brachy.  I actually found that fight pretty fun.  Reminded me why I like Monster Hunter.  But after seven runs in a row without getting a single reactor drop it also reminded me why I don’t like Monster Hunter nearly as much as you & Bard do.

Still, we should do a few runs together again at some point.

Man, what a thing to type when discussing a souls like, asking to martyr myself mentioning difficulty spikes or difficulty modes/options heh.

Honestly, I kind of share the criticism some people have made of the souls-like genre overemphasizing difficulty.  Mechanical challenge is a key aspect of the games, but Dark Souls 1 in particular is really Not That Hard.  It’s obtuse more than anything else, but once you know what the stats mean, know how to upgrade your weapons, and have a feel for the mechanics, it’s not that bad.  Especially if you take advantage of the summoning / multiplayer mechanics. I know purists can get uppity about getting help, but those mechanics are part of the game for a reason.  Dark Souls is probably the easiest of the souls-like games I’ve played so far once you know how it works.  I’d also say it’s probably my favorite, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The over-emphasis on difficulty alone when people discuss souls games can get in the way of enjoying them.  For instance, it leads to situations like new players trying dark souls for the first time bumping into the skeletons at the start of the game and thinking “wow, dark souls really IS as hard as they say” instead of “these guys are clearly too tough, I must be going the wrong way”.  It can also lead to developers focusing too much on challenge, and on a particular /kind/ of challenge, and missing out on the other compelling aspects of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, including the way Demon’s Souls in particular emphasized delivering a variety of game play scenarios, or how it understood that a well placed deliberate anti-climax of a boss can sometimes be more engaging than yet another straight forward test of reaction time and pattern recognition.

>final achievement BIG CONGRATS, THAT’S SICK! I know what going over the edge on a game renown for challenging gameplay can do to ya, and that’s quite the darn accomplishment!

Thanks!  I’m quite proud of myself, even if there are harder things that I still haven’t done in the game yet, and probably won’t ever.  Stuff not tied to explicit achievements, but that still have little in game rewards or markers that you’ve done them.  I certainly wouldn’t say I’ve mastered the game.  But I’ve probably gone as far as I’m going to go, and I’m quite content with how far that turned out to be.

Not that I’m done with the game.  I’ve played it all the way through three times already, and I can already tell it’s a game I’ll be coming back to replay fairly regularly.

>no thanks, I think I’m good I’m probably projecting since I’ve said the same thing 100 times (or thought to) on this very blog, but I ‘assume and apologize if I’m wrong in doing so’ you say this because you feel some sense of guilt like you didn’t ACTUALLY do all you could and you must put on airs for the blog and let me say, screw that noise.

Oh, no, not at all.  Yes, there’s stuff left that I’m not able to do, and there’s people WAY better at the game than I am, but going by steam achievement records less than 3% of the people who beat the first boss go on to beat the final pantheon, so by that metric I’m in the top 97% of rattatas Hollow Knight players.

So yeah, I feel pretty chuffed with myself.

>Can’t promise it’ll suddenly be my next game, and even if it was it wouldn’t sadly get much showing I suspect because my pc is more or less down. I DID get replacement equipment so MAYBE? But I haven’t sat down and attempted to get my old setup running again.

So it goes.  Again, if and when you do play it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.  Even if I can’t, like, watch you stream it or whatever.  Honestly, I’d like to be able to just blather on about it to you at more length without feeling like I’m spoiling stuff.

[riddlerosehearts]

okay, so. i’ve now officially finished the postgame story of swsh and that means i’ve done it all.

and honestly i’m frustrated because i’ve seen a few people say swsh has the best writing they’ve seen in a pokemon game and i just... i mean, i can see that in several of the character arcs and in the potential the story had to be great, but to me the writing is just... it’s full of extremely wasted potential. bede, hop, and sonia had pretty nice character arcs imo but we still could’ve seen a lot more of them if the story had been a better length, and i have to say i was expecting marnie to be a much more prominent character. i mean, she showed up like 3 or 4 times and i feel like i know more about piers than about her? i feel like i can’t describe her personality very well at all but she was supposed to be one of my rivals? there also wasn’t enough time to expand on team yell and what was happening in spikemuth, so i didn’t get attached to them like i did to team skull. i just found them annoying and that was all.

i also don’t even like... fully understand what oleana and the chairman’s deal was, i mean i thought oleana was puppeting everything but then she says you have to help because rose has gone nuts and even then i thought she was lying. i thought rose was just some asshat who didn’t care about bede at all because he seemed to not remember who bede was at the beginning, but then he’s like “oh i’m so sad i adopted you because i saw myself in you and now you’ve disappointed me :((” and i can’t even tell if he was being honest then or not, because he never ever gave me the vibe that he gave a single shit about bede, but it just wasn’t explored enough and tbh i really wanted bede to confront him and/or oleana at some point. i also still feel confused about what they were even doing in the first place and i wanted things to be explained better but they weren’t. i don’t even fully get what the darkest day was or why the day/night cycle only begins in the post-game and i just feel stupid. i had a theory that the darkest day and the day/night cycle and everything would relate to pollution and climate change somehow but it was just... something something eternatus something something dynamaxing, i think??

and speaking of bede being an orphan, i feel like i should not have had to learn that from a card and that it should’ve been a bigger part of the story tbh, i mean i love the league cards for non-plot relevant npcs like the gym leaders because i always wanted more info on the gym leaders of each region, but... having to learn that bede is an orphan who never got along with anyone so basically has no family or friends via reading it on a league card (which i feel the need to add, is optional to even read in the first place) is just making me imagine if in black and white n came up to you and handed you his entire traumatic backstory on a card, which would feel lazy and rushed just as it does to me here.

