Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

Stronghold is an RTS from the early 2000s about building and defending a castle. The economy is modeled very closely building-for-building, so you have wheat farms that have to be placed on arable land (often, in motte and bailey fashion, less defensible than non-arable land atop hills or the like), who bring the wheat to mills that grind wheat into flour, which goes to bakers who bake bread that your peasants can eat. To make swordsmen, you need iron mines placed on iron deposits, which are different from stone quarries, and then an armorer to make plate armor and a blacksmith who’s switched to making swords, not maces. This means that the vast majority of buildings in and around your castle are economic buildings.

The details of the economy are totally ahistorical, as the example of full plate armored swordsmen as a staple unit of high-tier lategame armies shows, but the zoomed out vibe is very accurate to building and defending a castle. You want to get as much economic activity as possible inside the walls of the castle, but because certain buildings, especially farms, can only be placed on certain terrain and are also very large, you probably won’t be able to wall them in completely. So you compromise by putting them in the shadow of your walls, within bowshot of nearby towers stuffed with archers or crossbowmen to prevent attacking armies from doing too much damage from them.

And then a fifth of the singleplayer campaign ditches all of that, giving you a big old army and telling you to use it to storm an enemy castle. You have no way to replace lost units, almost nothing to do with any resources you’re given (and you may not be given any), and in one of these invasion missions you’re up against a castle that’s sufficiently well-garrisoned that you cannot hope to win except by exploiting the AI. The missions are both very hard and throw about 80% of the game mecahnics in the garbage. At least when Iron Harvest did this, they had the decency to give me a skip mission button.

Worst of all, two of these missions are used for the two most climactic moments in the game’s story: When you kill Duc Truffe, the thug who murdered your mentor figure halfway through the plot, and when you kill Duc Volpe, the tyrant who killed your father as part of a plot to overthrow the kingdom clear back in the backstory. And they already had a perfectly good solution final showdowns with major villains! You defeat Duc Beauregard in a castle-vs-castle map where you have a castle and he has a castle and you have to defend against attacking armies while building up one of your own to take his castle. This is how Stronghold’s multiplayer works, and the only time they feature it in the singleplayer campaign is in one mission against a middlingly important villain, giving the most narratively important villains much worse confrontations.

While the standalone expansion Stronghold Crusader is very well regarded and adds several very welcome tweaks and rebalances, Stronghold 2 and 3 and Legends and Warlords were all flops. Between the poor performance of the sequels and the baffling lack of focus on their own core gameplay for the climactic moments of their campaign (which has a fair bit of attention paid to it, so I don’t think it’s because the whole singleplayer game was an afterthought), I have to wonder, did the Stronghold devs have any idea how to make a good video game, or did they just get super lucky on the first one, had the community holding their hand for Crusader, and then everything after that was a cavalcade of tears and failure? I got all the Stronghold games together in some bundle or something, so I guess I’ll see at some point.

It’s the first Tuesday of the month as I write this (November 1st this month), so what’s in the box?

Hell Let Loose is a multiplayer FPS set in WW2 that focuses on simulating large-scale battles. Fifty-players to a side with things like tanks and logistics modeled with more accuracy, with the goal of making the frontline fighting feel more like the massive engagements of WW2 and less like the tight-focused team battles of Halo with a WW2 skin. There’s an emphasis on realism, but in service to an experience at the frontlines rather than on crippling over-simulation. The game’s pitch is rock solid, but it’s a multiplayer game, so it isn’t going on the backlog. I might try it out sometime, but there’s no way to really play it to completion.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is famously the video game that plays like an MMO that saw all the skulls piled up outside World of WarCraft’s cave and decided to be a singleplayer game instead. The devs have denied this, although there was an MMO planned for the same setting, so maybe that’s a technically true denial where the real story is “we were going to recycle a ton of this code into the MMO but never got that far.” Or maybe it’s a flat-out lie. It’s not like it’s a crime to lie about your intentions regarding a piece of media you produced or something, so there’s not a ton of incentive not to do so.

In any case, I like MMOs, but mainly because I find it fun to be alone in a crowd. It’s fun to go to a nightclub with a small handful of friends and ignore everyone else but each other, and it’s fun to play an MMORPG alone while huge crowds of players surge around me in the safe zones and there’s a few stray encounters in the wilderness or dungeons (dungeons are usually instanced and for good reason, but if they’re not, and I bump into just one or two players down there, that can be fun). I meet people, we help each other briefly or just wave, and then we leave.

Still, I’ve always wanted to see what the singleplayer MMO would play like, so I’m tossing it on the list even though I expect it’s going to end up in Regrets and not Complete. I’m pretty stubborn about these things sometimes, though, so it might end up being a long term project where I play a few hours a month for half a year and get it to the end? We’ll see.

Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice is a tactics game about being a ninja that’s a standalone expansion to some other tactics game about being a ninja. Tactics games are good when they have a good strategic layer tying the tactical battles together and I don’t see one of those here. Looks like it’s more one of those games that throws one tactical battle after another at you, without anything carrying over from one battle to the next, although it only looks like that because I can’t find anything saying otherwise and that’s what I assume by default, under the grounds that if they had a strategic layer they’d probably tell me about it. Plus it’s a spin-off to a game I’ve never heard of. Pass.

Roboquest is a Roguelike FPS where the gun drops are randomized. I’m not a huge fan of Roguelikes, they’re a huge timesink and rarely have the gameplay to back it up. I’ll make exceptions for things like Hades because Supergiant Games don’t miss, but not for Roboquest.

Eldest Souls sounds like a joke. You might write the name off as people being unaware of other genres, but no, it’s a Soulslike, so it’s definitely named by smashing Elden Ring and Dark Souls together. You might then expect that it’s a parody, but no sign of that in the summary. It’s got 16-bit pixel art that’s quite well done, but I’m remembering how I never actually played Banner Saga 2 because I bought it for the art and realized that I could just look at screenshots on Google if I wanted that. If I want to play a game whose main and only selling point is its similarlity to Dark Souls, I can play Dark Souls.

Unmetal is a copyrights-filed-off remake of Metal Gear for the SNES, updated with all the lessons learned in the past 30 years of gaming history. I endorse these kinds of projects in general, there’s nothing wrong with revisiting classics and giving them a glow-up using the lessons learned from not only their own legacy, but also decades of general-purpose game design evolution. I don’t really care about the Metal Gear series, though, so I’m giving this a pass.

Raji is about a little girl with a bow who needs to kill an army of invading demons. The description on Humble Choice is very short, and mainly focuses on how pretty the game is. The game is pretty. So there’s Banner Saga 2 looming in the back of my head again, but on the other hand, this might be more like Journey, a game that is exclusively about traveling through wondrous landscapes with just enough gameplay sprinkled on to make it feel like a quest rather than a slideshow. I’m on the fence, but I’m going to keep it, just in case it ends up being something beautiful.

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a top-down RPG of some description, where you are a demon hunter and you have to fight seven particularly troublesome demons called the Seven Acolytes. It dedicates a surprising amount of its description to listing basic gameplay mechanics it has, like “looting.” Doesn’t really say anything about what they’re trying to accomplish with the looting. I have bad vibes about this one, but I’ll give it a try.

That’s three pickups – every single one of which is something I was on the fence about and might quickly toss into Regrets. Not a great month for the Humble Choice. Earlier in October, however, there was a Humble Bundle with Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. Pretty much the whole golden age of D&D CRPGs in one package, so that’s five new games on the backlog.

Even with a couple of games getting chucked into Regrets due to technical difficulties (the entire King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame series is plagued with technical difficulties that come from my hardware being too recent, which means it’s only going to be worse if I circle back around after an upgrade), I’m struggling to keep this list under 170. I probably will get the list back under 170, because it’s at 172 right now and two of the new additions have single-digit playtimes (and may get tossed into Regrets before then). Plus, in theory I could wrap up Hollow Knight with probably a single-digit number of hours, but all I have left to get 112% completion is the Godhome boss rushes, and that’s not usually the kind of thing I can sit down for four hours straight of on a weekend.

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about WATCH_DOGS 2. The critical consensus I’ve stumbled across on YouTube (as exemplified by Noah Caldwell-Gervais) basically reflects my opinion. WATCH_DOGS 2 has a very similar mechanical basis as the original, but ditches the drab interpretation of Chicago for a vibrant and colorful Bay Area. The melee attack goes from a tacticool extendable billy club to a combat yo-yo, which is generally emblematic of the protagonist’s shift in tone from broody and grimdark to fun and lighthearted, and while I wouldn’t have minded broody and grimdark if it had been done well, Aiden Pearce was bland and uninteresting where Marcus Halloway is chill and fun to watch.

The original game shouted “digital surveillance!” and then ran away, while the sequel portrays digital surveillance as a Bad Thing with the main plot revolving around opposing it. The original game portrayed ctOS as basically omniscient and perfectly accurate, with its crime predictions never turning out wrong (admittedly, this was mainly for gameplay reasons), while the sequel’s very first mission involves the black protagonist Marcus Halloway hacking into ctOS 2.0 and discovering that he’s been flagged as a criminal erroneously, with later side missions that draw attention to how these algorithms target black people in particular.

