#i probably don't have many arcane followers but I feel like. a few of you

[masterqwertster]

You know, their time with Ashton and Bells Hells may be Fresh Cut Grass's first time actually being emancipated. Free to make their own decisions while not being owned by anyone. (I'm discounting Dancer because FCG made the comment of still belonging to her when they met in Bassuras, and she did not deny previous ownership)

Because as pointed out in the trivia section of the Critical Role Aeormaton wiki page:

It is unknown if the aeormatons that took part in the Care and Culling were created before or after their race had freedom and will of their own. If they were created before, their orders would be the priority, but if they were created after, it would mean that these automatons deliberately decided to participate in said missions as spies and assassins.

And thinking about it, wouldn't it be weird to gift a citizen to another country as a peace offering? Like, the whole assassin angle should be half-expected in this scenario. The aeormatons were not gifted to advance the sciences, provide relief efforts, etc that would benefit the (rival) societies as a whole, thus making a citizen a gainful gift towards peace. No, the aeormatons were gifted to individuals of influence as companions. How many stories are there about the courtesan or other person sent to be a companion killing the client? If they've got free will enough to be citizens, they can decide to kill this person of influence that they are working closely with, and this should be under consideration, especially with Aeor's (probably) known militant slant.

On the other hand, gifting a particularly capable machine/artifact that is only made in your city sounds much more like a peace offering. This thing will follow its master's orders, and we're making you the master. It will help you in your daily work and do whatever you say. What a thoughtful gift. And if you're feeling particularly industrious, you can try to dismantle and replicate this gift so that more people in your country can have this high quality machine.

Also consider, for FCG being pre-aeormaton liberation, that Professor Isham confirmed that Fresh Cut Grass has an usually large arcane accumulator for the functions of an automaton of their size. Considering that this is basically the beating heart of FCG, I don't think that's something to be upgraded later should he have chosen to accept this mission. No, that sounds like something you particularly choose to design an individual machine to have. You make it look like other models on the outside, but the inside, which no one outside of your city has seen (at least well enough) to replicate is where you make things different for their special purpose.

I'd also like to add in that Dancer said Fresh Cut Grass came online with the personality he has. Now the subservient mindset can be taught, but if that's just the way he woke up... well, it gels more with a slavish "you're just a machine" mindset than a full-fledged citizen.

And with the way FCG is currently still trying to put someone else in complete control of their life kind of suggests, to me, that maybe they never have had control of their life like that.

So tl;dr:

I think there's a good chance FCG was built before aeormatons gained full citizenship in Aeor as there's quite a few logistics/details that point me that way, meaning he's currently experiencing acknowledged personhood and freedom for the first time with Ashton and Bells Hells.

[moonssugar]

🌳 👁️ for the asks please!

thank you for the ask rachel!!! :3 i love doing these

🌳 share a snippet featuring nature of any kind

this is from a chapter named "fireflies" i wrote i think last year! i really love this one. my three (sam, chelsie and aubry) are sitting in the middle of this marshland in the middle of the night and aubry finally shows them that she has an ability to summon insects (and repel mosquitoes which is really useful!). she summons fireflies to light their way out of the marsh

Sam didn't make a sound except to laugh breathily. He held his arms up, watching the fireflies dart over him in a river of bioluminescent light. They were everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. The entire world was aglow in yellow-green, an even growing river of light.

👁 share a snippet where the character is very visually engaged/a snippet with description

this chapter doesn't have a name right now except "sam's house" but this is when sam and chels are earlier in their friendship and she lets him do her makeup because he's more experienced at doing it and she isn't and wants to learn. the result is beautiful. its very sweet and i can bite through drywall whenever i think about this scene it literally drives me insane

Sam’s pillow is soft under her head. Her hands folded on top of her belly, Chrysa is looking at herself in the makeup kit mirror, reading all the names of the colors and Cosmos watches closely as Sam does his magic. It is magic to Chelsie, how he knows how to do this. His magic has the full focus of his attention. Any caps or gloss and packets of glitter that fall from the edge of the bed are picked up in Kaid's teeth and placed back into Sam's hands. It usually hurts when Chelsie tries to apply eyeliner. Lots of accidental poking and tears with no results. This, what Sam is doing, doesn’t hurt at all. A thin brush moves over her eyelids and it feels cool, nice. "I used to love doing this," he began. “My mom and Fae taught me how. Mostly Fae. She used to love to doll me up all the time and she'd let me practice on her." Chelsie smiled knowingly. "Used to? I can tell, you still love doing it. That's why you're so good at it." He blushed. "Thank you. And yeah, I do still love it," he happily admitted. "But you know, the harassment." She sighed and closed her eyes. "They're assholes. And you know what? Probably jealous as well." Opening her eyes again she shifted her head on his pillow to a more cozy place. He waited for her to get comfortable, then continued. "You have the arcane magical skill they don't." That made him smile. She felt the little happiness of success. Chelsie’s attention drifted to the prints on the bedroom wall. A lot of them were things created with oil pastels and gouache, watercolor, crayon, ink, pencil on scrap paper. Many landscapes, lots of sunsets and sunrises, trees and coyotes on hills. What he had made spread across the walls beside and across from them, torn outs from sketchbooks pinned up, wood blocks with glue on the backs, a few small canvas fitted together like puzzle pieces. Where the edge of one stopped another began, ocean touching desert. In others, where one began and ended was hard to see, they phased into each other with no boundary, no beginning or end. Different worlds touching. "I can see why you like doing makeup so much. It’s kind of an art isn’t it?" Sam looked back to her from where he followed her eyes across the wall. "It is art," he said, “and right now i think it’s coming out beautifully."

fun trivia under the cut!

btw the whole insp for the makeup chapter is this LMAOO. think this but t4t

[rcksmith]

Spring breeze — Spencer Reid

Sumarry: Spencer never thought about falling in love with someone, but he certainly didn't expect that he would fall in love with Gideon's daughter. — season 3 —

Part.2 Part.3 Part.4

A/N: I am marathoning Criminal Minds again and I can not express how much I loved the interaction of Gideon and Spencer!! So this idea came as an epiphany, and I love the conception of love at first sight. Maybe this becomes a serie...

English is not my first language, so I so sorry if have a mistake.

Requests are open. Love you ❤️

Couple:Spencer Reid/Gideon's daughter!reader.

Warnings: nothing, just very fluff.

— — — — —

Something was different. Maybe it was the way the sun's rays cascaded down in an atypical way, maybe it was the breeze that carried a more lyrical intonation on its back, or maybe it was just the Earth that was adorned by an ethereal veil. Spencer didn't know how to point out what was really different, but he felt in his soul that something in the hemisphere had changed.

At first, when he took the subway to work, Spencer thought it was just an ephemeral sensation, just like those seconds when you feel the breath of the breeze more cold. But it didn't. The sensation accompanied him to work, to the plane, to the case, it stuck to him like a tattoo and Reid found himself looking around for answers that did not exist physically.

He considered all the theories that were possible to explain that destabilization in his subtly balanced world. But he found none.

“Are you feeling anything different today?” That's what he asked Morgan.

Derek shrugged, finishing packing up at the police station so they could go back to Quantico.

“No.” Then he looked Reid whit his obsidian eyes “Is something bothering you? Is the Genie feeling any peturbation in the Force? ”

Spencer chuckled through his nose at the Star Wars joke, but just shook his head in a 'No'. And the conversation died there. How could he explain something that even he didn't understand?

Trying to ignore the way his heart was beating fast, for no reason, in anticipation of something Spencer himself was unaware of, he wondered how long he was going to have that sensation. The feeling of euphoria, the taste of something, there was something exciting in the air, almost angelic.

But how long was that going to accompany him? One day? One week? Whole life? For the first time, Spencer didn't have the answer. And that was disconcerting.

When BAU's glass doors opened for agents to settle on their desks and Hotch and Gideon go to their respective offeces, a wave of icy breeze from the DC air reverberated through the enclosure. Spencer can see that Morgan shrugged in the wind, Emily looke for a coat in the black suitcase, but his own body didn't seem to be hit by the same breeze. For Reid, it had been a caustic, lyrical, almost spring, wave that carried the promise of something extraordinary on back. Almost divine.

In that split second, in a time as short as a blink, the feeling that his life would never be the same made him losing his breath. Spencer does not know what attracted his gaze to the BAU door, nor what made his whole body turn in that direction, like a magnet, like a wanderer in the desert who finds his Oasis. But he had been attracted, and as soon as a female hand pushed through the glass door and her figure came into view, Spencer understood the extraordinary thing that him heart was beating for in anticipation.

You.

It was as if the universe had been preparing him all day for that moment. As if the body itself tried to prepare it. Because if Spencer hadn't fell those feelings of euphoria all day, he would have drowned in his own reactions to seeing you.

In a burst, like a violin string popping, Reid understood what was different about the hemisphere, because why the air was ethereal, because why the night felt like poetry, and why the moon whispered swears of love. In that moment, Spencer understood the mysteries of the world, unraveled the riddles of life, drank from the wisdom of The Oracle of ancient Greece. In an instant, watching you enter, Spencer understood the reason for his life.

In an instant.

The world shuddered in slow motion, capturing all your movements, all your graceful gait, all your glory. An elegant black dress with thin straps modeled your body in an arcane, almost divine way, your legs were supported on black high heels, making your walk seem like a glide of honey.

You were not beautiful. You are gorgeous. You shone. Sparkled.

And, like an atrocious wave that broke over Reid and pulled him into the sea, that whole feeling that stuck with him all day came to accompany the female figure. Following in your footsteps like the tail of a long dress.

Spencer was sure that his life would never be the same.

They hadn't even sat at their tables when you showed up. Like the muse that came out of an action movie. And when you got close enough to attract the attention of Emily and Morgan, whose Derek opened his mouth when he noticed the female figure that was the personification of Female Fatal, Spencer felt himself letting out the breath he didn't even know he was holding. He knew that anyone with eyes and a little common sense would notice how overwhelmingly beautiful you were, so when Morgan turned his body fully towards you, Reid was not surprised.

