RPGs Are Getting Boring. Here’s How We Fix That

With the release of arguably the most anticipated thing, let alone game, in human history, Cyberpunk 2077, the Role Playing Game continues to be a dominant genre in gaming. It’s not hard to see why; with a combination of long-form storytelling, character customization and complex open worlds, RPGs allow gamers to invest themselves in the experience far deeper than a disposable 10-15 hour campaign or repetitive multiplayer. From a publisher’s standpoint, that player investment translates to more monetization opportunities that grow the game world with more activities and customization options. It’s the perfect genre for both creator and consumer, but lately the genre has been showing signs of age, with more and more publishers churning out impressive looking titles that nevertheless rehash the same design principles. The same quest giving, the same distributing of stat and skill points, and the same boring fetching and killing in worlds that do nothing but sit around and await your arrival. The situation is particularly egregious in the East, with an endless parade of indistinguishable MMORPGs filled with brainless grinding and impractically armored women. Even more straightforward genres are expected to incorporate RPG elements, such as dialogue and leveling options. With an increasingly saturated market that borrows from the same cache of design conventions, creative stagnation in RPGs is real, and the circumstances couldn’t be more ripe for some new thinking. Here are some ideas that would make for a genuinely groundbreaking RPG that pushes the genre into the next realm of creativity.

A WORLD THAT CHANGES…WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR INPUT

Many RPGs advertise vast open worlds bristling with life (or death) that you alone can change. This sounds good on paper; after all, games are at their best when they grant players the agency to have profound effects on the game world. In 2021, the novelty has worn off and many of these open worlds are little more than glorified theme parks with animatronics that re-enact the same routine day after day. Nothing will ever change. The town with the ghoul problem will never do anything about it until you decide to, and even if you don’t, said ghoul problem will ever manifest into something serious until, perhaps, the “where they are now” sequence once you complete the game.

Here’s an idea: how about an open world that can change independent of your actions? What if the town with the ghoul problem hired an NPC mercenary to deal with it should you choose to ignore it after a certain amount of time, closing off the quest permanently? What if through an RNG roll, said NPC mercenary was killed in the process, inadvertently provoking the ghouls to swarm the town and massacre everyone, opening up a new series of quests that you wouldn’t have access to had you dealt with the ghoul problem?

A truly immersive game world is one that feels alive, and not one that only comes to life when you insert coins into it. This means that, while you might be spending time in one part of the world, events would be taking place in other parts of it that you have no control over. NPCs might migrate to new towns or even get killed. Towns might undergo changes in leadership, build new structures, and stores might flourish or go out of business. All without your input. Feeling a sense of smallness in a vast world isn’t just about size, but control as well, and ironically by removing some control over the game world, the actions you take that can in fact alter the game world feel much more meaningful as a result and not just an obligatory part of the game.

RETHINKING QUESTS

Nothing screams glorified theme park with animatronics like an NPC whose sole purpose is to stand around all day and bestows upon you a quest to fetch his prized family heirloom, the location of which he conveniently marks on your map. You proceed to the location and find the heirloom, returning it to the owner who rewards you. This is an archaic method of giving players things to do. What if, instead of having blips on the map that indicate a quest giver, the very act of getting the quest was itself a quest that players had to discover by paying attention to the world around them? What if you had to gain a character’s trust or build some rapport with them before they trusted you with such assignments?

Another aspect of quest giving that needs to go away immediately are “Activities”; essentially copy/paste quests of varying categories that are scattered across the world. Go here for an assassination mission. Go there for a racing mission. The biggest offender of this is Ubisoft, who for over a decade have been applying the same tiresome open world formula of having one main quest and hundreds of sidequests that, rather than having their own unique narratives, are simply the same rinse-and-repeat activities that you tire of after the 20th variation.

The best kinds of quests are the ones players give themselves when they connect the dots on what they need to do in order to advance in the game outside of simply grinding. This will require careful world design, with precious tools and resources located in very specific and perhaps remote areas, as opposed to simply acquired by murdering the nearest gang of enemies. One game that does this well is STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Many of the structures and areas in the game are completely devoid of useful items. However, in order to navigate past the exceedingly dangerous areas of the game, you need weapons and armor. Surveying the land, you see a structure in the distance that looks like a military installation. Since it’s likely protected, you elect to go in at night so you can sneak in under the cover of darkness. That right there is a quest, and it came entirely from you, and not a scripted NPC.

