The trick is that if you made a good game, then in ten years idiots will point to your highly political game as being from the time when games weren’t woke.

I’ll let you know if any good anecdotes come of it, thanks!

Wish listed. Should I show my kid? They’re a strong reader but would probably do no reading and smash the button with their forehead most days

That’s kind of their brand

Time to round up the nerds, we’re going to make the whitepaper of a shabby Russian grift startup run Doom.

It’s very much standing on the shoulders of Chrono Trigger, but in such an intelligent way that it ends up being the better game. Objectively (gameplay, art, direction, music, and writing are all much more ambitious in scope while remaining firmly rooted in the tradition of retro turn based RPGs) and subjectively (we got pretty emotional at some points and laughed pretty hard a few times, always stayed invested in the story) it’s just a better game than CT, which is something I simply never expected to say about a new game.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Noita, but haven’t beaten it.

What a list! You did all that this year?

I got through Sea of Stars this month. Really happy with it, glad there’s plenty of endgame side-quests since I’m not ready to say goodbye. I’ll be following Sabotage closely in the future.

If I can go back to any of that and not be deeply mystified by our collective insanity, we weren’t trying hard enough

Too fun, would scare normies

You don’t feel you came on a bit strong? Did you actually expect a sensitive and conciliatory response to your comment?

He’s busy… Doing everything

Apparently I’ve just shared in Funko Pop’s passion for creativity.

Is this a different language that sounds deceptively like English? I feel like someone wrote this by running whale song through an LLM.

It’s a pity all social media can’t just be normal links so we could actually talk about things instead of fussing with how we share them.

There’s stuff you can buy

… Maybe it’s in the tradition of Magritte? “This is not a game.”

We don’t really teach appreciation of art enough. People unabashedly “hate watch” shows or go out to see blatant cash grabs in theatre, and buy games they don’t enjoy…

I’ve had arguments with friends who defend shows they admit have no redeeming value, and are only watching it because there’s a lot of it. Like there’s a hole in them that can only be filled with sufficient volumes of content. I can’t even talk to them anymore.

Art is in a way the study of choice. To simply make things without meaning anything by them, without doing anything on purpose except to make money, to me is little more than cheap nihilism - without adding to the conversation in the way that considered nihilism can.

A few game makers actually do contribute to the conversation of games as art, following on what came before and enriching us with new ideas. Those few should be followed closely and supported, when you find them.

Of all the callow villainry, I wish a comparison to Baldur’s Gate 3 was the worst I’ve heard. I have seen such articles talk about Avowed in terms of Skyrim, which was released closer to Banjo Kazooie than Avowed. No irrelevant remark is beyond them, no matter how patently inane.

His games are certainly cinematic, and as game directors go he’s certainly an auteur. I’m still not sure why he felt the need to clarify.

Okay now I might buy it just for the redemption arc.

It’s a surface book 3. I’m out of office at the moment so the comparison is from memory alone, sorry if I was significantly off.

Further wrinkle: I run it from an external SSD.

Mine is not dissimilar and it runs BG3 on low settings.

Could also just be a well intentioned skew. A terminally ill person who’s already a fan and is getting a special gift from the developer isn’t about to say “the gameplay is fine, but it failed to make the most of its niche and has several glaring bugs”, are they?

Finally will get to play as whoever Ciri yells at for sucking

I think we’re about six hundred doomed worlds deep by now. Eventually we hope to cross some kind of Einsteinian barrier to get to the other side

I honestly don’t hate the idea of that. Obsidian’s style is far more novelistic, and this format of game is best when it’s just putting you inside a good story.

That’s fine, I think there are enough From titles to last me. I still haven’t gotten through BB, Sekiro, ER, or AC6. I’ll probably have finished them by the fifties, assuming civilization exists that long.

Plus, the actual creatives aren’t gone just because their studio stopped making games, they usually keep working in some other role. It’s hardly ideal, but it’s wrong to frame this as a loss of their future contributions.

To equivocate a little, a great team is bottled lightning and having them disbanded because of market dynamics is a loss.

I should have said more, for once. I meant simulation more to describe the Bethesda house style, which seems to be this idea that having apples that can roll around on a table or whatever is immersive and engaging enough that you don’t need Michael Kirkbride hanging around putting weird metaphysical shit all over the place, actually. I wasn’t saying they were good at it, only that it appears to be what they think.

I think they really don’t believe in storytelling in the way traditional game writers do. They think enough simulation can replace good writing.

Personally I’m certain they are wrong, and it’s tragic that they own the Elder Scrolls IP.

If their takeaway from this decade’s comedy of errors is to make more Metroid, I’d say let them cook. Dread was a little too easy (a scrub like me could beat it) but they could do worse than keep fine tuning that recipe.

When Elder Scrolls had a character sheet, you designated specific skills that would contribute to leveling. Stealth archers were only as common as the people who preferred that play style.

Archery did kinda suck in ES3 though. Point being, incidental play didn’t sabotage your character authorship. Character sheets are great.

This comment really makes me feel like Spider-Man

I agree. It does seem like media literacy vis a vis video games is not as generally strong as it ought to be, and if people did have a deeper understanding of game design, art, and writing in general even a brief look at gameplay would be enough for most people to make up their minds. If you have an even somewhat strong understanding of games I think it’s not too hard to sense at a glance how the game you’re seeing is trying to contribute to the conversation in game development. Between that, weighted reviews, and even the thumbs up or down from one familiar reviewer is usually enough for me to tell if I will get my money’s worth. I almost can’t remember the last time I bought a game on this basis and wasn’t happy - it was Nier: Automata actually, and that was basically because I didn’t like the feel of the combat, which is hard to spot. Didn’t even get to all the bleak philosophy stuff I was looking forward to, I just bounced off it hard.

Indie games have never been better, there’s no problem here that doesn’t solve itself if people just stop buying bad AAA titles

This isn’t Hitchhikers Guide, we don’t have an improbability drive.

That… Ideally, would be tantamount to theft, in any functioning body of law.

Edit; or destruction of private property?

Quite so, but I’ll be damned if fans are ever going to redo TES6 in whatever engine they make for (god forbid) TES10, forty years from now.

In August 2023, Todd Howard described his intent behind The Elder Scrolls VI as wanting to make “the ultimate fantasy-world simulator”,

That’s when you should have known. TES is at heart a novelistic series that is owned by a studio whose entire style is now “short term crafting and gameplay loops occurring within a physics simulation”.

Expecting your first indie release to be perfect is putting insane expectations on yourself. The worst things you can do at this point are to give up or fail to reflect on what you’ve learned. Think on what you would have done differently with what you know now - and then do not waste the lesson.

I’m really happy with my few hours in it. I was afraid it’d be another Rain World situation where I can tell I like it and admire the craft but don’t actually feel the need to play it much, but I do find it enticing still.