“Hi." Your voice, to Reid, had a floral intonation “Do you guys know where I can find Jason?”

When his eyes met yours, Spencer felt his breath being stolen from him once again. Usually, girls like you didn't look twice at guys like him, Spencer knew that. Girls like you liked men like Morgan. Athletes, strong, Alpha Male. And because of that, it was an explosion in Reid's system when you took a few seconds longer in that eye contact and a delightful smile appeared on yours lips. As if you appreciate what you were seeing.

That was a shock. Was it true or was he misinterpreting the signs? Was him mind playing tricks on him, like the flickering shadows of furniture under the darkness and the flame of a candle? Spencer would not be able to say a word without stuttering at that moment even that him life depended on it. In fact, he was already starting to feel cheeks heating up. So he thanked any deities that might exist when Morgan and Emily responded to you and broke the eye contact between the two of you.

“Jason Gideon?” Morgan frowned slightly.

“He's in the office but...” But Emily couldn't finish the sentence before Gideon's voice came out over everyone's:

“Y/n?” It was in a tone that no one there had ever heard in Gideon. A sweet, loving intonation... paternal.

None of the three agents present there had time to express their thoughts in facial expressions before you said:

“Dad!”

Then the whole world took a turn and seemed to be terrified, making them feel as if they had been thrown out of the tenth-floor window. This time, Reid's eyes widened at the two friends, who also had puzzled expressions. Everyone knew that Gideon had a past, probably with divorces and children, a life he had left behind, but no one expected...that.

Perhaps Gideon's vision of a family was something that was only in the imagination, never something tangible. Until that moment. Until the most beautiful girl Reid had ever seen was the daughter of one of the men he respected most. Until him heart soared at alarming levels for him boss's daughter. Spencer had been in trouble before when it came to matters of the heart, but the trouble gained a position in the top 3.

“What are you doing here?” A rare smile appeared on Gideon's face, his brow slightly furrowed.

“We were going to dinner today, remember? In that new Japanese restaurant.” Your tone of voice was not resentful or hurt by the situation that was explicit there.

The life of a BAU agent take many things, some with a more atrocious force than others, and one of them was the availability of hours. commitments that count on presence.

“I totally forgot, I'm sorry.” Gideon's voice was always calm and controlled, he managed to speak from the most tender emotions to the most heinous crimes with a peaceful intonation. But to perceive traces of parental love was new. “The case was very complicated, my cell phone died and...”

“It's okay, Dad.” You smiled, making a casual gesture with your hand “I thought this happened, but I thinking it best to come here to see if everything was okay instead of waiting until tomorrow.”

Your smile, despite being the simple one, was the brightest for Spencer.

Gideon still had a fatherly look and a chaste and grateful smile when he turned to the other agents who were still puzzled.

“Y/n, these are agents Derek Morgan, Emily Prentiss and Dr. Spencer Reid.” Jason introduced them to you “Guys, this is my daughter, Y/n.”

“Is a pleasure.” You smiled genuinely at them.

“I had no idea that you had a daughter!” Emily gave a low, slightly bewildered laugh that also made you laugh.

“Everybody says that.” You looked at your father again, having fun.

“I'm just going to go over some reports with Hotcher before I leave.” Gideon kept a chaste smile. “Why don't you wait here and then let's go get something to eat?”

“Of course, no problem, Dad.” You agreed, adjusting the thin shoulder bag that was on your shoulder.

As Jason went up to Hotcher's office, you turned to the agents again, with a gentle smile on your face.

“My dad said great things about you.” Emily smiled at your statement.

"I'm still chocked ." She laughed, and Morgan added:

“ I really need to know...” he looked around, in a playful suspense “Is Gideon really that serious outside the FBI?”

You laughed “Oh no! Definitely not.”

So you reached for your phone in the litlle bag, hunting for a photo on it and showing it to the three agents. It was a recent photograph where you and Gideon had their faces painted in easy ink. You had a skeleton mouth made with white and black paint, and Jason had a pink glitter butterfly covering his left cheek. You two were laughing in the photo.

Morgan was the one who let out a loud, dripping laugh, with a few tears accumulating in the corners of his eyes.

“How is this possible?” Morgan was trying to catch the air.

“It was at the last Halloween, he and I bet that whoever lost in the snooker that day would have to paint a butterfly on their face.” You laughed.

“And did he lose?” Spencer found a voice for it, his mind failing to process the image of Gideon losing any game.

“I have my suspicions that he let me win” You joked “But I enjoyed the victory just the same.”

The conversation was light after that, Spencer refrained from much of the dialogue, a little fearful that you could hear him heart beating loudly whenever you smile in his direction. As the minutes passed, Derek and Emily had to go back to their duties and finish their reports, while you were sitting in one of the chairs at an empty table.

It was one of those moments when Reid tried to focus on the files in front of him to exorcise what was going on around him. Paperwork had always brought the lull needed to make Spencer meditate. It was almost like relaxation. But in moments like this, when something in the environment around him pulled his attention so much, he stayed on the same page for long minutes.

That must be why he didn't hear the wheels on your chair approach, and he didn't even notice that you were so close until you said:

“Are you really a doctor?” Your voice was low, soft, as if you didn't want to disturb the other agents who were working.

Spencer turned his head towards you, only to find the modern personification of what would be the Athena de Troia. You were close, not close enough to touch, but close enough that he could smell your perfume. You smelled like the night, the excitement of nights and the brightness of the stars. And if Spencer looked deeper into yours eyes, he would sure they contained shine moonlight.

He swallowed, the mania for blinking compulsively returning a little.

“A-ahm yes. Not really a doctor, but m-my 3 Phd’s make me a doctor.”

He might be mistaken, but the smile that spread across your face was not just friendly, it wasn't curious, it was… delighted. As if the roles were reversed and he was the most fascinating thing in that room, not you.

The glow that was adorned in yours eyes had something lyrical, ethereal, wonderful. As if the brightness of all the galaxies were inhabiting your irises, moving in your orbit. At that moment, Spencer was deeply grateful to have eidetic memory, because 10 years from now he could still remember how you looked like a muse over there. DC night came in through the big glass windows, and if Reid had to describe that moment with the five senses, he would say that the world had turned the light down to a rose tone, the smell was heaven and your smile promised to contain wonders of the world.

Holy Mother of God, you are so, so beautiful!

“My dad said there was a genius on the team.” You said, your attention on him is always tender, adoreble. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

Your perfume invaded him sense of smell once again, and he felt his heart beat faster once more. Spencer would have told you all the secrets in the world if you asked. He would have told all own secrets.

“No way.” He sat back in his chair to look at you better, oblivious to the exchange of looks that Emily and Morgan gave.

You rested your arms on Spencer's table, the chair next to his.

“You never thought of being like... the wizard Doctor Strange?” You hoped that Spencer knew Marvel “Before he was a magician, of course. But why didn't you want to be a surgeon or something?” You laughed “There is a phrase him says: I have a photographic memory and this is what made me ..."

“ ‘Get my diploma and doctorate at the same time’ " Spencer completed you, laughing softly “I know the HQs. Did you know that the Doctor Strange character was created during the Silver Age of American comics to bring a different type of character and mystical themes to Marvel Comics? It him has an intellectual coefficient close to 177 points and I have… ”

The more he rambled, the more a stunning smile spread across your face. As if you were enchanted with him. And you were. Everyone was noticing the way Spencer seemed to have you curled up on his finger, your eyes sparkling and a silly smile twinkling on your face, paying attention to every word he said. It was an overwhelmingly lovely sight to behold.

But just as everything had a time, an hourglass, your time had reached the last grain of sand.

“All right, Y/n.” Gideon went down the stairs, cutting the end of Reid's sentence “Ready?”

You stood up, agreeing with your father and smoothing the dress. When you put your hands on the chair, ready to take it back to place, you turned to Spencer once again:

“I'm going to bring my dad to BAU tomorrow, do you think me and you can meting and you give me the answer to the question tomorrow?” Your smile was able to light up the whole of Washington.

“S-sure!” Spencer's voice went up more high notes than he would like to admit.

And, even when you left, even when Morgan and Emily jokes him about it, and even when he finally lay down on his own bed, you were still the only thing that occupied Spencer's mind.

[shelbazoidz]

Wrapped Up In You

(More Arcane content because I cannot be stopped.)

It feels like they've know each other forever, even though its barely been a year. Vi and Caitlyn's friendship has morphed into something new and quite frankly it terrifies it them both. As time goes by it gets more and more difficult to deny how they feel. The emotions get even harder to deny when Vi's goofy dog ends up trapping them together, which leads to a rather interesting turn of events.

○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○

There's a headache brewing between her temples, the urge to interrupt this tortuous lecture is suppressed as her mother goes over the instructions. Caitlyn doesn't even know how long she's been standing here trying to pay attention. This run down has been given to her so many times that it's been fried into her brain. Caitlyn was certain she could recite the instructions in her sleep by now. She meets her father’s sympathetic gaze, he offers her a small shrug with a loving smile that she returns.

"Are you listening to me?" Her mother's sharp tone draws her back into the conversation. Caitlyn truthfully doesn't remember the last thing she said.

"Yes, I'm listening." It's a lie that her mother seemingly sees right through by the look in her eyes.

"I said she takes her medicine at 7pm with her dinner. No later, no earlier." Her mother repeats the instructions as if Caitlyn doesn't watch the little ball of fluff nearly every weekend.

"Mom, please. I know." Caitlyn groans.

"Yes, well I want to make sure you remember." She leans down and scratches the tiny Pomeranian's head, its fluffy tail wagging happily.

"I'm sure she remembered after the eighth time you told her." Caitlyn's father begins to steer his wife to the front door. "We're going to be late if we don't leave now, love."

"Alright. Alright." She concedes and they both give Caitlyn a quick hug.

"See you Monday, dear." Her mother places a quick kiss on her temple.

