Matt Gambler

Edit: I'm sticking with calling myself a Necnomancer. Otherwise the risk of being called a TechRomancer is too great.

Let them come.

There is this one decision that I am hesitant about right before I get into the finale, so I figured it was time to just play video games for a while and dream about why one option is awesomer than the other. In the meanwhile I spent a bunch of time on a very special beta reader discord server reading other people's stuff and having them read mine, while also digging my way through potential comp titles inbetween, the usual. But Matt, how ARE you? I'm great! :) My girl is wonderful, my stocks are fun to watch, I'm comparably healthy, comparably relaxed about everything. It's just kinda boring to write this stuff down, so instead, here's a few sneaky peeky lines from Anbari for the thirsty ones: She gave a small nod, if just to put his mind at ease. The truth was that Da had left no doubt about it - she would pass, anything else would be unacceptable. Usually, you got three attempts: one at age nine, one at age twelve, and one at age fifteen. Many failed the first time, the tempering was designed to eliminate some prospects each round. If you failed three times, however, then you deserved death.

But then he went quiet. And it... honestly, it scares me. We need him. I'm not sure where he is or how I will free him, or how long it will take, but know this - I won't return without him. Wish me luck. -some dude with a sword

Name My girl Judith read this and went "why not include a query letter with actual feedback in it instead?" But that's the point - I didn't get one, they are all like that. Might be the writing sucks. Or perhaps the issue isn't in the writing itself, but the query letter is confusing? You know, those 350 words that you have tried to forcefully cram your entire novel into, and then you forgot to mention WHY your bad guy is bad? (Not that I would ever do that, ahem) Or maybe you got everything in there, and your writing is better than your rambly blogging skills would suggest, and it's simply that you decided to debut with a six-part fantasy saga instead of with a standalone novel that may have been a lot simpler and easier to sell. Then of course, you start digging, and obsessing, and throwing yourself around in bed at night, wondering if maybe you shouldn't have written that one part where the donkey fucks the queen! But it *is* a really handsome donkey, after all... Then you go and watch some Youtube videos, and this one agent says "at least have an Instagram account where you post regularly". Another one says "you should definitely have your own website at this stage, after all agents will most certainly look you up". So now I made my very first Instagram account (I left Facebook and Twitter years ago and never looked back) and looked around a bit on websites like Squarespace, although a little whisper in the back of my head is telling me that maybe it just wasn't meant to be. Then again, my brother read the whole thing in a week and told me "you should keep sending it, it's actually good". But I am also aware that I am one of thousands that get rejected every week, maybe even every day. Maybe I could write a standalone prequel in the same world. And if I can manage to sell that, then I don't have to debut with a saga anymore, and maybe that would make it easier then. But also, as I said earlier, maybe it simply needs more work. A stronger hook on page 1. A bit less of X, more Y. And so on. If your head is swimming, so is mine. Finishing my first ever novel resulted in a high that I'm still riding to this day, but I also finished in November, and now we have April. And while I have done a lot of work since then, I don't enjoy this part half as much - and I also haven't written anything new since November, and instead spent my time posting on Instagram, watching Youtube videos put out by literary agencies, reading through the archive of query shark, not to mention reading a ton of novels on the hunt for comp titles that fit, even remotely. I guess that's what I get for wanting to write a story that's different from what I've read before, good luck comparing it to... anything. This might sound like I feel disheartened, the negative nancy that is trying to convince herself into surrender, but really I'm just putting this here so I can show it to all the other aspiring writers one day when they ask me how I managed to become the next Stephen King of Fantasy. Obviously.

So. That’s the line. The map doesn’t end here - but past this point, you may encounter more and more glitches. Scroll on at your own risk.

Apart from that, I did try the game again towards the end of february 2022. I remember specifically because in March I met my girl for the first time in person and spent a 5 week long vacation with her. When I came back, over a month had passed and something else had caught my interest again and I havent gone back since. Curiously, since then I feel like my gaming preferences have changed. I play a lot more casual stuff, Merge Mansion, Neptunes Pride, Prismata, Power Wash Simulator, etc. It feels like even when I come home from work and my girl is asleep, I'd still only barely have enough time to really dive into a game as extensive as Phoenix Point, if at all. Maybe Im growing up, maybe Im growing boring, but really digging into a game that requires 100+ hours from me (especially if we talk highest difficulty ironman) just isnt something I feel like I have the time for anymore. I do find something occasionally that captures me, I spent 350 hours in Against The Storm for example, but it's rare and even in that given example you can finish a run in one or two days, while Phoenix Point would require continuous attention if I dont wanna forget what I was doing or why. So... Maybe one day? And we all know what kind of chance a game really has when that line comes out.

