Dénouement 2021 Part 2: The Disappointment

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 23, 2021

Filed under: Industry Events 89 comments

Before I talk about my games of 2021, I want to circle back and talk about a couple of older games. I spent a lot of time with them this year, and I didn’t get around to writing about them at the time.

Let’s start with…

Two Point Hospital

The name makes it feel like this is a sequel, but it isn't.
The name makes it feel like this is a sequel, but it isn't.

Maybe it sounds weird, but when I got out of the hospital I had a sudden urge to play the 2018 management sim Two Point Hospital. This game has you training medical staff, building facilities, and curing endless waves of patients from various pun-based diseases. It’s kind of admirable how far the game is willing to go in service of these lame puns, which gives the humor a bit of charm.

I think I spent about a month with the title, although I can’t be sure. I didn’t write about it at the time, and my post-hospital memories are a bit of a blur.

The campaign scenarios were mostly an exercise in frustration and tedium. Each map would be built around a single concept or disease. One map teaches you the importance of keeping people warm in a cold climate. Another teaches the importance of keeping the place cool and clean in a warm climate. Then you get one near a ski resort where you need to deal with lots of broken bones. Each scenario takes a few hours. So it ends up feeling like the whole game is one excruciatingly long tutorial, where 20 minutes of learning are stretched out over 40 hours of gameplay. Then to keep it challenging, the designers make your buildings small and inconveniently shaped.You can’t change the footprint of your buildings. You only get to decide how the interior space is divided up.

I told the janitors to stop cleaning the floor, just to see how bad it would get. As it turns out: Pretty freakin' bad. Yikes.
I told the janitors to stop cleaning the floor, just to see how bad it would get. As it turns out: Pretty freakin' bad. Yikes.

But the game really shines when you get to sandbox mode. You’re given a few huge buildings, a large variety of challenges, and you’re free to tackle them however you like. In this mode the game starts to feel a bit like a city builder where it’s less about finding the one correct answer to a given problem, and more about refining your design over time.

I really dig it.

My Problem with the Hitman Series

Make the world my weapon? WHAT? Is the earth a ranged weapon, or melee? Or do you mean I should kill people with gravity by pushing them off of high places? Please clarify.
Make the world my weapon? WHAT? Is the earth a ranged weapon, or melee? Or do you mean I should kill people with gravity by pushing them off of high places? Please clarify.

This autumn I watched some videos of bigMooney doing ridiculous “kill everyone” challenges in the Hitman games. And then I got the itch to revisit the new Hitman trilogy for myself. I tried my hand at omnicide Hitman 2, which turned out to be harder than it looked. I also ran through the maps properly and explored a bunch of stuff that I missed back in 2019.

Eventually I got bored with the old maps and decided it was time to pick up the newest entry in the series. But then I discovered that it was still an Epic Games exclusive, with no date for when it might show up on one of my preferred platforms.

This wouldn’t be a big deal, but theyWho? I’ll get to that in a minute. went out of their way to link the three games together so that you can use Hitman 3 to play maps from the previous two games. So they created a strong incentive to buy all three games on the same platform, and then they made the third game exclusive to the Epic Games Store. This is self-defeating nonsense. They could have done either of these and gotten away with it, but by doing both, they’ve discouraged me from buying a product I already wanted.

What’s the opposite of marketing?

UPDATE: Just before posting this series I discovered that the developer will let you import your Steam copies of Hitman and Hitman 2 to the Epic Games Store. That almost got me to make the purchase on EGS, but then I saw that this year-old game was still selling for launch-day prices. Do I want to pay full price for a year-old game on an inferior platform? No I don’t. Apparently Square wants to take the bigger cut offered by the EGS, and they’re not willing to pass any of that savings onto me, despite the many drawbacks and shortcomings of the Epic Games Store.

But then I figured I could revitalize Hitman 2 by picking up some DLC. I saw people playing the Maldives map, which isn’t available in the base game. So which DLC do I need to buy?

Hitman 2 - Expansion Pass

Hitman - GOTY Legacy Pack

Hitman - GOTY Legacy Pack Upgrade

Hitman 2 - Silver to Gold Upgrade

I just… WHAT? What’s the difference between an “Expansion Pass” and the “Silver to Gold Upgrade”? What version do I have now? Is this based on preorder nonsense? Because I don’t remember which games I preordered and which ones I didn’t, particularly not three years after the fact.

The “Silver to Gold Upgrade” states that:

Downloading this item grants access to all of the content included in Expansion Pack 2 and essentially upgrades Silver Edition owners to Gold Edition owners.

What the fuck is “Expansion Pack 2”? That’s not in the list above! The description describes the contents in terms of it containing another product which isn’t for sale.

It’s like I’m trying to buy fast food, and so I ask the guy at the register what’s on a “Superburger”. And he tells me that a Superburger is basically a Deluxeburger. But there’s no Deluxeburger on the menu and no way to determine what it is or what it contains.

How many maps am I buying? Which ones? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SELL ME? Is there an intended order of progression to these? Do some of these contain others? Why not just name them something like “Map pack 1”, “Map Pack 2”, etc?

After taking the time to read the descriptions of all four products, I was mostly convinced that what I needed was the “Expansion Pass”. It was marked down, 80% off. I could get it for just $8.

After I bought the DLC, I discovered that it included only two new maps: Maldives, and New York. It makes it seem like you’re getting four new locations, but two of the locations are “Sniper Assassin” maps where you just headshot waves of idiot AI mooks from your sniper loft, which is pretty antithetical to the Hitman experience and is totally uninteresting to me.

The Maldives. I'm sure you can imagine how deadly it is to tumble off that pier and fall two meters into the calm, warm, refreshing, crystal-clear water.
The Maldives. I'm sure you can imagine how deadly it is to tumble off that pier and fall two meters into the calm, warm, refreshing, crystal-clear water.

Maldives is actually a bit janky. Normally the game acts like pushing someone into water is an instant-kill. That makes sense when you’re pushing someone into a well, off a coastal cliff, or into a steep-walled water reservoir. But it makes no sense whatsoever when you’re pushing them off a low pier into hip-deep water that is clear, calm, and inviting. That’s not a murder. That’s barely even a prank.Your target is actually wearing a swimsuit, so you’re not even ruining her clothes!

Also, the AI seems to have trouble with the massive open spaces. I spent a lot of time getting spotted by distant guards through blinds, opaque foliage, and curtains. There’s an entire beachside house where you can’t see much inside because the windows are too reflective, which doesn’t impact the AI. This would be fine as a way of making the level more challenging, but it’s not clear what the rules are or how line-of-sight works. It doesn’t feel like they made the map hard on purpose; it feels like they didn’t do enough playtesting.

It's not a bad map. There's just not much to it, gameplay-wise. The designers make it FEEL substantial by having long empty halls and cavernous rooms, but in terms of routes of ingress, opportunities, and obstacles to overcome, this place is basically a big empty box.
It's not a bad map. There's just not much to it, gameplay-wise. The designers make it FEEL substantial by having long empty halls and cavernous rooms, but in terms of routes of ingress, opportunities, and obstacles to overcome, this place is basically a big empty box.