also like... the idea of the adults helping handle things and not putting it all on a kid is excellent until you realize all it’s doing is pushing you out of the action. even if you as the player might possibly be a kid like your character, you yourself are not in any danger and you want to have fun with things because this is a video game. the gym challenge is nice and all but every single time leon or sonia tells me to just continue my gym challenge and not worry about it i wanna say “fuck no let me join you and get in on the adventure and action just like every single other pokemon game lets me do.” every time sonia told me more cool info about the darkest day i got super excited and interested and then every time i didn’t get to do anything about it i was like “okay, well, maybe the action will pick up more after the next gym” and it just didn’t, until the VERY end and even that wasn’t long enough and overall the whole thing was just so incredibly oddly paced.

there’s also just... not enough to explore?? i mean, the wild area is pretty neat, but it doesn’t have dark caves and vast oceans and winding forests, and the region itself hardly has any of that either. there are only 10 routes and they’re short. i never got lost in galar mine or anything and it was the first time i actually missed getting lost in a video game, which i usually do constantly because i have an even worse sense of direction than leon. the cities are beautifully designed imo and there are a few where i went “holy shit this is gorgeous” when i walked in, but the whole region is just too small and i was pretty disappointed when ballonlea, despite having the prettiest design in the game along with glimwood tangle imo, was so tiny with hardly anything in it. i realize this part is a tangent and not related to the story but it just adds to the frustration i had with everything!

anyway, this post is already too long and too incoherent and i’m not trying to be overly negative because i truly did enjoy some things about swsh and am glad i bought it to be able to play with my friends and shiny hunt and collect all the new pokemon regardless of my issues with it, so i’ll try wrapping it up here. basically i guess i just feel like the plot was too incredibly oddly paced, not nearly explained well enough, and the characters weren’t expanded on enough at all despite several of them having very fun and interesting personalities and arcs and every one of them being likable to me. the lore of galar has very interesting concepts in it but none of them are used to their fullest potential in this game and i so desperately wish they were! i wish the world was bigger and that i got to be a bigger part of the action and that i had a better understanding of the game i just played (and hey, maybe i’ll understand all of it a little better once i replay/see my dad get to the story parts that puzzled me, but i feel like i should NOT be so utterly lost right now), but none of that was to be. it feels rushed and unsatisfying and i know it’s because the devs didn’t have enough time to make swsh as great as it could be, but i just wish they could’ve been given the time it needed! because these issues i have, along with other ones such as the bizarre removal of features like mega evolutions and the ability to pet your pokemon or the removal of such a high amount of pokemon, and the world itself having so little to really explore, just.... keep me from being able to enjoy it nearly as much as i wanted to.

i think i have to give the game a 6/10 or maaaaybe 6.5, which is lowered from the original 7/10 i was going to give it while i was still optimistic the plot would pick up more than it did. so, decent for me and much better than any of my least favorite mainline pokemon games (i haven’t replayed through xy since forever or really touched it to do anything other than shiny hunting in ages, for example), but not really great imo and i’m sad about it.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

instead of a chapter this week, here’s my writeup of how the first session of DIE went with my group. (sorry) (hopefully this is as entertaining)

In 2007, Tomb of the Worm King, a high fantasy-in-space mmorpg, launched. Three months later, it closed before the Worm King raid was even released. During the beta, the developers grouped testers together into artificial guilds... and after the game fell apart, our group of testers tried to homebrew a trpg system in order to keep playing. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. 

It’s 2027 now. 

Below the cut: everything my players are not allowed to read. Starting with the DM prep I did, if you’re planning a game and just want to read that.

Prep:

It wasn’t feasible for me to bring my laptop to the space where we play, so I had to try to write down everything that I wanted to remember for the session that wasn’t already on the cheat sheets. 

Things I ended up needing that I prepped: short versions of who to give the archetypes to, the long list of monster special abilities to create a custom fallen on the fly, rules for the Dictator targeting multiple people, melee/close/medium/far range rules.

Things I prepped and didn’t need this time, but probably will: God Debt rules, other ways to bring a Fallen back (taking memories sounds rad).

Things I forgot and wished I had written down: That the Neo’s systems coming online is supposed to be dramatic and have visual effects, that the book recommends offering a major miracle in the first encounter.

For Fair Gold, I tried to clean some pennies but ended up tarnishing them. Luckily, the person who’s condo complex we play at had some gold spray paint and we did that after the first session. For cheat tokens, I’m using popsicle sticks marked on one side, because the world’s oldest board game used them instead of dice, and Kieron says he like using weird dice but it gets confusing. 

Oh, and we ended up making folded name thingies for our personas, like we were still in middle school. That was a good idea.

The Cast:

Franz Gibson, a volunteer firefighter who quit his job as an accountant after he found out his wife was cheating on him with his boss. Has twin 7-year old boys who he misses terribly, and only weekend visitation. Was 17 in 2007. Playing Whylock the Enlightened, a Godbinder. Core desire: feels out of place in real life, more out of place in the game.

Sophia Twist, a Dickensian orphan who was 12 in 2007 but pretended to be 17. Inspired by Tomb of the Worm King, went to school to become a computer scientist, but decided not to go into game dev and became a cyber security expert. Playing Intel, a Neo. Core desire: I’m guessing her parents.

AJ Bryant, a culture reporter by day and youtuber by... afternoon? Started as a Let’s Play channel, but came out as a trans man and started transitioning a few years into it, and ended up doing a lot of leftist reactions to current events. Was 16 in 2007. Broke up with his boyfriend of over 4 years just under a year ago, and spent six months completely out of it. Playing Jett, a Dictator. Core desire: wants the privacy he was denied when he became a minor internet celebrity young.