Tldr: I have to stop streaming for a while with little certainty of when or if I come back. I explain why and how and say goodbye just in case. We’ve known for a while that this was coming - and now it’s time. Effective immediately the stream is on ice for an indefinite amount of time. For the longest time I was able to stream for two reasons - my awesome and very generous audience on one hand, grosserdad, the coolest dad out there ever, on the other. But while my father kept the door open so more people could come in, it slowly over time became clear that the sprint would turn into a marathon - which then eventually turned into an entire expedition. When I originally came to him I said that I expected the whole thing to take up to two years to get going without further help from his side, which was of course a little optimistic, but even after four years when I started talking to him about how I didnt want to sit on his wallet anymore, he still responded “at least do one more year”. I am eternally grateful to him for allowing me to try this incredibly exciting experiment. However then Corona came in and it became harder and more unpredictable for my dad too, we knew that with only an average of 200 dollars a month I wouldnt be able to keep going the moment his support ended. I didn’t want to take more from the viewers that I already had, I just needed more and the numbers kept stagnating. Maybe it would have been better if I had kept a big “newest donation” banner on screen, or if I had exclusively streamed XCOM or League of Legends or whatever, but I can say without hesitation that I created exactly the content I myself would have wanted to watch. And it’s alright if there isn’t enough demand for that out there. WHY NOW? Because I have my first serious job interview on Monday, 10 am. I expect they will take me. Even if they don’t, I could maybe dodge a few more and keep streaming with unemployment benefits for a while, but I don’t want to do that. I gave the stream almost 5 years, it’s unlikely that another month or two are suddenly going to triple my average viewer numbers - and even if they would, for how long? Instead the plan for the moment is to get a job, work, have a sleep schedule that works with that and then look at how tired I am when I come home. There might be occasional streams, hell, best case I will even start streaming regularly again 3-4 hours every night, but that would likely require me to only work halftime and I don’t want to make promises if I don’t know I can keep them. I have 10 bucks will this help? Thank you so very much, but the answer to that question is - not really. My audience has always been generous, but we are talking about dimensions here that require more than a one-time financial spike. You have your own life to live, your own problems to deal with and if I can’t draw large enough of an audience to support me, then it is not your job to pay for that. It worked in the past because I had grosserdad backing me up with ~400€ per month and that’s just not something that I can expect my crowd to suddenly cover on a monthly basis. So is this Goodbye then? Maybe? Pretty hard to tell at this point. I’ll start working, I’ll get a new routine and then we will see. I’ll be around on discord just like before, the gameclub can continue, maybe we could even do a meatup next year, who knows. I might even stream every now and then just because its more fun with you guys around. But it won’t be regularly and it likely wont be for as long. I enjoyed streaming for you very much and I will never forget the thousands of hours that we shared, be it hitting on Samantha Traynor, fighting the Alien Menace or just wearing a froghat and joking about pineapple pizza. I’m sad of course, but Im also excited to finally earn more money again and not being dependent on my dad and you guys anymore. And hell, who knows. I might even get a tan. Commander Matt Gambler signing off