The New York map is absurdly undersized. The whole thing takes place inside of a single bank, and it doesn’t offer nearly the complexity or depth of the locations in the base game. You can compare this to (say) Marrakesh, which has three different locations that are the approximate complexity of the bank, all contained on a single sprawling map.Also, I ran into a broken mission trigger that softlocked my progress on one of the side-stories. Which is kind of shameful, considering it’s a linear job on such a small map. If the location is going to be so small, can’t it at least be polished?

So despite that deep discount, I still feel like I was kinda ripped off. I paid $8 for 1.3 flat and unpolished new maps. And without the discount, this DLC would cost forty dollars. That’s so outrageously overpriced that it offends me.

I don’t even know who to blame for this mess. Hitman 2016 was published by Square Enix. Then developer IO Interactive self-published some DLC. Then Hitman 2 was published by Warner Brothers.

We can’t blame either publisher, since the same marketing and pricing problems persist across both games. So do we blame IO? Are they deliberately dumbing down their own game while also overcharging for it?

And don’t even get me started on their always-online single-player bullshit. That would make for an entire article-length rant, all by itself.

I don’t know where to point the finger, but someone, somewhere is making a mess of this series. Maybe they’ll get around to putting Hitman 3 on a real platformI would also accept GoG. Or hell, even Xbox Game Pass. Just, anything but EGS. eventually, but I’m not in a hurry to reward this clumsiness, apathy, and appalling sense of entitlement with $60 of my money.

The Disappointment

Getting rid of Kotick won't magically fix the company or right any of these wrongs. But it would be an important first step.
Getting rid of Kotick won't magically fix the company or right any of these wrongs. But it would be an important first step.

In these end-of-year write ups, I usually gather my disappointments into a big “worst of year” list. But this year I really only played one game I didn’t like.I’ll give that game a series of its own eventually. I don’t want to spoil it now. So my only major disappointment is that Bobby Kotick still has his job.

I think most people have the gist by now, but if you’re looking for a quick recap then Destructoid has you covered. Here are the highlights from the Destructoid article:

[In July 2021] Activision Blizzard is sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, as the result of a two-year investigation from the agency, citing allegations of harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace culture.

Blizzard executives J. Allen Brack and Fran Townsend address the suit in internal memos. (Townsend’s letter was later found to be written by Kotick.)

Activision Blizzard employees sign a letter, declaring leadership’s response to the lawsuit “abhorrent and insulting.”

Employees organize a walkout and also set forth demands, including a removal of required arbitration and new practices for recruiting, hiring, and promoting.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick calls the company’s response to lawsuit “tone deaf” and promises “swift action.” Employees respond to the letter, highlighting several demands that were not addressed.

[In August] A class action suit alleges Activision Blizzard misled investors over its failure to disclose internal problems.

Workers at Activision Blizzard form a coalition, the ABK Workers Alliance. They send a joint letter to the CEO and leadership criticizing the firm brought on to handle an internal review, WilmerHale, for its previous record of discouraging collective action.

Blizzard Entertainment president J. Allen Brack leaves the company to “pursue new opportunities.” Mike Ybarra and Jen Oneal are installed as co-leaders of Blizzard moving forward. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier also reports that Blizzard head of HR, Jesse Meschuk, is no longer at the company.

Shareholder group SOC calls Activision Blizzard’s response to the lawsuit “inadequate.”

The state of California expands its lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, alleging the publisher has interfered with the investigation.

Several Blizzard developers, including the director of Diablo IV and the namesake for Overwatch‘s gunslinging cowboy hero, leave the company.

[In September] the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launches its own investigation into Activision Blizzard.

Activision Blizzard releases a statement saying it is cooperating with the SEC’s investigation, as well as those from regulators at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and the California DFEH.

Blizzard Entertainment’s chief legal officer Claire Hart leaves the company.

The U.S. EEOC and Activision Blizzard reach an $18 million settlement in lawsuit over the company’s reported harassment and discrimination.

[…]

[In November] Blizzard co-leader Jen Oneal confirms she is leaving the company at the end of the year, with her co-head Mike Ybarra assuming her responsibilities.

A Wall Street Journal report alleges CEO Bobby Kotick was aware of sexual misconduct at the company for years. The story also sheds light on the departure of Oneal, who was reportedly paid less than her counterpart at the helm of Blizzard, and on Kotick’s own alleged interactions with his employees.

Kotick responds to the report, saying that “anyone who doubts my conviction to be the most welcoming, inclusive workplace doesn’t really appreciate how important this is to me.” The Board of Directors says it “remains confident” in Kotick’s leadership.

Activision Blizzard workers organize another walkout, calling for the removal of Kotick as CEO.

Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan sends out an email to employees, as reported by Bloomberg, that criticizes Activision Blizzard’s response to the report. Ryan says Activision Blizzard has “not done enough to address a deep-seated culture of discrimination and harassment.”

Over 1,000 Activision Blizzard employees and contractors sign a public petition calling for Kotick’s removal as CEO.

Xbox head Phil Spencer says he’s “evaluating all aspects” of their relationship with Activision Blizzard and making “ongoing proactive adjustments” in light of the reports, as reported by Bloomberg. “This type of behavior has no place in our industry,” said Spencer.

Activision Blizzard quietly announces a “Workplace Responsibility Committee,” chaired by two existing board members. The company also says it will seek out a “new, diverse director” to add to the board.

Jessica Gonzalez, a senior test analyst who was one of the organizers of the July walkout, announces on Twitter that she is leaving Activision Blizzard, with her last day on Dec. 10. In a message to CEO Bobby Kotick, she says that his “inaction and refusal to take accountability is driving out great talent and the products will suffer until you are removed from your position as CEO.”

[In December] U.S. State Treasures from California, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Oregon co-authored a statement of intent to meet with Activision’s board, with the general intent seeming to be confronting the company about the ongoing situation at the publisher.

The Game Awards showrunner Geoff Keighley confirms that Activision Blizzard will not be featured at this year’s event outside of the categories its games have been nominated in. Following backlash over an interview with The Washington Post that suggested indecision on how to “navigate” the situation, Keighley posted a series of statements to Twitter. “The Game Awards is a time of celebration for this industry, the biggest form of entertainment in the world,” he wrote. “There is no place for abuse, harassment or predatory practices in any company or any community.”

Following sudden layoffs at Raven Software in the QA department, developers at the studio walked out. They demanded members of the QA team, including those laid off, be offered full-time positions. Reports soon circled that they were promised a pay restructure for months, only to be called in one-by-one and let go. One report indicated employees moved cities for the roles just a few weeks prior.

I apologize for the wall of text. I realize that’s a lot. But I felt it was important to post the whole thing to give you a sense of just how much has happened in the last six months.