One of the greatest moments in gaming was onboard the 747 in the original Deus Ex. You are tasked with killing a terrorist leader by your overzealous instructor, and the game makes you think you have a choice between either killing the guy or letting your instructor do it. However, what many players didn’t realize at first is that there is a hidden third option: You can kill your instructor in order to prevent the execution of an unarmed prisoner. This is what quest-giving should be like: having a strong narrative and world design that allows players to come up with their own objectives and solutions, and go “Wow, I didn’t know the game would let me do that and even acknowledge it.”

NO MORE HYPERSPACE INVENTORY

One big reason I just can’t immerse myself in most open-world games is how generous they are with how much you can carry. In Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, you can carry up to 200 pounds of stuff, with no size restrictions. This means you could be lugging 200 pounds of assault rifles on your body, which is literally impossible. It’s hard to immerse yourself in the world when you open your inventory and see an entire library of crap that no human being could possibly carry, but most games make this concession because, for the sake of entertainment, you are expected to face off against numerous enemies and other challenges that would necessitate having plenty of gear.

A truly immersive inventory system would factor in both weight and size. For example, you wouldn’t be able to lug around five assault rifles, even if you were under the weight limit, because you don’t have the space to do so. Conversely, you wouldn’t be able to carry around a stack of gold bars, despite their small size, because they would take you over the weight limit.

One of the great joys of any RPG experience, especially a survival RPG, is defining not just your character, but your inventory as well. Many games pride themselves on having worlds with scarce resources, but they forget that a skilled player can gradually accumulate a vast repository of weapons and gear that they carry everywhere. Choosing what to bring and what to discard should be just as important as how you define your character.

YOUR ENEMIES ACTIVELY HUNT YOU

One idea that I really like but don’t see enough of is that enemy characters can take the initiative and actively seek you out as part of their own quest. The notion that actions have consequences is criminally underserved in RPGs, and in many cases you can gleefully slaughter hundreds of enemy faction members with little consequence besides them imposing penalties on future dealings with them. In The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, killing too many members of certain factions can trigger bounty hunters to come after you. This sounds good on paper, but in practice it amounts to a randomly generated enemy NPC awkwardly trying to “sneak” by crouch-walking up to you in plain sight…during the day. In Fallout 2, you would start getting random encounters with squads of bounty hunters. This is a better, more realistic idea, but at the end of the day simply amounts to the addition of a specific type of random encounter.

Red Dead Redemption 2 comes very close to this idea. As you progress through the story, rival gangs that you previously inflicted death on will set up ambushes at specific points of the world. You could be riding on a road when suddenly a gang of O’Driscolls would pop up from behind a nearby hill and open fire on you. The best iteration of this idea would combine Skyrim and Red Dead’s concepts: organized opposition that seeks you out in more ways than one. What if, besides the usual physical confrontations, the bar that you frequently drink at spawns an assassin who poisons your food and drink? What if a call girl that you pay for a good time turns out to be an assassin who kills you if you don’t pay attention to details in the environment?

RPGs are big into empowering you as a legendary hero who strolls into town and kicks ass and takes names, but they rarely account for the negative long-term consequences of all that killing you do. The idea that, as you level up and build your reputation in the world, you must also be more vigilant for threats that actively seek you out, is something that would give players investment in what is becoming a more banal activity in many RPGs.

NO MORE FUCKING STATS

It’s a staple of all RPGs, the idea of item stats and character stats that allow your character to move faster, shoot better and take hits stronger. Having to look at your character’s stat points as if he/she were a robot with built-in monitoring systems to tell you how much poison resistance or critical hit chance he/she has was fine back in 1990s and 2000s, but today it is an unnecessary time sink. Having to constantly switch out the same type of weapon every half an hour because you stumbled upon one that does 5 points more damage than your current one is mind-numbing. Stat scrutinizing in RPGs is a distraction from immersing oneself in the game world; a holdover from the days of pen and paper RPGs. Why is it still a requirement for RPGs to have this feature in the 2020s?