Thomas Bryant, an accountant who hates being called Tommy. Was 14 in 2007, which made him the group baby. Worked at Walmart for a long time, but eventually went back to school to get his current job. Has been on and off with his boyfriend Michael for four years, and was planning to break up again, except Michael’s mom just died. Ouch. Playing Genevieve, an Amazement Knight. Core desire: not sure, but maybe boredom? Boredom got him to go back to school, and he is playing a knight of surprise.

Tripp Declan, a skeezy used car salesman and former frat boy. Was 17 in 2007. The less said about his attitude towards women the better, but his core drive is a fear of getting older. Playing Flip, the magnificent Fool.

Elena Forbes, who in 2007 was 21 and secretly a developer monitoring the group’s dynamics. After Tomb of the Worm King shut down, revealed her true identity to the group. Recently laid off just before a game shipped, so her name won’t be in the credits, so she can’t claim the game on her resume. Many years ago, warned Sophia not to go into game dev. Artistically frustrated. The Master, of course. 

Yes, I named my persona by mashing up two characters from The Vampire Diaries, knowing no one else at the table had ever watched it. 

(setting it in 2027 turned out to be a mistake, because whenever I prod people for popular culture they get vague because we don’t know what people in 2027 will be watching/reading/playing. but also, most of our players were 10 years old in 2007, and pushing back our teenage years back too far would be weird. and I wanted that where-did-my-life-go feeling from the comic.)

The Session:

During persona generation, I make sure to say Elena lives in a place with a space like the room we were playing in. I also take the hit as the person who falls prey to the Geek Social Fallacies enough not to kick Tripp out for being a creep. There’s an interesting divide between the players who work out their personas aloud and the ones who want to have a nearly-finished product before they say anything.

During character creation, when Tripp reads the beginning of the Fool’s character sheet aloud everyone groans at “their friends have to deal with the consequences”. This will probably happen with a lot of groups, if you give the Fool to the obvious candidate.

We ordered food in between persona generation and character creation, but we actually ate it in between character creation and getting sucked into the game world. This worked out great because doing character creation entirely in character was a bit much for me, so we ended up eating dinner as our personas instead. Turns out Franz has the same nut allergy as his player, but his sons love peanut butter. A modern tragedy.

After being sucked into the fantasy world, Elena transforms into Vesuvia, High Priestess of the Worm King and recognizable NPC from the old game. I don’t highlight that she transforms after grabbing her die hard enough, and have to make the other dice glow in order to prompt my players. Thomas tries to grab Tripp’s die when they’re the only two left, and I almost want to let it happen, but then I imagine running  Tripp as an Amazement Knight and... nope. 

Before the fighting starts, Thomas’s sword tells him to look at the door opposite the one the Fallen use to enter, ensuring that he’s surprised. I don’t give him a disadvantage on initiative, but when he ties with someone, I make him go second.

The first encounter reskins the Fallen as the Xenomorph ripoffs from Tomb of the Worm King’s starting zone, except they’re cybernetic in a way they weren’t before. After the first round of combat, a knockoff Xenomorph queen appears—the final boss of the only raid that the game launched with. Elena’s sent it as part of the first encounter to demonstrate that she’s done with old content. It’s time to get to newer things.

The Neo hasn’t read her character sheet completely and is very surprised when I tell her she has a slot in the back of her neck. Her AI System is more fun to act as than the Knight’s “aggressive” sword. The Lady of Ashes—the Godbinder’s fire god—is more fun than either. (Luckily he only casts fire spells this session, so I get some time to think about his other two gods: Brightbearer and the Master of Windows.)

After they defeat the Fallen, Thomas opens the door his sword pointed out to him earlier revealing... the Academy, part of the game’s starting zone. End of session. We go spray paint some coins.

Plans:

Give Sophia a chance to save her parents. Give Franz a chance to one-up James. Tempt Tripp with beautiful women. Unsettle AJ with the fact that as a Dictator, he doesn’t have any more privacy here than in the real world. 

Tomb of the Worm King didn’t give the players spaceships, just teleportation pads for jumping between planets. Give players a choice between hopping between pads to get to the final encounter or going overland to find and defeat those guarding the pad that brings them straight there. They’ll encounter similar encounters, but with different texture.

During the final encounter, Elena reveals that Vesuvia was always supposed to defect and help the players defeat the Worm King. All they need to do is agree to stay, and they can finish the raid, and then keep playing. Keep playing forever. Oh, and she’s not going to agree to leave.

[robotloveskitty]

Good news and Bad news!

Ahoy there! It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us, we’ve been very quiet on here since trouble began. 

Thank you for sticking around, we have really lovely fans, I don’t know what we did to deserve you all!

I have good news, and I have bad news, I’ll give you the bad news first. We are putting Upsilon Circuit into the “Cupboard of Lost Games” indefinitely.

The good news is that we aren’t giving up, and have a new game we’ve been working on called Super Tony Land that brings some elements of UC with it. ..But more on that later.

It was incredibly hard to write anything about UC. It’s been nearly a year since we initially halted production, but it still makes my chest tighten up thinking about it all. It took me 6 tries, but I did my best to write this, because I feel like I owe everyone the best explanation I can muster. I tried to really be open, because so often game cancellations offer very little real information.

Since this was a 3 year journey, it’s a long tale, so get comfortable!  

The concepts for UC grew from a small idea we had because I really enjoyed watching people livestream our (then) newly released game Legend of Dungeon. It grew into an exploration of mortality in games, and so much more. We loved and still love all the things that UC was supposed to become.

So, if we loved it, then why did it get cancelled?

If passion was all it took, I’m sure many other games would exist. Money, time, and luck seem to be big factors based on what we’ve seen and experienced. And the bigger your project, the more you need of each.  

It was an incredibly ambitious project for the two of us. We knew failure was very possible, and I’m proud that we tried anyway.

Why did UC fail?

