Games Benedict

Wildwood is a city along the lower part of New Jersey’s coast. It has roller coasters, a boardwalk, and an endless sea of better-than-you-would-have-guessed pizza shops. When someone invokes the deeply mythologized words “Jersey Shore,” it’s safe to say that some, if not all, of what the phrase is meant to capture is reflected somewhere along the Eastern edges of Wildwood. But when most people picture a beach, they probably don’t picture this one. More so than perhaps any other part of the Jersey Shore, Wildwood is known for the sandy sprawl in-between its piers and the water. Several football fields’ worth in fact, such that actually getting from the car to where the waves crash requires its own peculiar form of patience and delayed gratification. 

Destiny 2 may only be the second game in the series, but it is also the sixth expansion since it originally started. This means that certain patterns have had years to establish themselves, including the single-player story campaign that accompanies each new era in the game’s MMO universe. These tend to include big action set pieces, short but epic cutscenes, and a bunch of useless space loot that gets thrown out as the end game (i.e. “real game”) begins. Ostensibly they make-up the “core” of the game, containing both a narrative conflict and its resolution, as well as short demonstrations of every major mode and feature included in the game. But anyone who’s played Destiny for any length of time, or even read about the people who have, knows that the single-player missions, wherein players gain experience points and build toward the game’s current level cap, are not the thing: they are the thing that gets you to the thing. 

Having been inculcated into the particulars of the latest expansion’s “improvements” and made familiar with the general rhythms of its progression grind and in-game loot economy, it’s not until after the big bad has been revealed and vanquished, and the credits have begun rolling, that the true content, including special ambient quest lines and, of course, the marathon-length Raid missions, becomes accessible. And like a long, sunny day spent laid out in front of the Atlantic, Destiny’s end game is worth it. Walk along the hot, granular morass of scifi gibberish and thematic cliff notes poising as character dialogue and you will eventually reach your destination.

Unlike the Southeastern Jersey shoreline, however, Destiny was made entirely by humans. It was not discovered in some ditch like a fossil with a single-player campaign already in-tact. Rather, six iterations in, Bungie has maintained the long walk from the thing to the real thing out of, perhaps, habit, or maybe even the need to tick off a box for those impatient for the next Halo and could possible be confused into buying into a streamlined MMO with all the trappings of a conventional, early aughts shooter. Whatever the reason, it somehow persists, despite how much time and energy is spent reminding players that nothing in the single player campaign matters. That growling life bar you shot a million holes in? Just a dinner roll. The main course is actually gated behind a series of grindy level progressions and match making snafus. Or even, possibly, hidden away somewhere in Destiny 3 (seriously). 

Some other thoughts as I approach the steepest part of Destiny 2′s end-game incline:

I really can’t stress enough how rushed the entire arc has been, or how terrible the Ghaul boss fight is. It’s always a bad sign when your main villain is hopelessly upstaged by the scenery. Remember: there was no secret plan to destroy the city, it just happened because the bad guys are badder than ever, or something. Having stripped you over your powers, home, and toys, the game then rushes to restore all of it (except the last part, because then what would be the point) to make it all feel like Dorothy waking up from a dream.

It’s disappointing to see so many things from the first game removed. Rather than simply adding and streamlining, Bungie also took away ammo synths, faction bounties, and vendor legendaries. In addition, there aren’t any new sub classes or enemy type that really break the mold. In this respect, while Destiny 2 is by far the better version, it does feel more lackluster than the first game when all of these things were new.

Destiny 2 is out. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to find there. At this point, it’s pretty clear Bungie’s never going to make the Destiny game I want. But I’m going back nonetheless because 1) the guns still feel great and 2) there’s some damn pretty stuff to see.

After getting to spend a fair bit of time with the game last night I ended up with quite a few screenshots, so rather than go on a long rant about how this series is still a mess, I’ll try to keep my list of grievances to a minimum and focus instead on some of the cool world building that happens in the game despite itself.

There are all different types of science fiction, but I think Destiny’s version tends to come off as inconsistent and off the wall. But really it just reminds me of the illustrations artists would do for old sci-fi paper backs or even astronomy coffee table books. It’s not built around a particular technological question, or hypotheticals about life in the future. Instead, the game’s approach is to simply take the Wikipedia page for a planet or astronomical phenomenon, dream about it, and then start throwing lines and colors on a page. On the surface, Mass Effect Andromeda seemed to be doing the same thing, but in reality the results ended up feeling much more engineered and modular; the difference between scanning a planet from above and painting it from below.

Destiny’s backgrounds are great. Especially because they’re always balanced with a middle ground you can actually get to and nearby objects that contrast in volume and help frame the vista ahead.

The early part of Destiny 2 veers heavily into Lord of the Rings and I sort of dig that.

Bungie knows how to take good looking scenes and really make them pop by adding dramatic lighting effects. The Sleeping Beauty bramble cave below a pedestrian looking aluminum silo is also cool.

Whatever you wanna call it--instagramification, neon-drenching, etc.--I think it works and helps give Destiny 2 a visual identity apart from the first game. Fighting uphill in the woods below a pink and teal sky against camping aliens is better than a lot of the alternatives. 

I've really missed this series’ skyboxes.