No TLDR this time. I said in the past that I could write pages over pages about this. I guess its time to see how many pages we are actually talking about here. Phoenix Point is currently rather mediocre. From the soundtrack to the many bugs and rather rough implementations, the missing features that were envisioned in the kickstarter campaign, the 5 scheduled DLCS, the epic store exclusivity, the inferior graphical polish in comparison to Firaxis’ XCOM reboot, the inferior complexity in comparison to Longwar, probably even the inferior Idontknow in comparison to the very first XCOM games from way back when, I didnt play those. If you are looking for something to hate in this game, you dont have to look too hard, there is something here for everyone. The reason Ive been a determined defender of Phoenix Point is not simply because I have a different taste in games than the mainstream however, but because I feel there is a way deeper underlying problem at work here. I’ll come back to that later. Btw starting now, when I say XCOM, I mean Firaxis’ XCOM. Personally I want more games like XCOM. More games like Battlebrothers, Mordheim: City of the Damned, Invisible Inc, hell, even Bloodbowl, even though I dont dig the sports angle. Games with permadeath, nameable characters, dynamic overworld systems and missions and situations that are created ideally by circumstance, not by simply playing mission 1, then mission 2, until you reach what the devs decided to be the last one they would make for the game. I thoroughly enjoy that concept of progression and many turnbased strategy titles just dont do it for me because they are too linear, even when they are otherwise nicely crafted experiences. Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is a nice example of this, the game looks nice, sounds nice and is very well made, but it lacks the one thing I enjoy most in all the games I mentioned earlier. Along comes Phoenix Point and the moment I look at this game I know that it is all about scratching that specific itch. Not only that, it also brings with it a variety of creative features to even improve the established turnbased squad tactics formula. I didnt lie when I said I think that it is in many ways better than XCOM. Just that... WHAT?!?! ...the overall game doesnt compare well if we look at the sum of their parts at the moment. YOU CANT BE SERIOUS!!!!! About Phoenix Point being better in many ways? Sure, let me make a list. 1) Aiming In XCOM you aim, you have an x% chance to hit, you either hit or you dont. While widely accepted because of the quality of the overall games, its a pretty simple system that becomes especially frustrating when your guns model on screen is touching the enemies forehead and you still manage to miss. Or when a flashbanged and suppressed sectoid crits you in full cover after rolling a natural 20. In Phoenix Point bullets get simulated and trace a path from the barrel of your gun to a target that they then either hit or miss. Smaller enemies in Phoenix Point are hard to hit not because the game designers arbitrarily decided so, but because smaller enemies are simply smaller. In comparison, in XCOM you roll dice. 2) Modular enemies Similar to Battlebrothers, Phoenix Point has you encounter the same brigand thug (crabmen) over and over again. The enemy itself doesnt matter as much, its more about the number of different variations you can encounter. Brigant thugs can come equipped with simple helmets and/or armor as well as different weapons that have different abilities. They also have different faces on top of that. They are by far not the only enemy in the game, but even if they were, by the time you encounter the exact same thug a second time you wont be able to tell anymore because you have seen so many others inbetween. The same goes for most enemies in Battlebrothers (with a few exceptions), it becomes way more about your opponents equipment than about his actual type or class. Phoenix Point goes for the very same approach, but falls short because of  a variety of reasons. To name just one, the first time you encounter New Jericho as a faction, you fight four New Jericho soldiers and all four of them have the same armor, the same weapon and even the same face. To hammer it home the mission also always takes place on a variation of the exact same map. It is an absolute travesty. The ambition is there and in random encounters on the map you can see where it is supposed to go, with every enemy type in the game being designed in a way that allows for as many variations as the devs can think of, from paralysis tentacles and bloodsucking arms to mist generators and everything inbetween. The possibilities are endless and from the standard crab to the giant bosses every enemy is designed with this modularity in mind. In XCOM in comparison, you have a variety of different enemies, but for the entirety of the first month (what is that, 3-7 missions?) you only fight the sectoid. Or maybe the drone too, I havent played vanilla in forever. Longwar tries to spice that up by using preexisting models and assigning new abilities to them, making some models bigger and giving others new abilities, but at the end of the day the sectoid looks the way the sectoid looks. I love what it looks like btw. But modular enemies are decidedly cooler. 3) Scale In XCOM you control 4, later up to 6 soldiers at the same time. In Longwar it goes up to 8, or 12 in that one mission. In Phoenix Point you start out the same way, but to my knowledge you can bring as many soldiers to any mission as you can get there via aircraft. Meaning that as soon as you get a second manticore you can theoretically have up to 12 soldiers in a mission, or 18 with a third. Naturally you would probably want to split your forces instead and be in 3 places at the same time (and you can), but this sort of thing being possible, both the 18 soldiers in one mission as well as the 3 different squads doing missions in 3 different places of the planet, is something XCOM simply does not offer.  4) Other features Be it vehicles, giant enemies, diplomacy or the amount of control you get on the overworld map, Phoenix Point does (or attempts to do) a huge number of things that in XCOM are simply nonexistant. In XCOM you dont get to decide were to fly, missions are simply spawned in popup fashion, the skyranger is on autopilot, “diplomacy” is managed by talking to top secret bald guy representing the council and by sometimes fulfilling a councilrequest. The only opposing faction apart from the aliens is EXALT which can be regarded as more of a separate mission type with human enemies and not really as a faction that contributes in any diplomatic way. Dont get me wrong, I dont think XCOM needs diplomacy in order to be good. XCOM is already good, fantastic in fact. But if we compare based on features alone and not the quality of their implementation, then Phoenix Point is doing A LOT of things that XCOM never even touched. This is in no way me trying to trash XCOM. I love XCOM, especially Longwar. However for the sake of an at least somewhat fair comparison the only games we should compare Phoenix Point to at this Point are XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, both at launch. Bringing Longwar into the mix is something I do for the sake of providing a third angle, not because I am blind to the fact of how ludacris it would be to compare a newly launched game with an extensive overhaul mod that was in the making for years after the vanilla game and even its expansion were already released. As I was saying, along comes Phoenix Point doing all those very ambitious things. And it gets DESTROYED. To quote Beaglerush, the probably best known XCOM streamer out there: “But honestly, for anyone with experience in the XCOM genre, anyone who likes XCOM games, and anyone particularly who likes XCOM games at a harder difficulty or likes to obviously, like, play well, I do not think it is possible to enjoy this game unless you are getting a big paycheck and you are a good actor.” To be clear, I didnt watch the entire footage that made him come to that conclusion and I dont want to comment too much on what “playing well” means, but i have played Longwar on the highest difficulty in ironmanmode for 2000 hours (without beating it, but also always with Training Roulette active) and I have beaten XCOM 2 on highest difficulty in ironman mode. I do consider Longwar as one of my favourite games of all time and I do consider myself as someone who has experience with the genre, likes games and likes to play them “well”, or at least on highest difficulty. I dont agree with Beagle (duh), but I can of course see where he might be coming from. In its current state Phoenix Point is not finished. Playable, but even for an early access game its still pretty rough, with many mechanics not or only sometimes working (leanout, aim and aimsnapping, end turn, details, you get the point), features missing, performance issues, lackluster soldier customization, lackluster diplomacy options, a rather simple skilltree, questionable balance, etc. Don’t look at me like that, if I wanted to I could jump that hatetrain any time! But if I was to do that, where would that leave us? The XCOM genre, as Beagle calls it, is a niche genre at the best of times. Not only regarding the playerbase but also regarding game developers willing to invest time and money into creating something new. Xenonauts 2 is a year or more behind its originally panned release date with not much news to speak of, Terra Invicta is a distant memory of a game that will maybe one day still be released and Im still waiting for the XCOM 3 announcement and who knows if it will even come. Especially after we, the players, completely demolish Phoenix Point to the point where I would just cancel the 5 planned DLCS right now if I was in charge of the devteam. The main reason I defended Phoenix Point was not because of what the game currently is but because of what the game could be after 5 more DLCs. Ive played every backerbuild of the game and statements like “the game is still what it was 2 years ago” are simply and factually false. Especially between backerbuild 4 and 5 there was a huge jump in quality and between 5 and the release version that same jump has ocurred again - with an entire game that is now playable and completable. Yes, it could have more voiced lines instead of text, yes, it doesnt have the sexy “alerted sectoid” animation sequence when you run into a new enemy pod (pods dont exist in PP but you get me) and sure, the epic exclusive sucks I guess and I dont care much for the soundtrack. But after Backerbuild 5, who knows where the game will be after the next DLC? And the next? If you compare XCOM Enemy Unknown with XCOM Enemy Within, the difference was breathtaking. And here we have a game that has so much work already done, so many assets created, so much code already in place, and we, the players, punch them in the face and shout “NOT GOOD ENOUGH!”. You wanna go back to the drawing board, have somebody else start fresh on something that could be better in a year or two if we are lucky? Ive been looking for a game like XCOM for literally years. Battle Brothers was the closest I found. Tens, if not hundreds of others inbetween failed hard, from “Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus” to “Legends: Viking” to “Wildermyth” and basically everything inbetween. And here we have a game that seems to have the right idea, the right amount of ambition and a good amount of the work already done and we are bitchslapping them left and right just so we can go back to getting hyped about the next mediocre linear story experience. Sure, them releasing already is a shame. But if I was the one to decide, I would give them the same amount of money again and triple it and tell them to finish the job instead of spitting in their face when they come to us and lowkey tell us that they ran out of money. And I would send them flowers and tell them that Im sorry. Anybody can polish a game with extra cash, but getting the core idea right is something that even Firaxis almost failed to do with XCOM 2, as far as Im concerned. I said earlier, that there was a deeper underlying problem here and that I would come back to it and here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Modernday gamers are an ungrateful, hateful bunch of whiny spoiled brats, who think they are entitled to only the best of the best while in fact they “deserve” nothing. The entire concept of a kickstarter campaign is that you provide funds and trust so a bunch of people can try to realize their vision. If you dont like the outcome, then that doesnt mean they betrayed you, it means you have poor judgement. Notice how I say judgement and not taste. You dont have poor judgement because you dont like the outcome, but because you gave them money in the first place. I should maybe add at this point that my anger is mostly directed towards the public reaction and the phoenix point subreddit and not towards my own viewership. (hello) Phoenix Point is not the first game that has had me feel like the entire gaming landscape is slowly spiraling out of control. 5 years ago I thought quality means sales. At this point Im worried that a high marketing budget means sales. And I dread the possibility that 5 years from now I might be convinced that a high marketing budget means quality. Some of the best games this year were literally destroyed by players. Artifact wasn’t only boykotted, but actively brutalized, with people at some point purposefully streaming porn and torture under the Artifact tag on Twitch. Pathologic 2 had the devteam almost go bankrupt after poor sales and unfavourable reviews by people that barely grasped the basics of the game. All the while people feed money to the ginormous immortal that is Magic The Gathering and praise Hideo Kojima for his “unique vision” for Death Stranding. I didnt play Death Stranding and Magic can be pretty fun, but does nobody see the smothering double standards in play here? Im not saying that Phoenix Point has no problems right now in terms of quality. Some of the issues player encounter are in fact inexcusable, at least longterm. But XCOM 2 also had a bumpy launch with long loading times and tons of bugs and then they were fixed and today there are people that think XCOM 2 is better than Longwar. Incomprehensible to me how anyone could think that, but time and some postlaunch fixes did clearly change peoples minds. I think the main reason Phoenix Point got so much hate on launch in comparison to XCOM 2 (which also released 3 DLCs ,or was it more) is because its drastically different and more ambitious in many ways, not because it is half as bad as people make it out to be. XCOM is just like Phoenix Point, just dumbed down I guess. Kappa. (I hate it when people use the term “dumbed down”. This is a joke. Ffs why do I have to explain this)

