Last week I ran a poll asking people how they thought Blizzard would respond to the recent controversy. Too late I realized I’d conflated two different ideas:
1) How will Blizzard handle this short-term PR problem?
2) How will they change their behavior in the future?
As a result, the answers were muddled. Here’s the chart:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Blizzcon Survey Results”
I really love the YouTube Channel of Patrick H. Willems. He’s done some solid work over the years. I think I’ve watched his entire channel twice by this point. How to Make a Perfect Action Scene is brilliant and Marvel’s The Defenders: Why is the Hand So Boring? answers a question that Netflix probably should have figured out about four years ago.
Over the past handful of years I’ve had to pay more attention to narrative and structure because the videogames I critique are so often designed and marketed with a huge emphasis on their stories. To do a proper analysis I need to understand what they were trying (and often failing) to accomplish in a cinematic sense. Which means that I’ve spent a lot of time watching stuff from filmmakers-turned-YouTubers. PHW is one of the better examples of this.
A few weeks ago he published SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES. I knew the video was going to get him into trouble the moment I saw the title. At a couple of points in his essay he even says, “You’re watching movies wrong.” That’s provocative to the point of being flame-bait, although I doubt he intended it that way. As of this writing, SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES has more views than any of his other work, but it’s also the most intensely disliked. It’s got a 30% negative rating, which is way out of norm for the channel.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shut Up About SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES”
My column this week is a breakdown of why the response to the Diablo: Immortal announcement was so negative. I tried to keep the outrage distant and abstract and just look at this from the point of view of a PC-centric audience.
Having said that, how bad was the outrage? The big meme-worthy moment was when one guy asked the presenters if the announcement was an out-of-season April Fool’s joke. Sure, that’s a little rude. But if I just spent hundreds of dollars to attend a convention focused on classic PC games made by Blizzard and the main event was a shallow phone game that wasn’t made by Blizzard, I’d probably be pretty miffed too. Where is this supposed outrage? The toxicity? To me it feels less like outrage and more like annoyance and disappointment. I’m sure we can go on Twitter and find some loony spewing personal attacks at the developers, but if that’s your standard for public outrage then literally everything is an outrage because there’s always That Guy.
I think it’s still a controversy worth talking about, simply because it shows a sudden shift of behavior in a major company. It’s also a pretty good example of a major miscalculation that seems obvious in retrospect.
So what happens next? Right now it feels like anything is possible and nothing is likely. Blizzard PR seems to be AWOL, but I’m guessing this caught them flat-footed and they’re scrambling to form a strategy. Will Blizzard double down? Will they backpedal? I’m curious what everyone thinks, so let’s do a poll:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: The Last Bastion of PC Gaming Goes Mobile”
Alec Ryder walks up to the alien machine and holds up his hand. A huge starmap(?) appears, along with an alien symbol. The electrical storm stops, the skies clear, and everything is fine.
Except!
A blast of energy knocks Alec and Sara off the platform. Sara falls and busts open the faceplate of her helmet.
This entire section is a disaster of confusion, contrivance, and contradiction. This is the big moment when the player becomes the Pathfinder, and none of it works. This is the point in the story where Mass Effect Andromeda slides into the bad habit of self-defeating plot-points in the style of Mass Effect 2 and incoherent hand-waves in the style of Mass Effect 3.
At the start of the mission, Sara fell out of the destroyed shuttle. She landed hard and cracked her faceplate. Her suit began leaking and she started to suffocate in the poisonous atmosphere. Then she took out a little gizmo and repaired the faceplate. Boom. Fixed. All good.
So now she breaks her faceplate again. The most natural thing for the audience to assume is that the previous helmet-smashing incident was a setup for this one. It’s completely reasonable for the audience to expect that – when presented with the same problem – the protagonist will employ the same solution.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 5: The Pathfinder”
This week we bring you yet another show, now with 15 extra minutes of show. You get 25% more show for the same money. That’s a good value! On the other hand, the first 25 minutes are basically a spoiler for my column later in the week.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #231: Diablo Immortal, Witch Watch, Enduring Games”
The last time I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind was in the early 1980s. I was a kid, and I watched it on television. Some parts of it were too scary for me. The rest was too strange for me to understand.
It popped up on Netflix two nights ago and I fell in love with it. Spielberg was only 33 when he wrote and directed it. Most filmmakers have a rough early period of awkward films before they hit their stride, but apparently Spielberg was born a master of cinema. Must be nice.
The film has this iconic five-note tune that the characters use to communicate with the aliens. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve probably heard the notes. The movie was stuck in my head and as part of unpacking it I turned those notes into a song.
Every creative endeavor has its downside. Writing a story is fun, but proofreading is boring. Programming is fun, but debugging is a chore. Likewise, it’s fun to come up with melodies and rhythms, but mixing and producing sucks.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: Getting Closer”
The setup of the main chunk of Hearts of Stone’s story goes like this: Olgierd von Everec, who first put up the contract to kill the monster in the Oxenfurt sewers, has made a deal with the devil-like figure Gaunter O’Dimm. In order to fulfill his end of the deal, O’Dimm enlists Geralt to make three of Olgierd’s wishes come true.
I get the distinct sense that the writers were given more of a leading role in this expansion, because this is the perfect excuse for them to do all the stuff they’ve probably always wanted with this setting and cast of characters. Olgierd’s wishes can be (and are) as off-the-wall as CDPR would like, and they take advantage: show Olgierd’s (now-dead) brother “the time of his life,” steal an entire house, and a third which is left unrevealed until Geralt has completed the first two.
I would say the writers chose their wishes well, because the first two are clean and promising setups for long set pieces featuring a body-swap comedy and an elaborate heist, respectively. In the first, Geralt attends a wedding while intermittently possessed by the spirit of Olgierd’s late brother Vlodimir, and in the other, he recruits a crew of charming sleazebags to steal a will (the “house”) of a wealthy merchant.
Rather than try and do a blow-by-blow of each of these two sequences, I thought I would just point out a list of things that I enjoyed, and which I think illustrate some of the unique advantages an expansion can have over a base game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone, Part Two”
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
T w e n t y S i d e d