Titan is definitely my favorite location to date. Even if it was giving me hard Gears of War 3 flashbacks, and most of the fights weren’t as good as Gears of War 3, trading empty expanses for narrow corridors and ledges was a nice change of pace. 

Destiny is also at its best when there’s extreme terraforming involved. In this case, Titan basically functions as a combination of Star Wars’ Cloud City and Minos.

More teal! But also lemon yellows and sun baked sheet metal. There’s been a subtle shift in Destiny 2 toward big industrial equipment which, intentional or not, helps give some actual shape to some of the backstory about what civilization was up to before the fall. Giant turbines, hydro-pistons, and big alien drills draw a nice contrast with the sleek space ships and magic armor; more Alien than Star Trek.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about the designs on Titan, but felt very IKEA to me. Maybe it was just the yellow, or the rain at sea on a rig (all of which I weirdly associate with Scandinavia). Between the first game’s old Russia Cosmodrone and Destiny 2′s European Dead Zone, it all feels a bit eurocentric.

This is my favorite tunnel in the game so far. And there are a lot of tunnels.

Skyboxes with giant planets in them are even better.

Seriously though, Titan’s the best.

The giant biodome has a very Logan’s Run feels to it and, assuming there are some interesting side missions, strikes, or (fingers crossed) and eventual raid there, it will immediately jump toward the top of my list of best post-apocalyptic malls.

7066 Nessus is a small Vex rock, and as such, looked equal parts beautiful and re-used assets from Venus. The hazy teals and electric blues are once again in full effect, but I’m down with it. While the rest of the game seems content to double down on the “log on and shoot shit with your bros” appeal, the art direction in Destiny 2 commits much more strongly to the series’ trippy sci-fi vibes.

The eye motif that follows the Vex around is one of my favorites, even if it makes Nessus look like the GLaDOS home world. 

Otherwise, here are some quick thoughts so far, in no particular order:

The writing is bad. Destiny’s writing was mostly silly nonsense, but Destiny 2 tries to invoke this feeling of being under siege, especially in the beginning, that makes it feel like you’re supposed to be taking it all totally seriously

I’m not the only one to point this out, but anytime you tell the player not to die and then let them respawn seconds away the first time they die after that, there’s probably some holes in your design.

To that point, why even bother to Metroid the player if you’re going to re-introduce the bulk of their powers a few moments later with no interesting obstacles in-between? Not being able to run, jump, or throw grenades is a very jarring thing in Destiny, and yet that brief survival-horror sequence is played mostly as a walking sim. Normally that’s something I’d encourage, but in this particular type of situation, it seems to completely miss the point.

I’m so tired of loot boxes. Overwatch and PUBG have ruined us. Especially since most of the loot boxes that appear in Destiny 2 are full of tedious junk.

The environments are big and beautiful but still mostly empty. 99% of interactions boil down to “Hold square to spawn monster closets.”

You can tell Bungie really wanted to go for it this time in terms of the linear narrative, but it feels completely uneconomical given the dearth of plot throughout the rest of the game. Too many of the cutscenes don’t advance the story or tell me something I couldn’t have guessed before. More importantly, they don’t introduce more questions. This was a problem in the first game, but it feels even more acute in the second given its apparent emphasis on getting us to care about these characters and their struggle. Basically, every time Bungie has a chance to build out a mystery it chooses to make a bad joke instead.

It’s a sequel, so stuff is bound to be different, but I got the sneaking suspicion on more than one occasion that stuff was changed from the first game to the second simply to make the second feel like more of an upgrade. I don’t see the point of the new skill tree look, for instance. At bottom it’s still asking you to make the same trade-offs as before and not allowing you any greater degree of customization. While there are plenty of small graphical and quality of life improvements, there’s also an awful lot of crap that looks like it was given a fresh coat of paint just cause. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it feels hollow and overly conservative on Bungie’s part.

My quintessential E3 moment is rifling through the pages of Game Pro in the mountains of New Hampshire some summer in the early aughts. I’ve never been to the conference, and long before streaming the press briefings on a laptop late at night and following the reactions on Twitter, E3 was a fiction confined to magazine cover stories.

I can’t remember whether or not I knew there was an annual show where developers demoed games for retailers and press back when I purchased gaming magazines for their newsstand price a few times a year. E3 just sort of appeared out of the blue, leading to oversized issues filled with blurry screenshots of games that might never come out, and even if they did, would probably look quite different.

I don’t remember what exactly was in that Game Pro that year (SSX 3? Dark Cloud 2? A lot of grainy pictures of dark warehouse show floors?) I do remember feeling completely elated, however. I didn’t own half the systems needed to play the games being pushed, or have the money to buy them for the ones I did. 

That didn’t matter though. 

The zig-zagging layouts bursting with color and buzzwords gripped my eyeballs. Seeing “the most anticipated new games” ripped away from the limitations of their code and hardware, almost completely decontexualized except for the vague descriptions of an enthusiast write-up, and plastered onto cheap paper filled me with questions whose answers weren’t important. In the magazine their potential could be captured and immortalized and kept in some way pure, as if the games would be forever in a state of becoming, unsullied by budgets, scheduling, and poor execution.