"Have a good trip." Caitlyn waves as they both exit her apartment. Once the door clicks shut she lets out a breath. Dealing with her mother was stressful at times but she still loved her with all her heart.

Caitlyn stretches her arms above her head before looking down at the dog.

"So what do you want to do today, Pepper?" She asks and Pepper offers a little yip, following right on her heels while Caitlyn makes her way to the kitchen.

"Cleaning? Is that what you said?" She replies to Pepper's bark. The little dog does a few excited circles, nearly losing her balance on her three tiny legs.

The memory of Pepper's injury would probably stick with her for life, they had all been so worried. About four years ago there had been an accident in the home and Pepper injured her leg pretty badly. Her father had broken the speed limit driving to the emergency clinic. Her family was devastated when the vet told them there wasn't much they could do to save the leg. Pepper was a fighter though and came out alive and well...minus the leg.

Caitlyn picks up the dog and holds her close for a second, remaining herself the Pepper is perfectly fine now. She chuckles when Pepper tries to lick her face. Caitlyn puts her back on the floor and gives her a treat before cutting on some music. She begins to tidy up as she bops along to the song. Pepper is like a fluffy shadow as she moves around her apartment.

She missed living with the dog. What she absolutely did not miss was living under her parent's roof. The last year had been the final straw that pushed her into finding her own apartment. But her parents were often gone for business which ended up with her watching Pepper most weekends anyways. After her own chaotic and stressful weeks with work Caitlyn was always happy to have Pepper as company most weekends.

Her place hadn't been too messy so she was able finish cleaning within the hour. As she leans against her counter scrolling through her phone, it buzzes and she smiles. It falls when she realizes the message not from the person she’s been wanting to hear from all week. She was the last one to text Vi in their chat and didn’t want to seem like a bother so she had been waiting for the other woman to respond. It had barely been a week but she missed her, a lot more than she was letting on. Somehow Vi had wiggled her way into her routine and it felt weird to not have her over for so long.

continued

[youhearstatic]

For the micro-prompts: 20, 16, or 47? (I like to give options in case one jumps out more than the others, so don't feel like you should combine them or something!)

20 - You probably thought I forgot, right? I didn’t! (And I haven’t forgotten the other two I have left, either!)

Surprise, surprise, this one went long. Hope you like it!

--------------------------

Alone, Finally

 Barry followed the rest of the crew down the backstage hallway, tugging at the unfamiliar robe they’d been given right before they went on stage. Well, that some of them had been given. Magnus was wearing a jacket he’d instantly pulled the sleeves off of. The captain had a longer version of the same jacket that was tailored immaculately to him with military severity. Merle hadn’t even worn his for the press conference. The twins had worn both jackets and robes, somehow making the IPRE uniform look like couture instead of standard issue. Lucretia was in the robe but she looked like a lost boarding school student, the crimson robe looked stylishly scholastic on her. He tugged at the neck of the robe again, even more self conscious than he’d been on stage. 

Ahead of him, the twins had their heads bowed together, whispering and laughing. For the first of many, many times, the echo of Lup’s comment on stage scraped across his thoughts like nails on a chalkboard. 

Nerd alert!

Just a few more minutes and the others would be heading to that bar they’d mentioned. And then - for one last time for a while - he’d be alone, finally. 

---

 Trailing his hand down the wall, Barry made his way by memory. After eleven years he could have done it with his eyes closed.

Which was essentially what he was doing. 

It was stupid, so fucking stupid. Okay, sure, that first year he hadn’t known to take his glasses off. Why would he? But by the third time they regenned he should have figured out that his glasses were going to be important and he should set them aside before … whatever it was that happened at the end of the cycle. That fourth year he’d died, that could be excused. The eighth year he’d had it ingrained in him not to even think of removing his mask. So that year could be excused, too. 

But that still left six regens. Six opportunities to set aside a pair of glasses in case of emergency. 

Well maybe next year he’d remember. But for the rest of this year he was practically blind. Anything beyond arm’s reach might as well not exist. He could make out colors and if he squinted really hard sometimes he could get a slight hint of shape to the faceless blurs around him. 

It’s fine, he told himself for probably the thousandth time that day.

It wasn’t fine. Sure, he could make his way around the ship, fumbling his way from room to room by memory and feel. But once he was there he didn’t have much to offer. He couldn’t work in the lab. Experiments were off the table - literally if he was trying to do them. Just trying to clean basic equipment in the lab had resulted in two broken beakers before Lup kindly, patiently, but insistently suggested he leave the job to her. He couldn’t help look for the light. He couldn’t take notes on their observations. He couldn’t even help with chores around the ship!

Pushing open the fifth door on the left, he was alone, finally. Dark blur straight ahead was his bed and beige-ish blur to the left was his desk. And then the blurs were watery and the tears of frustration and self pity that he’d held off all week caught up to him. He leaned against the door and let his facade drop.

He was so tired of being a drain on the crew. Not being able to help, having to be looked after, and maybe worst of all, pretending it didn’t kill him by inches, pretending it was all just a silly thing to be joked away. ‘Barold bumping into things for three more months,’ wasn’t it hilarious? ‘Barry fell of the rock jetty, lost his glasses, almost died, and now he’s talking to the coat rack because he thinks it’s Lucretia.’

“Barry?”

Fear shot hot and electric through his body, startling him into embarrassed silence. He swabbed his hand over his face, trying to disguise the fact he’d been leaning against his door crying because he…

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “I went in the fourth door, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Lup answered. That one syllable was so patient and kind and understanding and honestly, it was just salt in his wounds. He didn’t want to be understanding about this whole thing and he really didn’t want Lup to be understanding about him bumbling into her room and having a breakdown.

“Sorry, I, just, um,” 

A blur separated itself from the bed-blur, straightened into a taller blur, and approached him. He could almost see the shape of her hair in her silhouette - it was loose, not braided was all he could make out - when she was close enough to take his hand. “C’mere,” she said, tugging him gently towards the bed-blur. “Hold on,” she said. The Lup-blur bent then straightened again. “Don’t want you tripping over my boots,” she explained. There was a clunk to his right and he assumed she’d tossed the shoes towards the wall to get them out of the way.

It was disconcerting, being pulled into a sitting position on Lup’s bed. Their rooms were arranged identically, looked identical to his unassisted vision, and sitting on her bed was, in theory, no different than sitting on his own.

Except it was. It wasn’t his bed, it wasn’t his room, and worse - oh so much worse - it was Lup’s bed in Lup’s room. His face was burning and his stomach was winding itself into furious little knots and dammit, he hadn’t thought he could feel worse than he did three minutes ago but, look at that!, here he was sunk lower than the freezing point of mercury. 

“I didn’t mean to bug you,” he mumbled, eyes aimed at the floor or where the floor was if he could at least be trusted to get that right.

“Hold still,” she tells him. Then she’s pushing the hair back from his forehead and there’s a weird sensation, like a pinching pull that doesn’t quite hurt but it’s just so odd he can’t figure out what’s going on.

“Stop frowning!” she tells him, her voice colored with laughter. “I’m just clipping your hair back.”

“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself. He feels like he’s three steps behind what is happening.

“Because we’re doing face masks.”

“What?”

“Relax,” she tells him. 

And for some strange reason, he does.

 ---

 They’ve been alone. Over the years, in a dozen planar systems, across doomed worlds, in forgotten ruins, or just in the lab working silently, they’ve been alone.

They’ve been alone. Over the months of study and composition and practice. They’ve been alone, just the two of them and their music filling the empty room, no witness to the way the notes have been building and the music has been building and the way the tempo has somehow gotten slower. Here at the end, right next to each other, a pair of pathways that have wound ever closer over the years, the paths have almost joined and yet.

And yet.

They meander these last months. Dancing closer and closer but not touching, not mingling, not yet. 

Each step forward slower and slower until the momentum is crawling forward, making the distance of a few inches last and last.

They are alone together on stage. 

There are so many around. Instructors and audience and all the people that it takes to keep an infrastructure like this running: janitors and receptionists and the guy that refills the coffee machine in the fourth floor break room. Anyone in hearing distance that day notices. It’s like that sometimes. You can go weeks and months and nothing sticks, even the pieces that get rebroadcast, they run together at some point. It’s beautiful, amazing, but there’s filters to restock and inquiries to respond to. There’s a leaky water heater that needs tending to. But for a minute, you stop, lean on the broom and take notice.

But not Barry and Lup, alone, finally, despite the people surrounding them. Their music is still echoing around them when their hands find one another. 

Lup and Barry, alone on stage. Two paths that have run side by side, so close for so long, join at last.

There’s applause and then the song is sent out anew, reflected from deep within the mountain instead of from her violin and his piano. There’s applause and an empty stage.

Alone, finally.

 ---

 There’s a pillar of bone carved with arcane symbols. There on the hill, two people lean together, forehead to forehead. Further away another watches. But in this instant there’s no one else. Seven on this planet yes. Eight if you count their strange, duck loving new shipmate. 

But for now. On this hill. In this moment.

There are only two. 

Two liches.

Alone, finally, after years of study.

And then like so many times before, they pick up their responsibilities and work and pull it all back on like a costume they only ever drop for a little while.

In those moments they are alone.

 ---

 He’s alone.

This was the final place. It was supposed to be… 

His shoulders sag. It was supposed to be their happy ending, their settled-at-last, their no-more-running. 

But he woke up and she wasn’t there.

It felt different. He didn’t say it, but it did.

And then morning turned to day turned to week turned to months.

He’s alone.

 ---

 Exhaustion wears them down, hang like too-heavy cloaks on backs that can’t stand tall without her. 

He’d been alone.

But feeling the last of her disappear - the her that was only in his memories - he knows what alone really means. He can’t lose her that way, not again, not like this.

“Taako, k- kill me! Right now!”

 He’s falling.

Forgetting.

Forgotten.

Alone.

Final.

y

 ---

 He’s alone. There is so much that makes no sense. Three guys - one of them made of fucking wood if you could believe it - and him naked in a tank full of goo. 

Then he got in the one guy’s pocket? Somehow?

The details are fuzzy.