The reputation system has been completely excised, which on the one hand does mean there’s no consequence for killing pedestrians, but on the other hand it’s probably better to just quietly ignore the vehicular homicide rather than give a specific and shockingly high number of vehicular homicides you can get away with before anyone notices or cares. They even dropped the vestigial “liberate the districts” mechanic from the original by removing ctOS towers completely, and while my complaints about side missions being annoying to find remain, at least they no longer stamp my map with districts centered around towers that don’t really do anything.

WATCH_DOGS 2 does have a few mechanical steps backward from its predecessor. Well, really only one that I can think of: The way you can only unlock certain high-tier upgrades by finding “key data” in various places around the map, except you don’t know where exactly. So in order to buy the upgrade that lets you crash communications nearby to stop baddies from calling for reinforcements, you have to wander around a specific neighborhood of the map (at least they tell you what neighborhood) until you stumble into a key data badge, then solve whatever jumping puzzle is between you and the collectible. Ordinarily, a collectible side quest like that is one that I would quickly realize I don’t much like and decide not to worry about, but all the best abilities in the game are locked behind it. Often I’ll just look up on the internet how to find and solve the puzzle, because dammit I just want my reduced scope sway on sniper rifles or whatever.

And while the new tone is very well executed in cut scenes and certainly an improvement over the original’s, it’s a terrible mismatch with the gameplay. There’s a mission early on where a Blume (the corporation behind ctOS) executive brags about how DedSec (who have been promoted from kinda shady mostly-allies in the first game to unambiguous hacker superhero protagonists in the second) has played right into his hands, scaring all the other tech companies into adopting ctOS 2.0 for protection despite all the cyberterrorism Aiden and his rival hacker Damien got up to in Chicago, 1.0’s flagship city. The executive does this in person, right in front of Marcus Halloway. The result is that Marcus punches him in the mouth, but is forced to run away as the police are rapidly closing in. Then gameplay!Marcus takes over and kills the SWAT team to a man. You can play WATCH_DOGS 2 as a sneaky hacker spy, using little drones and camera-hacking and good old-fashioned cover stealth to accomplish your objectives (the game’s upgrades even push you towards one of three different playstyles, “ghost,” “trickster,” and “aggressor,” although I’m not sure what “trickster” is supposed to be), but one of my favorite things about this series is how much better cover shooting feels in an open world where the arenas aren’t telegraphed, so that, uh, is not how I play, despite the fact that the game’s plot kind of assumes that Marcus is almost totally non-violent until at least the second half of the game (“aggressor” upgrades aren’t even deeper in the upgrade tree compared to others, and even if they were, acquiring and shooting an assault rifle requires no upgrades at all).

But regardless of some minor flaws, WATCH_DOGS 2 is a much better game than the original. It has something to say about hacktivism and surveillance, and while it’s not exactly setting the world ablaze with its bold speaking of truth to power, having a clear theme carried by a likeable protagonist solves the first game’s biggest flaws, while retaining the cyberpunk-is-now hacker open world gameplay that got me interested in the series in the first place. I’ve heard WATCH_DOGS Legion is bad, so I’m going to call the series here, but unlike Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry (though in fairness, I’m not done with the Far Cry backlog yet), I could see myself playing a future WATCH_DOGS game not to find closure on the things I wanted but could not have from the era of my life when I didn’t have enough money to buy gaming PCs or consoles, but because a game like WATCH_DOGS 2 is actually fun to play.

WATCH_DOGS 2 stars an ensemble cast of five characters: The social media artist Sitara, the destructive semi-psycho wrench, the autistic hacker whiz Josh, the tactical and logistics guy Ratio, and the protagonist Marcus (alias Retr0, but that codename gets used pretty sparsely) who, as Player One, is good at everything. They also eventually pick up an aging hacker Raymond Kenney at a Burning Man knock-off. During the finale, you play as Sitara and Wrench briefly before resuming control of Marcus for the finale’s finale.

And I wonder: Was this originally supposed to be more of a thing? The game’s upgrades are split into three different tags, “Aggressor,” “Trickster,” and “Ghost.” And these map pretty well to the three most prominent non-Marcus characters: Wrench to Aggressor is a super obvious connection to make, and Sitara as Trickster and Josh as Ghost also line up pretty well (admittedly, I’ have no idea’m not confident what the Trickster playstyle is supposed to actually be, like, mechanically – its upgrades revolve around hacking vehicles and drones, but that doesn’t add up to a fully functional playstyle unless you have most of the upgrades unlocked). Ratio (spoiler warning) dies halfway through the game, which means he doesn’t appear in any of the side missions which can occur before or after the story mission that kills him, which means he’s by far the least developed of the group.