... I’m getting a little unfair here, I know. I actually think coop is a cool feature, even though I personally never used it and even the multiplayer pvp invasions are an original and interesting concept, although I’m not personally into it. Magic is cool too, although poorly balanced and therefore in my opinion less interesting. The reason I added those last two points to my unfinished list is not because I dislike them, but because of the lately relevant “does Sekiro need an easy mode” controversy. Especially the most elitist diehard fans of the souls franchise strongly disagree with the addition of an easy mode, which is funny... ... given that Dark Souls 1 has several. Personally I dont think Sekiro NEEDS an easy mode, but it sure wouldnt hurt anyone. I personally wouldnt have minded playing on a lower difficulty, I had three or four bosses greatly overstay their welcome before I finally managed to smash their asslike faces in. ...but Im rambling. On a surface level, just looking at the feel of combat, movement and overall story coherence Sekiro is already miles ahead, but I can understand that it therefore feels less like a Souls game and that not everyone will like that. I can understand and respect that. DarkSouls 1, as well as 2 and maybe even 3, have a couple of features that I greatly appreciate and that partly even surpass Sekiro in my otherwise overly critical eyes. Dark Souls 1 has the best and most memorable map in my opinion. Dark Souls 2 has incredible DLCs, especially Frozen Eleum Loyce was awesome and beautiful, with the minor exception of that retarded snow zebra area and how you would respawn *before* the loading screen to get there again instead of after. I also liked the Pursuers concept a lot, as well as the idea of despawning mobs if you killed them often enough. I dont remember much about DS3, it was okay as far as Im concerned but I enjoyed it the least out of the three, probably because of burnout as I had played through all three (blind) in a row. Im mentioning all of this because I want to clarify that in my eyes Sekiro is not THE TIMELESS MASTERPIECE NOBODY WILL EVER SURPASS that Darksouls 1 is often celebrated as. But in many ways it is headed in a direction that makes more sense to me than “if you are not enjoying it then you are doing it wrong and you should maybe think for once”. (Not that Sekiro streamers werent told exactly that just the same) Let me tell you, there were many instances in Sekiro where I also didnt think, didnt consider every possible option the game had given me, honestly Im pretty sure I sucked most of the time, in the eyes of your usual GITGUD-Bro. But I struggled, I improved, I succeded, and I had a way better time during it all, even though I did the same shit in the Souls games as well. Just without falling off edges in waist-high water every 10 minutes, or being invaded by some bowing edgelord, or losing 50% of my max hp as punishment for dying to the wrong enemy. There is this myth going around online that Dark Souls might be a harsh mistress, but at least a fair one. The one spreading that rumour must have been the Bed of Chaos herself, because that is nothing but horseshit. Sekiro isnt exactly fair all the time either, there are many moments in the game that feel all too familiar in their GOTCHA nature. Like how the game conveniently places the key to one of the hardest areas of the early game in your path so you go check it out just to get crucified there by Lady Butterfly and a special drunkard, just for you to learn after finally breaking both of them that you would have had a way easier time if you had simply ignored that area and soldiered on on your original path. Sure, one could have simply abandoned that area and returned later, but how many of you did? I sure didnt. The game likes to oneshot-kill you if you fail to dodge the wrong attack, be it a giant carp, a giant snake, or a giant TERROR man. Even worse, in Sekiro you cant even get your souls back! You die, you lose 50%. ALso 50% of your cash. Suck it. Im not particularly happy about that myself and Im not sure what the motivation behind that design decision was, but you take the good with the bad, right? Another thing that Sekiro does that I dont understand is how the game has you collect loot. Every time you kill an enemy you need to hold a button to collect. You can kill several in an area and then grab everything at once if they arent too far apart, but at the end of the day it eludes me why From Software didnt simply go for autocollecting instead. It’s not a big deal (even though I would forget about picking up loot every now and then) but at the same time it isnt adding any enjoyment to the game either, no matter how hard I try and emphasize with whatever a gamer who likes this might possibly think. It is not hard, its is not really relevant,  and I cant think of a single advantage it has over autocollecting. Maybe holding that button is supposed to feel rewarding? I consider it meaningless at best and tedious busywork at worst. At the same time the game introduces a stealth system that actually means something, while at the same time keeping it both well integrated as well as completely optional. Im truly impressed by how that is even possible. I also like the immortality mechanic, that results in you only truly dying if you go down twice, and even refreshes that revive if you kill enough enemies inbetween deaths. It doesnt help that much, as it doesnt refill your estus fl.... healing gourds, but it allows for a little bit more practice against tough enemies before you die, a little bit more lenience while exploring in an area where it is easy to fall, a little bit more standing power in a world where a giant carp can simply eat you. I appreciate it and it is far from making the game anything close to easy. Its more like an extra gourding flask. I could keep going and praise this (surprisingly satisfying enemy style and variety given the setting) or criticize that (less replayability because of fewer possible weapons and builds), but at the end of the day my opinion is crystalclear - Sekiro is stunningly beautiful, very enjoyable, hard as fuck, and while I have heard people say that “it is not a true soulslike”, I have to shrug and agree. It is better.