But dammit, he’s happy. Something feels right. After so long. (How long?)

He’s alone.

Alone, but -

Finally.

 ---

 Who’d have guessed this was a skill? The ultimate hangover and when you got that giant memory dump poured on you every time you did something stupid like fell off a cliff or didn’t bring enough water into the desert… well, you got better at it.

So while the others recovered, he was alone, the only one not under fire from a million contradicting thoughts.

Alone, Finally.

At the end.

And then… and then… his brain comes up empty at the thought. And then?

Alone?

 ---

 The pale green glow throws strange shadows across the cave. There was a ball of brilliant fire but, well, anchoring yourself in a body after a decade out of practice took some concentration. And he didn’t exactly have the concentration himself.

After so long. After everything. After endless nights in this very cave, planning and plotting and hoping.

Alone.

And then.

Finally.

Alone together.

[disasterhumans]

sketchy mage: use your friends to your own advantage. i am alive because people died for me. get your own goal through others. Me, squinting: don't enable calebs former habits

Okay, okay, okay, so that entire exchange was super fascinating, and I knew pretty much immediately that it was going to be a thing I wanted to write about. But, while Yusa’s comments certainly reflected some of what we know Caleb’s perspective on interpersonal relationships to be, I actually don’t think the conversation poses any real risk toward enabling said behavior. In fact, I think it had close to the opposite effect. I went ahead and transcribed the entire exchange, including Caleb’s silences and physical responses, which communicated just as much as his words in this scene.

Yusa: [after Caleb’s memorized the runes]. A quick learner. Good to know. Where did you train?Caleb: Mostly on my own, to be honest. For years.Yusa: Impressive. You have a talented eye for picking up arcanic sigils and glyphsCaleb: It was not my intention to bother you here. My friends are very curious.Yusa: That they are.Caleb: It was fairly obvious to me that this building…was real estate owned by someone of great skill Yusa: It is designed to keep people like you out. But sometimes tenacity makes for interesting breakfast conversationCaleb: Hm. I actually thought it was a very bad idea to come here.Yusa: It was–but you came anyway, and look where you areCaleb: I sometimes follow my friends places I shouldn’t.Yusa: That may one day get you killed. Or–it may one day get you what you seek.Caleb: [takes a deep breath and looks askance] Well, uh…my apologies for my group’s presumptuousness. Ehm, I hope that we have not made a grave error here today. And if we haven’t [beat] I hope to earn that trust, as you say. Yusa: [narrows his eyes–as in discernment–and leans closer] I’ve lived a long while [long pause] and the only reason I’ve lived this long, is I have made allies. I followed them into sometimes “stupid,” unnecessary circumstances.Caleb: [works jaw/grinds teeth]Yusa: Many of them died helping me. Many of them I outlived. But I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t believe in the power of others.Caleb: [leans back and blinks slowly, breaking the eye contact he’d been holding, and seeming reluctant to re-establish it][swallows thickly and whispers] That’s good advice.Yusa: Use who you need to. But know, everyone can be useful, if you can mete out their skills.Caleb: [takes in a deep, full bodied breath; frowns and tilts head in acknowledgment] I’m sure you have much to do today.Yusa: I’m sure you do as well.

A few general observations: 1) the entire time Caleb has spent in or around the tower he has been visibly wary and distrusting, a demeanor which only seems to increase over the course of this conversation 2) throughout it, Caleb is clearly trying to end the conversation, which 3) he attempts in a deferential manner, and by reiterating his comprehension of the power differential between Yusa and the party (and by entirely glossing over Yusa’s praise of him); 4) Yusa seems to catch on very quickly that he’s touched upon a nerve with Caleb. I’m not sure whether or not Yusa was trying to keep Caleb on the back foot, or if he was genuinely offering up what he thought was helpful advice, but it was pretty clear that he was deliberately ignoring Caleb’s attempts to draw the conversation to a close. 

It’s well established at this point that Caleb frames and understands his relationships as being transactional. But it sometimes remains under-appreciated how much it’s a defense mechanism far more than how Caleb truly feels about his friends. (Early on maybe it was just that practical. I think practicality flew out the window somewhere around episode 18, and was long gone by episodes 26/7.) Caleb hasn’t dropped any of his goals, but at this point I think he understands—even if he has a difficult time admitting it to himself, let alone others—that he cares about his friends. I think that fact terrifies him equally as much as the thought of actually using/manipulating friends does. (Remember, Caleb was filled with immediate revulsion over his manipulation of Fjord in episode 44.)

In the end, I think this exchange probably had a few contradictory effects. Caleb is already prepared to take everything Yusa says with a healthy chunk of salt—he clearly sees a number of similarities between Yusa and Trent. So, “use your allies,” (because Yusa said nothing about friends) is not an effective argument to use with Caleb in this circumstance. He looked visibly upset and uncomfortable with nearly everything Yusa said during that exchange.Caleb heard “actively disregard the well-being of others to serve your own ends,” not “mask your real feelings behind thinly veiled excuses.” I really don’t think this conversation made it any more likely that Caleb is going to fall back into actively manipulative behavior—especially because I think he’s still beating himself up over what he did to Fjord (even if he’s also grateful for that favor). On the other hand, I think the conversation did make Caleb think about how much he genuinely cares for his friends. And I think it heavily influenced the way the conversation between Caleb and Beau played out later in the episode. 

During the conversation/argument Caleb has with Beau, the thing Beau seemed to hear throughout it was Caleb’s fear. Fear of being discovered, fear of being harmed—and I think she also heard a fear of being alone and unprotected. All of that may have been present, but what he was trying to say was, “I am scared to lose you,” and “I am scared I’ll get you killed.” When Caleb says, “if I care for any of you, [and Trent] knows where any one of you are, he knows he can get to me,” he’s not just expressing a fear that Trent will find him and the group. He’s scared that Trent will hurt his friends not just to find Caleb, but because hurting them will also hurt Caleb. I think Yusa’s utilitarian explanation of allies made it all the clearer to Caleb that that’s not what he wants. He doesn’t want any of the party to “be killed helping [him].” He’s upset with Beau during their conversation because while he’s trying to beg her to keep them all (including herself) safe, she’s offering to throw herself into the fire for him. He’s upset because, “the problem with friends is that you have to care about them,” and sometimes they don’t make it easy.

I think the real danger that the conversations with Yusa, and then Beau—and then everything in Felderwin poses, is not Caleb regressing in how he treats the others, but that together they offered up another reason he might want to leave. Instead of/in addition to wanting to leave because the group is a “distraction,” or because of their (hypothetical) objection to his past, Caleb may now feel compelled to leave in order to protect them. And in that regard, he really wasn’t listening to what Beau was saying either, because what Beau was saying, ultimately, was “we’re stronger together.”

[secondarystructures]