And other Ubisoft games in development before and after used a similar concept. In Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, released the year before, the two protagonists have some max-level abilities only available ot one or the other of them, not both, with Evie having some max-level sneaking powers while Jacob has some max-level combat powers. In Watch Dogs: Legion, different procedurally generated characters have different procedurally selected traits, abilities, and gear. Maybe there was a version of WATCH_DOGS 2 where Marcus was the Mario, with broad access to all skills but no top-tier abilities, and Wrench, Sitara, and Josh were locked out of most or all of each other’s skillsets but had access to high-end abilities in exchange. Ratio would’ve been the voice with an internet connection giving briefings and such, a position the game as it exists rotates around all the ensemble cast instead, and Raymond Kenney would’ve taken over the briefing role after Ratio was killed (or this might’ve been a version of the plot where Ratio isn’t killed – his death is an unskippable main story mission, but narratively it’s episodic and could be removed entirely without affecting anything else). I could even see Raymond Kenney, as a late addition to the group who’s considerably more experienced, potentially having been at some stage of development an unlockable super-character with access to all skills.

I had a real nasty run with Regrets in September, and I’m pleased to report that my first and so far only Regret of October has been relatively tame. Siege Survival: Gloria Victis just isn’t fun, and I figured that out after just a few hours of play. I often don’t have a ton of fun early on in a game I end up loving – I need some time to settle into it, to understand how the game works and what it’s about. This is true even if the game has a perfectly effective opening, as Siege Survival does.

But I’m comfortable in saying that Siege Survival is just not a game I like. It’s This War Of Mine transposed into the medieval era and with all the emotional greys sucked out. Turns out, the scavenging and crafting/survival mechanics of This War Of Mine are pretty boring without the context of being civilians trapped in a wartorn city desperately trying to survive, confronted with options to do things like rob a helpless old couple blind because you need food dammit, delivered in gameplay so you don’t just click the “rob helpless old people” option, you actually have to walk through the house and click on stuff to put in your inventory while the old man is following you around begging you to stop.

Siege Survival trades that out for a goodies versus baddies set up. I mean, it’s medieval warfare, so probably our team is just as despicable on the offensive, but I’m playing as a couple of peasants in a town under siege, so the villainy of the invaders is on full display and the villainy of the defenders is weakly implied by the fact that this is a realistic-ish medieval setting so we can extrapolate some things that are otherwise not hinted at, let alone depicted, by the game. And while you play as a couple of peasants huddling in the courtyard of the castle, scavenging supplies from the city at night to build stuff to get you through the siege by day, some of the things you build are weapons and armor for the soldiers holed up in the castle’s bastion. You are unambiguously on their side and yet for some reason none of those guys ever go on dangerous night-time expeditions to retrieve stone and timber from the half-demolished remains of the town.

And while that town does have a few story vignettes, none of them are especially compelling. The goal with them seems more to depict the grit and brutality of a medieval siege – but not in such a way that asks any of the compelling moral questions that This War Of Mine did. TWOM’s great accomplishment was in applying such intense resource pressure to the player that you are sorely tempted to do terrible things to alleviate that pressure, and may indeed die if you do not, and Siege Survival has the resource pressure but doesn’t give you any questionable or blatantly evil options (and yet in such a mundane way – you don’t arm soldiers committing war crimes or sell your neighbors out to the invaders or anything as dramatic as that, you just walk into a house and put the soup cans in your backpack while the house’s helpless owner tells you to stop).

Siege Survival also has the problem that, as a resource management game about outlasting a siege, it’s possible to make crucial mistakes very early on that can jeopardize your ability to hold on at the very end. In the first few days of the siege, I managed resources very poorly and my pigs died of starvation. Looking at some guides online, this looks like it will make the entire rest of the game much harder. I’m glad I looked that up in a guide, because if I’d gotten eight hours deep into the game and found my situation was pretty much untenable because I lost my pigs in hour one, I would’ve been way more frustrated. And unless I play the game while following a guide through the whole time, I might bump into a walking-dead situation like that at any time. This is the kind of pace some games have, but if they do, they need to be really good to justify potentially having to replay 5+ hours of a scenario to avoid a mistake made very early on that became crippling only in the endgame, and Siege Survival is quite boring.

Gamedec is an adventure game where you are a game detective, that is, a private detctive who specializes in cases taking place in full dive virtual worlds. You visit a bunch of different virtual worlds for various cases, and it turns out the future-cyberpunk internet’s a small place, apparently, because you run into a surprising number of recurring characters despite going into a new game every time. The game is driven almost entirely by dialogue, without any of your old school bullshit adventure game puzzles where you have to rub every item in your inventory on every interactable object until plot progress pops out.