The oversimplified answer would be that the scope of the game was too ambitious and we underestimated the time and money needed. In reality, for any project, there are many things that can go wrong that influence these things.

As with anything, it’s.. ..complicated.  But the big troubles for us were: Scope, pushing beyond our capabilities, jumping into a partnership for funding, and overwhelming stress.

The scope:

UC’s concept had many game elements highly intertwined and reliant on each other, so cutting features without changing the functionality and direction of UC was impossible. It was also difficult to explain fully to people, including our team.

Pushing beyond our capabilities:

We are just two self taught indie game devs. To make UC, we hired people, signed with a partner/incubator near the end, and then managed a large team, all for the first time.

In hindsight, these were things that we not only didn’t know how to do well, but also made the two of us very miserable.   

Jumping into a partnership:

Instead of scaling the project back when we realized our money would run out long before release, we pushed ourselves harder and kept going, and eventually signed with a partner to help fund the last leg of UC’s journey.

Signing with a partner or publisher and bringing in a larger team are very normal things to do in the industry. However.. they were entirely new to the both of us. Learning (about setting and meeting Milestones, dealing with various issues, and managing a large team) on such a complex project turned out to be very bad for us and UC. No one really did anything markedly wrong, but nothing seemed to go the way it was supposed to. Which in part led to the next point..

The overwhelming stress:

New to running a team stress. New to having partners stress. Crowdfunding stress. Partners pulling out mid failing crowdfunding stress. Having to tell a team “sorry and goodbye” stress. So much stress.

We felt like we had something that could change the gaming world forever, and we were so passionate about it. When things went belly up in the third year, the emotional hit was debilitating.

Bleh!

We really wanted to find a way to finish Upsilon Circuit anyhow, but the truth is, even if it wasn’t saddled with stress and emotional burden.. we’ve already put too much of our money into it. We can’t even support ourselves for long enough to complete a game this big right now.

Looking back on it all now, it’s hard not to feel like we were making a game that the world didn’t want. We knew that it was an out there idea, but that was why we felt that making UC was so important.

We knew publishers wanted something less experimental and risky.. But it was a bit surprising when the gaming community showed so little interest, since articles about UC had reached millions. 

When we lost our partner and shut down our crowdfunding campaign, we made a Patreon, and reached out to the tens of thousands of people on our newsletter. We didn’t get enough pledges to cover the cost of our shared office space, let alone paying even one person.

While there were people who were very generous and amazing, it felt pretty terrible to see something people had seemed so excited about struggling so much to get support when it was truly needed.

When we finally shut everything down, we both thought we might never enjoy making games again. We felt like garbage. We drowned in that for a long time.

You can learn a lot from failure, and we certainly did.

Things we learned from our failure (your own mileage may vary):

Take the project’s timeframe, and triple it. Then triple it again.

A unique idea can add an “I need to get this out before someone else does it” feeling. Let. That. Go. No good choices were made from that feeling.

Don’t bring on full time artists or audio people until the project is really ready for them, use placeholder art and sounds, when you can. Things change, and we redid a lot of our art.

Make sure all contracts clearly state what happens if things get cancelled, or situations drastically change.

Hiring more than one or two people means managing them part time, or full time. We now know that we hate managing people, and are terrible at it.

No matter how smart and awesome your team is, if you can’t get someone 100% behind your idea, your project will suffer.

Having a partner or publisher is a lot like having a boss while also being a boss. Some people like it, but we will likely stay indie or die trying.

Don’t sacrifice your own well being or happiness for a dream. Yes, we’ve sacrificed a lot in the past, we lived in a tree house in the woods so we could keep making games before. But there is a limit, and we found it with Upsilon Circuit, and we stubbornly ignored it and payed the price mentally.

Kittens make things a lot better.

If we had it all to do over again it would have been a very different game, but maybe we could have finished it, or at least avoided some of the worst moments.

So what now?

It’s been a year, and after many conversations, we have found no solutions for bringing back UC. ..But we have healed a little, so we are taking the ideas, story and world, and building them into our future games

We started working on a new game called Super Tony Land this year, and it will be part of UC’s legacy in its own way.

Super Tony Land is a physics platforming adventure game that has many worlds, a story, and easy access to user created levels and entire game worlds. Imagine if Cave story, Mario Maker, and Besiege had a dynamically lit baby.

In Upsilon Circuit the story was something we wanted the players to unfold and influence.. To give creation to the audience, experience it ourselves, and encourage Streamer/audience connectivity. To give real power to the players.

For Super Tony Land we’ve designed an extensive level editor, with visual programming blocks and NPC/Story tools. Anyone can build worlds or challenges in the free editor that we will be releasing alongside the game. We hope that communities and content creators will build and share their own universes, and we are looking forward to playing them!

Here’s the teaser trailer we just released! 

If you’ve been with us for the long haul, you might notice that this is actually a sequel to Tiny Plumbers!

This new game won’t be a lot of things that UC was, but it will be the game that the two of us made that helped us remember how important making games is to us.

It will be available on Steam this spring!

That’s about it for news!

Both of us are thankful to our team during UC’s development, and to our community and friends that have been there encouraging and supporting us throughout this journey. 

We will keep doing our best to make the games we want to see exist, for as long as we are able to make games.

Here are a few links you might want:

If you want to stay up to date on all things RLK, jump on Twitter!

If you want to chat with us or catch streams we have Discord

If you want to support development we have our RLK Patreon here

Thanks for your continued support and understanding!