       First thing you gotta do is make a party....simple enough....I     recommend a paladin, warrior, bard, rogue, conjurer, and magician     to start with....        I didn't use a bard in my party but I created one and edited him     to about level 56 when I needed to get farther in Harkyn's castle. A     hunter many be more preferable because they're devastating at higher     levels, but you need a bard, or the teleport spell, to solve the game     so you can do like I did or just make a bard to start, they're really     not that bad.....        Okay, next you want to vist Garth's equipment shop, which is marked     by a "G" on the Skara Brae map, and buy what you need...you can also    sell items that you find and whatever he didn't have he'll keep an    inventory of.        For now, just wander around the town and get some encounters by    going into all the empty building in the street...avoid fighting the    guardian statues, except maybe the samuri one on Rakhir street, and do    this until all your characters reach 2nd level or maybe even 3rd. When    you reach 2nd or whatever the case may be, you might wanna try you luck    against the guardian giant statues, which can be found around the temple    or Fargoer street and right above Harkn's castle off Blue Highway.        Or if you'd rather you can go ahead and kill the samuri on Rakhir    street, go into the bar behind it and have one of your player order a    wine...the bartender will then tell you to go into the wine celler and    pick a bottle, so you do that.        You can wander in here for awhile, though there isn't much to see,    or go down the stairs at (18 north, 7 east) and enter the sewers.        The sewershave a lot more monsters so you'll have your hands full    here, but the only thing you really need to get in here is the name of    the Mad God, which the magic mouth at (4 north, 3 east, 2 below) tells    you...that's the 2nd level of the sewers...        On the 3rd level of the sewers (16 north, 17 east, 3 below) is a set    of stairs that will take you Mangar's tower after you have gotten the    Onyx key, so if you find these before you have the key, don't worry about    it right now.          After you have gotten the name of the Mad God, which is "Tarjan", you    should be ready to enter the catacombs. Go to any of the Mad God's temples    in Grand Plaz and speak to the priest...answer Tarjan and in you go.        The first level is likewise uninteresting, though a much more complex    dugeon, except for an encounter with a serant of the Mad God named Bashar    Kavilor, a master sorceror. You can get to him by going through the one    way door in the big "circle" of doors outside the spiral, but you better    have the phase door spell or apport arcane (teleport) or you won't be able    to get back out unless you kill yourselves. Remember, you don't have to    fight him if you don't want to and can just go to the 3rd level.        In the 3rd level you have to kill the "Ancient with King" and retrieve    the eye of the Mad God. To get to him go to the teleporter at (0,21) and    then you'll appear at (10,7). From here go to the second teleporter at    (21,15) and you'll appear at (13,17). Just follow the winding corridor and    go through the 2 doors until you meet face to face...the "Witch King" is    actually a spectre and very tough at that, even worse his touch drains a    level. You probably won't be able to hit him with weapons so you'll have    to use spells. (stone tough might do the trick, if you have it, but if not    just try your damage spells.)        Don't worry if someone get drained...the temple will restore lost    levels, for a price of course.        If you do kill him and have enough room for more objects then one of    the party will get the eye and you can take the next step in the    adventure...the eye is also worth a good bit so you might want to look at    the duplicating cheat in the cheat section in the program.        The next place to go is, if your ready, Harken's castle. You can tell    if your ready for Hawkyn's castle. The grey gragon statue will always be a    problem if it breathes on your party so don't worry if you lose a few    members to it before you get in the castle, just go to the temple right    outside and get fixed up.        The only thing to get on the first level is the crystal sword at    (0,19). Tough to get to the stairs to the second level you will need a    bard. If you already have one you can go to the throne in the big room and    have the bard sit on it...the only other obstacle will be the captain of    the guardat the end of the next corridor, he is a master ninja but will    not critically hit if he can't hit you; hence a high armor class.       The second level of the castle has quit a bit more, most importantly    the silver square, which you get to by tracing your way to telporter 3.    you will have to go through smoke, which can be dispelled by casting or    recasting a light spell, and answering a riddle, whose answer is    "Vampire". You can also get a ybarrashield if you answer the magic mouth    at (0,19) with "Shields" and you can fight some extremely tough madar    guards at (14,4). I would suggest not fighting these things because like I    said, they're very tough and would give even a party of 15th levels    characters a hard time.       There are a lot of creatures, darkness spots, damage spots, etc. also    on this level but nothing else of significance so you now go to the third    level.       The third level has what you got the eye in the catacombs for and it    can be found at (1,20,2 above) if you can teleport there. It is a statue    of the Mad God which comes to life if you approach it and and one of the    party members has the eye. You then have to fight him but he is really not    as tough as you might think...just cast death strike, stone touch, or    somthing as potent at him.       Immediately after you kill him, you will be telported outside to the    upper-right corner of the town, just outside Kylarean's tower. The only    other thing of intertest on this level is the room with Harkn's legion,    which is 4 sets of 99 beserkers. If you your first 3 characters have an    ac of -8 or better than you have nothing to worry about as long as you can    cast mind blade spell, which affects all of the creature and will kill at    least half of them the first time. If you do kill them all, youre looking    at 65,000 experience points for each member of the party...imagine what    that could do if you kept coming back here...though I wouldn't go through    the trouble without the apport arcane spell.       Oh, by the way, you have to go through the legion before you get to the    Mad God, unless you teleport.       Kylarean's tower was by far the hardest dungeon, not toughest, becuase    it is filled with darkness and is a bitch to map. Anyways the first thing    you have to do is take the teleporter T1 to (21,21) and then follow the    small corridor to T2 which takes you to (12,11). From there go to the    magic mouth at T3 and answer "Stone Golem" and you'll be "ported" to    (8,9), all these coordinates are marked by number appropriate to the    teleporter by the way...From here you have to go to the magic mouth at    (2,12), marked by an 'R' on the map, and answer "Sinister Street". That    will make the door at (5,1) appear so you'll have to make your way to the    maze, but before you go to the door you have to go get the silver circle,    which is at (20,2). After you get it, you can weave your way to and    through that door. Just keep going south through the rooms until you reach    the crystal golem, just pause a moment here to kill it, supposedly the    crystal sword is supposed to help but isn't necessary, and continue. Enter    the follow the long "serpent-way", go to the appropriate rooms, or    whatever it takes to get to teleporter 5. From here just follow the    corridor and at the end you will have to enter a small room, wherein sits    Kylarean. He will give you the onyx keyand then you will have to go    forward once more into the last teleporter, which takes you straight to    the stairs. Then you say bye, bye.       Uh oh, this is it!, you are now ready to face the final challenge! or    are you?       First of all, to get to Mangar's tower you have to go to the stairs on    the 3rd level of the sewers with the onyx key. Then if you are feeling    bold you answer "yes" to whether you what to use the stairsor not.       The first level has nothing special but you'll have to study the map to    see the pattern in which you get to the parts of the dungeon, unless you    teleport anywhere on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd levels of this dungeon, but not    not anywhere else.       On the second level you get the final silver "Shape" by answering    "Circle" to the magic mouth at the center of the "squares" at (15,4). This    is all you need to do here so you can make your way to the stairs up and    proceed to the third level.       The third level was a bit tricky to get through, but at leastyou have    help. There is a series of inscriptions, 7 to be exact, that were to be    found so you could answer the magic mouth at (4,10). But since I've found    them for you, you can go straight to the mouth. Answer "lie", "with",    "passion", "and", "be", "forever", "damned" in that order with <cr> after    each one and "lost" starirs will appear at (9,3). Before you go though,    you have to get the master key from keymaster for 50,000 gold pieces. Now,    you can go to up the "lost" stairs.       On the fourth level just go to each teleporter in turn until you come    to the point marked "X" on the map. Moving into this spot will cause doors    appear everywhere where there were none and the doorsthat were already    there to disappear...that makes a lot of doors but if you look at the map    you see that you can now get to the portal up....so what are you waiting    for?       Well, this is really it!, The fifth and final level. Go to the    teleporters as you need to and make your way to the pool of boiling    liquid, marked by a 'P' on the map. Then what?, jump in of course! Go    north from where you appear and go to the end of corridor just before the    one-way door. Now you see what you needed the silver shapes for now Huh?    Anyways you can keep going north until you reach Mangar or you can go    through that first door and follow the wall to the right until you reach    the magic mouth at (21,10), which happens to be right above Mangar's room.    Answer "spectre snare" to the magic mouth and you'll get it...you can use    that against Mangar if you want, but a "simple" deathstrike will do it.    When you kill him Kylarean appears and give each party member 300,000    experience points and gold pieces, but doesn't teleport you out and as far    as I know you can't get out unless you kill yourself. Demeaning I know but    at least you get to keep 300,000 gold and experience                                    The End         The Lunatic Phringe BBS     312-965-3677 3/12/24 x100 Baud X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X Another file downloaded from:                     The NIRVANAnet(tm) Seven & the Temple of the Screaming Electron   Taipan Enigma        510/935-5845 Burn This Flag                           Zardoz               408/363-9766 realitycheck                             Poindexter Fortran   510/527-1662 Lies Unlimited                           Mick Freen           801/278-2699 The New Dork Sublime                     Biffnix              415/864-DORK The Shrine                               Rif Raf              206/794-6674 Planet Mirth                             Simon Jester         510/786-6560                          "Raw Data for Raw Nerves" X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X

http://textfiles.com/adventure/bardsolv.txt

[symbianosgames]

At its inception, player death was something of a necessity: a way for the arcade cabinet to enforce the collection of quarters. Life was a commodity, and if you wanted more of it, you had to pay. As games moved out of the cabinet and into the living room, that idea persisted, first through the direct ports of the arcade games, but then as an established convention. The “Game Over” screen was a staple of video games, and it’s been tenacious.

As with most conventions, it’s not questioned nearly enough. When accepted as essential, player death robs the player of the chance to recover from failure, to push through an unwanted or unfavorable situation to reach a satisfying conclusion further down the line. As an industry, we’ve attempted this narratively, with player choice being increasingly pushed to the forefront of story-focused games, where bad decisions aren’t punished, but supported just as much as the good. However, mechanically speaking, we’ve been far more stagnant -- if only because conceptually the alternative is that much more difficult to comprehend.

“In a game where killing is a systemic verb, I feel like death is certainly [important],” Clint Hocking answers when I ask him if player death is essential. “You can certainly create a contrivance around it; you can have an infinite number of buddies who rescue you in Far Cry, or you can be possessed by an elf wraith from a thousand years before, and you can increment forward on failure.”

With that latter example he’s referring to the recent example of an alternative to player death being a fail state in Shadow of Mordor, where, narratively, the player dies at the beginning of the game. Any subsequent mechanical deaths are accepted by the game, and in some ways encouraged, as it progresses time by three days and allows Mordor’s procedurally generated orc armies to reshuffle and regroup.

Both Far Cry 2, of which Clint Hocking was the creative director, and Shadow of Mordor offer an attempt to subvert the mechanical convention of player death resulting in that disruptive “Game Over” screen. The former responds to the first player death after a save point by having your "buddy" (a fellow morally ambiguous mercenary) come in and rescue you, dragging you away from a firefight and plunging a medical syringe into your chest, getting you back on your feet and back into the fight. The caveat there is that your buddy is now in the field of combat, and suddenly an actor in it; they fight, and they can die, resulting in them being systemically removed from the game.

  "You have skin in the game at that point, because it's a friend or ally that's going to be lost if you don't deal with the consequence of your failure."

“Now you’re playing for real stakes.” Hocking explains. “When you’re playing a game and you die, sure, you have lost some time, but with most games today you don’t even get reset more than 10 feet back. With this game it was more to say that now there’s a real stake. Now this buddy rescue has happened, now your ante is on the table. Now, if you don’t deal with that situation… you can just run away, but if you do that your buddy is sacrificed, they’re gone. You have skin in the game at that point, because now it’s a gameplay asset, and hopefully it’s more than that, hopefully it’s a friend and ally, that is going to be lost if you don’t deal with the consequence of your failure.”

And that idea of consequence is at the heart of what’s lost when the player-death-as-failstate is followed. While it flirts with the borders of the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, more importantly it interferes with the flow and impact of the interaction between mechanical systems and narrative context. It’s telling that Mordor struggled itself during a few of its more story-driven missions, taking away the immortality of the player in favor of more actively controlling the way it told its story.

 “I’m certainly not saying we found the ideal solution for [player death],” says Michael De Plater, director of design on Shadow of Mordor. “It’s something we’re thinking about a lot moving forward. The way in which death is treated is a key part of the style and tone of the game. We had a goal which was to keep time moving forward and create new opportunities and a motivation for revenge against an enemy who took you down. I love the trend for roguelikes now, and how they handle death and failure.”

Roguelikes, for their part, have certainly popularized the idea of death and consequence, albeit it in a way that is less engaged in telling an authored story, but rather allowing one to emerge out of systemic interactions. The likes of Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, and The Binding of Isaac all are fully aware that death will be frequent and necessary for progress, and build the games around that concept.

Fundamentally, this is where the crux of the problem lies, in the tension between authored and unauthored game time. The more control the game tries to exert on any one moment, the more rigid it becomes in regards to the possibility space. The more systemic and unauthored, the more it can support and cushion failure and failure states. One of Far Cry 2’s greatest strengths was in building failure into the experience, from the jamming weapons, the malaria attacks and the propagating fire, to the buddy system and the way it embraces consequence.