I don’t want to discuss the plot in detail because it mostly all works and is pretty well written, and I don’t want to spoil it. It’s a mystery game, so of course any discussion of the plot is going to be spoiling the solution to all of the mysteries, and even discussing the premise for some of the later mysteries gives away the ending to some of the earlier ones.

This is not to say the game has no flaws, just that those flaws are all mechanical. Some of these are intentional decisions that I think were bad ideas, most notably, that you can’t see which dialogue options give you XP and of what type. The game has a skill tree, and having skills on the tree unlocks dialogue options. Unlocking skills requires the right combination of four different flavors of XP, each associated with a loosely related set of personality traits. Whenever you pick a dialogue option that favors one of these personality traits in particular, you get XP. This is a perfectly good system except for one thing: The game never indicates which dialogue options give you XP or of what type. Since you know the XP flavors are tied to different personality types, and since you need XP of all flavors (though in varying amounts) to unlock most of the skills, you’re incentivized to shift your dialogue choices based on what kind of XP you need right now. Picking one flavor and sticking to it isn’t viable – no path on the skill tree can be unlocked without getting at least a few points in all 4 XP types. And not every dialogue option has XP associated with it, so frequently I’d pick a dialogue option hoping to get a specific type of XP to unlock a skill, only to find that it doesn’t actually do that. The end result is that XP comes in basically at random unless you look up a guide that tells you which options give you what.

Other flaws are outright bugs. The game originally had a default male protagonist with a customizable name (apparently this is not true, contrary to an online discussion I’d read about the game, which makes the sloppy implementation of the protagonist’s pronouns even more egregious), which later expanded to a protagonist with customizable appearance and pronouns, but the implementation of the gender-swapped pronouns is badly broken, with code fragments like “(gender!female” showing up (I can’t remember the exact example, but it was clearly a bit of code for the variable pronouns that hadn’t been closed properly). A particularly annoying one actually affected what ending I could get. According to guides online, it should be impossible to be locked into just one of the game’s six endings. One ending is always available no matter what, but also there’s a boolean variable that you can flip with certain choices in the game which unlocks two endings in one state and one ending in another. This means there should always be a minimum of two endings available. I got locked into just one ending, though, because the game seemed to think I had simultaneously done and not done the thing that affects the other three endings (and I legitimately didn’t qualify for the other two).

Particularly annoying since I played the recently released so-called “Definitive Edition,” so you’d think that’d be the one where they fix bugs as critical as being locked out of endings you’re supposed to have qualified for. Or alternatively, fixing the dialogue so that it’s not extremely misleading about how you qualify for the endings (the dialogue for the ending I got does imply that it’s the leftover for people who didn’t stick to any of the other paths hard enough – but then the dialogue for several of the other endings implies I definitely should’ve qualified for those, so one of these is misleading).

And the mechanical flaws – intentional or otherwise – stack up more the deeper into the game you get, which has the unfortunate side effect of making the ending of the game the weakest part of the whole thing. In the final few scenes, properly investigating becomes a chore as you get swept forward in the plot without warning, leaving me with insufficient information to make what seems like critical decisions in the final case, only to learn at the end that none of those decisions were ever intended to affect what ending I get, and the endings are broken anyway. A disappointing ending to a game that’s 80% good.

WATCH_DOGS is a 2014 video game. Usually I list the year to give context to what games were contemporary and sometimes to point out how certain things made sense at the time even if they haven’t aged well. For example, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’s aping of the style of BBC’s Sherlock made a lot of sense in 2015.

But for WATCH_DOGS, “2014” is the sub-genre and premise. Not that it strictly takes place in 2014 (although I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be set, like most media with a modern setting, more or less in its year of release), but that it is so heavily informed by the culture and anxieties of that year to the point where it becomes a useful view of what the world was like (or at least, what contemporary mainstream culture thought it was like) in the Obama era. All the Obama era concerns about the surveillance state and electronic warfare had reached their most advanced forms, and yet remained totally detached from the alt-right Nazi militias and peer-to-peer cyber and propaganda warfare that have become the dominant conversation. These days, concerns about the surveillance state are a side note to discussions of the FBI tracking down January 6th insurrectionists and what 2022 sanctions limiting the activity of Russian psyops did to the audience of this or that online community or the comments section for whatever political news site or YouTube channel. In WATCH_DOGS, it’s firmly the other way around, with the vaguely right-wing militia being bit players included, as far as I can tell, mostly just to give rural the small town section of the map some criminal baddies for protagonist Aiden Pearce to mow down.