Your co-pilot, 

Kitty

[bellabooks]

3 Things TV Can Teach Gaming about Queer Storylines

Even though television had a head start on the first generation of video games, these two art forms have found themselves on an even playing field within the last decade. Graphically, games may have evolved a bit slower over the decades but, that didn’t stop them from leaving as much of a cultural mark on the world as popular TV shows. Motion capture technology has allowed games the ability to deliver cinematic experiences in a far more immersive setting. One thing that is truly holding back major video games from exploring a range of gender and sexual identity, is the production process. In many cases, big name game developers can take two to four years to produce one title, and that’s if they’re lucky. Television shows take far less time to produce and thus, have done more to advance stories of the queer community by simply providing more of them over time. This is not to say that games have not attempted to include queer characters at all. In fact, indie game developers have been leading the charge in intersectional diversity for years. The only time queer characters come close to being the sole lead of a multi-platform gaming franchise is if it’s a massive RPG and you get to create your own avatar. While these kinds of games are enjoyable, they do not provide the same definite representation that a game with a set protagonist does. If we look back at the Tomb Raider reboot we can see a clear example of an opportunity for representation that was missed. In a 2013 interview with Kill Screen, Rihanna Prachet stated that she wished she could make Lara Croft gay, and went on to make very clear points about representation beyond including more female characters in games: “Whenever anybody talks about a need for more female protagonists I say: “There’s a need for more female protagonists, but there’s a need for characters of different ethnicities, ages, sexual orientation, ability, et cetera.” We are very narrow when it comes to our characters.” This interview gave many fans, including myself, hope that the reboot would establish Lara Croft as queer, especially with Lara spending the first game rescuing her best friend Sam, whom she clearly had a deep connection with. Since this interview, we’ve had one more installment of the reboot that side stepped Lara’s sexuality entirely. This didn’t make the game any less enjoyable but the complete disconnect from the events of the first game was not unnoticed by fans. Not only was Sam nowhere to be found in game, her Wiki page stated that she was in a mental ward. Now with Pratchet leaving the post of lead writer for the third installment there is not much hope left that we may see a queer Lara Croft anytime soon. It’s my belief that if major game developers studied three key factors of how queer storylines have been handled well (and poorly) on TV, they may be more willing to consider writing queer protagonists. Maybe even some that fall under that “et cetera” category Pratchet was talking about nearly four years ago.   I find that most forms of mainstream entertainment relegate any serious exploration of gender identity to the fringes. Independent filmmakers, indie games devs, premium or non-cable TV networks. Billions, a Showtime original series, is introducing the first major genderqueer supporting character in a drama series. The character’s name is Taylor, and will be played by Asia Kate Dillon, an androgynous actor that identifies with they/them pronouns. In 2016, the now canceled MTV show, Faking It, featured many queer characters within one plot. It also had the first intersex character in a supporting role on a TV show. There are far more examples to pull from in television these days, with many shows including at least one queer character and sometimes even multiple queer storylines and once. It seems like an odd thing to dwell on because nobody ever says “look at all these hetero people in my plotline” but if we really think about the number of mainstream shows or movies in recent years with more than one or two queer protagonists who aren’t in a relationship with each other, it’s not as common. A current instance of this is Orange is the New Black. While not without its faults, there are a range of queer identities throughout the show. This does not make it exempt from failing its audience by killing off queer characters in misguided ways or failing to uphold a character’s sexual identity, however. Piper, the main character of the show, is clearly established as a bisexual woman through her various romances and yet, is never referred to directly as a bisexual. She is often referred to as a “former lesbian” “dyke” and so on, but she never corrects anyone. Oddly enough, the best onscreen conversation about bisexuality didn’t happen in a show like this, it happened on a now canceled show that aired on ABC family, Chasing Life. In episode seven of the second season of Chasing Life, Brenna Carver attends an LGBTQ club meeting and her bisexuality is brought up. The conversation that ensues showcases many of the most common misconceptions that bisexuals face. The conversation Brenna has reminded me of the conversation Krem in Dragon Age Inquisition has with the Inquisitor if they choose to have drinks with Iron Bull and his crew. The primary difference being that once the conversation is over in Dragon Age Inquisition, Krem turns back into NPC set dressing and in Chasing Life, Brenna is still a full-fledged member of the plot. Krem’s presence in Inquisition was incredibly important, but the impact he would have had if he had been a romanceable party member would have been astounding. Many people probably wouldn’t scoff at a trans male character like Krem at the helm of a major video game plot. Adding queer characters to a story is as important as actually utilizing them within it. It would also be ideal to include more than one queer character, to increase the likelihood that a queer character might end up alive at the resolution of a story. They often end up in shows or movies where “anyone can die” and due to the low number of queer people present, usually take the entirety of the stories queer representation with them if they get killed or written off. When this happens, it creates a bitter fan base and usually leads them to stop watching a show or seeing a filmmaker’s next 90-minute dramedy. It’s simple: don’t write queer storylines like an episode of Highlander. There can be more than one. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the closet knows the depths to which one will claw at any scrap of positive representation they can identify with, even if that means reading into things only they can see. Often we are forced to create our own worlds within the restrictions put forth by the storytellers. Games like Final Fantasy XIII, while widely regarded as the most unfavorable game in the franchise, is also considered being the queerest one due to subtext. This is the result of the seemingly over-affectionate nature of characters Vanille and Fang. For those who didn’t pay too much attention to the development of the game, like me, you probably were unaware that Fang was first developed as a male character. This could explain why the relationship between Vanille and Fang reads as romantic. Intentional or not, if Fang had remained a male character, it’s highly likely that we wouldn’t be having debates over whether or not her and Vanille were a couple. We can only imagine the impact that game could have had if the relationship between them had been at the forefront. This “close female friendship” phenomenon is a very common form of subtext. A TV show notorious for subtext of this kind is Rizzoli and Isles. Ending in 2016 after seven seasons, plenty of beards and a hefty amount of queerbaiting, our heroines found themselves relaxing in a bed planning a trip to Paris together. Completely normal non-romantic behavior right? Let’s put things into perspective here. Bones, a show that has been on air since 2005, featured almost the same dynamic, a cop and a medical examiner working together with a rag tag group of scientists and detectives. The difference being that the heterosexual relationship between the two lead characters is acknowledged and fully actualized with them going on to marry each other in season 9 and even have children. Bones got to marry her quippy lovable detective friend, while Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles were constantly being bounced around to romantic storylines severely lacking in chemistry in order to deflect from the fact that they were perfect for each other. Had the relationship been made explicit it would have been the first major network detective show of its kind to put a queer female romance at the forefront. The resolution of the hero’s journey often relies on martyrdom or some other form of doom and gloom to wrap up a story. This is never more true than for the queer individual. If it wasn’t, then the Bury Your Gays Trope wouldn’t exist. It is very real, and self-explanatory but if you truly don’t know what it is, you’re one Google search away from being fully briefed on the topic. I’m one of those people who love a great ambiguous ending or twilight zone twist at the end of a story, but when it comes to queer characters, I would take riding off into the sunset over death any day. Games like The Last of Us provide us with Ellie, a queer supporting character who ultimately rises to equal footing with her male counterpart Joel but, her story is still rooted in tragedy. Many responses from showrunners have been that death is just part of the show and if we want to be treated like everyone else we should except it. Sure, that might make sense for Game of Thrones but not for shows like Last Tango in Halifax, which grew in popularity between 2013 and 2015, due to its inclusion of a genuine late-in-life coming out story and romance between two women. In the finale of the third season, Caroline marries her pregnant live-in girlfriend Kate, only to be widowed within 24 hours. Kate gets into a car accident off screen and dies, and a little piece of every fan rooting for them dies too. These types of “sudden death” storylines occur across television and film far too often. At a certain point, it stops being about just one character. Each new death rubs the salt deeper into an already open wound, a wound that constantly throbs with anger. An anger rooted in the fact that queer people have been around as long as there have been stories to tell and yet, we still live in a world that consistently fails at replicating our experiences. It’s 2017, and the only shows where there are well established queer female romances that will most likely not end with one of them dead are featured in shows like Wynonna Earp and Supergirl. Everyone involved in the creation of these two shows including the actors, has openly stated that they are invested in the characters that make up their queer representation, treating them as they would a heterosexual couple. SyFy even created an entire section of the Wynonna Earp website dedicated to the relationship between Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught. Games have the unique ability to sidestep the restraints of having to seek out crowd drawing actors or shooting in expensive locations because they can literally mold characters out of polygons and build their worlds out of code. This uniquely positions them to create something we have never seen before, someone we’ve never seen before. As Rhianna Pratchet put it: “Exploring something about what it means to be a gay character, bisexual character, transgender character, in games, that would create some interesting stories.” I couldn’t agree more http://dlvr.it/NKvGm1