According to Hocking, this was present in his design ethos going all the way back to the original Splinter Cell. “I fought as a level designer really, really hard to say 'I think all of these “Game Overs” you get from being detected by a guy, or failing to hack into a computer, are all terrible, and really frustrating experiences.'

"If I’m Sam Fisher and someone detects me I don’t just throw up my hands and say, 'Oh well, I guess we can’t prevent the war in Georgia, the nuke’s going to blow up and everyone is going to die.' I probably try to kill that person and adapt to the situation. The reason they were there was because as designers and developers we couldn’t support the failure cases. We didn’t have workarounds for what happens if the player gets detected in that situation. So we just had to gate them with Game Overs.”

  "The reason they were there was because as designers and developers we couldn't support the failure cases."

The difference between recovering from being detected and recovering from being "killed," though, would seem to be the reason one has been consistently rectified and the other hasn’t. We’ve reached a point where instant failure in stealth games is mostly a thing of the past, most exemplified by Dishonoured’s generous possibility-scape when it comes to raising alarms and adapting to situations. But importantly, the difference mechanically between one and the other really isn’t so large. Instead it’s a conceptual problem; we can imagine, instantly, how Sam Fisher would react to and recover from being discovered, whereas we can’t do the same when he’s shot and killed.

One of the oldest and most effective attempts to solve this problem can be found in Planescape: Torment, where the player character begins the game in a morgue, apparently having recovered from being dead and cold. Throughout the game your immortality is emphasized and even used as a narrative device, memories and facts from your past bubbling up to the surface in the desperate recollection in the moments preceding death, life literally flashing before your eyes.

“With Torment, there was the added complication that one of our goals was to “tell the story of what happens after the death screen,” Chris Avellone says. He was lead designer on Torment. "And in the context of the story and the arcane physics that caused the Nameless One to be immortal, a perma-death didn’t make any sense either -- instead, it seemed more appropriate, narratively, that the Nameless One would wake up somewhere else (technically a time cost).

"But then, I got excited about the possibility that it could be used as fast travel ('Hey, I need to go back to the Mortuary fast, or back to the merchant area') and even a puzzle element, and could take you to new locations or allow you to get through areas mortals couldn’t, as long as you allowed yourself to die (which we didn’t use very much in the game, unfortunately).”

The result of this creative approach to player death meant that, once you accepted the conceits and  contrivances of Planescape: Torment, there was very little to get in the way of you experiencing the game. While there were still a few "hard" fail states, they were few and far between, meaning that the majority of the time the experience was unadulterated by the "gates" that Hocking mentioned.

However, that doesn’t mean that Avellone believes that death and failure states need to be removed from games. “I don’t consider the divide between player death and story to be a bad one, and in fact, adds adrenaline and urgency into a situation that may lack drama when you know that there’s no real fail state. Furthermore, it’s an understood mechanism of the genre, especially for RPGs. I do feel there’s more interesting things to do with death that sometimes narrative can give context to (it sure did for Torment, and I believe it will for inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera as well).

“There needs to be a consequence and a fail state -- if there’s nothing to lose, then a lot of narrative tension dissolves as a result. I think there are other consequences you can levy on a player (and many games do) but you have to be careful in how they are presented or else they will simple cause a reload as a result.”

  "The possibilities of what your game can be and what your game can say is astronomically larger. It means you can be more than just a power fantasy."

One interesting case of "other consequences" is actually found in the Mass Effect series, at the end of the second game. While combat in the Mass Effect games isn’t trivial, it can be fairly unthreatening, especially on the lower difficulties. But at the end of Mass Effect 2, BioWare instead made it about your narrative and tactical decisions, rather than your performance in any one fight. Suddenly, companions that you had spent dozens of hours getting to know where exposed and vulnerable based on decisions you made -- decisions which were far enough back that a simple reload would revert hours of progress. They were essentially leveraging your patience for narrative strength, and it paid off extremely well -- even if it was hard to swallow when your favorite character bit the bullet.

“I think a lot of players are raised on games that are pandering to the power fantasy.” Hocking says, when I ask why we haven’t seen more experimentation in regards to player death. “I think when you try to do things that are more challenging than that, or more questioning of that -- or undermining it, playing it against itself -- you will get negative reactions.

"And you get negative reactions almost universally at first, so the question is, what percentage of the players are willing to suck it up for half an hour and realize what is going on? I think once you get over that hump, though, the possibilities of what your game can be and what your game can say is astronomically larger. It means you can be more than just a power fantasy, which is great.”

The rise of the Souls games, currently culminating with Bloodborne, is certainly encouraging when it comes to the idea of a developing player understanding of what death can be in games, as well as a deconstruction of the power fantasy so often extolled by them. While the attitude towards death in those games is certainly one that won’t work for the vast majority, it is an alternative that’s taken root in the minds of the audience.

Far Cry 2, for its part, could certainly be argued as a dis-empowerment fantasy, with the increasing moral ambivalence of the player character and the world around them echoed systemically as your plans are driven awry by the constant interference of its systems, from out of control blazes to weapon jams, to a range of other interactions.

After so much discussion with the people behind some of the most successful attempts to alter the convention of player death being a fail state, I realised that death is more of a symptom that is caused by an inability, whether financial or creative, to create the systems necessary to accommodate player failure and recovery. It’s no easy task to fundamentally change what is expected when the health bar goes down to zero and it all goes dark, not least because of what has been the case for so long.

But to at the very least question it, so that checkpoints and “Game Over” screens aren’t in your game before there’s even been a discussion, is the way that more interesting and compelling interactions will be pursued and realised. Even something as simple as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’s rewind mechanic was a revelation at the time, allowing players to manipulate a system to reattempt a difficult jump or encounter without the brusque interruption of a “Game Over” screen.

The thing is, the game is going to go ahead, whether the player dies or not. No matter how many times they see “Game Over”, the game isn’t over unless they decide to turn it off. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ahead, wrestling with that screen until it doesn’t appear, and the "canon" version of the story is cemented by a save point. Now victory is assured, always was assured, and any failure is relegated to the narrative beats that were set in stone before the player even started. Letting go of that adherence to victory, to success, is going to, and has, made things a lot more interesting. Failure, and recovery from that failure, is fun.

[sucharide]

I'm curious!

[symbianosgames]

At its inception, player death was something of a necessity: a way for the arcade cabinet to enforce the collection of quarters. Life was a commodity, and if you wanted more of it, you had to pay. As games moved out of the cabinet and into the living room, that idea persisted, first through the direct ports of the arcade games, but then as an established convention. The “Game Over” screen was a staple of video games, and it’s been tenacious.

As with most conventions, it’s not questioned nearly enough. When accepted as essential, player death robs the player of the chance to recover from failure, to push through an unwanted or unfavorable situation to reach a satisfying conclusion further down the line. As an industry, we’ve attempted this narratively, with player choice being increasingly pushed to the forefront of story-focused games, where bad decisions aren’t punished, but supported just as much as the good. However, mechanically speaking, we’ve been far more stagnant -- if only because conceptually the alternative is that much more difficult to comprehend.

“In a game where killing is a systemic verb, I feel like death is certainly [important],” Clint Hocking answers when I ask him if player death is essential. “You can certainly create a contrivance around it; you can have an infinite number of buddies who rescue you in Far Cry, or you can be possessed by an elf wraith from a thousand years before, and you can increment forward on failure.”

With that latter example he’s referring to the recent example of an alternative to player death being a fail state in Shadow of Mordor, where, narratively, the player dies at the beginning of the game. Any subsequent mechanical deaths are accepted by the game, and in some ways encouraged, as it progresses time by three days and allows Mordor’s procedurally generated orc armies to reshuffle and regroup.

Both Far Cry 2, of which Clint Hocking was the creative director, and Shadow of Mordor offer an attempt to subvert the mechanical convention of player death resulting in that disruptive “Game Over” screen. The former responds to the first player death after a save point by having your "buddy" (a fellow morally ambiguous mercenary) come in and rescue you, dragging you away from a firefight and plunging a medical syringe into your chest, getting you back on your feet and back into the fight. The caveat there is that your buddy is now in the field of combat, and suddenly an actor in it; they fight, and they can die, resulting in them being systemically removed from the game.

  "You have skin in the game at that point, because it's a friend or ally that's going to be lost if you don't deal with the consequence of your failure."

“Now you’re playing for real stakes.” Hocking explains. “When you’re playing a game and you die, sure, you have lost some time, but with most games today you don’t even get reset more than 10 feet back. With this game it was more to say that now there’s a real stake. Now this buddy rescue has happened, now your ante is on the table. Now, if you don’t deal with that situation… you can just run away, but if you do that your buddy is sacrificed, they’re gone. You have skin in the game at that point, because now it’s a gameplay asset, and hopefully it’s more than that, hopefully it’s a friend and ally, that is going to be lost if you don’t deal with the consequence of your failure.”

And that idea of consequence is at the heart of what’s lost when the player-death-as-failstate is followed. While it flirts with the borders of the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, more importantly it interferes with the flow and impact of the interaction between mechanical systems and narrative context. It’s telling that Mordor struggled itself during a few of its more story-driven missions, taking away the immortality of the player in favor of more actively controlling the way it told its story.

 “I’m certainly not saying we found the ideal solution for [player death],” says Michael De Plater, director of design on Shadow of Mordor. “It’s something we’re thinking about a lot moving forward. The way in which death is treated is a key part of the style and tone of the game. We had a goal which was to keep time moving forward and create new opportunities and a motivation for revenge against an enemy who took you down. I love the trend for roguelikes now, and how they handle death and failure.”

Roguelikes, for their part, have certainly popularized the idea of death and consequence, albeit it in a way that is less engaged in telling an authored story, but rather allowing one to emerge out of systemic interactions. The likes of Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, and The Binding of Isaac all are fully aware that death will be frequent and necessary for progress, and build the games around that concept.