The Challenge of Change

...to jail. But I'll settle for him just leaving.
...to jail. But I'll settle for him just leaving.

On one hand, I realize that changing the company culture isn’t something you can do overnight. Culture shapes almost everything in a company. How people are hired, how they’re paid, how good work is recognized, how meetings are held, how bad work is discouraged, how problem people are handled, how disputes are settled, how schedules are created, how projects are assigned, how leaders are chosen, and how employees engage with the public.

You can’t magically change all of those behaviors with a memo. A lot of people – middle managers in particular – are going to see this scandal as a temporary disturbance. They’re just hoping to hold onto their positions until this whole thing “blows over” and they can get back to being lecherous, duplicitous, predatory little bullies. At the same time, a lot of other folks are eager for reform. Your problem as a leader is that you can’t tell which group someone belongs to by looking at them. You can’t tell by asking them. Sure, you can ask their boss and colleagues, but how do you know which of them you can trust? No matter how much you care, you can’t personally get to know all of the thousands of people involved. You have to start at the top with people you trust, and push the reforms downward. It’s difficult, slow work.

You need to push your reforms through as quickly as possible, or people will assume you’re all talk. At the same time, you can’t just start firing people or your reforms will turn into a grotesque Stalinist purge. Once the pink slips start flying, people will be eager to demonstrate their fealty to the New Ways by weeding out “evil doers”. That probably sounds nice, but the track record of these sorts of things is not good. What you’re left with is a combination witch hunt / Squid Game. Those sorts of contests favor the ruthless and cunning. The survivors will be people who are good at pointing fingers and tracking grievances, not people that are good at trust and collaboration.

So yes. Fixing Activision is going to be hard. It will take years. It will be messy. Some injustices will go unpunished.

But the first step – the first thing anyone needs to do to begin the process of fixing this – is to get rid of the guy who cultivated the existing way of doing things. It doesn’t matter if he’s magically turned over a new leaf and he’s 100% serious about reform and he’s not just a predatory creep trying to save face. He must go.

He has to go because nobody can take the promises of reform seriously while he’s there. This rotten company culture was created by him. Either he allowed this behavior to fester due to indifference / incompetence, or he served as the toxic template that everyone else emulated.

Here is how stories like this normally go:

Kotick is given a massive severance package and allowed to retire in peace, without needing to admit to any wrongdoing in public.  In the following months, the ongoing investigations with various governmental groups will be frustrated Nuremberg-style, with all of the remaining leaders insisting that they didn’t know about and couldn’t stop all of Kotick’s shenanigans.

Kotick’s chair is filled by one of his lieutenants. The new boss will be cut from the same cloth as the old one, and once the media frenzy dies down everything will go back to business as usual.

None of the leaders are punished, and none of the exploited workers receive amends.

The company will experience some very slight reforms. While nobody will say it explicitly, the general gist of it will be “In the future, don’t have so much fun that you create a public scandal.” Instances of harassment will be a little less brazen and a little more “he said, she said”. The company will do a better job at covering up its lies, and exploited overworked people will get paid some tiny percent more.

That sucks, but that’s usually the closest we can get to “justice” when dealing with corruption at this scale.

And we couldn’t even get that.


So that’s the big disappointment of 2021 for me. Next time I’ll run through my list of 2021 titles and talk about what I liked.

Also: If you bump into Santa, please tell him that all I want for Christmas is a good launch for the James Webb Space Telescope. Merry Christmas everyone!

 

Footnotes:

[1] You can’t change the footprint of your buildings. You only get to decide how the interior space is divided up.

[2] Who? I’ll get to that in a minute.

[3] Your target is actually wearing a swimsuit, so you’re not even ruining her clothes!

[4] Also, I ran into a broken mission trigger that softlocked my progress on one of the side-stories. Which is kind of shameful, considering it’s a linear job on such a small map. If the location is going to be so small, can’t it at least be polished?

[5] I would also accept GoG. Or hell, even Xbox Game Pass. Just, anything but EGS.

[6] I’ll give that game a series of its own eventually. I don’t want to spoil it now.



From The Archives:
 

89 thoughts on “Dénouement 2021 Part 2: The Disappointment

  1. Freddo says:

    On top of that I cannot shake the feeling that more donations to the political party in power would have avoided Blizzard being sued in the first place.

  2. Mattias42 says:

    I really like Two Point Hospital, but it’s a flawed gem.

    My biggest gripe and why I keep dropping it, is how you need so many of the low level rooms to keep patients flowing, but none of the dang maps seem to be built around that. So you basically have to stuff all that exciting and neat room customization stuff into a bin, and focus on finding out the One Exact Solution for how the devs imagined you’d lay out your current hospital.

    It’s a super weird design choice given the core gameplay loops, and pretty much on its lonesome drops the title from an 8-9 game to a 6-7.

    Still, I’ll give it this much: It’s pretty much THE closest any game has gotten to Theme Hospital since Bullfrog folded. The humor and presentation is pretty dang top notch.

    1. Sleeping Dragon says:

      I actually feel like TPH is trying to recapture Theme Hospital almost to a fault. My main issue is that the later parts of the levels tend to be just a waiting game until the goals (especially the higher tier goals) tick or fill up. I still enjoy it as a sort of fairly chill game that I can run while, say, watching something. Also did not invest in the DLC so maybe those put some more twists in? I hope their next game (I think it’s Two Point University or something like that?) is more exciting but even if it is similar I’ll probably get from a bundle or at a good sale.

  3. Moridin says:

    I was interested in Hitman as a series, then I got Blood Money for free from GOG and bounced off hard. Not only does the game not support 16:9, but a large chunk of the content apparently no longer exists because it was only available online and the servers that hosted it no longer do. And this time-gated approach to content is apparently endemic to the series. I certainly have no interest in paying money for a game if I know that should I want to play it again in five years time, I’ll only have access to a truncated version of it.

    1. Philadelphus says:

      The game doesn’t support 16:9? The single most common aspect ratio of the last ~decade? What do they expect you to be playing on, a phone? A square CRT?

      1. evilmrhenry says:

        This is Hitman: Blood Money, which was released in 2006, not the newer trilogy. I assume it’s a decision that made sense at the time.

    2. RichardW says:

      I have no idea what version you’re playing, but Hitman Blood Money absolutely supported widescreen modes. It was a 360 launch title so had 720p out of the gate (granted, the pre-rendered FMVs and loading screens are 4:3, it was a transitional time).

      There was no online content in Hitman until 2012’s Absolution, so I’m not sure what content you’re talking about being time-gated? Leaderboards? Who gives a crap? That’s the flimsy justification they’ve given for the always-online in the latest trilogy, but there’s rumblings that Hitman 3 will be ditching that next year along with allowing elusive targets to be replayed instead of vanishing forever.

      Also Shamus, if you’ve been holding out because of Epic, Hitman 3 is out on Steam come January.

  4. bobbert says:

    So yes. Fixing Activision is going to be hard. It will take years.