[symbianosgames]

Ion Storm Austin’s Deus Ex was a critical and commercial success when it was released in the summer of 2000, laying the groundwork for an enduring franchise.

More importantly, it inspired a generation of game designers to dig into the nooks, crannies, and conveniently-placed ducts of what we now shorthand as “immersive sims”, those games that ask players to make interesting choices in how they want to confront or slip past obstacles in their path.

Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisisted the subject after 17 years to shed some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be.

“People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,” said Spector. “The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.”

Spector acknowledges that a lot of what he's talking about is standard practice in the game industry now, but he reminds fellow devs that it absolutely was not common practice 20 years ago when the game was first conceived.

“Conceptually, I thought of Deus Ex as a genre-busting game, which let me say, really enamored us to the marketing folks. They loved that,” said Sepctor. “If you ever want to make a marketing perosn unhappy, mash some genres together.”

The game was envisioned as a mix of first-person shooter, adventure game, and RPG. But Spector traces the history of its development back to playing tabletop games, long before he became a game designer.

"I would not be here, you would not be here, if not for that game of Dungeons and Dragons”

“Let me tell you were it began -- this is going to get a little embarrassing,” said Spector. “It all began with Dungeons and Dragons.”

In 1978, to be precise, when he started playing D&D with a new Dungeon Master.

“I would not be here, you would not be here, if not for that game of Dungeons and Dragons,” said Spector.

The Dungeon Master of that game was “cyberpunk guru” Bruce Sterling, and Spector says the experiene was meaningful not because of the story being told, but because of how it was being told -- by Spector and his friends, under the guidance of Sterling.

“The story belonged to Bruce, but every detail belonged to us,” said Spector. “I was completely hooked; I played in that campaign for ten years.”

So how does that lead to Deus Ex? Spector says it inspired his entire career in game design, a long-running attempt on his part to try and recreate that experience he had playing D&D for the first time in ‘78.

“That’s been my life mission: to recreate that feeling,” he said. “Every game I’ve worked on, every single one, has been trying to engage players in the telling of the story. My only hope is to do it a little better every time.”

So Spector became a game designer, and joined Origin Systems in 1989 to work on games like Ultima Underworld. But at some point he got tired of making those games, and he decided to “Try and swing for the fences.”

“I was sick to death of making games about guys in plate armor swinging swords,” said Spector. He says he wanted to make what he saw as a “real-world role-playing game” in which the player’s choices would say more about the player themselves than their in-game avatar

“I don’t care about your puppet; I care about you,” he said.

He also wanted every player to get to the end of the story; he wanted to tell a story with players the way Sterling told a story with him and his friends back in the ‘70s.

At Origin Systems he pitched a game concept that allowed him to do all this: something called (Trouble)shooter, which was a sort of hard-boiled noir game. Electronic Arts and Origin weren’t interested at all, and Spector shelved the idea. A few years past, he left Origin and joined Looking Glass, where a game called Thief was being developed.