DEDSEC, the off-brand Anonymous that the game presents mostly heroically (Aiden doesn’t want to help them at the end, but it’s not really clear why), doesn’t have any QAnon imitators or splinter factions. Corporations and government act as a unified whole, “the Man,” rather than being deadlocked by bitter partisan political warfare, but the police are still considered good guys despite being government enforcers. Aiden Pearce uses binaural beats for “digital trips” which, modulo some exaggeration for gameplay, evoke the idea that such beats’ effects on the psyche could possibly replicate or even approach the effects of psychedelic substances, a common myth from the era which has quietly fallen by the wayside as more and more people have tried it and had no effect, making it clear that the exceptions are some combination of placebo and attention-seekers fabricating counterculture tech so that they can claim to be on the bleeding edge. Good background music does help with focus, but that genre is dominated not by any alleged binaural beat, but by lo-fi hip-hop beats to relax/study to.

The game’s morality is also 1) focused on with a reputation mechanic that rewards you for completing missions that help the city or rescuing civilians from firefights and penalizes you for killing civilians and police, and 2) an absolute mess. Firstly, the game takes place in Chicago, yet it still posits killing the cops as a bad thing. All cops were not broadly considered bastards back in 2014, but the fucking Chicago police have always had a reputation as authoritarian stormtroopers, plus, vigilante justice is nearly impossible to justify if the police are doing their jobs. The protagonist’s hacker powers come from slicing into a city-wide network that the police already have access to, so if the police aren’t either totally incompetent or totally corrupt (or both), what can Aiden possibly do that the ten thousand strong Chicago Police Department can’t?

And a lot of mechanics that clearly put the public in danger have no impact on reputation at all. You can hack stoplights to cause a car crash at an intersection right after you pass through, for example, thus catching pursuers in the wreck while you speed away. Apparently the injury and potential death of the civilians caught in the crash aren’t important. You can also wander around town hacking random people’s phones to siphon funds out of their bank accounts with no impact on reputation.

The reputation system is, of course, reputation, not something that claims to be judging your actions objectively, so maybe the idea is that your theft and causing wrecks can’t be traced back to you and thus doesn’t affect the public’s opinion. If that’s the case, though, you’d expect the narrative to notice that, high reputaiton or low, the protagonist is an unrepentant villain who freely harms innocent people in pursuit of his goals with, at best, a Homelander-like willingness to save people whenever it benefits his public image, or that they’d be more willing to use police as footsoldiers of resident evil corporation Blume.

The game’s themes in general are a dog’s breakfast. It’s doing that corporate storytelling thing where it brings up something (at the time) topical and controversial, but then refuses to say anything about it. Aiden Pearce uses the city-wide ctOS surveillance system to track down criminals and evade police, but the game never takes any position on whether this is a good thing, or if it’s a bad thing, or if it’s bad that ctOS exists but Aiden is making the best of it by using it for justice, or if it’s good that ctOS exists but criminal hackers and corporate corruption are perverting its potential. The game runs in the room, shouts “city-wide surveillance network!” and runs away. You can decide to use or not use ctOS in various ways, but the game doesn’t notice if you do. The first and only time your choices impact the story or game world is in a mid-credits scene where you can decide to kill the hitman who killed Aiden’s niece (accidentally, while trying to kill Aiden) or not, so the story neither makes its own point about its own themes nor does it give you any meaningful way to provide your own answer.

Continue reading “WATCH_DOGS” →

In WATCH_DOGS, there are vaguely four criminal factions that keep showing up: First, the mercenary “fixers,” criminals for hire who show up as generic baddies for things like the assassins being sent by a mysterious villain with unknown allegiances or the goon squad who provide combat backup for a random hacker. Second, the Chicago South Club, your classic mafia, run by someone considered a model citizen who has the mayor in his pocket, and a major antagonist of the game. Third, the Pawnee Militia, some right-wing gun nuts who live out in small town Pawnee which has somehow been imported from the Pacific Northwest, who, as far as I can tell, exist mainly to give some criminal bad guys for the protagonist to mow down in that section of the map.