Pathway is beautiful, and if I were to make games myself I would want them to look like this. Pixelart is not for everybody and doesnt fit every game equally well, but personally I am happy that games with this kind of aesthetic are still being made and they usually get me at least curious instantly. You control a diverse cast of adventurers in a setting that perhaps isn’t new, but which still feels refreshing as it isnt nearly as oversaturated as your everyday Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Postapocalyptic / WW2 scenario. But Matt, technically speaking this is World War 2 as well, arent you fighting nazis? And zombies arent exactly the most original opponents either... True perhaps, but it still feels more like an Indiana Jones setting than anything else and I can appreciate that as an attempt to do something different. With that being said, it is not the setting or the graphics that quickly had me lose interest, but rather a couple of specific design decisions. 1) Roguelite Progression? I love good roguelites and I can sink weeks into them once they have me hooked, dying my way from unlock to unlock while I develop my skills until Im finally ready to face the final boss for the first time, every run feeling different because of different characters, different upgrades, etc.  Replayability and difficulty are king here and when I looked at all the playable characters that I could unlock I got excited and was reminded of what it felt like when I played Dungeon of the Endless for the first time. Pathway, however, chooses a somewhat untypical format for it’s actual missions (or adventures, as they are called). Each one of them has a wincondition that seems easily achieveable, and unlocks a completely different mission once it is done, which is only connected to the one before via story and nothing else. You can switch characters inbetween, you cannot build up a reserve of ammo or fuel, and if you fail adventure 3, you simply retry that one instead of the earlier ones. On top of that characters gain experience and become stronger, but after they die progress is not lost, similar to leveling up gods in Thea - The Awakening. Characters are different from each other, but also rather restricted in what they can and cannot do, with most characters only being able to wield one type of weapon and having perks that for the most part are only relevant in specific textbased events. For example you may find a sick camel and if you have a character with medical skills you can choose to try and heal it. Otherwise, keep moving, nothing to do here. 2) Interesting choices? Levelups are similarly uninspired. Yes, your heroes have a skilltree, but almost all of the possible choices are bland stat increases, so you may have the choice between slightly more movement, slightly more accuracy or a slightly higher critchance. Endurance is the worst example of this, as it only increases the time that a character can survive unconscious after they have been downed. That, combined with a levelcap of 5 per character and the fact that your heroes remain leveled up for all future runs as well, turns character progression into something that is not only rather boring, but also eventually completely removed from your games altogether. Personally I fail to see the appeal of this method and I would have probably enjoyed the game just as much (if not more) if levelups were completely absent from the game. The few skills that are not stat increases are usually unlocking a different weapon or armor type, so your character might be able to now wear light OR medium armor instead of only light armor. Usable abilities do not exist apart from that, they are exclusively tied to what weapons and armor you have equipped and there is one ability per weapon. A shotgun can fire at all enemies in a cone, a sniper rifle allows a person to go into coneshaped overwatch. Light armor lets you sprint, medium armor allows you to duck so you are harder to hit and heavy armor allows you to hunker down so you take only 50% of the damage you otherwise would have taken. It is all very basic and for people that have played the XCOM games, Battlebrothers, or really any game with a skilltree, there isn’t much to see here. What makes this even worse is that you can find weapons, but often you can’t use them eitherway because the vast majority of characters are shackled to only their one preferred weapon and armor type so they will always have the same weapons, therefore weaponbound abilities and because of the levelup system even stats. All of this denies meaningful choice (apart from what team of characters to send in together) and shackles replayability completely needlessly. 3)Enemy variety and combat The first adventure features nazi dogs, nazi troopers and nazi shocktroopers. I believe the final fight of the map has a first medic. Troopers and shocktroopers use rifles, the dog bites, the medic can heal and uses a pistol. Enemy numbers vary between 3 and 5 in all fights. On its own that doesnt sound so bad yet, and later adventures introduce new enemies, most notably zombies but also nazi snipers, officers, medics, I stopped playing there but there’s probably more later, right? So what am I complaining about? This is a rough guess, but I would say in order to beat the first adventure you have to go through about 7-10 battles. Each one of them uses the same three enemies. Some might not have shocktroopers, some might not have dogs, but it will always be 3-5 enemies either in a procedurally generated ruin, or a procedurally generated desert base, or maybe a desert bunker if or desert oasis. Hell, even writing this is boring. The biggest culprit here is probably not even enemy variety, but the fixed numbers. Battles happen quite regularly and they all feel pretty much the same. Sometimes it’s an ambush and you have to deploy your heroes in the center of the map, other times its not and you deploy on one side, but at the end of the day these fights all feel the same and I found myself hoping everytime I would move my people that I would find nothing again, instead of another fight. This, combined with all the other things I mentioned before basically results in a gameplay experience that is always the same. Your characters are the same (but hey, at least there are many different ones to choose from, I count that as a big Plus), your enemies are the same, the maps are the same and the abilities your characters as well as the enemies can use are always the same. A shame really. The Saving Grace However I want to note that it is not all bad. While combat itself gets repetitive rather quickly, the overworldmap and resource management in general are pretty great. One run you might run out of ammo very quickly, on another you might trigger a trap or 2 early and struggle with healing supplies and in the next you wont have enough jeep fuel. (Im kidding you never have enough jeep fuel) This, together with the fact that characters do not only use up bullets as a ressource, but also do not heal inbetween fights, gives the game a sense of lasting attrition that you need to fight against, which felt a lot deeper and had me more engaged than for example running out of fuel in FTL in comparison. One of the things that I was worried about most in combat was not the battle itself, but how I could get by without using too many bullets. How many enemies could I shank or knock out instead? At the end of the day there wasnt enough to keep me busy however. Games like The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon have me excited about what weapon I will unlock next or how different the next run will play out. What bosses will I have to fight this run? If Pathway has bosses, then I stopped playing before encountering teh first one, I was deep into adventure 2, on its 3rd map to be specific. The game seemingly doesnt want you to have too many options, doesnt give you a sufficient amount of skills to choose or other choices to make and basically falls flat when it comes to replayability. A shame, because music and graphics are beautiful and the overworld map hints at what potential there was. If I ever run into Pathway 2 I will try it, but in the first 5 minutes of the game I will look at the skilltrees and keep an eye out for abilities like “allows character to use shotguns” and hope that I dont find anything.