I’ve looked at and read about far more games than I’ve actually played. We are part of a culture now that’s extremely conscientious of spoilers. We don’t want to ruin that feeling when something reveals itself by messing up the proper order we think makes this experience most satisfying. But nothing I’ve ever seen or read about a game has been able to spoil it as much as actually playing the damn thing. Which is to say salivating over E3 coverage has been some of the most fun I’ve ever had with games. 

I don’t think I’m alone either, since so many people seem bent on breaking down E3 press conferences and trying to show the publishers and console manufacturers what they could be doing differently to win over more hearts and minds (mostly hearts). There’s no doubt about it: this is an extremely peculiar genre of video game writing. It perhaps makes more sense in politics when people breakdown candidates performances since they have a real stake not just in that person’s beliefs and policies, but in their ability to build the support among other people necessary to actually carry out their agenda. The political horse-race is grating and overemphasized but it does, to some degree, matter.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why it matters that EA should do better at its press conference next year. The games will come out eventually, or they won’t. And they’ll be good, or maybe not. But EA doing a better job of explaining how Battlefront II, a sequel to a reboot that shares the exact name with a previous game in the series, will iterate on multiplayer death pits peppered with beautiful Star Wars visual and sound effects, seems entirely beside the point (unless you are EA).

Battlefront II is, in one respect, at its best right now while most people haven’t played it and still don’t know just how much it will be exactly like they might have expected. It’s a fully formed idea that’s only been partially revealed and thus able to function like a rorschach test for people’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations regarding the game (and whatever the game is a substitute for, or escape from, in their own lives).

But inkblots are just inkblots unless you have someone their to coax you on and a context in which interpreting uninterpretable patterns has some sort of meaning and purpose. And so we turn to the companies showing off their games and the creators trotted out to talk about them to try and help us find meaning in an announcement trailer, or a gameplay demo, or even simply the split second appearance of a game logo. On the one hand I understand why the Pokemon Company saying they are working on a new Pokemon game for the Switch is exciting but I also know how ridiculous and absurd it is that the confluence of a few sparse and deeply predictable details is grounds for my heart rate to go up.

One of the biggest E3 announcements of all time was Sony getting Square Enix to reveal a remake of Final Fantasy VII. People went wild even though it’s unclear when or if the game will ever come out. When and if it eventually does, it almost certainly won’t be transformative. But that doesn’t really matter. We all want to go back to Midgar, and with one simple teaser Square gave millions of people permission to. If anything, the game’s unclear timeline for production makes it that much more effective as an E3 drug: instead of forcing us to return to some shitty remake of Midgar, we have years of getting to day dream about returning to our own personal version of it--the one we experienced in a friend’s bedroom or a neighbor’s basement--sort of like a parent planning a trip to their favorite child hood vacation spot, left to enjoy the tangled contradiction of space and time in their imagination prior to facing the reality of how rundown and in some ways depressing local will no doubt look in the light of adulthood.

It’s a powerful snake oil and not an easy one to bottle, as evidenced by how eternally disappointed most of us are with E3 and its press conferences and how eager we might be to try and tell companies precisely what they need to do to unlock the dams of consumer jubilation. But unfortunately, at the end of the day, it’s still just snake oil, whether you have a hand in crafting the con or not. The games and the people surrounding them are the only real things, and whether amazing or garbage or somewhere in-between, no amount dazzling highlight reels and non-cringe-worthy transitions will stop them from eventually arriving as actual, immutable things. 

At Polygon, Arthur Gies did an interesting interview with Dean Hall not to long ago. They cover a lot of ground, but it was the stuff about Early Access and having a lose game plan going into development that stuck out to me,

I actually worked with them on it for quite a while. I'd probably have to revise the description of DayZ a bit. I'd say Kerbal Space Program is the perfect example. DayZ — In some ways it's ... it's not a problem child of early access, but it got so big. It got so popular so fast. It's a first-person shooter game. People have an expectation of it.

...

Xbox One as a platform has quite an element of that. Microsoft has a walled garden. They're very particular. That'll help them quite a bit. Anyone they're looking into bringing on, they're going to be putting the thumb down on them to make sure things actually happen. They want it to be a success story. I guess Steam is further down the track. They're trying to grow an environment where they don't have to be the police.Towns, 2012For me, I learned one big thing: you need to have a good road map. When I was in charge of DayZ, we didn't have a good road map. That's a huge pitfall. People get excited about the end result of it, like Kickstarter, right? But they don't know all the steps it takes to get there. That was a huge lesson for me, doing a really good road map.

...

I look at DayZ. It gets really frustrating. You get people who are very upset with the development. And that's why, to be honest, Steam refunds are a bit of a godsend. At least you can say, if someone's dissatisfied in two hours they can return it, and you haven't lost a future customer. But for people who have played longer than that, it can get quite frustrating.

...

I love that as a game developer. I don't like us saying, oh, well, this is our scope, this is our budget, everything else gets put in the sequel. It's nice to be able to be agile about it. With Ion, for example, we're being really agile about how we approach it. 

To me, the idea that Hall learned his lesson with DayZ regarding having a design road map is questionable. But it’s not just Hall or Peter Molyneux--this is a problem that plagues lots of different developers. And not just developers, but creatives in any industry or medium struggle with this.