A more unique and intuitive way to handle character build is for specific attributes to improve based on how you play WITHOUT any of the detailed real-time updates (ie “You gained 1 point in athletics” a la The Elder Scrolls IV). Players would instead have to pay attention to their character’s performance to notice these changes. They could then go to an NPC and undergo tests that would produce different readouts of their character build. This would be a great way to integrate game systems and game world together, and it would give players a sense of excitement as they anticipate what their character readout will say based on how they have played so far. Similarly, instead of looting very nook and cranny for a rare drop, weapon and armor upgrades can be best handled by seeking out increasingly skilled armorers or gunsmiths, allowing you to invest more deeply in a smaller pool of gear rather than having a revolving door of them. This spreads out the upgrading experience over a more meaningful and narrative driven manner rather than the loot-based design that has already outstayed its welcome.

As you can probably tell by now, all these ideas are designed to drive RPG design closer to how things are in the real world. At the end of the day, the goal of any RPG is to maximize immersion so that players feel invested in the experience. As game production values become more lifelike, the mechanics that drive gameplay must also become more lifelike in order to deliver what so many games aspire to but rarely ever achieve.

Terminator: Resistance Is The Best Terminator Since Judgment Day. I’m Not Joking.

The original Terminator movie and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day solidified the Terminator franchise as one of the most beloved, legendary science fiction franchises of all time. An epic tale of man versus machine, with both the present and future juxtaposed against one another in a desperate race for survival, few other science fiction stories capture Terminator’s muscular action, sheer brutality and its constant tug of war between despair and hope. Yet beyond the first two movies, literally not one good piece of notable Terminator media has been made in almost THIRTY damn years. Instead, we saw one terrible sequel after the other get churned out like Terminators being sent back in time to kill a successful story. This culminated in the awful, awful Dark Fate which, thanks to its terrible box office performance, has put off studios from making another Terminator movie for the foreseeable future. How strange, then, that after so many avoidable missteps, a small and unknown Polish game developer called Teyon has finally put out the single best Terminator story in three decades that explores a narrative fans actually want to see, while fleshing out the franchise lore so meaningfully: Terminator: Resistance.

Resistance takes place during the future war set between Skynet and the human resistance, and unlike the Mad-Max-esque, sun-soaked Terminator: Salvation, Teyon really did their homework and scrutinized every detail of the future war sequences in both the original movie and Judgment Day in order to craft their game’s aesthetic. The result is a truly immersive post-apocalyptic setting that feels distinct from other franchises like Fallout. Set in the carcass of a bombed-out Los Angeles (which, by the way, isn’t too far-off from that today), the game levels are large and filled with many structures to explore for supplies while you stay out of sight from hunter-killer drones and Terminator endoskeletons. The sense of atmosphere is filled with so many wonderful details; the color palette is dominated by a grim blue-gray tint, hunter-killer aerials patrol the skies with their searchlights piercing the night, and battles are filled with bright red and purple plasma bolts streaking across rubble while accompanied by sound effects straight out of the movies. For Terminator fans who salivated at the brief glimpses of the future in the first two movies, the visual and sound design of Resistance is a godsend.

Terminator: Resistance is a small-budget game by a small studio, and this shows in a few places. The quality of its voice acting and character animations would have been considered first rate a decade ago, but certainly not today. The game, by default, gives you way too many advantages, such as night vision goggles with unlimited batteries that let you wallhack the Terminators. This was likely done to make up for the game’s lack of sophisticated stealth mechanics and one-note AI. In my playthrough, I played on Extreme difficulty and disabled the wallhack vision, along with most of the UI, and found this to be a definitive survival experience, in which the Terminators can only be engaged with guerrilla tactics such as hacking their defensive turrets and setting traps. Even so, there are areas where the AI can be exploited by simply taking pot shots at them and falling back by a certain distance until their parameters prevent them from chasing you any further.

In spite of these shortcomings, I enjoyed Resistance immensely because it’s a game made with a lot of heart and commitment to doing its source material justice, and its weaknesses were mainly the result of the studio’s size and budget. In many ways, it also reminded me of classic single-player shooters from the early 2000s like F.E.A.R. and Far Cry. These were games that largely stayed within the parameters of a linear, story-driven first-person shooter, while at the same expanding gameplay to allow for more flexibility to approach missions. This is something that many shooters today have lost by adopting open-world gameplay; with so many sidequests and distractions to get lost in, the main narrative becomes a disjointed mess with no sense of urgency. Resistance never lets you forget about where you are at in the story, and the missions are nicely varied between large, open areas in which you can explore, sneak or fight behind enemy lines, and more linear sequences in which you are accompanied by fellow resistance forces. There’s no tacked-on multiplayer, no microtransactions, nothing to grind for; absolutely none of the irritating gameplay features that have creeped their way into most modern titles. This is a nice, old-fashioned, meaty first-person shooter that knows which modern gameplay elements to include and which to leave out.