!points Shows you how many burgers you have earned, as well as hours watched and your current rank. You earn one burger every 5 minutes, or double, if you have been active at all in chat in the last 30 minutes. !give username amount of burgers (!give matt_gambler 666) Gives someone your burgers. It is encouraged not to give burgers to people just to be nice. We had that in the past and then some guy who barely ever watches the stream gets to name a character and immediately disappears again, or even enters a game in the tournament, etc. Burgers are a way to reward viewers and should be reserved for people who actually watch the stream. That’s pretty much it. Now of course there is all that fancy stuff, there is a !quote command, !twitter and !discord and many more, but most of that is fluff that you pick up by watching the stream enough and which isnt really important. THEN there are of course all the fancy soundbits, but I don’t have a list of those because then somebody who already accumulated some burgers finds that list and naturally is tempted to try ALL THE SOUNDBITS IMMEDIATELY - and that is tedious for me as a streamer to go through repeatedly. Therefore soundbits are handed down from generation to generation and you best learn them by being in chat when somebody else uses them. You can of course make your own lists if you like, but I will not be responsible for them being up to date or even have anything to do with them at all. So if you find a list that says that !ahuhuhu costs 50 burgers, be aware that by now I might have changed the price to 10 0000000000000 or possibly might have deactivated it alltogether, so use at your own risk, no burger refunds. :P

TLDR: Viewers had until December 1st to enter the Sellout Tournament with their game suggestion.Starting on January 1st 2019 I will play games that were suggested by participants and whichever game nets me the most new followers wins - and with it the guy who suggested it earns 20 000 burgers. Participation Rules 1) In order to participate one must pay the 2000 burger entry fee 2) Only one game per participant 3) The goal of the tournament is to suggest a game that results in as many followers as possible. Trollpicks, boosting score with alternate accounts or any other behavior that seems to me as if the system is being abused can result in a rejection of any given game at any given time. Yes, that includes you not caring about the tournament and simply wanting to see your favourite game. 4) Games that already appeared on the channel at any point in the past are not allowed. Exceptions to this rule can be made but are unlikely. 5) The participants suggest a game. They do not however influence the time at which the game is being streamed, the way in which it is being streamed, if I have a donation ticker on screen or if I’m wearing a christmas tree costume. Tournament Rules All games submitted until December 1st are randomly pulled from the pool one after the other and streamed for one day at first. If during this day at least 2 follows happen, the game qualifies for stage 2 and is continued on stream on the next day. If at the end of this day the total number of follows is higher than 5, the game qualifies for stage 3 and is continued on the next day, etc. These are the qualification requirements. Stage 2 does not mean 5 follows on the second day but 5 follows in total since the beginning of stage 1. These numbers are subject to change based on how many game submissions actually come in before December 1st.  Stage 1 - 2 follows Stage 2 - 5 follows Stage 3 - 10 follows Stage 4 - 18 follows Stage 5 - 30 follows Stage 6 - I’ll think about that once the first game reaches stage 6 Tournament Prizes Once a game can’t reach the requirements anymore, we note down the final score in follows and continue with the next suggested game until all participants have been evaluated. The one who suggested the game which resulted in the most follows at the end of the tournament receives 20 000 burgers. Based on how many people actually participate there could also be prizes for 2nd-10th place. The premise here is to make it into the top 33% so if 30 people participate the first 10 gain more burgers then they paid as entry fee. If only  6 people participate, there will be a prize for second place. Maybe third too if Im feeling generous. FAQ Q: When does the tournament end? Depends, no idea. If there are 28763 participants and each one of them gains me 32672139 followers, then I’ll probably die from old age before the tournament ends. Q: Can I pick any game I like? Any game that 1) you genuinely think has a chance to win, 2) will not get me banned on Twitch and 3) I havent already streamed in the past. If you are not sure if I have streamed the game you have in mind, feel free to ask. Q: What if you hate my game? Then I have to play it anyway. Sir Van Birne has already suggested League of Legends and if there is any justice in the world then he will burn for that. It’s part of the fun, I will however not pretend to like a game if that is not the case. Let the salt flow. Q: What happens if two or more people suggest the same game? Then they may highfive each other and share the entry fee as well as the prize money. Q: How do we go about suggestin our games? You simply tell me, and make it official by paying the entry fee. You do that by visiting my streamchat and then typing the following line: !give matt_gambler 2000 If the bot confirms that the transaction is successful, great. Otherwise you were unlucky enough to catch the bot being offline and have to repeat the process later one more time. Without the bot confirming it, nothing happened and you didnt lose any burgers. In order to see how many burgers you have you can also write !points in chat, which tells you your burgercount, how many hours you have watched, as well as your current rank. Q: Do I have to be on the Discord server in order to participate? No, but you are missing out. Get Discord. Q: How do you afford all the games from those suggestions? I buy games all the time for the stream anyway. The only difference is that you get to pick one for a change. Q: All those rules are complicated! That is not a question. However, you don’t need to remember most of that stuff, it’s just here for reference in case somebody wants to look at something in more detail. Read the participation Rules section. Apart from that you don’t have to keep track of any numbers or even be there for the stream. Q: Can we vote on the winner? No. The game that results in the most follows wins. If you viewbot me I will kick you in the ass. Q: Can we influence the outcome by being active in chat and inviting people to follow, or by getting friends to watch the stream? Sure. If you copy paste “DONT FORGET TO FOLLOW” every 3 minutes I will get annoyed however and eventually time you out until I’m done with your game. Getting friends to watch the stream is fine and you should do that even when there isnt a tournament anyway. Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe and all that. Q: Is there a list of all games already suggested somewhere? No and there won’t be one. I think it’s more fun to pull out game after game at random and hope it will be exciting which game happens next. Also I dont feel like making that list and then keeping it up to date. However I will tell people what game will happen after the current one if they ask me directly. Q: What happens if game X releases during the tournament? For games that are in the pool that are only going to be released during December, I will still draw them at random but redraw if the game is not released yet. If it launches on December 4th and only gets drawn again on December 29th, then that is bad luck. Streaming a game right at launch isn’t reliably better anyway as most games attract a lot of competition on launch day. For games that ARE NOT in the pool - you are probably talking about the Battle Brothers DLC. There are very few games that I am so hyped for that i need to play them immediately but yes, if the Battlebrothers DLC (or Wargroove, or perhaps Below off the top of my head) release during the Tournament, then we will probably simply pause or delay the Tournament. (note - BB DLC released pretty much immediately after I wrote this, tournament was delayed to start only at the beginning of the new year) Q; I have a question that’s not in the FAQ! Ask me on Discord or while I’m live.

