DISPATCHES FEBRUARY
Across the universe
Reading your article on NFTs [E365], I found myself agreeing with the sceptical tone. NFTs in games seem daft at best: a solution looking for a problem, or potentially the worst innovation to come at the worst time; pointless, environmentally damaging tech bobbins for grifters to hype while we’re looking down the barrel of potential climate catastrophe. That said, I couldn’t help but try to think of what an interesting use case might be, and I think I’ve found one: NFTs should be a curse.
What about a scenario where, if you’re killed or invaded in a Dark Souls-type game, ownership of a curse gets transferred to you? The curse then wreaks havoc in your game – or maybe it’s a creature that hunts you like Mr X in Resi 2; its target indelibly logged in the blockchain and the only way to get rid of it is to transfer it to someone else. Maybe it could be like It Follows or The Ring, and after you’ve been got it goes after the previous owner.
All the proposed scenarios for NFTs seem to just be about making what could be functionally infinite digital products have artificial scarcity. It’s all about making players care about ‘ownership’ of digital tat. I’m not sure that many people even care about ownership of games themselves, considering the success of PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass, let alone the products in those games. However, the idea of a specific digital entity travelling through a network, manipulated by players, its journey recorded in digital history, is actually intriguing – infinitely more so than the prospect of owning a specific copy of a +5 axe or one of those awful apes.
Dave Merrett
A use for NFTs in videogames that feels not only legitimate but fascinating? This is precisely how to go about winning a year’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership.
Dig it
I have been having a brilliant time with the recently released Battlefield 2042, putting in about 52 hours in the weeks since release, which is about the same amount of gaming I had managed in the previous three months. It is fair to say that this game has its hooks in. Yet the current meta in subreddits and gaming forums is to slate the game and EA/ DICE for releasing ‘a broken, buggy mess that is an insult to gamers’.
Now don’t get me wrong – this game has its fair share of bugs, poor design choices and balancing issues, and arguably should have been delayed until next year after the beta. However, despite these issues, I am enjoying the game immensely. If I decide to pop my head above the parapet and declare this fact, I get quickly flooded with comments telling me why my opinions are wrong and that I am ‘part of the problem’.
I have no issue with people expressing their negative opinions of the game, so why am I not allowed to discuss what I like about the game without getting shot down? I don’t think I have seen such polarisation in discussions around other forms of entertainment, so what is it about videogame discourse that so quickly descends into name-calling and shitposting?
It certainly doesn’t help me persuade non-gaming friends that gaming is now a grown-up hobby when they see articles about Halo subreddits being shut down for due to toxicity or developers getting death threats. I dearly love my hobby, like Henry Cavill likes his Warhammer, but as in his case, it seems we just aren’t allowed to enjoy what we enjoy these days without someone crapping all over it.
Matt Spink
“The curse wreaks havoc – or maybe it’s a creature that hunts you like Mr X in Resi 2”
Unfortunately, it’s been like this going back to Ugg deriding Ogg’s wonky stone wheel in front of the entire tribe. Our advice: discuss games with friends, not strangers.
Get back
As someone who rarely revisits older games, I often find it surprising how much conversation there is around spending what limited time we have on this planet reliving our past. Be it remakes, re-releases, game preservation or backwards compatibility, there is a vocal group of players keen to resuscitate past experiences and developers keen to make some easy money.
I rarely go back to retro (or even fairly recent) titles – partly due to having such a huge backlog that I feel guilty doing so, and partly because the experience is often disappointing. Even when I’m convinced the game in question will hold up well, such as Super Mario 64 or OutRun, I’ve been left disappointed. In more recent months, we’ve seen some shocking ports that barely work.
Reliving many of these experiences isn’t that great. Control inputs have improved. Our patience for replaying sections multiple times and only getting a save opportunity every 30 minutes has diminished. And the tech has left the past, more often than not, slightly redundant. Every new generation promises better AI or more processing power, but often that power is just spent on better visuals. What if we used all of the new processing power of modern platforms to reinvent these retro experiences, building on what’s already there and working well?
What if F-Zero GX was online and with 40+ racers on track? What if Halo 3 upped the ante and the larger set-pieces featured even better AI and scale? What if Deux Ex: Human Revolution made the enemies 50 per cent more clever and unpredictable?
Tetris 99 is one of very few games I can think of that took an old game, and gave me a reason to experience it again in a new way. It brought back the feeling I had, but made it entirely original. I’d be much more tempted to return to games of old if more did the same.
Sean Thomas
To be honest, we had a much longer, more thoughtful response in mind, but such egregious OutRun slander will not stand around these parts. Online F-Zero GX, though? Mmm, now you’re talking.
The long and winding road
Today marks the tenth anniversary of Skyrim’s
Clairvoyance spell. Or, as I call it, the biggest missed opportunity I’ve seen in game design. Here’s the deal: for a little mana you can shoot a beam that points the way to the closest objective. I never used it because Skyrim’s arrows on your map are clear enough. But imagine if there weren’t any markers. I bet we would look around a bit more and use Clairvoyance the moment we start to get frustrated. Especially if the price of using the spell was one worth considering. That could have been an interesting choice!
Location markers overshadow the details of our virtual worlds. But we also hate having to look up directions on the web. Some games, such as The Witcher III, let you turn them on and off. Some, such as Breath Of The Wild,
give you instructions. Some, such as Hollow Knight, have us venture around before we find a map. Oh, and you can pay hard cash for a map pack in Forza Horizon. It’s a sensitive balance. But why not gamify this like we do with everything else? Think of how we make save points a choice, such as in Resident Evil and Ori.
How about giving Assassin’s Creed extrachallenging towers for special map markers? Deus Ex fills your screen with location distances – why isn’t that a modification that requires upgrades or energy? Cruelty Squad
blissfully lets you search for its secrets, but I occasionally wouldn’t have minded trading an organ to get a hint.
Videogames have this crazy paradox: when they point out where you can go, you lose the goal of the game – namely, the chance to carve out your own path. This leads to an extremely subjective tension. It only makes sense to give the player better control over this.
Robert August de Meijer
Two of us
There’s a lot of talking in videogames, but not a lot of it is dialogue – at least if we focus on the communication the player has any agency over. Dialogue: a conversation, an exchange of ideas, a discussion.
In part it is the limitations of digital storytelling. The nonsequiturs, tangents and callbacks that happen in natural conversations are a social dance. Not only do they require a lot of script, but also that NPCs take a role in driving conversation.
When Paul rebukes JC for using too much violence, it still stands out because it’s a rarity. He brought up the subject and a strong opinion on it. The power fantasy places NPCs in the passive role, being pumped by the player for quests or clues: hardly a dialogue. Only in Grand Theft Auto IV were NPCs allowed to annoy the player on their own initiative, and that’s not going to be repeated.
The best dialogue should happen with the antagonist, but – Wolfenstein cutscenes aside – we often spend little time in their company. The Illusive Man’s arc gave us a sense of how that might happen, but what conversation can you have with a man indoctrinated by space magic? (One gated by a reputation bar, apparently.) When we do get to speak to the villain, how often do we hear “We’re not so different, you and I?”
The day may never come when I can have a dialogue with an NPC in the sense of two equals in a social dance: too much of a technical and content burden for too little payoff. If I want a dialogue in a game, I could always unmute the multiplayer lobby.
Tom Piercy
Hmm. Not too sure about the latter option, although to be fair it is always useful to find out where our mothers were last night.