    I severely doubt that. Either it will stay the course or go out of business. See also: K-mart, GM, Crysler, Sears, &c

    1. John says:

      I’m really not sure what you’re going for here. “Don’t change at all” and “go bankrupt” are not the only alternatives or even the most likely alternatives. I think “change enough to suit regulators, the courts, and possibly even some of the employees” is much more likely than either.

      1. bobbert says:

        I guess what I am trying to say is, “Genuine cultural change is so hard, that it is nearly impossible. ” They might want to change it, but institutional inertia will fight them every step of the way.

        RCA knew they were on the road to perdition for decades, but in the end…

  5. Joshua says:

    Once the pink slips start flying, people will be eager to demonstrate their fealty to the New Ways by weeding out “evil doers”. That probably sounds nice, but the track record of these sorts of things is not good.

    I also have the experience that sometimes the causes of high turnover is ironically enough, high turnover. People get increasingly stressed by the changes in their duties and who else in the company can provide them with the information/resources they need and who now needs something from them, and they decide to join the wave of employees leaving because they don’t want to put up with another 6-12 months of this stress in hopes that it “settles down”. So, even though the problems may be “fixed”, the resulting instability just keeps the pressure on the other employees in a death spiral. In this case, even if the problem people are fired, this “weeding out evil doers” can result in still more good employees leaving because at the end of the day, it’s still a stressful place to work, even if it’s no longer toxic.

  6. Thomas says:

    It’s really depressing that we’re still in an age where one person can be responsible for a culture that bad and still have their job. Even if you only count the stuff that’s happened since the scandal came out, Kotick has done enough shady things in response to lose his job.

  7. eldomtom2 says:

    Also, though it might not be exactly PC to say it, clearly part of the problem at Activision is that employees aren’t willing to make sacrifices to force the company to change. Though they obviously won’t say it directly, it’s clear that turnout for ABetterABK’s walkouts and ongoing strike is poor. Replace “workers” in that Destructoid article with “some workers” and it’ll be more accurate.

    1. Fizban says:

      When you’ve got a generation of workers who’ve been programmed to believe this is the norm (and often poisoned against the concept of unions, which are apparently far rarer than you’d think outside of certain sectors), and are living in places where they can barely make rent even with “proper” jobs, I wouldn’t be surprised at all with a large portion not doing it. As always, it’s easy to talk about sacrifice until it’s you on the table, and then usually still easier for someone from a different situation than the one actually being expected to take the hit.

  8. kikito says:

    Happy holidays, everyone!

    (There’s still time to pick up Hades if you haven’t tried it yet)

  9. Parkhorse says:

    My “favorite” bit of the Bobby Kotick stuff was that he threatened to have his former assistant killed. It was several years back, but really, there’s a world of difference in tone between “threatening to kill someone” and “threatening to have someone killed,” especially coming from someone with the money and connections to make that plausible.

  10. Dreadjaws says:

    Apparently Square wants to take the bigger cut offered by the EGS, and they’re not willing to pass any of that savings onto me

    Ah, yes. Remember when this used to be one of the major selling points of the store? And how in the years since it launched it has yet to happen even once? Funny how that works out. And now Squeenix is not only unwilling to use their bigger cut to offer a better discount, they’re even launching their new games at a higher price, hoping to establish a new $70 standard. Console gamers have already accepted it. How long until PC gamers do it too, even though it has yet to be genuinely justified? (and no, “game development is expensive” is not a real justification)

    We can’t blame either publisher, since the same marketing and pricing problems persist across both games. So do we blame IO?

    Yes, we absolutely should blame IO. They’re the ones who published the game in GOG and still refused to remove their single-player DRM.

    As for my personal list of gaming disappointments this year, I guess I’m lucky I didn’t really have one (even the whole Activision deal can’t be counted as a disappointment because I couldn’t possibly expect anything good from those jerks). My disappointments have all come in the form of movies or TV. Aside from Spider-Man: No Way Home, everything Marvel has released this year has been from mediocre to terrible. Mortal Kombat was a disgrace, MOTU Revelations insultingly bad and I really wasn’t expecting much from Snake Eyes, the new Home Alone and Matrix Resurrections, but somehow they ended up being worse than I imagined. Even 007 No Time To Die and Ghostbusters Afterlife, which I overall enjoyed, ended up leaving me a bit empty. And the less we talk about the animated Injustice movie the better.

    Thank God for Dune, No Way Home, The Suicide Squad, Godzilla vs Kong, the CGI MOTU show, Snyder’s JL, the animated Mortal Kombat movie and Arcane, or else I would have started to believe I had become a cynic that couldn’t enjoy anything. Man, Arcane is so good. If you haven’t watched it, Shamus, I recommend it. I know it’s based in some MOBA game which I don’t care about, but I guarantee you, you don’t need to be familiar with the game to enjoy it. And the art style is just gorgeous.

    1. Chad+Miller says:

      Watched The Matrix Resurrections myself. I’m only not upset because my expectations were low, but the highlight was definitely the part where I found myself thinking “I know that I complained that some of the previous sequel fights were overlong and monotonous, but I don’t think having a hobo in the background monologue at nothing was the way to fix that problem.”

      1. Dreadjaws says:

        Man, that guy… I actually liked him in the other movies, but his presence here is pure annoyance. I honestly don’t understand what they were thinking here. Was this supposed to be funny? Illuminating? Philosophical? The only thing it was to me was groan-inducing.

  11. RamblePak64 says:

    I had a lot written here, but this is honestly one of those things I struggle to discuss because I feel like I approach it pragmatically, and also with a lot of questions and acknowledgment on the complexity of life. I can’t believe that getting rid of Bobby Kotick is going to make things better, and I’m skeptical enough of my fellow man and woman to be honest that I wouldn’t be surprised if many uninvolved onlookers simply perceive this as an opportunistic chance to get rid of a man that won’t make games we like (despite clearly making games that are successful). Does that mean I do not believe he deserves to be held accountable? Absolutely not, but he’s clearly not the only one, and as you note, sussing out who is and isn’t part of the problem becomes insanely difficult.

    All I can say and hope is that the situation gets fixed as neatly as possible, though I agree it could take a while despite everyone’s insistence it be resolved now.

    What I will comment on is Raven Software, even though this could get me in hot water as well: I want people to be careful to differentiate types of unions, because I keep seeing the idea of having a union being tossed around like a wonderful panacea that will help solve everything. Ironically, the executive that tried to warn employees that they’d be giving up their personal right to discuss their own benefits and such by giving it up to a third party is absolutely correct depending on what kind of union you’re going for. People try to make him sound like the villain, but I have a feeling that most people arguing for a union have never worked for one or spoken with people (multiple (ideally from different states because that matters too)) that have worked for one. Unions are made of fallible people and can be just as corrupt as anything else.