In a recent post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Richard Cobbett argues that the resurgence in PC gaming and the advent of crowd-funded development have been kinder to RPGs than Adventure games. Not being that familiar with either genre’s early PC days, I’m hardly in a position to disagree. And while I think he’s a bit to wishy-washy with some of his examples, he makes some interesting points,

“You wouldn’t know this from most modern adventure games though because… and I’m not speaking about literally all adventures here… they’re now largely a cargo-cult genre. By that I mean that far too many simply ape the design of the past without understanding that to make something like Monkey Island isn’t a question of making something like Monkey Island. That game broke every mould that the genre had. To name just a few things – creating the Three Trials system that’s still the standard design style today, adding real-time puzzles like following the shopkeeper, coming up with dynamic mechanics like the insult-swordfighting system, having a total tonal shift from conventional adventuring to something more RPG like upon arrival on the titular island… I could go on, but you hopefully get my point. The vast majority of adventures that we get aren’t even trying for that level of innovation or novelty value, and sure as hell don’t have the relative budgets to pull it off.

...

If you’re a modern adventure developer working in the old-school style, you’re basically trying to recreate blockbusters with pocket-money budgets. Modern tools may be endlessly superior to the ones of the day, but expectations are also endlessly higher and the audience’s willingness to try new things depressingly lower. RPG developers sure as hell don’t have it easy, and I’m not trying to suggest otherwise, but they do at least have an audience willing to consider The Witcher 3, Bard’s Tale IV, Numerera, Wasteland 2, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and hell, even South Park as equally valid expressions of what the RPG can be and do. (Admittedly, Bioware’s not been too popular of late, but still.) The spectrum of what’s considered acceptable for a modern game is also far wider, especially in follow-up games. Wasteland 2 isn’t exactly the belle of the ball, but hey, it’s a hell of a lot prettier than the original, right?

...

Over at IGN, Jared Petty wrote a very timely July 4th reminder of how unregulated technology can threaten our individual and collective privacy rights. He writes, 

“Orwell's 1984 surveillance state has arrived. By scanning identifying characteristics of your body, a computer can figure out who you are, where you've been, and very often what you're doing. Coupled with the ubiquitous presence of cameras, your identity is becoming a commodity to be captured, held, bought, and sold without your permission. And unfortunately, most everyone’s response to these circumstances has been acquiescence. Acceptance of universal surveillance is now the default setting for our expectations on privacy, and that’s a very bad thing.”

The whole this is worth reading. As surrounded by technology as we are, and as heavily mediated as daily life has become, It’s often easy to forget that nearly all of it comes with the price tag of having your personal information tracked and recorded nearly 24/7. “It's a real-world Watch Dogs. The imminent possibilities are frightening and dehumanizing,” writes Petty.

As ubiquitous as this type of digital surveillance is, the entire thing can sometimes feel both overwhelming and inevitable. Fortunately, Petty concludes with a number of things each of us can do to try and halt the erosion of our privacy,

“Horizon Zero Dawn aims to fill the open-world gap between GTA and Skyrim.”

That’s according to a headline for a post-E3 preview of the game by  Megan Farokhmanesh over at Polygon. As the game’s senior producer, Mark Norris, explained, Guerrilla Games wanted to expand on the moment to moment action of its Killzone franchise and expand it into a larger world with more dynamic possibilities,

"’What we always wanted to do on Killzone was, of course, to be a little more than just a shooter,' Norris told Polygon. 'We wanted to be a very tactical and strategic shooter. I think we pulled a lot of what we learned on Killzone, in terms of how to create compelling combat scenarios, and pulled that into Horizon Zero Dawn. What we have to do now is just make sure that we layer in the encounter design and the level design from open worlds that fits that sort of combat paradigm that we've pulled over from Killzone.’" 

I’m not about to compliment Killzone’s combat scenarios. Unlike Norris, I don’t think that was necessarily one of the series’ strengths, especially compared to shooters like Halo and Far Cry. But I appreciate that Guerrilla games wants to marry interesting encounters with interesting world building in their new game. Many action adventure games focus only on one or the other.

Too often though, interesting world building boils down to creating a big space filled with tons of repetitive activities differentiated from one another only by a color palette or the specific details of the job at hand (collect A instead of B, talk to X instead of Y). “Open world” has become the holy grail of a lot of AAA games, no matter the genre. Instead of the next GTA or Skyrim, however, we usually end up with something as lifelessly tedious as Dragon Age: Inquisition. So I hope that between its crafting and upgrade systems, Horizon is more than just a beautiful looking loot cycle.

And let’s be honest, the chance that in five years anyone mentions Horizon Zero Dawn in the same breath as either GTA and Skyrim is slim to none.

More heartening is Norris’ concession that, “while the game isn't going to break the mold in terms of new ideas, Guerrilla hopes to combine those elements in a way that feels fresh.” In addition, the studio seems to have put their money where their mouth is when it comes to assembling the talent necessary create such an ambitious departure from Guerrilla’s previous projects,

Philip Kollar profiled Square Enix’s efforts to rehabilitate the franchise in a post-E3 article that ran on Polygon last week. It’s an interesting read and gives a good idea of how to think about the upcoming installment: Integrity and Faithlessness.