Fundamentally, this is where the crux of the problem lies, in the tension between authored and unauthored game time. The more control the game tries to exert on any one moment, the more rigid it becomes in regards to the possibility space. The more systemic and unauthored, the more it can support and cushion failure and failure states. One of Far Cry 2’s greatest strengths was in building failure into the experience, from the jamming weapons, the malaria attacks and the propagating fire, to the buddy system and the way it embraces consequence.

According to Hocking, this was present in his design ethos going all the way back to the original Splinter Cell. “I fought as a level designer really, really hard to say 'I think all of these “Game Overs” you get from being detected by a guy, or failing to hack into a computer, are all terrible, and really frustrating experiences.'

"If I’m Sam Fisher and someone detects me I don’t just throw up my hands and say, 'Oh well, I guess we can’t prevent the war in Georgia, the nuke’s going to blow up and everyone is going to die.' I probably try to kill that person and adapt to the situation. The reason they were there was because as designers and developers we couldn’t support the failure cases. We didn’t have workarounds for what happens if the player gets detected in that situation. So we just had to gate them with Game Overs.”

  "The reason they were there was because as designers and developers we couldn't support the failure cases."

The difference between recovering from being detected and recovering from being "killed," though, would seem to be the reason one has been consistently rectified and the other hasn’t. We’ve reached a point where instant failure in stealth games is mostly a thing of the past, most exemplified by Dishonoured’s generous possibility-scape when it comes to raising alarms and adapting to situations. But importantly, the difference mechanically between one and the other really isn’t so large. Instead it’s a conceptual problem; we can imagine, instantly, how Sam Fisher would react to and recover from being discovered, whereas we can’t do the same when he’s shot and killed.

One of the oldest and most effective attempts to solve this problem can be found in Planescape: Torment, where the player character begins the game in a morgue, apparently having recovered from being dead and cold. Throughout the game your immortality is emphasized and even used as a narrative device, memories and facts from your past bubbling up to the surface in the desperate recollection in the moments preceding death, life literally flashing before your eyes.

“With Torment, there was the added complication that one of our goals was to “tell the story of what happens after the death screen,” Chris Avellone says. He was lead designer on Torment. "And in the context of the story and the arcane physics that caused the Nameless One to be immortal, a perma-death didn’t make any sense either -- instead, it seemed more appropriate, narratively, that the Nameless One would wake up somewhere else (technically a time cost).

"But then, I got excited about the possibility that it could be used as fast travel ('Hey, I need to go back to the Mortuary fast, or back to the merchant area') and even a puzzle element, and could take you to new locations or allow you to get through areas mortals couldn’t, as long as you allowed yourself to die (which we didn’t use very much in the game, unfortunately).”

The result of this creative approach to player death meant that, once you accepted the conceits and  contrivances of Planescape: Torment, there was very little to get in the way of you experiencing the game. While there were still a few "hard" fail states, they were few and far between, meaning that the majority of the time the experience was unadulterated by the "gates" that Hocking mentioned.

However, that doesn’t mean that Avellone believes that death and failure states need to be removed from games. “I don’t consider the divide between player death and story to be a bad one, and in fact, adds adrenaline and urgency into a situation that may lack drama when you know that there’s no real fail state. Furthermore, it’s an understood mechanism of the genre, especially for RPGs. I do feel there’s more interesting things to do with death that sometimes narrative can give context to (it sure did for Torment, and I believe it will for inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera as well).

“There needs to be a consequence and a fail state -- if there’s nothing to lose, then a lot of narrative tension dissolves as a result. I think there are other consequences you can levy on a player (and many games do) but you have to be careful in how they are presented or else they will simple cause a reload as a result.”

  "The possibilities of what your game can be and what your game can say is astronomically larger. It means you can be more than just a power fantasy."

One interesting case of "other consequences" is actually found in the Mass Effect series, at the end of the second game. While combat in the Mass Effect games isn’t trivial, it can be fairly unthreatening, especially on the lower difficulties. But at the end of Mass Effect 2, BioWare instead made it about your narrative and tactical decisions, rather than your performance in any one fight. Suddenly, companions that you had spent dozens of hours getting to know where exposed and vulnerable based on decisions you made -- decisions which were far enough back that a simple reload would revert hours of progress. They were essentially leveraging your patience for narrative strength, and it paid off extremely well -- even if it was hard to swallow when your favorite character bit the bullet.

“I think a lot of players are raised on games that are pandering to the power fantasy.” Hocking says, when I ask why we haven’t seen more experimentation in regards to player death. “I think when you try to do things that are more challenging than that, or more questioning of that -- or undermining it, playing it against itself -- you will get negative reactions.

"And you get negative reactions almost universally at first, so the question is, what percentage of the players are willing to suck it up for half an hour and realize what is going on? I think once you get over that hump, though, the possibilities of what your game can be and what your game can say is astronomically larger. It means you can be more than just a power fantasy, which is great.”

The rise of the Souls games, currently culminating with Bloodborne, is certainly encouraging when it comes to the idea of a developing player understanding of what death can be in games, as well as a deconstruction of the power fantasy so often extolled by them. While the attitude towards death in those games is certainly one that won’t work for the vast majority, it is an alternative that’s taken root in the minds of the audience.

Far Cry 2, for its part, could certainly be argued as a dis-empowerment fantasy, with the increasing moral ambivalence of the player character and the world around them echoed systemically as your plans are driven awry by the constant interference of its systems, from out of control blazes to weapon jams, to a range of other interactions.

After so much discussion with the people behind some of the most successful attempts to alter the convention of player death being a fail state, I realised that death is more of a symptom that is caused by an inability, whether financial or creative, to create the systems necessary to accommodate player failure and recovery. It’s no easy task to fundamentally change what is expected when the health bar goes down to zero and it all goes dark, not least because of what has been the case for so long.

But to at the very least question it, so that checkpoints and “Game Over” screens aren’t in your game before there’s even been a discussion, is the way that more interesting and compelling interactions will be pursued and realised. Even something as simple as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’s rewind mechanic was a revelation at the time, allowing players to manipulate a system to reattempt a difficult jump or encounter without the brusque interruption of a “Game Over” screen.

The thing is, the game is going to go ahead, whether the player dies or not. No matter how many times they see “Game Over”, the game isn’t over unless they decide to turn it off. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ahead, wrestling with that screen until it doesn’t appear, and the "canon" version of the story is cemented by a save point. Now victory is assured, always was assured, and any failure is relegated to the narrative beats that were set in stone before the player even started. Letting go of that adherence to victory, to success, is going to, and has, made things a lot more interesting. Failure, and recovery from that failure, is fun.

[symbianosgames]

Arkane Studios' Raphael Colantonio is probably best known among developers today for his work on Dishonored with fellow co-creative director Harvey Smith. 

But by the time Dishonored shipped in 2012 Colantonio had already been working at Arkane for over a decade, leading development of games like Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. 

These games, made back before the French studio was acquired by Bethesda parent company ZeniMax and expanded with a sister studio in Austin, failed to achieve high-profile commercial success -- to this day, Colantonio is quick to acknowledge Arx was "full of bugs."

What they did achieve, though, was attracting communities of players passionate about the games' mechanics and systems-driven design.

As Colantonio now prepares to ship Arkane's latest project, Prey, Gamasutra sat down with him to briefly chat about the projects he's shaped over the years, and how they've in turn shaped his approach to making games. 

So you gave a presentation at the 2006 Montreal Game Summit -- this was ages ago -- and you talked about your experience building a small indie studio in a world of big-budget game companies.

Colantonio: Yeah, with Gamasutra, actually.

So it's been over a decade since then. Arkane is pretty big now, and split across continents. How does it feel?

  "We seem disorganized and like we don't know what we're doing, but I think it's part of a process and I really think that it's something that we now embrace and accept."

Feels like a different life. Well, it feels yet so far, and at the same time so recent. It's funny how time works in people's head; in many ways we still feel like this little unknown company that just started a few years ago. Even now, like people say, "So what are you working on?"

"Oh, Dishonored."

"Oh, yeah, I played that game!"

"Yeah, sure." That's how I feel. You're just saying that to be polite, you know?

But yeah, it took a while, but it's great. It shows that with determination and believing in what you do, eventually it works out.

How has the working environment changed? I think fellow devs would be curious to know what it was like, going from one studio to two, each with their own separate projects.

I think it works out for us because it was such a slow incremental process. It took us seventeen years to go from one game - one studio, to two games - two studios.

So it's been a very very meticulous adding one piece at a time. You look at how many people we add a year, it's really not much. So at the end now it's very different even though it felt natural, because Dishonored was made between Lyon and Austin; that was probably the weirdest move for us.

I can't remember exactly how many people we had in Austin and how many we had in Lyon, but it was like two teams -- slightly bigger in Lyon. That was a real weird move and then after that, once we were done just adding people on both ends started to almost feel like you were managing two different studios at that point.

But we're still sharing the same DNA for game design; it's like the cousin that went to a different country and evolved their own way. Because you can still recognize the styles in both games, right? In Dishonored 2 and Prey, even though they're not the same team behind it.

Do you miss having that small studio focus?

Sure, yeah. It's different; when you're ten in the same room and just yell across the room because you need some file or whatever, it's not the same thing as when you have to input it in some software that goes into a list of tasks that maybe one day will be read by someone on the other side of the building.

So I do miss it, but I think we still manage to maintain the same culture and passion because we -- I think we have a very strong culture and we know why we're doing what we do, so we hire people that embrace the same values and they hire people with the same passions. So if you ask anyone at Arcane, most of them know why they're doing what they're doing, even though it's a pretty big team now.

Do you have any specific techniques or processes that you put in place to maintain that sort of culture? 

Yeah, I can think of two things -- well three things. One, recruiting is very, very important. We are very, very picky.