    However, I do believe it would benefit the games industry (and most tech industries these days, honestly) to set up Trade Unions for positions that are commonly needed but also commonly laid off, especially in cities/states where there are large gatherings of studios in one area. We know that, when a game project is reaching its conclusion, lower-level programmers, artists, and QA are laid off since there won’t be enough work to go around for months or even a year. If they were part of a Trade Union, then that Trade Union would already be in touch with other studios and publishers in the area, aware of who is going to need work, how much, and for how long, and would be able to reposition those employees accordingly. I have friends that work or have worked in Trade Unions and any lay-offs were often very, very temporary.

    That is the sort of union I think the games industry should be pursuing.

    Hopefully I didn’t say anything too awful. I feel like I end up looking at these things in a way that is often unpopular, but in turn I feel like everyone just oversimplifies what are complex matters, especially because we’re talking about large organizations made up 100% of fallible people. It’s easy to point the finger when you’re not the one in that position, and to also claim you’d never do X, Y, or Z when you’ve never had the opportunity. But, all of that said, I do think Bobby Kotick bares much of the responsibility, and I hope he and any others responsible are removed from their positions of power. I just hope collateral damage is minimized.

    1. Fizban says:

      that they’d be giving up their personal right to discuss their own benefits and such by giving it up to a third party is absolutely correct depending on what kind of union you’re going for.

      I think by discuss you mean negotiate- the discussion of your compensation with other employees is one of the first steps to collective negotiations, which is why companies want to squelch that discussion in the first place (so that no one knows who is getting paid more, and thus just assumes they’re all getting paid correctly and the boss can do what they want). Though I’m not sure if it’s a state law or part of the union contract that had someone/the union suing our workplace (and winning, or rather probably “settling”) a while back for trying to stop said discussion.

      And I can feel the potential downside too. We were told to “fight for four dollars” and voted to strike, then suddenly negotiators rolled over and took one and a half dollars on the last contract. Seemed pretty fishy. On the other hand there is a strike going on in another state right now, so maybe they’ve gonna use some more teeth on this one.

      1. evilmrhenry says:

        Trying to stop discussion of compensation is outright illegal.

      2. RamblePak64 says:

        I think by discuss you mean negotiate

        Yes, actually. I was rolling over in my mind what obvious word had suddenly blanked out of my brain. “Barter” kept coming to mind but you don’t barter a salary. I tried searching Google for synonyms to barter but none of ’em sounded right, and of course they didn’t, because none of them were negotiate.

        Forgetting common words right when you need them is the weirdest bug the brain has and I wish someone would patch it.

        Discussion of salaries and pay rates being frowned upon is something I can understand, though, given that it assumes all workers are equally capable or produce equivalent quality of work. I mean, even if two people start at equivalent pay, performance reviews (if based on performance and merit) would easily see the “better” employee earning more than the other. The problem is that “better” is not something you can objectively measure in most systems, especially when run by fallible people. And because of those fallible people, it turns out there are a lot of reasons that pay discrepancies exist.

        I would say, however, that a modern one is that there’s a lot of folks that came out of College without ever being told that you always see if you can get more than the offered pay rate before accepting a job. My understanding is that they cannot rescind an offer, so if you ask for more money they can’t change their mind. Granted, doesn’t mean they can’t get you more money, but common knowledge for a while is that they always offer less than they’re willing to go because such negotiations were expected. Or at least, this is what I was told was common knowledge. I remember telling my sister about some of this and discovered she never thought to negotiate her salary. Now she does it every time and almost always gets higher pay than she otherwise would have.

        It’s one of those things I find odd, where there’s so much emphasis on “preparing you for a job” in our education system, and yet simple stuff like negotiating pay isn’t covered at all. And I even had College seminars that went so far as to instruct you how to tie a tie! But, to bring this back home, what happens when one person starts a position without negotiating the salary, but then the other person did? Is that the company’s fault? Is it the employee’s fault? Or is it the fault of a system where negotiations are expected rather than just being honest about how much you can or expect to pay?

        And I’m the sort of person that likes asking the questions but not giving a definite answer, which is maybe why I find myself in hot water with this stuff at times.

      3. eldomtom2 says:

        I think you’re getting confused about what precisely the original Activision email was talking about. It was specifically about the right to negotiate contracts, which if they organised under the CWA (the union taking an active interest) they would definitely be signing over to the union.

  12. Darker says:

    Re Hitman

    I agree the different editions of the game are beyond ridiculous. When buying 2 and 3 I had to consult an online guide to determine which editions to get to ensure I will get all available content and won’t pay again for something that I already have. I am no marketing guru but I’d say something is very wrong if people write tutorials on how to buy the damn thing.

    I think you are being a bit too harsh on the Maldives map, it’s generally considered to be one of the better maps of the whole trilogy. And there’s a TON of stuff to discover – I’ve spent hours replaying the map thinking I have seen everything without realizing there is a whole James-Bond-villainesque lair hidden under the island.

    The Sniper Assasin maps become more interesting when you realize it’s possible to eliminate everyone with no bodies found and no alarms raised, which arguably is closer to the standard Hitman experience. The fact that the game doesn’t make this goal explicit doesn’t help. Also, it involves a lot of repetition and trial and error which might not be your cup of tea.

    And finally, if you ever get to play Hitman 3 you will probably be disappointed, as most of the maps, while good, are much much smaller than Hitman 1/2 maps…

    1. Chad+Miller says:

      Getting Silent Assassin, Suit Only on Maldives is some of the most fun I’ve had in Hitman 2.

  13. Philadelphus says:

    Just make sure Santa’s out of French Guiana airspace around the time window the JWST’s scheduled to launch in, that’d be one heck of a mess to sort out…

    1. Richard says:

      It’s currently due to launch at 07:20 EST (2021-12-25 12:20 UTC), so Santa will be back home putting his feet up ready to watch it.

      1. Philadelphus says:

        Oh, right—the launch is like 2AM here in Hawaii so I forgot it wasn’t necessarily middle of the night in French Guiana.

        1. Philadelphus says:

          At least I wasn’t the only one who thought of that scenario…but it looks like it’s away safely, so merry Christmas everyone!

  14. Adam says:

    I remember that one of the NuHitman games launched on GOG, and was met with swift and justified fury that it broke GOGs no-drm policies with its always-online and server-gated content. GOG themselves got the brunt of it, mostly because it was expected from the publisher. Then it was quickly pulled. I don’t know if it ever did, or will, come back in some form.

    But at least there is some segment of audience and business that appreciates these things, a little bit. GOG probably got burned enough that they’ll think twice about doing it again, but not so much that they feel they have to suck it up for the moneyz.

  15. theBrost says:

    Can anyone expand on Shamus’ comment, “despite the many drawbacks and shortcomings of the Epic Games Store.”? While still lacking many of Steam’s features, the Epic Games Store has good sales.

    1. Erik says:

      Off the top of my head, no provision for gifting, no social support, and although I see it has a wishlist now I remember complaints that it didn’t even have that originally. There were several other missing features that I’ve seen complained about, but they aren’t coming to mind right now.