“In a lot of ways, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness seems to be walking a precarious balance between elements that are classic to the series and trying new things,” writes Kollar.

"One of the lessons we took from Star Ocean: The Last Hope is wanting to create a game that is seamless," he says. "When you play some RPGs, what happens is that there are so many cutscenes. You play a little bit, and then your play comes to a hold, and you watch a cutscene for a few minutes before playing a little bit again. Lots of fans find this distracting and find it difficult to immerse themselves into the world because of how many cutscenes there are."

...

“Kobayashi is already dreaming big about Star Ocean's future — which, he says, could include a shift to open-world gameplay — but first he needs to prove that people can still care about the series with Integrity and Faithlessness. We'll find out how successful he is when the new game is released on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in 2016.”

Personally, I’ve never been blown away by the story in Star Ocean games, but not because of a lack of flow between narrative action and gameplay action. More often than not, narrative scenes are boring or stale by virtue of being boring or stale, not because they make the player a passive observer (eliciting controller inputs from a player isn’t the only way to emotionally engage them in what’s taking place on screen).

What I’m more interested in is whether the latest entry in the series will do a better job of letting its myriad systems take priority. The general swirl of fantasy and sci-fi tropes littered throughout a Star Ocean game do a nice job of creating an interesting world and overarching conflict, but their characters and plotting were where those games excelled. I’ll take more accessible and customizable item crafting systems over more personalized and organic banter between characters any day.

Jeff Grub has a great write-up of Apple’s banning of civil war videogames displaying the Confederate flag at GamesBeat. As he explains,

“Games like Civil War: 1863 and Ultimate General: Gettysburg are no longer available for download on the iOS App Store. Apple is likely making this move as part of a response to the national outcry over the continued reverence for the symbol in parts of the United States. Retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Sears all agreed to stop selling the emblem, which represented the side of the U.S. Civil War that fought to protect the practice of slavery.”

Apple states upfront in its guidelines to developers that it treats Apps differently than books and other media when it comes to free expression. The result of which is that you can still buy Ken Burns: The Civil Wars documentary from Apple but not Ultimate General: Gettysburg. Without imposing some sort of false equivalence between those two pieces of media in terms of historical value or artistry, I think it’s fair to say that Apples policy and actions in this regard are the result of a bias against interactive media rather than a particular opinion on the merits of a handful of civil war-oriented apps.

Not surprisingly, controversy makes a large company heavily invested in its brand image like Apple very queasy. As Grubb points out, the company has a history of banning apps from its store that might be considered controversial or politically charged, 

“In January 2013, Apple made headlines for prohibiting the launch of Endgame: Syria on the App Store...

A few months later in March 2013, Apple pulled Sweatshop, a game that explores the harsh and impossibly demanding conditions of manufacturing plants in the developing world...

In May 2014, Apple used its policies to block a sexual-exploration app called HappyPlayTime. The developer of this game designed it to use interactivity to encourage women to become more comfortable with the idea of masturbation.

Also last year, a developer decided to not even release its marijuana-growing simulator Pot Farm on iOS...”

This trend, of which games like Civil War: 1863 and Ultimate General: Gettysburg are only the latest examples, indicates just how detached Apple is from the creative potential and value of the App Store. The company doesn’t want to take the sort of responsibility for its content that would come with curating it in more active, visible ways, but it also doesn’t want to leave it open to any content that might be considered off-brand or clash with the public perception of Apple it’s constantly trying to craft.

“There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.”

Starting up Arkham Knight feels like waking up as Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. The game opens with “press X to incinerate” the Joker’s corpse. And then there’s the Scarecrow, followed by a meeting with Jim Gordon, a digital drop-in by his daughter, and an early cameo by Poison Ivy. If you’ve spent more than a handful of hours playing the previous Arkham games (and I’ve played them all), it all feels a bit like popping into a dream you’d forgotten you’ve had a hundred times before. “ And you and you and you...and you were there.”

I’m only an hour in so far, because like the pulpy equivalent of a dense Russian novel, I need to acclimate myself to the waters before diving all the way in. During that first 60 minutes I flew across some roof tops and admired the city for its prolific if unremarkable level of detail. I sent a couple dozen guys to the hospital, or the grave, who can really tell anymore. And then the game tried to introduce me to the Batmobile. 

Like when one of your best friends introduces you to one of their other best friends, the whole time I couldn't help feeling like hey, who invited this guy? The streets in Gotham do feel a bit narrow, which is fine when you’re busy grapple hooking to the next rooftop, but less so when you’ve got to pilot a station wagon muscle car outfitted with light artillery down them. I can think of a million interesting ways to invite a player into Arkham Knight’s ambitious sandbox. A muddled car chase down winding boulevards filled with miss-fired RPGs and flailing pedestrians is not one of them.

Soon after that, the game encouraged me to summon the Batmobile with my remote control and transform it into a tank. From there it tasked me with blowing up other small tanks. Between all of the overlapping controls I sort of made a mess of things and died barely fifteen seconds into the encounter. Like, really? This is your other best friend? I think I’m going home now. See’ya tomorrow, I guess.