This leads me to Resistance’s other strong point, which is its surprisingly well thought-out story that slots in perfectly with the other two movies, forming a cohesive trilogy that begins with this game and concludes with Judgment Day. The details of how the resistance came to defeat Skynet, leading it to send Terminators back in time, and how the resistance captured and reprogrammed a T-800, are only hinted at in the movies. Resistance reveals that entire side of that story, as well as finally answering the question as to how exactly Skynet sent a second terminator to go after a young John Connor despite its failure in the first movie. The beauty of the story is how it slowly unravels itself to reveal the role your character, Jacob Rivers, plays in all this. None of it feels contrived, and thanks to a pretty memorable cast of characters, Resistance’s story makes you think it’s a standalone side story until it reveals towards the end that it is, in fact, a direct prequel to both Terminator movies. The problem with the sequel films is that they pretended to be directly tied to the original movies, but were in fact studio-mandated springboards from which entirely new Terminator movies could be churned out. Resistance, on the other hand, feels like an integral and necessary third chapter to the Terminator story that stands on its own while lending so much more context to the other two chapters.

Thanks to its excellent story and capturing of the future war setting perfectly, the climactic battle at the end is one of the most fun and awe-inspiring sequences I’ve experienced in a while, far better than any of the grand setpieces in the Call of Duty games. There is nothing quite like charging across a battlefield alongside resistance troopers against an army of terminators, with a hijacked hunter-killer tank raining plasma fire on the enemy while Brad Fiedel’s signature theme booms in the background. This is literally what so many Terminator fans, myself included, have been crying out for for decades, and it is a testament to Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy that a small Polish developer of less than 100 people finally made it happen.

There’s no question in my mind: Terminator Resistance is the true follow-up to Judgment Day. The developers effectively captured the aesthetic appeal of the Terminator universe and crafted a brilliant story that fills in all the gaps with the first two movies. It’s also a damn good shooter, with good old-fashioned single player FPS design coupled with modern features like large, explorable levels, crafting, skill points, dialogue choices and multiple endings. It has the ambition and scope of a triple-A game jammed into the confines of a small studio, and while it lacks the polish and sophistication of its more big-budgeted peers, it has a much bigger heart that it wears on its sleeve. Forget Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys and Dark Fate: Resistance is the true heir to the Terminator throne.

Command & Conquer: Remastered Shows Us How the Past Should Guide the Future

For many gamers over the age of 30, Command and Conquer represented many firsts for us. It was our first Real-Time Strategy game, our first experience with live-action Full Motion Video, and our first game narrative that was nuanced and very well thought out. A quarter century later, the traditional RTS genre is pretty much being held aloft by one game: Starcraft II. Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection will not change anything with the genre, but it does serve as a valuable and much-needed reminder of what so many games today have lost.

C&C Remastered is squarely aimed at those who played the original Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert in the mid 1990s; it makes no overtures whatsoever to today’s generation of gamers. This is immediately apparent in the opening introduction, which takes the original CD-ROM (remember those?) installation sequences and cleverly reworks them to make it look like your EVA (Electronic Video Agent) is upgrading itself into the modern era. I cracked a smile when the EVA cycled through various antiquated audio selections such as “Sound Blaster” before arriving at “High Definition Audio.” So many details of these sequences will be lost on anyone other than veteran C&C players, and hell, once it’s complete, the EVA even says “Welcome back, Commander.”

The two games are largely unchanged from a gameplay perspective, warts and all. You still set up your MCV and construct a base, amass an army, and annihilate the enemy like before. The AI pathfinding is still remains somewhat dodgy, with units sometimes eschewing the shortest route to their destination and casually strolling into enemy territory. C&C Remastered‘s charm stems from its massively enhanced visuals and sound, giving the gameplay a refreshing feel, like a new coat of paint on an old Gran Torino. The updated visuals are a huge standout, and you can now zoom in to scrutinize the new details they gave the units, such as the GDI Commando’s sniper rifle and the driver in the Allied Jeep. For longtime C&C fans, it’s like the revealing of the mystery of what these units would look like if they weren’t tiny pixellated blobs.