Spector says he had a moment while playing Thief: he hit a part that was too tough to sneak through, and impossible to fight through. So he asked the team to make the player character tougher, so he could fight his way through; but the team balked, saying that wasn’t the point of Thief. The game was about sneaking, after all; it wouldn’t make sense to let players smash through a roadblock.

That, says Spector, was when he got the idea to go back to (Trouble)shooter. So he left Looking Glass shortly before Thief shipped, and wound up nearly signing a contract with Electronic Arts to make a totally different game.

“That’s when John Romero called me and said don’t sign the contract; join me at Ion Storm and make the game of your dreams,” said Spector. “Who can say no to that?”

And so Ion Storm Austin was born, with the game that would become Deus Ex as its debut project. But before work got underway, devs may appreciate Spector's recollection of asking himself a series of questions he calls the 6 + 2 + 1 -- a vetting process he says he applies to all games he works on.

“Why I don’t call them the nine questions, I don’t know,” said Spector. “But if I can’t answer any of these questions I don’t make the game.”

What’s the core idea? Can you describe the core of the game in 2-3 sentences?

Why do this game?

What are the development challenges?

How well-suited to games is the idea?

What’s the player fantasy? (If the fantasy and goals aren’t there, it’s probably a bad idea)

What does the player do? (What are the “verbs” of the game?)

Has anyone done this before?

What’s the one new thing? (“You can always find one thing that hasn’t been done before [in games], even if you’re making a My Little Pony game.”)

Do you have something to say? (“In Deus Ex I wanted to explore all sorts of big issues,” said Spector. “And I wanted players to explore those things in ways that only games could do.”)

All of these questions were answerable for Deus Ex, so in 1997 work on the project got underway at Ion Storm Austin.

“If we were gonna plug into the real cultural zeitgesit, we had to play close attention to things in the real world,” said Spector. Things like mechanically-augmented soldiers, or the rising tide of terrorism.

“You didn’t have to be a genius, even in 1997, to see that the news was increasingly filled with reports of terrorism,” he added.

”And really interesting to us was the rise of nanotechnology; the dangers of that seemed fun to explore. But most importantly, everywhere you looked in 1997, it seemed like there was a conspiracy theory,” said Spector. “The world of Deus Ex was being created all around us; we didn’t have to make anything up. It was great!”

In short, Spector says the game was designed to answer five big questions:

What would happen if you mashed up the adventure game, shooter, and RPG genres?

What would happen if you dropped a secret agent into a world wih no black and white -- just shades of grey?

What if all conspiracy theories were true?

What does it mean to be human in world with augmentation?

How should the world be? Would the world be better off ruled by a secret cabal, a sentient AI that connected all humankind, or plunged into a new dark age?

“The game was going to have no bosses to kill; it was about deciding how the world should be,” said Spector. “You could answer those questions through your play choices.”

To explore these questions in a game, Spector says he established some “commandments” for the team to follow:

Ion Storm Austin Commandments (or, the Deus Ex rules of roleplaying)

Always show the goal. Players should always see what they’re trying to accomplish.

Problems, not puzzles. “It’s an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle.”

No forced failures. “Failure’s not fun.”

It’s “role” not “roll” -- ie.. “It’s about playing a role, not rolling dice,” said Spector. “Why do we still have character classes and skill levels and die rolls?”

If there’s cool stuff happening, players should be doing it. Players do the cool stuff; NPCs watch the players do the cool stuff.

Lay out constant rewards to drive players onward.

As the player gets better, make the game harder.

Think 3D. “I believe 3D maps can’t be laid out on graph paper; if players aren’t looking up and down constantly, you may as well make a 2D game.”

Be connected. Tunnels from A to B aren’t interesting, says Spector; interconnected spaces are.

Every problem should have multiple solutions.

By the time the team moved from the concept phase to pre-production, the Ion Storm Austin team had grown from 6 to about 30 people. It was a “totally dysfunctional team,” according to Spector, and the team had “about sixish months” of pre-production. The design document was cut down to 270 pages (“which nobody read”) and the team entered full production.

“You don’t want to know how many times I was told to just make a shooter, and I said no,” said Spector.

“Then there was the day we hit pre-alpha and realized the game was not fun; that was a good one,” recalled Spector. By this time, September of 1999, Spector says the game had finally come together and the team found out it wasn’t fun.

“Luckily, Eidos saw the potential of the game and gave us more time,” said Spector. “By June of 2000 it was ready to ship. It was the game of my dreams.”

He seems to really mean this, too; Spector says at the start of every project he closes his eyes and envisions what a game will be. By the time Deus Ex had shipped, he looked at it and recalled that “every single detail had changed, but in spirit it was exactly the same. It was kind of amazing; it’s the only time that’s ever happened.”

So what positive lessons were learned from the experience that fellow devs might appreciate? As you might expect, Spector had a list:

Don’t give up

“The lesson here is that if there’s a game you have to make, never give up, because someone’s gonna be stupid enough to give you the money some day.”

Have clear goals

“We wanted players thinking about who they were in the world...we wanted players to think about how they wanted to behave in the world,” said Spector. “We wanted them to feel like they were actually in the world….everything in the game had to be based on something real.”

“If there’s anyone in the audience here who worked on deus ex, I’m sure you hate me,” added Spector.

Don’t skimp on pre-production

“You can always use more, but we did okay,” said Spector.

Keep your game design organic -- be open to change

“Our game systems didn’t work as well in reality as I thought they would on paper,” said Spector.

Always have a playable build

“We always knew where we were, even if that was painful,” said Spector, explaining that the team would build out envisioned missions early, in limited form, to test how they played. These “proto-missions” were small and ugly, but critical to the game’s production because it helped the team see things that didn’t work, early enough to do something meaningful about it.

Also, says Spector, make sure to playtest with real people

“Do not let your publisher know you’re doing this,” said Spector, recounting how Ion Storm Austin would bring folks in to do playtests without telling Eidos. “Listening to their responses, I called that particular milestone the ‘wow these missions suck’ milestone.”