In case you weren’t aware, people are making games for the Xbox One. Some of these, like Fullbright’s Tacoma, will be exclusive to the system. Others, like Fallout 4, will be available almost everywhere else. At its press event, people from throughout the Microsoft family made clear that if you own an Xbox One or Windows 10 device, there will be things for you to buy, download, install, and play. Most of them will involve primarily, but not exclusively, aiming a gun a gun and firing it. Others, like Rare’s Sea of Thieves, look like half-hearted imitations destined to be forgotten in the ongoing stream of contemporary gaming detritus. Pirates! Persistent, shared worlds! Colors!

If you generally like and enjoy games, as I do, then Microsoft’s event was nothing if not reassuring. The company is helping developers bring niche projects to a large audience, including games like Beyond Eyes and Cuphead. The MOBA genre, previously confined to PCs, is breaking new ground on consoles with Smite and soon the gorgeous looking Gigantic (I joked about colors, but sometimes a brilliantly pulsing palette is enough). And while I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to reasonably afford a HoloLens, the tech demo showing off its use in a co-operative Minecraft session was genuinely exciting in a way I don’t think any other Xbox peripheral has ever been. Unlike VR, whose challenges remain obvious but its solutions much less so, the possibilities and advantages of AR seem both obvious and practical.

Less obviously exciting, though to my mind much more significant, was Microsoft’s unexpected announcement that the Xbox One will be more or less backwards compatible by the end of this year. After two years of being told by console manufacturers that backwards compatibility wasn’t feasible, and countless critics and journalists reiterating that assertion as gospel, Microsoft has now reversed its position. Xbox Live Gold has come a long way since it originally started trying to compete with PlayStation Plus, and this move makes Sony and Nintendo’s dedication to re-selling the same content every five years seem even more cynical.

For much of the last console generation, I was MIA. Outside Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, and the occasional attempt to finish Final Fantasy XII, I had little to no exposure to the rest of the gaming scene. I wrestled with a handful of Colossi in-between shots of Vladimir on some of the lonelier nights during my sophomore year at college, but that was about it. I had never touched a Halo or a Gears of War, let alone Bioshock. I came several years late to Fallout and Mass Effect. The Xbox 360 era really did belong to the first and third person shooter, a shift which, for to someone who came up through Nintendo and then PlayStation, was new and confusing and unwelcome.

Playing Modern Warfare 2 with a friend though was what got me back into games. From there I bought a refurbished red-ring-prone 360 for under $100 and dived headfirst into industry defining evolution of a genre I’d never before paid much attention to. Games drop in price remarkably fast. After a year or two on the market, blockbuster titles which had sold millions get traded, eventually landing in the discount bin at your generic retail chain of choice. Even now, more than a year after I switched to my PS4, it’s hard to walk out of GameStop without picking up the hottest thing from three summers ago for barely more than $5. Hell, I still have an unopened copy of Enemy Unknown from when it was on sale for $15 on Amazon two Christmases ago. Who has the time though?

Which is why backwards compatibility matters so much to me.  As someone who doesn’t just play games for fun, but is also interested in the aesthetics, culture, and history surrounding them, having access to past games in important. Especially in such an iterative art form. The worlds born from games that are almost a decade old are still living and breathing due to the videogame industry’s financial dependence on brand recognition. The universe was effectively reset at the end of Mass Effect 3, and yet there’s totally going to be another Mass Effect, if not two or three. In an environment like that it’s absurd to think that continuity in the art form might only be preserved according to the narrow logic of financial spreadsheet. Buy an Xbox One to play Fallout 4, the impressive follow-up to an award winning game that only runs on obsolete machines that overheat after being on for more than an hour. Who cares though. After all, old games is old. Right?

Aside from putting Sony in the hot-seat, given that its entire post-PS4 ecosystem is predicated on re-purchasing old content through digital ports and PS Now streaming, Microsoft’s backwards compatibility announcement leaves them in an interest spot with regard to their own remake strategy. In the same press conference where it announced that you will be able to play every Gears of War on your Xbox One, a Gears of War “Ultimate” edition was also revealed. While I think the ease with which many publishers seem to be rattling off next-gen “definitive” editions of recent games, like Dark Souls II, Dishonored, and Borderlands, indicates the shallowness of the gap between the newer consoles and their older counterparts, I’m also hopeful that this announcement from Microsoft signals a shift away from this practice.

The field of upcoming major console releases is already littered with sequels, many of them now annualized, the last thing anyone needs is for a growing number of remastered re-issues to suck up even more of the oxygen. Other quick reactions:

Microsoft trying to diversify its presenters is not enough but always a good sign.

None of the smaller games, including Fullbright’s, grabbed me in the way that Sony’s often do. Cuphead has been around the block, but beyond that, nothing in the Transistor/Journey/Axiom Verge category that has an obvious appeal.

I hate fake banter between people demo-ing products on stage.

The lack of third party presence, while not something that matters, certainly hints at an on-going shift in power between Microsoft and Sony coming out of last console cycle.

Simon Parkin explores connection in some interesting ways, including that argument by Adorno and Horkheimer that “amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work.” He also suggests a few reasons why so many of us are so easily drawn to games that revel in digital drudgery.

