Gaming Under The Influence

Valheim recently received its biggest update since launch, containing the titular Mistlands biome long-time players have waited many months to explore. The new zone is weird & awe-inspiring, with rocky peaks jutting into a purple sky from an ocean of impenetrable mist, where man-sized insects war with the dverger (a dwarf-like race of initially-friendly npcs) amidst the skeletons of giants. The content also brought challenges; the difficulty spike from the plains was more severe than between previous biomes, while the new Seeker raids destroyed the most well-fortified bases in short order. The fear of death was palpable throughout our time in the Mistlands; we were forced to utilize every mechanic possible to ensure our survival. Learning enemy patterns & navigating carefully through the mist was necessary. But people have been complaining about just this same content. After much complaining, a patch has been announced, which will nerf enemy aggression in the Mistlands & Seeker raids in particular. Join Mike & Alex for a discussion of why these changes amount to disappointing pandering to gaming’s lowest common denominator (people for whom self-gratification is the only measure of quality, even at detriment to the game).

The Game Awards 2022 were the best iteration of the show yet. Activistic filler content was minimal, awards were well-distributed and the industry's greatest developers presented their current projects. We were left with many reasons to be excited about the future of video games. Join Mike & Alex for a recap of the most interesting announcements from the Game Awards 2022.

Evil West is a refreshing game to play in 2022. While, as its marketing has noted, it lacks secondary monetization features of any kind, it also recalls games developed in the PS2 era, before the advent of contemporary information technology: when developers lacked the ability to monitor community opinion or concurrent steam players and instead had no choice but to focus on the integrity and self-contained merits of their games.

At the AAA scale, both Kojima & Miyazaki have attained an unusual degree of financial & creative freedom over the games they make.: Miyazaki is president of FromSoft, while Kojima owns his own studio. Join Mike & Alex for an optimistic treatment of the future this makes possible.

Alex & Mike at GreenDragonCVR present a list of the absolute best games yet to launch in 2022. From JRPGs to farming sims, from Pokemon to survival horror, some of the most important games of the year will be released in November & December. Are you ready?

Harvestella [Developed by Square Enix, Live Wire]

The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me [Supermassive Games]

Pokemon: Scarlet & Violet [GameFreak]

Evil West [Flying Wild Hog]

The Callisto Protocol [Striking Distance] Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Remake [Square Enix]

Join Mike & Alex for a discussion of the top 10 games of 2022 so far. From soulslike to survival to pokemon to FPS, this year has been packed with outstanding games we could not be happier to share our thoughts on. Tune in next week for a list of the most exciting games left to release this year.

Playing a game involves two things: gameplay on the one hand and, on the other, the world, story & meaning which gameplay conveys. Gameplay, like the words in a book or paint on a canvas, is the medium the game-maker uses to communicate his concept. Even where gameplay mechanics are similar, as between entries in the same genre, each game is distinct at least to the extent that its mechanics are used to communicate an original world, a novel story & meaning.

Sometimes gameplay impedes player enjoyment of the world & story; tedious, repetitive mechanics, reused assets or even scenarios implemented to pad out the game can make it impossible for the qualities of the game-maker’s ideas to shine through. We call this ‘gameplay bloat’.

Other times, the concept a developer has tried to communicate is itself impoverished: tedious & reused, passed between hands & kept alive for profit alone. This is ‘franchise funk’: no mechanics of any quality can save a game from a poor, zombified & unappealing concept.

What does the failure that is Stadia have in common with the firing of Kurvitz, Hindpere & Rostov from ZU/AM? They both result from an industry fixation on market-immanent metrics of a product’s ‘success’ at the expense of the integrity of the work. Join Alex & Mike for a discussion of streaming services & sh*t-canned creators, both of which manifest a profoundly sick & degenerate video game development culture.

Alex & Mike discuss bloat in contemporary open world games & the tension they often exhibit between narrative & systems. While survival games & soulslikes convey the intelligible content of the world & plot via the player’s tactile engagement with a virtual space, western open world games with heavy narrative focus put forth an unhappy and contradictory marriage of needlessly dense systems and cinematic storytelling. Also a brief discussion of why Cyberpunk 2077 should have been a walking simulator.

Gaming Under the Influence @ Green Dragon CVR with Mike + Alex; Developers out of 343 Industries have recently offered insight into why they believe “games are harder to make these days”[i]. Amongst the items on their list of reasons are enhanced technical expectations and the intricacies of running, updating or maintaining online games. Not one of these things is integral to a good game; this serves as a list of features proper to many games precisely as bad.