      Steam has good sales as well, and is technically a much more complete and polished platform. Epic started off with an adequate starting point, but hasn’t shown any sign that it actually intends to improve it enough to actually compete on anything but potentially lower cost via lower commission (if the actual game publishers agree to pass along the lower commission as a lower price, which some don’t).

      Good sales don’t remove the drawbacks and shortcomings; at best they offset them – and how much lower cost makes up for lacking features is a personal choice that mostly depends on whether or not you personally care about those features. If you really need a missing feature, cheaper games that don’t meet your needs don’t help.

      1. Rho says:

        Additionally, Steam doesn’t generally have issues like suddenly going down and blocking all players from using the products they paid money for. They do take a higher cut, but in exchange built a robust data system that can deliver information to players and has lots of redundancy. I often buy games on GoG if available, but Steam is still a very reasonable choice that offers strong support, good forums, better social integration, convenient access to guides and communication, etc.

        If GoG is down, I can still play anything installed. If Steam is down, I may not even realize an issue exists. If Epic is down, I can… go do something else entirely.

      2. Mistwraithe says:

        I think the bigger problems with the Epic Store (relative to Steam) are lack of game reviews and lack of mod support.

        Gifting is niche (and last time I tried it on Steam it wouldn’t do what I wanted anyway) while I don’t find the social overlay in Steam all that useful to me – I understand others may differ, I use Discord for most of my social gaming communication.

        Personally I like the Epic Store but that’s largely because I am interested/involved in game development and I think Steam has been milking it on the commission side. The only way that was going to change for the better was someone like the Epic Store seriously challenging them. I know people don’t like Epic’s exclusives but I honestly think it was the only way of realistically challenging Steam.

        1. Soylent Dave says:

          While it would have been desirable to see a decent alternative to Steam come along and remove some of the monopolisation risks by challenging Steam, what we’ve got with EGS is someone intent on REPLACING Steam.

          And replacing them with a service that isn’t quite as good, to boot.

          If they were successful, we’d still have all the monopolisation problems, just with a different icon on our taskbars – we’re definitely not seeing any benefits of competition, because they’re not really competing with one another; EGS are trying to entirely supplant their competitor.

          (which is both unlikely and undesirable from an end user standpoint)

          Always worth remembering that when Steam first launched it was crap, of course. But still. I’d like to see some actual benefit for end users from the situation – choosing between walled gardens is rubbish.

    2. Geebs says:

      I can give you the reasons why I just uninstalled the Epic Game Store, even though I have a bunch of free games and a couple of paid games on there: it never updates itself in the background, and it always forgets my password. This means that, every time I want to play something on the EGS, I have to spend ten minutes mucking about. That’s just enough friction that I’d rather re-buy games on another store or (in the case of EGS exclusives) just play a different game instead.

      It doesn’t help that the EGS has fully embraced Launcher Hell, so for example to play my copy of Jedi: Fallen Order I have to open the EGS, get it to update and dig out my password, hit “play” in the EGS which then opens Origin, which now needs to update itself and has also forgotten my password. I have never finished J:FO.

      1. baud says:

        > Launcher Hell

        I recently had this with PoP: forgotten sands, the last of the PoP games by Ubisoft. So first I launch the game via Steam, it installs a Ubisoft thingy, which doesn’t work. Checking the forums, apparently Ubisoft has changed a few things without providing an update path, so I have to install that other thingy. But after installation the new thingy refuses to start, with a crash at launch. Then I realized that even if I successfully got it to run, I’d have to deal with Steam + the Ubisoft thingy (knowing I’ve lost all info on my Ubisoft account, including which email address I used), so I just said sod it and downloaded a crack that I stuck in the Steam installation directory.

      2. Mistwraithe says:

        I don’t know what isn’t working on your computer or how widespread it is, but for balance we have 4 computers with Epic Games in our house (we all play the same multiplayer game on it) and just turning on the computers is enough for Epic to install the latest patches (don’t even need to login) on all of them. I don’t believe any of us have eve had to re-enter our passwords into Epic either. I suspect the password issue is the root cause of your update problem.

    3. John says:

      Well, for one thing, Epic didn’t get around to implementing shopping carts until this month. Epic’s prior lack of shopping cart didn’t make the store non-functional, but it did make the store more inconvenient than it needed to be for anyone who might have been tempted to buy, y’know, more than one game at a time during a sale. I really can’t account for it. The shopping cart is old technology. No self-respecting e-commerce venture since the Dot Com Bubble has launched without one. It can’t be the case that no one at Epic understood the concept until recently. I personally don’t care too much about the store’s lack of social features, but its lack of basic convenience features is deeply weird and, I think, betrays a certain lack of regard for its customers.

      The Epic store also lacks any kind of Linux support, but that kind of thing is unfortunately to be expected.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        My main issue with them right now is the inability to categorize/tag games in my library. Having said that Epic just might eat the part of my “holiday sales” budget that Steam normally would (already got some stuff on GOG) just because those 10$ coupons make some prices really, really attractive…

  16. GoStu says:

    At this point in the Industry of Video Games’ existence, I’m convinced that mass studio departures is the only way that we get new IP and healthier companies.

    If enough of the Acti-Blizz people can band together and say “F this, we’re out” then start up a studio or studios, they’ll likely work on what’s similar to their old expertise but with enough new IP to avoid the lawsuits. Then the dregs that are left can churn out shitty games with the old IP names from a toxic work environment.

    Of course, the new company has the problem that the old one has all the agreements with publishers, financiers, and so on.

    I don’t know what my point is. Maybe try to be less attached to franchises, and support more indies?

    1. John says:

      The one drawback to this scenario is that the people who leave big publishers to start new studios and work on new IP don’t have the money to produce games on the same scale as the big publishers. It doesn’t matter how many, say, Assassin’s Creed developers desert Ubisoft. They can make a game that’s mechanically similar to Assassin’s Creed, but they can’t make one that’s as big as Assassin’s Creed. They just won’t have the budget for that. You could argue that’s a good thing. (That’s sort of how I see it, to be honest.) But, given the way the Assassin’s Creed games sell, there have got to be people who enjoy them specifically because of their big-ness. Even at my most cynical, I can’t bring myself to believe that it’s all just marketing.

      1. RamblePak64 says:

        Funny thing is, it just recently came out that Ubisoft has been having a bunch of talent leave in surprisingly large numbers. The official statement from the publisher is that they are also hiring a lot of talent so there’s nothing to worry about.

        Whether the publisher themselves believes this to be true or not is up in the air, but the problem with large companies (and large anything) is that you become more and more distanced from individuals and therefore it is easier to view them as expendable and replaceable. People need work, and some may even be unaware of what they’re getting into (especially if they’re young), so it’s possible high turnover doesn’t concern the higher-ups because it’s just business as usual to them and there will always be a market of young, fresh-faced laborers to fill the gaps, and the higher the turnover rate, the less you need to worry about annual pay increase.

        So, it could actually be a benefit to them.