Austin Walker, recent hire at Giantbomb, and stellar freelancer at Paste Games and elsewhere before that, put up an essay on games criticism and censorship yesterday. His subject is the common refrain that writing X about a given game is akin to “trying to force a developer” to change and/or censor it.

To put the argument in simple terms, eschews the binary of ‘criticism affects things’ vs. ‘criticism doesn't affect things’ in favor of what a spectrum. On one end is the position that developers should always do what the want. On the other is the position that developers should do whatever a certain person, coalition, or community thinks they should do. Plenty of people in real life believe in the former, while no one (at least who will admit it) maintains the latter.

Most importantly though, Walker points to the varying degree of measures people will take to influence game development, including (1) criminal legislation, (2) legal incentives, and (3) grass roots pressure brought by consumers. The first two happen very rarely, the third much less so, especially as social media has increased the importance (perceived or real) of various brands maintaining a certain public image. Companies simply don’t like any kind of outrage being associated with their product, so to the degree they can take steps to minimize or assuage it, they’ll do so.

And then there are reviews, thinkpieces, hottakes, or whatever else you want to call them, occupying some moderate middle ground on the spectrum. This is where people influence developers through arguments and discussions, not by force, but by rhetoric (the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything else contained in that broad class of communicative acts).

Then Walker comes with what is to me the biggest take away,

“So when I look closely at the arguments that say 'don’t try to influence devs,' what I end up seeing more often than not is 'don’t try to influence the devs in this one way.' It's not wholly dissimilar from those who say they want government to get out of the way of business, only to then also insist that regulations be put in place to protect some corporations and to incentivize industry-wide innovation. In both cases, 'freedom' is held up as sacrosanct and 'intervention' is positioned as a boogeyman. In reality the two are never wholly separate, and what’s really desired is a certain sort of intervention, just one that is so aligned with the status quo that it quietly fades into the background and feels 'normal.’”

On top of this, Walker adds a second element to his spectrum of influence: “reach.” So not only is there degree to which you sanction developer X for doing Y (e.g. I’m not buying another Arkham game vs. no one should buy another Arkham game vs. the U.S. government should ban Arkham games), there’s also the degree to which your arguments carry weight with the people involved. I’m interpreting Walker on this point, so I could be wrong, but I take him as meaning “reach” in the sense of, how many people listen to you, share the cultural, political, and social touchstones on which your appeals are based, and how much do they matter in turn (one of the many distracting debates over gamergate was how much reach the movement had, and thus what the appropriate amount of time and attention spent combating it was).

Walker brings all of this up in relation to some things he and others have written about The Witcher 3 (”The Witcher, Race, and Historicity, a post expanding on some of the ideas in the first...[and] a piece titled Colorblind: On Witcher 3, Rust, and gaming's race problem”). I still haven’t touched the game (slow progress on this front includes moving the case from an Old Navy bag on my bedroom floor to prominent spot on my coffee table) so I can’t really comment on any of this beyond general agreement with most of the general points being made if not necessarily the particular denials of the textual interpretations on which they’re based (this might turn out not to be the case but based on my priors I’m guessing otherwise).

What I do want to point to, beyond the fact that Walker’s piece is worth reading and a nice sign of growth for the outlet where he posted it, is just how muddled the different segments on Walker’s spectrum are. Censorship is a big pet issue of mine. Mostly I’m interested in it because, like a lot of mythologize political values, it’s difficult to actually talk about the thing itself without getting weighed down by a bunch of ideological baggage. Censorship is a priori bad, ergo anyone who holds a position that can be logically shown to endorse certain forms of censorship is also bad. More subtle ways in which these arguments can get derailed include how we define censorship, e.g. if someone isn’t specifically calling for X person or group to be locked up for saying Y, then it ain’t censorship. 

But I think Walker has prudently already cut through some of that by noting the similarity in kind, if not in magnitude, between taxing, fining, and boycotting. All of them work based on incentive. Whether you don’t voice X opinion because the government will lock you up if you do, or people will stop shopping at your sandwich shop, the point is your behavior is being governed in part, more or less depending on the case, by external incentives.

To me, the important distinction is one Walker points out earlier, though not explicitly, between force and persuasion. The difference between trying to ban the sale of GTA V, either as a member of Congress or an individual citizen, and simply trying to persuade people and game designers that its parody is trashy and internally confused, and its overarching structure and rule system conservative and boring, is a difference that matters. As Walker points out though, they aren't fundamentally different. Both are (I’m off the reservation here and Walker may or may not agree with this elaboration) communicative acts that try to influence the world in the ways we want. 

I wrote at more length about my experience with the game so far here, but the short version is this: Helldivers is somewhere between good and great, also broken and incomplete.

I convinced two friends to buy it on Friday. One was on PS4, the other on PS3. None of us ended up playing together though because, contrary to how Arrowhead Game Studios has advertised Helldivers, it doesn't actually include cross-play at the moment. And despite the 1.03 patch from Thursday, I’m still having save file sync issues between the PS4  and Vita versions, leading me to abandon trying to play the game on the latter for fear of unintentionally overwriting my data, but also because the Vita controls are just sub-optimal, to put it nicely. They aren’t’ even as good as the PS4-streamed-to-Vita controls, which, when you think about it, is kind of ludicrous.