EDIT: This is the Police 2 has a skip button. Not for the tutorial, but for the cutscenes. I was wrong after all when it comes to that detail, but will leave the entry unaltered apart from this correction. Please play more games. I’m sure there are many restrictions and hardships in the life of a gamedev, deadlines, funding problems, pressure to keep an active playerbase for multiplayer games, etc. I do not claim that making games is easy. I do claim that I could do it better than many of you however. Feel free to send me job offers if you like. Yesterday after the stream I looked at This is the Police 2, a game that intrigued me and even now still looks interesting, inspired even. But in order to play the game you have to get through a short, wellmade tutorial and then you have to watch 45 minutes of cutscenes. 45 minutes. Sweet jesus, have you ever even heard of the word “pacing”? And of course you cannot skip any of it, to my knowledge, and I even checked the steam forums after Google couldnt help me. This is only one of countless, literally unbelievable fuckups. The makers of Dawn of War 3 admit they were partly inspired by the popularity of Mobas. Duelyst embraces Grandmaster Variax and decides its players are dirt. Ash of Gods should have been a book based on the amount of reading required. The Forest decides it doesn’t need to put content in it’s forest. Battletech decides it just wants to exist in slowmotion. No Mans Sky says hi. Yes, there are good, successful games out there, worth every cent they are asking for, and often more than that. But the majority of games I play seem to have a new goal in mind: lowering the consumers expectations, permanently. I’m being an ass here of course, but that doesn’t change the underlying message. Many of these games only exist because there is no minimum bar of quality and everybody can just try it and if they dont make money off of it, well, thats the risk they take, right? Sure. But I hate how much of my time you guys waste in the process. So what I am suggesting is that you play more games. Pay attention to what you like and what you dislike. And maybe, just maybe, you won’t put 45 minutes of unskippable cutscenes at the beginning of your game. I had a guy message me, he was making a game, wanted me to take a look. It was somewhat of an Enter the Gungeon clone and I could appreciate that, ambitious, but it’s a solid and proven concept. His demo was way worse of course and I ended up writing him a 2 page list of things Id work on for one reason or another, often referencing Enter the Gungeon while at it - until it turned out the guy didn’t even KNOW what game I was talking about! I mean, hey, good for you, making clones is sort of frowned upon anyway, but seriously - and I want you to write that down - YOU DONT MAKE AN RTS WITHOUT PLAYING STARCRAFT AND YOU DONT MAKE A MOBA WITHOUT PLAYING LEAGUE OF LEGENDS. If you wanna make a roguelite, maybe play some of the most successful roguelites first? Just a thought. I’ll stop being an ass now and wait for This is the police 2 to implement a fucking skip button.

I would provide a link for a BattleTech melee attack as well but I couldn’t find a reasonably short clip between the thousands of letsplays. Im sure you get my point.

