DISPATCHES DECEMBER
Creed is good
Aren’t you tired of Elden Ring? Doesn’t it just remind you of being 18 again and doing your Duke Of Edinburgh Gold Award, stuck on a Welsh hillside in January with a rickety tent and a compass that you have no idea how to read? Well, I might have just the game for you. Not only is it a breath of fresh air, I think it could even be the future of open-world games after FromSoft nearly ruined them. It’s by a little-known but up-and-coming studio called Ubisoft (the better ‘soft’, in my opinion), and the game in question is called Assassin’s Creed. Instead of bizarre and oblique lore that sounds like the mad mutterings of an opium addict, you get a clear story, good voice acting, and a world that draws credibly on real historical sources. Instead of gloomy rain-soaked landscapes, you get sumptuous, inviting vistas of lush oases and sprawling beautiful cities teeming with life. As you walk around, you are enveloped by the sights and sounds of ancient Greece or Egypt. Instead of an almost unusable UI, Byzantine levelling and a baffling crafting system, you get clear, user-friendly menus and well-thought-out level progression. Elden Ring says, “You see that mountain over there? You can climb it and then immediately get one-shot killed by an angry demon the size of a house 86 times until your thumbs bleed.” Assassin’s Creed says, “Hey, tired dads, we know you might no longer have the reactions of a fighter pilot. Take a stroll up that mountain, watch the sun go down over olive groves, take out a bunch of bandits and feel good, for just 15 minutes in your tired dad life. You’ve earned it.” So, let me put a metaphorical, non-tentacled arm around you, and let’s walk together into that bright, new 4K dawn. Here’s to the future. Here’s to Assassin’s Creed.
Joe Crook
Come on, surely 37 fruitless attempts at Malenia are precisely the tonic needed to keep tired dads awake beyond 9pm, no?
Money for nothing
Robert Frazer recently shared their concern about videogame preservation in E376. Indeed, game companies have had a mixed track record in keeping historic games available for consumers. On the other hand, the emulation scene has been a great boon to gamers and even companies.
One problem with emulation is that it is in certain ways illegal. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. It just means governments are allowed to penalise gamers who don’t stick to the rules. But those rules are determined by elected representatives. In other words, if enough folks want copyright laws to be different, we have the ability to change them.
Now, those copyright laws do have merit: it’s only fair for the producers of a game to reap the benefits of their work. However, current laws keep copyright intact for 70 years after the creator’s death. Most of the money therefore ends up with the distributors. In that sense, the law is mostly on the side of those who have but one goal in mind: to make as much profit out of a work as possible. I understand that distributors take care of marketing, printing and many other important facets. To be clear, I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t benefit either.
Ultimately, I believe that the 70 years after the developer’s life is absurdly long. In my estimation, people working on games should be paid for 20 to 3o years. That’s plenty of time to strike it rich. After that, it would be best for games to be owned by everyone. Case in point: do you really believe that whoever still works at Atari and Nintendo should still be the main beneficiaries for 8bit games? And, of
“Take out a bunch of bandits and feel good, for just 15 minutes in your tired dad life”
course, how many of you are glad they’re still being stored on computers owned by fans, like you, who will gladly take care of their legacy? PS: Any chance you’ll review Automaton Lung?
Robert August de Meijer
Depends. If we promise to feature it in our year-end catchup, will you agree not to mention it as often as Cruelty Squad? Anyway, for your regular services to Dispatches, have an Edge T-shirt on us.
Boom blocks
I’d like to respond to the NFT coverage in E365 and the dispatches in E367 (yes, I’m running a little behind, so if you want to take a month off to fix those issue dates, I won’t be complaining). I have been involved with Bitcoin and the blockchain for over a decade now and have a firm technical grasp of the subject.
In reality, there probably aren’t many uses for NFTs (or coloured coins, as the original concept was called about ten years ago) in games that actually make sense. The curse idea mentioned in Dispatches sounds like a cool idea, but NFTs are not really suited to the concept. If I was to try to implement such a feature, I almost certainly would not use NFTs as the foundation.
There are some legitimate, interesting ideas for NFTs, but it’s probably not any of the things you are seeing pushed around on social media and in the news. It is also a tiny, niche area of blockchains. It is just one small feature of a much larger set of things that blockchains can do, so I still find it mind-boggling just how much this concept has been blown out of proportion.
Also, going back a bit further, I was a little disappointed in your coverage of the metaverse. The idea that a metaverse would be better run by Epic than Facebook doesn’t fill me with confidence. Even if you believe Epic is more trustworthy today, if you give it that much control in future, do you really think it won’t become the next Facebook?
While I was reading that article, I could think of only one group that I would trust to build an actual metaverse, and that would be the developers behind Matrix. This is a decentralised, end-to-end encrypted protocol that currently sees its main use as a chat platform. That means you are not locked into one company’s service, as you can just move to another (or even run your own server) and still be able to talk to everyone regardless of their server (as per email). It can also bridge into other platforms such as WhatsApp etc, so you don’t have to convince all your friends to switch over immediately.
So, a metaverse or similar that was built on Matrix would be something that would be open to all developers, and be secure and privacy-respecting to users, with no centralised company monopolising the service. And today I just found out that such a service is already under development, a project named Third Room. So, my hope is that neither Facebook or Epic will succeed, and that we’ll see a push for this open service in the future.
Finally, I’m just hoping that when I catch up, I’ll see some reviews for Playdate games I should be checking out, as I’m expecting mine to arrive in just a couple of weeks.
Bill Tyler
Might it not be a hard sell to ask the world to collectively plug into something called Matrix? We have this niggling memory about some movie from a few years ago where that didn’t end too well for most of humanity. A month off, though? Now you’re talking.
Medicinal purposes
Leo Tarasov (E374) raises some good points, but fails to define ‘games’ to my liking. Allow me to posit the definition I have accepted, gleaned from the writings of philosopher Akiva Tatz. His definition of a game refers to an activity with no goals other than the activity itself. In other words, one can make a game out of a chore, but it is fundamentally a gamified chore. In contrast, one who is truly playing has nothing to gain other than experience of the game itself.
Granted, the lines are somewhat blurred today. Publishers, in an effort to increase the relevance of their games, now often attempt to pack them with life skills on the side. Nevertheless, the game remains a game – and if it were not a game, one would not play it (similar to medicine that tastes good, but not good enough to eat if it didn’t also have medicinal properties).
Mevin Yavin
And so this particular debate comes to a close. Ten points to anyone who can launch a new one with the same kind of longevity.
Print the legend
As someone who has been reading Edge for as long as I can remember (25 years, more or less), I’ve never felt more strongly that the work you do is so important to the game industry than I do today. When I find kneejerk YouTube reactions, influencers and ‘hot takes’ from less prestigious outlets than your good selves tiring, there’s no feeling like walking into the local newsagent and seeing that familiar font and striking artwork, opening the pages knowing your access and insight are second to none. A feature I particularly love is the Collected Works of developers. Seeing the career journey they take is an inspiration. I’ll admit to not agreeing with all the review scores you’ve ever given, but far be it for me to indoctrinate these fabled pages with my scores to games you haven’t reviewed… Ahem. My last letter was critical of the direction the game industry is heading, but the direction this magazine has gone over the years has been counter to that culture. You’re fighting the good fight – it’s an important one, preserving and archiving what’s great about videogames with integrity and respect. Thanks for that. Nathan Brady-Eastham
Well, goodness. Is it just us, or did it get a little dusty in here all of a sudden?