By itself, this is all just a disappointment. The developer lied about the state of the game, and I as a consumer wasn’t diligent enough to check Twitter and Reddit to see if anyone was experiencing issues with it before purchasing. The way the studio has addressed some of these concerns though, especially those having to do with cross-play, the entire reason I urged two of my friends to buy the game, and one of the big reasons why I decided to pick it up when I did, just adds insult to injury,

“Q: ‘Why does this patch not contain improved cross-play functionality?’ A: Cross-play is an advanced system integrated into the entire matchmaking process. The cross-play feature is working as intended across the different platforms, but we are trying to find a way so that you are able to more easily find and play with friends. It is not something we can fix overnight, but we are working on a smoother experiece!”

As one commenter responded to the Q&A, 

"[A]s intended"? Really? My friend on PS4 made a game, I filtered my settings for it. I got a list of 5 games (which doesn't max out one page), and none of them were his - and I was on a PS3. I also tried from an account were we weren't friends. If it "worked as intended", you would be able to find those games by filtering, but we can't. Can only find games we both can see, which end in "host migration..." 100% of the time.”

To my mind, this is made all the worse by the fact that Helldivers is one of the games Sony is promoting heavily as part of its “Spring Fever” marketing campaign. Like, yea, companies lie all the time, so getting caught up on one particular instance of it, especially when it comes to something as frivolous and unimportant as video game purchases, is, in the ultimate scheme of things, more than a little silly.

It seems like only a few hours ago I was guiding the young Ramza Beoulve through his first military campaign to defeat and scatter the Death Corps (in reality it was last week). Now, the renegade high born, less naïve but no less idealistic, has just encountered his first extra-dimensional demigod, Cuchulainn, the Impure.

It’s worth noting just how well Final Fantasy Tactics tackles the obligation of “boss fights” despite being a turn-based tactical RPG. Unlike other battles that build up more slowly with stat buffing and strategic positioning, boss fights against the Lucavi are usually closer to bar fight brawls. Fast paced and extremely messy, my usual plan is to throw everything I’ve got at Cuchulainn as quickly as possible. Whoever isn’t instantly knocked out by his Bio spell is shoved into the fray: my lancer jumps and my wizard targets flare while Ramza launches a blistering frontal assault. It’s intense, and requires some luck, but the result is satisfying, even in the handful of times the battle doesn’t go my way.

Of course, difficult encounters like these always brings back the issue of choosing guest characters over generic ones. I have the same fondness for the random warriors I’ve been cultivating across countless battlefields that I do for the Pokemon I caught and raised myself (as opposed to the Legendary ones which were prepared for me by the game’s developers). Agrias, named after a type of butterfly, is one of the game’s most compelling characters (not least of all because she’s a woman knight who is more capable than the main protagonist), but also arguably its second most overpowered. Developing her “Holy Sword” abilities makes her into a deadly failsafe in any encounter, but it also takes the edge of what might otherwise be tense and challenging affairs.

This is less the case with Mustadio, whose sniping is a support ability, and thus pairs with other weapons and skill sets (like the Knight’s “Break”) in interesting ways. I’ve never been one to enjoy playing a game while actively going out of my way to hold one hand behind my back, which is why using Agrias but just not letting her utilize her most deadly attacks simply doesn’t feel like a solution to me. Nevertheless, with the additional content in the War of the Lions remake, I’m looking forward to being able to unleash guest characters like her on more difficult foes in later side quests.

As for my three main generics, Gwayne, Isabella, and Rosalind, I’m currently at a bit of a loss with what to do with them. Rosalind is going to be my face-to-face combat expert, but there are any number of ways for that to manifest itself. The Monk’s “Hamedo” counter is high up on my list. Though people complain about its reaction rate, it’s always come through for me in big ways in the past. Few things in the game are as satisfying as teleporting a Knight or Ninja into a swath of enemies and see each one pummeled as they try to land physical attacks in vain.

I’m less sure of what to do with Gwayne. He just got Flare and Magic Attack Up, and while I could have him waste time getting every black magic spell, elemental attacks in Tactics are mostly beside the point, making only one spell (fire/ice/thunder) of each level necessary. So what’s next for him? In the past I’ve always been in the habit of segregating physical attacks from magic. If one character was going to have black magic, they were also going to be in charge of summons and time magic as well (though never white magic because Final Fantasy has long since conditioned be to think of those two things as anathema to one another).

But now I’m realizing how inefficient that is. Clearly it’s better to spread the magical wealth, even if that means having to manage unwieldy equipment loadouts (Knights wearing robes and magic gauntlets, Summoners toting around swords, etc.). Hopefully things begin to take a more precise shape as I progress through Chapter 3. For now I’m left to ponder Final Fantasy Tactics various escoteric trade-offs: “Blade Grasp” or “Full Restore,” “Cyclops” or “Meteor,” Mustadio or Agrias?

One last thing though before heading back into the breach. I don’t like many of the “improvements” Square attempted to make to Matsuno’s masterpiece with the War of the Lion’s edition. As others have noted, the animated cutscenes are cheap and over-performed. Tactics’ melodrama succeeds when delivered by understated sprites rather than five cent impressions of Shakespeare.