I am showing you this because a) I think it’s interesting and b) because I want to show you that the curve is clearly going up. I don’t have the numbers for 2016, but it looked pretty much like February to May, I probably made less. The big jump in August can be explained by the fact that I got my sub button in June and Twitch keeps the money for 2-3 months in case of refund requests or whatever else can happen to that money. Looking at these numbers I can’t predict the future, but I want to believe. I want to look back at where we were a year ago and where we are now and hope that a year from now things are looking even better. I’m not sure if the channel grew at a slow pace or at a quick one, I have no idea what the average growth rate for streamers like me is and how big of an issue it would be if others grew quicker than me. I don’t really care either. What I do care about is that the past two years were the best of my life and I would absolutely passionately hate to ever stop. Even the thought of streaming less makes my heart cramp a little, because I’m worried that only 4 hours per day or only 3 days a week (or whatever else we might end up doing if we have to) would turn the steady growth of our community into a slow decline. Is that likely? I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried streaming less before. So - what now? The big Dad was kind enough to ease me into it instead of suddenly cutting off all support. What that means is that according to my calculations I will need to earn about 600 € per month starting in March. 900 € starting in June. 1500€ starting in October. Clearly that is not gonna happen just by streaming, I’m not about to ask you guys to suddenly give me 10 times as much money as you have so far. As a matter of fact I will have to find a dayjob, no matter what happens. However! I still have about 2000€ saved up. The big Dad took care of rent, insurance, etc over the past two years and provided 500€ per month on top of that for me to spend on food, energy drinks, etc. Given that I have money leftover I clearly don’t need 500€ per month, but I felt it would be better to calculate with those numbers instead of shaving off every last cent and then having to realize after 6 months that I was too optimistic. I bring up those 2000€ because that effectively means that I can keep streaming for at least another two months, no matter what. Of course I will. However, sooner or later I will run dry and have to find work. I’m not afraid to not find anything, I’ve done a hundred jobs before I started streaming and I’m confident I can find something immediately if I have to. The question is how much the schedule will suffer because of that. Worst Case I have to take a fulltime job. 40 hours every week, it pays enough for me to get along, but I come home tired everyday and then maybe sit down and stream for 2-3 hours, possibly not even everyday. Even in that case I will live just fine. I won’t go hungry and I won’t have to sleep under a bridge, but I will miss you guys like hell. And worst case many of you will eventually stop missing me and the whole thing dies a slow and painful death. Best Case I have streamed for another three months - and with your support maybe even 4 or 5 - and since then the community has continued to grow and I can now comfortably work for only 30 or even 20 hours per week and still stream a good amount, most people don’t even notice that my dayjob makes me stream a little less. We continue like that for another year or two and eventually I quit my dayjob again because by now I don’t need it anymore. Realistically speaking we will probably end up somewhere inbetween those two extremes. I have always strongly believed in the way I run my stream and that includes how I treat financial support, subscriber goals, etc. This blog entry on its own is already almost violating those beliefs. Accept gratefully what you are given, do not ask for more. I have seen too many people try to milk their audience at one point or another and I would absolutely hate to have any of you feel like I’m doing the same now. So if you are even the slightest bit unsure if you want to support me or not, please don’t. The Donate-Option is only for those that want it, and always will be. However if you always felt like “nah, his dad is taking care of it anyway.” - Well the times of milk and honey are sadly over. Glhf to all of us. :P FAQ “So basically you are asking us for money because you don’t want to get a proper job like the rest of us?“ Yes and no. Obviously I want to keep streaming as much as possible and having a job at the same time makes that impossible. However I never wanted to ask people for money, I even refused to get a donation button for the first 4 months because I felt like I “wasn’t good enough yet”. Even now writing this is something I do because I have to, and be it only because if I dont explain it right away, I will have to do it anyway once people start asking why the schedule got butchered and left to die in a corner. However there is no reason to approach me and explain why sadly you cannot support me. I completely understand. Please don’t try to help if you can’t easily afford it. If you really want to, however, then you can. “I really want to help more, but sadly I can’t.” As I just said - I completely understand. However - there are many ways of helping me out that don’t include money at all. KittyTwo and Monokilho only found me because JohnyEdx told them about my channel. Kaioner was then dragged along by those two (I think). Even more importantly, simply watching the stream is by far the best way to support me (apart from straightup buying my soul with money). Not only from a channelgrowth-perspective but more importantly because I love to have you in chat when I stream. I have no idea how likely this is, but by far my biggest fear for the future is that a radical change in schedule could turn a slow and steady growth into a sudden decline alà “well, he’s gonna stop soon anyway, might as well find a new guy to watch”. Some of you might smile right now and think that I’m an idiot and that I worry too much. Others might have already left, it’s not like I can tell. “I am a subscriber already, and I watch a lot, I’m somewhat surprised your income isn’t already higher given how many subs you have.” You are forgetting that the sub button, while certainly effective at killing aliens, comes with it’s downsides. Twitch and I have a 50/50 split, so for every 5€ that you lose, I get about 2,50. Possibly less, there’s no easy way for me to tell if there’s additional fees, I just get for example 120€ at the end of the month and I have to assume that subs and bits added up to that amount. In comparison, if you give me the same amount using the donation button below the stream, I receive between 4,30€ and the whole 5 €. Even though I’m not sure how that is possible, but my Paypal history shows me that that has happened every now and then. Maybe Paypal had a Happy Hour at some point. Of course - if you use the Donation Button instead of the Subbutton, you don’t get the emotes, and the sub streak message, and the fancy subbadge, etc. It’s your call, but if you want me to keep streaming, one option helps more than the other. “Matt, I read through all of that and you should really do X. We need to raise more money, I recommend you ask for donations every 20 minutes and sell nudes on Discord. Also host more Girlstreamers, and you definitely need to upload more to Instagram.“ Your help is greatly appreciated and I am happy that you are so invested in my stream. But backseating is still a no-go. I have thought about this for two years and I will stick to my ideals, for better or worse. If you are convinced that you have it all figured out better than me, feel free to start your own channel. There are a few rare people that have mastered the fine art of suggesting ideas to me without making it feel like a command, but I am seriously touchy when it comes to how I run my stream. “Matt, will you play X if I give you enough money?“ Depends on the amount and the game, but in 99% of all cases, no. “Matt, will you sleep with me if I give you enough money?“ Depends on the amount and the dickpic, but in 99% of all cases, no.