License good tech

“That was something we did right; we licensed Unreal Tournament,” said Spector. “Adding what we needed was much easier than it could have been...3 programmers made Deus Ex. They were very overworked.”

So what went wrong? What should you know to avoid in your own game projects?

The team structure didn’t work

“I had two people qualified to be lead designers so instead of picking one, I gave them both roles as lead designers with design teams,” said Spector. “Don’t do that. I thought I could manage the tension between the teams, and I couldn’t...I had to call one of the design teams 1 and the other one team A, because neither would be team B or 2.”

However, Spector took pains to say one thing he did right was in choosing who to hire. “Those guys do not get enough credit for the creative aspects of the game, the fact that we shipped at all, and managing the team.”

Goals were too big and unrealistic

“Harvey Smith and another designer, Steve Powers, came to me one day and said ‘you cannot make this game. We cannot make this story,'” recalled Spector. “So we cut a bunch, and the game was better for it.”

He recommends you limit yourself in a kind of creative box, and ensure your entire team is operating within it.

More risks should have been frontloaded

Put simply: Spector says devs should prototype more systems earlier so you can iterate and make them better -- or throw out what doesn’t work.

Be careful about licensing tech

“This is something that I said we did right, but it’s also something we did wrong,” said Spector. “Unreal Tournament was not designed to have a deep sim and allow fighting, sneaking and talking...we had to layer all that stuff in on top. It worked, but….we ended up faking a lot of stuff, to be frank.”

He also added that the engine presented the team from being able to create the large, open areas they envisioned, and he feels it significantly impacted the game.

“It was a mistake to try and recreate the real world...in 1997,” said Spector.

Any publicity is not good publicity

“Ion Storm was not a quiet company; I don’t know how many of you remember this,” said Spector, pulling up an image of an ad for Ion Storm Dallas’ Daikatana, also released in 2000. He went on to mention Playboy shoots in the office, articles about pay rates at Ion Storm, and more, noting that “it’s hard for everyone on your team to be productive when everyone’s screaming about your company.”

But when the game finally released in 2000, Spector says the results were gratifying: it sold well, reviewed well, and most importantly (according to him) players got excited about the notion of making meaningful choices in the game.

“Be ready to define success for any game you make; if you can’t define success, you are not ready to make that game,” said Spector. “Conversation was my definition of success.”

He’s talking about the sort of conversations that are now a common goal in game design: the “what did you do? How did you get through this part? What ending did you choose?” conversations between players who are playing through the same game in different ways.

“That was what Deus Ex was all about. It wasn’t about what the development team thought they world should be, but what the player thought the world should be,” said Sterling. “Like Bruce Sterling and every other Dungeon Master, we provided the skeleton of the experience and the players put meat on the bones.”

“Here’s my final thought for all of you: I sincerely hope that everyone of you gets the opportunity o work on the game of your dreams some day,” said Spector. “And I hope every one of you gets to work on something that’s still relevant 17 years after you make it, and has a life beyond you.”

[ratcandy]

random tangent here but god i wish there was more stuff of the npcs in general. in both the fandom and in game

they are in fact my Favorite part of the game ever i love them so much more than the main cast of the game. EVEN if they are interesting and whatnot, and have cool lore, i love the npcs so much.

one of my favorites ive stated before was helob. and there isnt enough fan content for him. i love that walking talking red flag of a spider, he's great. like i know he just sort of exists to sell you followers and thats it but STILL. look at him. he's so,, unnerving in his dialogue and mannerisms and i love that. spooky man-eating spider y'know.

and theres even less for the others too. like look at rakshasa, HE'S RAINBOW. i love his sort of no-nonsense expression he has. we got forneus!! cat mom! of course she gets a little more attention because of her sons but still. not enough to satisfy. i also wish there was more of monch, i think monch is cool. i like moths. theres barely anything about monch. big sad. and plimbo is a really goofy character, i like his mother-in-law jokes.

i love their designs and the small snippets of dialogue we have for them, they are so funky and colorful and weird.

I KNOW It. Drives me bonkers. But the problem is that. With canon touching on them so barely, fandom has little to go off of. Especially in the case of someone like Monch, who I ALSO really like, because Monch has exactly TWO lines of dialogue !! and he's such a random chance encounter I didn't even know he existed until I was well through the game!!

and IT SUCKS!!!! BECAUSE I ALSO REALLY LIKE THE NPCS!!!!! There's so much character in what little we DO get, and it just leaves me longing for more interactions that the devs are denying me. And that subsequently fandom is also denying me, because (and reasonably enough) fandom is too focused on the Lamb and the Bishops.

I realize I am saying this immediately after Kallamar posting but LOOK, I can appreciate both the Main Guys and the NPCs sdhgKSDJGH

But honestly even in cases like Sozo, an NPC who gets a lot more content than the others, fandom do be neglecting him too. Not nearly to the extent of ones like Monch or Rakshasa of course, but I am sTARVING OVER HERE.

If devs aren't giving us the npc content we crave why don't We start doing that more. C'mon guys. Pleas.

Anyway I think Rakshasa and Helob should interact they're literally in the same room across from each other for the entire game and say nothing about each other. I want them to have a standoff because they've just had to stare at each other from across the way for ages and say nothing while Helob's gaze is Incredibly Unsettling and Rakshasa's just like. 👁_👁 try me bitch

ALSO I WAS JUST LOOKING IN THE WIKI TO CHEKC SOMETHIN GI DIDN'T KNOW RAKSHASA FUCKING ATTACKS YOU IF YOU HIT HIS WIFE?!?!? HELP??????? he's like I don't give a fuck if you're a cult leader you come after my wife you're DONE FOR!!!!!