        1. Geebs says:

          You’d hope that Ubisoft might learn from their disastrous experiment with outsourcing the Prince of Persia remake, but I doubt they will. “You get what you pay for” is something management seem determined to ignore.

    2. ContribuTor says:

      This reminds me painfully of the original manifesto and philosophy of a group of game developers who quit to develop a new kind of studio. with a focus on gamers and the joy of creation.

      You know them today as EA.

      Best version I can find:
      https://johansenquijano.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/the-electronic-arts-manifesto-can-computer-make-you-cry/amp/

      Lofty ideals are fine and dandy. But they don’t create a lasting utopia.

      I’m no longer sure what my point is.

      1. John says:

        Activision has similar origins as a bunch of disgruntled former Atari developers.

        1. Liessa says:

          Ah yes, the great Circle of Game Development. A small team of employees leaves a larger company to focus on creativity and passion over money. They make some great games, develop a good reputation, become financially successful, go public (or get bought out by a larger studio), become more and more profit-focussed, start making shitty cash-grab games, gradually lose their reputation. A small team of devs leaves to form a new studio and make games their own way. And so the cycle continues.

      2. DanielFogli says:

        I’m no longer sure what my point is.

        Maybe something in the lines of “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain”?

  17. Sniffnoy says:

    Typo spotting: You have “Stalanist” for “Stalinist”.

    1. Grimwear says:

      I like it, kinda makes it seem like a mixture of Stalinist and Satanist since Bobby Kotick is also the devil.

      1. Trevor says:

        Hail Stalan!

  18. Hal says:

    Two Point Hospital is something of a sequel to the 1997 Theme Hospital; dame basic gameplay and several of the same creators. I played the heck out of Theme Hospital back in the day.

  19. Grimwear says:

    I don’t know who is behind the terrible Hitman dlc but I do know that Square is absolutely horrendous. Also IO may be terrible. I don’t know if they ever changed it, but I recall when Hitman 1 came out that they had limited time events where you could get assassination targets and if you played when it released it was unlocked forever but if you missed out, too bad it’s gone forever. That pretty much killed any interest I ever had in the series since going in I knew I’d always be missing content. Did they ever fix that?

    Also in regards to DLC. So I played the new Tomb Raider 1 and 2 so 3 is constantly recommended to me, including during this winter sale and here’s how it goes:

    “Buy Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition!”

    I click on it. It then brings me to a bundle with 4 items in it.

    1. Deluxe Extras (outfit, gun, soundtrack aka useless)
    2. Croft Edition Extras (2 outfits and 2 guns aka useless)
    3. Definitive Edition Game
    4. Definitive Edition Upgrade (aka super extreme useless)

    Now this bundle shows as being sold for 17.55 CAD while the Definitive Edition game itself is shown priced at 17.81 CAD so it’s a deal right? Except if you click on the Definitive Edition it takes you to the store page where your only option is to buy the bundle. You CANNOT buy it individually.

    Even better I googled and it turns out that when the Definitive Edition first came out it came with the Deluxe Edition and Croft Edition upgrades. So ignoring the fact that they’re selling you the Definitive Edition AND the Definitive Edition Upgrade in the SAME BUNDLE, but the 2 other dlc extras are ALSO PART OF THE DEFINITIVE EDITION YOU MONKEYS!

    Needless to say I outright refuse to buy the third game because of its offensive and blatant attempt to lie about a “good” deal which is anything but. Whoever devised this can suck an egg.

    1. Chad+Miller says:

      Did they ever fix that?

      As of 3 games in, Elusive Targets are still ongoing. I’ve made it a point not to buy the games until after they end in order to intentionally spite their attempted FOMO exploitation, so I haven’t played 3 yet.

      1. RichardW says:

        Elusive Target Arcade is coming to Hitman 3 this year, which very much sounds like a way to replay them endlessly. And a word of advice for anyone curious who hasn’t got the first 2 – just buy Hitman 3, which includes the whole trilogy collection.

    2. ivan says:

      if you played when it released it was unlocked forever

      Not, sure, but you appear to have misunderstood Elusive Targets. They work like this (I think). For a period of time (a week), it is available to play. You can attempt it many times during that week, but if you ever ‘finish’ it (leave via an exit after completing the objectives) it is no longer playable for you. At the end of that week, it is no longer playable for you, regardless of if you finished it or not. At no point are Elusive Targets ‘unlocked forever’, for anyone.

      1. Chad+Miller says:

        It’s actually pretty funny to me how nearly any conversation about Elusive Targets ends up with at least one person saying “No, it’s actually even worse than it sounds”

  20. Gautsu says:

    DLC for games seems like Shamus’s Kryptonite

  21. Mark says:

    “Omnicide” is actually the method by which I completed Hitman: Blood Money in part because you can stay anonymous so long as you kill everyone. The last mission in the Heaven/Hell themed club is actually pretty hard to complete this way due to the sheer number of people. The AI in Blood Money is pretty spotty. There’s definitely the precursor to the AI in the current game, but then there are things like the dancers in the aforementioned last mission who just kinda, don’t do anything as you blow people away right next to them.

  22. Zaxares says:

    “At the same time, you can’t just start firing people or your reforms will turn into a grotesque Stalinist purge.”

    If the corruption/problems are deep and systemic enough, sometimes the only way to truly fix it is indeed to burn it all to the ground and start from scratch. This was what happened with Singapore’s police force in the turbulent years following independence. There was deeply entrenched corruption that went all the way to the top, and in the end the newly elected government decided to just fire the ENTIRE POLICE FORCE and hire from scratch. None of the previous police were allowed to re-apply for their old jobs, and foreign trainers had to be brought in to train the new police force. It was VERY messy and expensive, but it worked.

    1. tmtvl says:

      I imagine there’s a fair few people in the Twenty Sided community who work in Tech, so we should be well aware that burning it all down and starting from scratch is sometimes a very attractive proposal.

      1. Philadelphus says:

        The slightly-more-arson-based version of “turning it off and back on again”.

    2. Ninety-Three says:

      If you fire everyone at Blizzard and hire replacements then there is an important sense in which you no longer have Blizzard: you basically shut that company down and started a new one in their old offices. At that point why bother? Unlike the police we don’t need Blizzard to exist so if the owners decided that Blizzard really should be burned to the ground they’d just shut it down, sell the IP and take their money elsewhere.

      1. Steve C says:

        Note that you can fire all the police. It’s a real option. For example Toronto fired all their police in a clean sweep decades ago. Just saying that it is possible to fix corrupt organizations by removing all the people in them. Even for the ones deemed essential.

        But you’re right. It wouldn’t still be Blizzard if they did that. But that’s not a bad thing either.

        1. Ninety-Three says:

          Yes, the thing I meant was that if you fire all the police you still need to have a police force even if it’s not with those cops, while if you fire everyone at Blizzard it’s not obvious why you would want to rebuild them: there are plenty of other studios to invest in.

          1. Syal says:

            Recently learned about the Night of Terror when Montreal Police went on strike for a day.