Finally, the subject of our discussion: The Viceroys, an inner city street gang being run by a criminal called Iraq, because he was in the military and brought back professional tactical training with him, which he passes on to his inner circle. That whole backstory has nothing to do with Saints Row, but the name is suspiciously close to the Vice Kings, a gang specializing in prostitution and other sex work from the first Saints Row game. The Vice Kings were the black gang, and while the WATCH_DOGS gangs are not as heavily racially coded as the first Saints Row game, the Viceroys have the same inner city Compton-from-the-90s vibe that the Vice Kings were channeling. And while the sex slave auction that you infiltrate halfway through the plot is a joint venture between the Viceroys and the Chicago South Club, the Viceroys are the ones who are in charge of security, with the Club in a more managerial role (there’s an implication that the leader of the Club is grooming Iraq to take full control of the auction at some point, as reward for doing the Club’s dirty work), which is another connection to the Vice Kings, who run prostitution rings with at least some amount of human trafficking involved (you save some kidnapping victims early on in the first Saints Row, although it’s not clear how much of the Vice Kings’ sex trade is coercive).

And once I started wondering if the Viceroys and the Vice Kings were connected, I noticed that the charming sociopath criminal ally/last minute antagonist Jordi Chin is pretty similar in temparament to Saints Row mascot Johnny Gat. He’s got the obsession with violence, the flippant and (moderately) witty disregard for human life, and even the same first letter and cadence to his name.

I don’t think any other game elements are particularly borrowed from Saints Row. The Militia and South Club don’t have a ton in common with any of the Saints Row series’ gangs, none of the other characters remind me much of any Saints Row characters.

There’s no smoking gun that Viceroys are Jordi Chin are definitely based on the Vice Kings and Johnny Gat, and probably the biggest evidence against is the question in the title: What’s the point of the comparison here? Jordi Chin as a Johnny Gat expy kind of almost makes a point about how fucked up the character is, and maybe say something about the Saints Row games as a setting where that character feels natural and at home, except the protagonist Aiden Pearce is the actual player character and therefore does pretty similar violence to what Johnny Gat gets up to (implicitly – gags about his body count and his general attitude imply that he does similar ultraviolence as your average Saints Row player, but it’s never directly depicted). And Aiden acts like Jordi Chin is much more violent and unstable than he (Aiden) is, even though it’s hard to tell the difference between them. Admittedly, the game does try and encourage not harming civilians, whereas Saints Row doesn’t care how many people you run over, but regaining reputation lost from accidentally plowing through pedestrians is so easy that the nudge against civilian casualties is pretty gentle.

And while Jordi does turn antagonist at the very end, it’s like thirty seconds before the credits roll, and you defeat him literally by pressing the square button. You don’t have to move into position or wear away any defenses or anything. He shows up, he points a gun at you, you push the square button to hack a nearby light to explode, and that takes him out of the fight. It’s really baffling what Jordi’s last minute betrayal is supposed to accomplish and I wonder if there was supposed to be something else here, something that might actually say something about Johnny Gat – like that an unstable violent psychopath wouldn’t actually be a reliable ally the way Gat is.

A lack of clear messaging isn’t unusual in WATCH_DOGS (the first game, not necessarily the whole series – I haven’t played the second one yet, and haven’t even decided if I will play the third), so I don’t think the lack of anything to say about Johnny Gat necessarily means that Jordi Chin isn’t based on the character, but it does make me less confident in the connection. Maybe there was a commentary on Johnny Gat that got cut down until we get the Jordi Chin we see in the game as it is, a character with almost no relevance to the plot at all. Maybe someone really liked Johnny Gat or some suit thought they should capitalize on the popularity of the archetype and shoved a character based on him in, and the reason why Jordi Chin has little to do with the plot is because he’s just there to check a box labeled “character who’s kind of like Johnny Gat.” Maybe it’s all just coincidence, and there was never any connection between Jordi Chin and Johnny Gat (or the Vice Kings and the Viceroys) at all.

Ori and the Blind Forest released in 2015, initiating the Metroidvania revival that’s still ongoing. You can tell Ori started it, because it had to bridge the gap between the current dominant indie archetype, the Metroidvania in a ruined world, and the previous dominante indie archetype, the platformer about a tiny cute thing in a big scary world. Hollow Knight, the genre’s current reigning champion, also had a tiny cute protagonist, but even then, the Knight comes across as far more capable than they appear, rather than being a small vulnerable thing in a dangerous world like Ori (and the protagonists of Limbo and etc.), and Blasphemous, the Bloodstained series, Crowsworn, and so on don’t have tiny cute protagonists at all.

You can also tell Ori is the first in the Metroidvania revival because it’s not as good as basically any of its follow-ups. Ori has lots of skill in execution, especially in its art and music, but it lacks a lot of quality of life features that have become standard as the indie Metroidvania scene has developed. It had no fast travel system until its Definitive Edition rerelease in 2016, its combat is pretty perfunctory for how central it is to gameplay, and it has almost no branching paths at all. It follows a pretty standard Metroidvania structure where you have a prologue area that sets up the main quest, three MacGuffins you need to get, and then a final confrontation with the bad guy at the end, but instead of setting you loose in the map like other Metroidvanias of the modern era, Ori takes you through one MacGuffin after the other in strict order (something which more closely resembles older Metroidvanias like Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid).