I think the second thing is, we have a few values that are important to us. One of them is player choice, for example. So for each game that we do, Dishonored was the same and it's the same now with Prey, we have some little posters that we place everywhere in the office with the name of those values and an example and why it's important to us. Like mantras, almost. Then people wherever they go for a break or lunch or something they see this thing on the wall that would say "multi-solutions" or--

Motivational posters.

Yeah, motivational posters. That's two, and three I would say the leads, who you choose to represent what you want for the team and the game, making sure that they are really in alignment with you and they will perpetrate that culture.

Sure. I know some team leaders who do things like regular team lunches or dinners to help build studio cultures they can rely upon. But that's usually with teams of like ten or twelve people. If you have thirty or forty in your studio...

Yeah, you can't. And funnily enough we've never been so much into those things at Arkane. Like you know there are those big corporate companies that take everybody to Disney World or something. We're just, everybody does what they want to do. Some actually gather together because they want to play some RPG -- you know, Role-Playing --

Tabletop games, yeah.

But this is nothing we enforce. It's strange, we don't do the lunches and all this stuff.

Ahh, everybody's different. Do you yourself ever play tabletop role-playing games?

Not anymore. I used to play Cthulhu, actually, more than Dungeons and Dragons.

You played Call of Cthulhu?

Uh-huh, yeah.

I'm impressed. That's a rough game to play; everybody loses at the end.

Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's why I like it. The tensions between wanting to progress and not wanting to progress because you know that you are a cooler character now, but you're sooner to die.

Playing those games, did that inform your approach to videogame development at all? The way you run teams or the way you design levels or anything like that?

Probably, yeah. Yes, because, in fact, even to this day, if I design a piece of level because I want to highlight a situation that is important to me, I will actually use -- how do you say?

Graph paper.

Yeah, I will still use that with the same kind of iconography that you do on the Dungeon and Dragons.

I think that stuff's fascinating, but before we fall down that rabbit hole I should ask: now that you're wrapping up work on Prey, what have you learned from it that you'll take forward to other projects?

In the specific case of Prey? There's many lessons...on the positive side, I do think that it's really confirmed our approach to multilayered system development where we just develop a system out of context, just with the tools, and we drop it in the simulation and let it live and see what happens. Usually it spawns new ideas.

So you have an AI, for example, that you did not have before and you just give it a few rules and as it's in the game and starts to interact with the rest of the simulation and something weird happens. It pushes objects, for example -- you never thought of that. And because of that it creates some new gameplay, some new opportunities.

So we rely a lot on that and it's actually a really cool way to make games because it falls back to player expectations, I think, in the way that when these things happen, "Oh, you know what? Since this thing happens maybe we should support it and actually do this, this this." As opposed to having some sort of plan from the get-go and then just follow the plan.

So I think that's a technique that...we seem disorganized and like we don't know what we're doing, but I think it's part of a process and I really think that it's something that we now embrace and accept as mythology for us.

Yeah, like the Mimic enemies early on in Prey -- Is that an example of a thing you tested, a creature that can crawl and hide and transform into objects? Where did that even come from?

Initially, it was just we thought it would be cool to have a creature that actually turned into things to hide because we have full ecology for our aliens and how they work and each of them have a role. So the role of the Mimic was to be a scout: it scouts around to gather energy, hides, turns into things. Turning into things came as a later idea. Like, "It hides." 

"Okay, how does it hide?"

"Well, you know it goes into corners and it waits for you to show up and jumps you."

Okay, that's a cool idea. Then someone had an idea, I don't remember who. "What if it turned into objects? If it actually picked an object in that room and turned into the object?"

"Oh wow, that's awesome." So we did that. Then that led to another thing because as we were developing this game we also started to think, "How are we going to acquire the powers?"

"Well, what would be really awesome would be if you could steal the powers from the enemies." So we started down that route of, "You can steal this or that." And sometime in a meeting we said, "Hey, hold on. If we can steal the powers, really we should be able to turn into objects as well."

As we said that, half of the room was terrified by the idea because it means, "Oh god, this is going to be -- maybe ridiculous, maybe silly, maybe super-hard to implement," because now you are a small thing in the world and...how are the physics going to handle that? The other half was super-excited about that and people started to laugh about it. So that's what I mean by the game designed itself.

It's like a painting where you know where you're going more or less, but not exactly, and as you're painting and you realize that the blue of the sky over there should actually reflect on that corner over there. And so at the end the painting becomes really defined as you go.

So how do you balance the needs of that creative process with the demands of operating a business?

I think if you look at the leader, you will know what is the culture of the company. In our case it started with game design, game designers, so our very first game [Arx Fatalis] is very game design-oriented. Not very technological. It crashes all the time, is not very production-ready and full of bugs.

I remember thinking it was very neat, though, with stuff like the gesture commands for casting spells.

Right, right. It's neat, but it was not very marketable. It was not ready for the market, and I think as we grew we started to accept other disciplines a little better. So now I think we've reached a balance where we have strong production, strong art, strong tech, while at the same time still maintaining the strong design.

I still think design will always win at the end of the day if there's a conflict between, "Should this game be polished or should it be designed?" I'll still push for the fun thing, rather than the polish. And maybe it's a mistake. It did bite me in the ass a few times, but at some point as you grow you have to...well, now we are also part of Bethesda. So there's a lot of money involved in these games. We cannot just make games in a vacuum and not care about it. So I had to give more and more power to production and et cetera. But unfortunately for everyone I am also the president of the company, so.....

It's tricky. It means that I will always have a personal push for creativity over any of the other disciplines. But I also try to be mindful about it and not run the company against the wall.

I think a lot of devs face the same problem. I should ask also, I notice it's not the same engine as Dishonored 2. You went with CryEngine, right?

Yeah.

Why choose to go with someone else's engine rather than something you build yourself?

Because in fact, when you look back to when we started Dishonored 2, which was a little before we started Prey, actually, we were faced with a few challenges. In the case of Dishonored, our biggest challenge was to make the technology work. Because we knew what game we were going to do, but we did not have an engine for it. Back then the CryTek engine was not ready.

So we said, okay, this is our try is going to be to make our own engine. Because we know what the game is and and we have to make a new team. So that was enough challenge already.

And then you look at Prey, we were not wanting to add some more burden on the Dishonored 2 team because Dishonored 2, we had to to make our own engine there. Now with the same engine if you have to make two games, that would be multiplying the challenges. So [for Prey], the challenge was more like, let's take an engine that we know exists and is solid that we have and tackle a new challenge which is inventing a game.

It's essentially a new type of game, even though it's Prey, it's still a new IP in a way. So it's just risk management, and choosing the right thing. So, you know I was saying your company culture informs how you work, like in my case it's all creative, but at the same time, in this case it was a lot of production calls. We have to be logical.

Yeah, but I do think it's surprising you'd want to avoid having everyone working on the same tech. Whereas I feel an organization like EA, which is obviously much bigger, they're making an effort to bring all of their stuff into one engine.

Yeah, I'm not sure why because it's only a million dollars for those -- It's nothing secret here. The cost of an engine is about a million dollars. Any engine that you can buy and I honestly can't remember how much we payed on the case of CryTek, but it doesn't justify -- It's not a big win to say, "Well, we're going to unify all our games onto one engine." It seems more risky and more of a constraint for teams.

In fact, the entire Bethesda organization, everytime we try starting a game, they never care. They always ask us, "What engine do you want to use?" It doesn't matter if we want to use our engine, some new engine. It's a cost. If you make your own engine it's going to cost you something. If you buy one it's going to cost you something. There is a cost -- I can understand why some people want to unify everything because this way they can have their teams that know how to use their tools. Once you know the production pipeline of an engine you can reuse that for every time. So there is some sort of a save.

But at the end of the day there are so many constraints as well to use -- I know a publisher that now went under who were obsessed with using the unified engine across all their teams all their studios all over the world. It drove them to their death, because it's more constraint on the developers than there is any benefit.

I honestly think it's an ideology and it's a political idea that sounds beautiful. "Well, we'll put our efforts combined into one thing. Then we can share technology between studios." It sounds beautiful, but it never works.

So let's talk about beauty, for a sec. What is one thing you hope fellow game developers see in this game? Is there a certain level, or a mechanic, or a little production trick you did somewhere?

Well, your question has multiple facets to it. One could be, "What is it that they will praise us for?" The other one would be, "What there is that hopefully will inspire them?" So the inspiring thing -- As a player, I want to play more games that are real-life simulations and let me play the way I want and give me an experience that I feel I own, as opposed to something very directed. There are some games that do that, but there's also a lot of games that go somewhere else.

So I want to see more and more games that allow me -- Because that's the difference between a movie and a game, I think. So the more games that are simulations, the more fun it is to me. So I hope some future generations are going to go deeper in that genre.

As far as the thing I hope people recognize, I think it's the complexity of making a new world. Everything is designed in this world. The chairs, the tables, everything is designed -- The fashion. So I'm sure the artists and storytellers will have a chance to appreciate the amount of work that was put into the researching the background of the world and how it works.

Yeah, you had the idea for this long before you decided to use the Prey name, right? Do you remember any of the names you were originally going to use?

There were many and I think one of them was after the name of the alien race themselves, which is the "Typhon." So then we started to think, "Hold on, people aren't going to know if it's with an i, a y, is it ph, is it f?" So at the end of the day Prey was actually a pretty solid name.

Yeah, it's easy to spell, short. So if you had to give one piece of advice to fellow game developers, given your time in the industry, what would you say now?

You know, I think we're at a fascinating phase because there's way many more propositions than there ever was before. Now you can play mobile, different types of formats of games, like the indie games for $20 or the AAA for more. I think it's a great time to succeed. Better than when there was only one channel.

Now, there's more noise as well so it's hard to get through this noise. And also the other thing that I notice is that people give less importance to how amazing is your graphics. That I think is a great, great opportunity for developers to focus on their message, whether it's artistic message or gameplay message, rather than the form so much. Because we've been so blinded by trying to get the latest technology, the latest shader, the latest detail that costs a fortune. It's a big distraction from what really matters in the game. So I hope people focus on the art intentions and the gameplay intentions more than the technology, and how amazing the graphics are.