  23. MelfinatheBlue says:

    Merry Christmas, Shamus! Here’s something I think you’ll enjoy…. A Musician Gamer who’s made songs about some games I know you like, like Prey 2017, Doom (Rip and Tear my Way to Your Heart), Two Point Hospital, and a bunch more. He’s TheStupendium on youtube, and I have no affiliation other than thinking his stuff is good.

  24. Rho says:

    Merry Christmas to Shamus and all the Twenty Sided community, including YOU (yes, you right there reading this!). Double Merry Christmas in your case.

    1. pseudonym says:

      Thank you, and Merry Christmas to you too!

      Merry Christmas everyone!

  25. Chenko says:

    And don’t even get me started on their always-online single-player bullshit. That would make for an entire article-length rant, all by itself.

    Please make that rant. Please.

        1. Dreadjaws says:

          Fourthed.

          Also, Merry Christmas everyone.

          1. BlueHorus says:

            Fifthed!

            Shamus ranting about needless complications and bullshit in gaming trends is a fine tradition, and one I can never get enough of.

            Also indeed: Merry Christmas to all.

            1. tmtvl says:

              Sixthed! And happy Hannukah!

              1. Rho says:

                Seventh’d (day of Christmas my true love gave to me…)

                More seriously: I think there’s actually good design opportunities there, but companies want to do this the easy/lazy way. And from what I’ve seen, Hitman is the worst on this

    1. Chad+Miller says:

      If you want fuel for that rant: Recently they tried to release the games on GOG. At which point a bunch of fans stepped in to say “Um…isn’t this store supposed to be DRM-free?” and got it taken back out.

    2. Ninety-Three says:

      If we’re all commenting on this, I seem to be in the minority but I vote against. I feel like such an article would inevitably end up as an exercise in explaining the obvious: no one needs to be told that mandatory online in a singleplayer game is dumb and bad. Well no one except but IO, but I don’t think they read Twenty Sided.

      1. Chenko says:

        That’s fair.

        I wanted to read the article because, in my experience, I’ve had a very narrow view on quite a bit of stuff (lootboxes, et al), and I got a new perspective from the articles on this blog. Either that or I got more insight on certain things I already believed.

        I’ve enjoyed reading them regardless, and if I can get more of something I like, I’m okay asking for it. :)

        1. BlueHorus says:

          It is, indeed, fair.

          Tell you what: how about Shamus tries to list the *good* reasons for an always online single player? Call it a challenge…

          1. Syal says:

            You know how children spend too much time in front of screens? Well now their games have built-in time restrictions! Ness’s father could only suggest you take breaks, but now companies can make you. inevitably resulting in a healthier, more productive population! They’d be stupid not to do it!

            (Remember parents, power-outage weather is the perfect time to send the kids outside.)

  26. evilmrhenry says:

    Epic is giving away Prey, Christmas day only.
    https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/prey

  27. BlueHorus says:

    Have I got time to add the Wheel of Time TV show to the disappointments for the year? The season finished yesterday, and I’m kind of sad. It started out…genuinely quite promising, I thought. I was invested.

    But the last few episodes suffered from a severe case of what I’ll call ‘How Did THIS Chump Get All The Screentime?’ Syndrome, wherein world-changing aretifacts, plot-essential revelations etc are shoved into the background so that random side characters we’ll never see again can have their entire backstory revealed.

    I think my favorite bit was when a load of goons who looked like escaped player characters from a WoW server started attacking their king’s throne room with pickaxes during a trolloc invasion apropos of nothing – all so they could dig up yet another MacGuffin that had never been mentioned before…and then it didn’t even get used!

  28. Ninety-Three says:

    On the Blizzard situation, everything I’ve heard from actual Blizzard employees says the culture has gotten significantly better. All the really salacious stories in the saga are from many years ago, and it seems like Brack might have been forced out over a mess that happened before he even took the reins. No sympathy for the guy though, “get fired to appease the public if something bad comes up” is one of the duties of a CEO and for what they were paying him I’d happily be a scapegoat.

    The 2021 software industry is against predatory lechs the way the 1961 US military was against communists. Now that an eight figure lawsuit has gone down, no one’s going back to the bad old high-harassment climate of decades ago and I promise you that the Bad People still at Blizzard are not so optimistic as to hope for anything more than “maybe I’m too low-profile to get fired like Brack and McCree”.

  29. TLN says:

    I agree with the bank being too small, but I think you are definitely not giving enough credit to Maldives or Sniper Assassin. Maldives is a lot bigger than it initially seems and the three distinct areas of the resort area/mansion and surroundings/underground base all feel very different. It’s one of my favourite levels of the new trilogy personally.

    As for Sniper Assassin, it’s.. weird, sure, but “sniping waves of AI mooks” is not at all what it’s about, so I’m thinking you maybe misunderstood the game mode? It’s not at all a wave-based shooter, it’s a puzzle where your only tool is a sniper rifle. That makes it less complex than regular Hitman yeah, but there’s also a ton of extra challenges that can be really tricky. If someone sees someone else get shot or a dead body that was left behind, they’ll go for the alarm, and once that happens your targets will rapidly attempt to leave the area. Sure, you CAN just kill your targets as they are fleeing, much like how you CAN clear pretty much any map of Hitman guns blazing mowing down every guard with an assult rifle, but I feel like that is missing the point.

  30. maydaymemer says:

    Shamus I love you, but you couldn’t be more wrong about New York. The Maldives is a little janky, especially in Hitman 3 which still hasn’t patched NPCs seeing thru walls, but that’s more because they made the viewcones bigger in order to up the challenge. The map itself is fun and full of opportunities, and the drowning stuff while unrealistic is great for a sandbox game like Hitman. New York is one of the best maps in the whole series and there’s still a ton of ways to beat it despite its size. At least 20 ways to get rid of that one target, which is way more than maps like Bangkok and Sgail which have bigger spaces but less interesting targets. The map’s design is incredibly fluid for moving around in and just because Marrakesh, which I also love, can fit NY inside itself three times or more doesn’t mean it’s better. New York has way better design with less dead ends and has more of an interesting setting to play contracts in to boot. You’re also forgetting you’re getting four mini missions on the other maps with this too, and like I said you can play New York and the Maldives in contracts mode to get the most bang for your buck

  31. Damiac says:

    Bobby Kotick is an idiot and a plague on the industry, but that doesn’t make everyone jumping on the bandwagon the good guys. A bunch of testers want to organize and they’re using some alleged harassment as a jumping off point. The whole point is to pressure BlizzAct not to fire the troublemaking workers and let them unionize and control the company. Of course the state of California is happy to get involved.

    Look at that list of events. It’s presented as “Blizzard is full of creeps” but all the specifics are about organizing and unionizing. They’re trying to conflate “harassment” meaning discouragement from unionizing with sexual harassment. These people pictured in these walkouts are just taking advantage of one bad situation to try to gain control.

    The real blizzard died 20 years ago and now it’s just parasites fighting over the lifeless shambling corpse.

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