The remade soundtrack especially deserves mention. C&C Remastered features a full-fledged customizable Jukebox with remastered tracks from both games, but the real highlight is the suite of completely remade songs done by original composer Frank Klepacki and the C&C tribute band Tiberian Sons. The tracks are superbly arranged and mixed, with classics like Mechanical Man and Act on Instinct given much needed facelifts to take them out of the cheese of 90s midi into the gritty punch of live drums, guitars, digital synths and Stingray bass. It’s incredibly rare for any game, let alone an RTS, to pay so much attention to its music, and that’s why the C&C soundtrack still remains the greatest videogame soundtrack of all time. Each and every one of its tracks can stand on its own as a properly thought out piece of music, and not pedestrian drivel designed to solely accompany visuals.

Beneath these new additions and updates, the biggest takeaway from playing C&C Remastered is how so many of its storytelling details flew over my head as a kid. RTS games are rarely known for storytelling, but just like their soundtracks, the C&C games’ storylines are galaxies beyond the low bar set for them. Without ever spelling everything out for you, they use a combination of news reports, mission briefings, and cutscenes to give you insights into the current state of the world, the nature of GDI/Allies and Nod/Soviets, and the role Tiberium plays in shaping the world of C&C. The responsibility is on you to put the pieces together, and it really is fascinating to see C&C prophesying some of today’s events. In particular is how the insidious forces of Nod use the media to paint GDI as a villain in an attempt sway public opinion (not unlike Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East), and Nod’s exploitation of vulnerable countries, particularly in Africa, in order to shore up resources and supporters in their fight against GDI (not unlike similar efforts by China in Africa).

The most appealing aspect about C&C is how it puts emphasis on unconventional areas to enhance its gameplay. In today’s gaming industry, all the marketing strategies and focus groups would tell you that story and soundtrack are of least concern when developing almost any game. Yet the guys at Westwood Studios defied that conventional wisdom, and as a result, Command & Conquer remains one of the most rewarding RTS games to play because everything you do feels so badass. The immersive storyline gives meaning to your strategic machinations, giving motivation to go from one mission to the next in order to see how the story unfolds. The soundtrack goes above and beyond the elevator-music standard that plagues so many games, working together with the visuals to add heaviness to every building constructed, every army moved and every enemy annihilated. C&C Remastered is pretty much required for anyone who appreciates the original games for these qualities, and hopefully can inspire appetite in developer Petroglyph for another batch of remasters for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2.

The 2019 Gaming Industry’s Heroes and Villains

Ever since my parents bought me a Sega Mega Drive for my third birthday, each one of my birthday anniversaries has also been my anniversary as a gamer. In the 30 years that have transpired since, I’ve watched as this relatively niche, geeky activity I enjoyed grow up alongside me into a humongous, unfathomable being; a far cry from what people used to consider a stupid distraction for social neophytes. Gaming, now a multi-billion dollar industry, is synonymous with everyday life. Your uncles and aunties, the same ones who tisked at you when they saw you playing your Famicom or Mega Drive, now play stupid crap like Candy Crush and Angry Birds on their phones. Zillennials, kids born after 1995, gorge themselves on Fortnite. Esports is now on par with traditional sports in terms of revenue and viewership. Meanwhile, companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon want a piece of the pie and are starting their own gaming divisions. Gaming is undergoing its industrial revolution, and various publishers, developers, and media platforms will be driving this revolution in both productive and destructive ways. A lot has happened in the first half of 2019 alone, so I thought now would be a good time to take stock of the most prominent heroes and villains in the industry (in my opinion) and see what they’ve been doing to take gaming in both good and bad directions.

HEROES

CD Projekt Red

Of all the behemoths across gaming history, from Activision to EA to Nintendo to Sega, Polish developer and publisher CD Projekt stands proud as perhaps the greatest example of how to make great games and treat your players right. CDPR are the people behind The Witcher game series, the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, and Good Old Games, a digital storefront that specializes in DRM-Free games, both classic and current. Ever since they put themselves on the map in 2007 with the first Witcher game, CDPR have been very upfront and true to their word in promoting a player-centric philosophy. With every game release and community announcement, they have demonstrated time and time again that their allegiance is to the players, and not shareholders, corporate overlords or media figures with ulterior motives. Their success is attributed mostly to the strength of their games and player loyalty, and not from clever business strategies that work developers to death in order to milk players of every dollar they’re worth.