Ori also has some major missteps in its most climactic moments due to ludonarrative dissonance, that is, the feeling communicated by gameplay not matching the feeling communicated by the story. At the end of each of the three MacGuffin dungeons, the reactivation of one of the elements of the forest (water, wind, and warmth) causes some manner of Metroid-style escape-the-lava, with the most fast-paced and intense music and visuals in the game. The mood of the rest of the game is much slower, exploratory, sometimes tense or dread-inducing, but not frantic like the escapes. Punctuating the ends of the dungeons with such fast-paced escape sequences is a good idea, but they’re way too hard to serve their purpose. The escape sequence isn’t usually even the hardest part of the dungeon, but it’s hard enough to require multiple attempts, which sucks the momentum right out of them.

The first one, in the Ginso Tree, isn’t so bad, although dying even once robs the sequence of a lot of its momentum. The second and third escape sequences, however, lose all their excitement because you can’t actually race through them in a blind panic the way the game’s atmosphere wants to imply. You have to methodically pick your way through, learning and adapting to each obstacle until you can run the entire gauntlet from beginning to end. It might seem like the added challenge would increase the tension, but the opposite is true: Being repeatedly confronted with the reality that nothing worse than being sent to the automatic save point at the start of the escape makes it inescapable that actually I have plenty of time to escape. Hours, really. What stands between me and success is not the need to go fast and escape danger, but to repeat the same obstacle course over and over again until I have it memorized. The third and final escape sequence is especially egregious, since nearly every obstacle is an instant kill no matter how much health you have left, meaning the escape can only either be so easy that you complete it flawlessly on your first try, or else it must confront you with the reality that the stakes could scarcely be any lower.

The sequence following the Forlorn Ruins escape works much better. Kuro, the evil (ish) owl, is hunting for Ori, who must hide behind various rocks and logs to escape her, so the challenge is in platforming around the area while staying hidden. The mood in this scene is tense instead of frantic. Dying over and over still confronts you with how low the stakes really are, but at least the pace of the narrative and the pace of the gameplay are in sync.

The story aims for a bit of nuance, and falls apart in doing so. It turns out Kuro, the main antagonist owl, hates the tree Ori is trying to revive because the tree killed Kuro’s babies. That’s not an implication or hyperbole or anything, in the prologue the tree does a big light show to try and signal the lost Ori to come home (it doesn’t work), and it is later revealed that this directly and unambiguously killed the owl’s babies, so the owl takes revenge on the tree to protect her remaining (unhatched) child.

Ori wasn’t even in any kind of danger, and had no way of signaling back to the spirit tree if they were. The only way the distress signal can work is if Ori sees it and is able to follow the light show back home (it doesn’t work – Ori’s adoptive mother Naru dissuades them from following the lights). It’s only after Kuro’s children are killed by the light show that Kuro goes after the tree for revenge, causing the forest to wither and become dangerous, at which point Ori ends up re-orphaned and wandering through the now much more deadly forest looking for food. The spirit tree couldn’t reasonably have predicted all the dominoes that would lead to the distress signal putting Ori in mortal danger, but you’d think it would be aware that it would kill any owls in range and that Ori wouldn’t benefit from the light unless they were in a safe and stable enough position to follow it home.

At the end, Ori sets the forest on fire (Ori themselves may or may not have intended this, but it was an inevitable side effect of the main quest to revive the tree and pretty easy to see coming – the previous two dungeons caused a flood and a windstorm, and the last dungeon is a volcano, so it’s not hard to guess what kind of storm its restoration is going to cause), threatening to cook Kuro’s remaining child alive, so Kuro has to sacrifice herself to restore the tree that killed her children, so the spirit tree can use its power to put out the fires. This doesn’t kill Kuro’s remaining child, even though it kills the owl herself – maybe it’s because the remaining child (unlike the others) is still an egg.

So on the one side we have Ori, who’s trying to revive the tree that used its baby-killing distress signal to let Ori know dinner was ready and it’s time to come home, and who sets the forest on fire to the point where an egg halfway across the map is in mortal peril not as an accident or a result of outside interference, but as an expected consequence of the quest. On the other side we have Kuro, an owl who was minding her own business when the spirit tree killed all her children save one, who attacked the spirit tree to protect the remaining egg, and who ultimately sacrifices her life to revive the spirit tree (her most hated enemy!) once it becomes clear that this is the only way to save her remaining child.

I think Ori is the villain.