The design and business strategy behind CDPR’s The Witcher games themselves best reflect the company’s values. The storytelling is extraordinarily mature and sophisticated, at no point stooping to pander to sensitive or ignorant people. These are games that demand your full mental investment, and in return they reward you with some of the finest of stories and richest of lores to ever grace any creative medium. The series has also been supported by robust post-launch DLC, both free and paid. The Witcher 3, in particular, had two massive story expansions that were worth way more than what was charged for them.

I had the pleasure of attending CDPR’s E3 2014 presentation of The Witcher 3 and briefly spoke to one of their senior designers, and it was evident that these people genuinely love what they’re doing and are fully aware of the role they play in the battle for the gaming industry’s soul. As triple-A gaming is besieged with greed and political correctness, CDPR is holding the line for the rest of us who still care about quality titles made by people who love both games and their players.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft, in my eyes, have turned quite a corner with some of their most recent releases. Once the domain of classic titles like Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, their game design became appallingly lazy around the early 2010s, with games like Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, and Assassin’s Creed being little more than grindfests and collections of minigames set in open worlds. Interestingly, rather than ditch the formula entirely, they’ve listened to player feedback and made innumerable improvements in their two latest games, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and The Division 2, the latter of which I’ve been enjoying the hell out of. I also appreciate the deluge of content The Division 2 provides, with plenty of missions, campaigns, weapons, armor, customization and gameplay opportunities that well exceed the $60 price tag. The fact that the game isn’t overly monetized is appreciated, even though it is so good that I actually wish they would monetize it a little more by offering more apparel sets and weapon skins.

Recently, Ubisoft’s VP of Editorial Tommy Francois stated that although many of their games feature political themes and motifs in order to define their characters and settings, they do not promote a specific ideology. This is a very welcome statement for many players like myself who don’t like being lectured to by our entertainment media, and the fact that it ruffled a few feathers in places like PC Gamer and The Verge, two media sites that indeed do a lot of lecturing and finger wagging, is proof that it was an effective statement. I don’t mind that games feature realistic settings, ripped-from-the-headlines stories and real social issues, but since gaming is an experience built around player choice, it makes more sense to present these issues in such a way that players from all walks of life can have different interpretations of them. Ubisoft are so far the biggest company to openly acknowledge this, and so they’re on this list.

Capcom

Once upon a time, the Japanese dominated the videogame industry thanks to powerhouses like Sega and Nintendo. That dominance began subsiding once the 2000s rolled in and giants like EA, Activision and Ubisoft rolled in, but thanks to a combination of blunders from western publishers and a steadfast, gameplay-centric philosophy, the Japanese are regaining their foothold as a beacon of respect in the minds of many gamers. This is nowhere better exemplified than in Capcom, who have put out quality title after quality title over the last few years such as Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5, and Monster Hunter World. While many western game companies are busy catching bad press from their bumbling attempts to radically turn their games into live services, Capcom has stuck to its guns and have continued improving on their existing franchises based on player feedback.

One new development with Capcom and other Japanese gaming companies that’s put them on this list is that they no longer shun the PC. Japanese games, for the longest time, have always been the domain of consoles, with the PC getting ports so half-assed that the first thing you often see upon starting a game was “Press Start”. It was sometime after the utterly broken, unmitigated disaster that was the Dark Souls PC port and the backlash that followed that Japanese developers sat up and realized they couldn’t ignore the PC market. As of late, Capcom’s PC releases for practically all their titles have been flawlessly optimized and offer a range of graphics and control settings.

Finally, while many western triple-A titles such as The Last of Us have increasingly aspired towards the gravitas of high cinema, Capcom have always maintained an energetic 1980s B-movie tone with their games. This is most apparent in the Resident Evil series, which has everything you could possibly want from a good weekend’s worth of entertainment: body horror, gratuitous gore, corny dialogue, lots of firepower, and vibrant, memorable characters. The storytelling may not win any BAFTAs, but they sure are entertaining and stick with you long after you’ve finished the games, and that’s perhaps the best thing any developer should aspire to.

Independent YouTube Commentators

The proliferation of independent gaming YouTubers in recent years is a classic case of supply and demand. Ever since the 2007 fiasco in which Gamespot journalist Jeff Gerstmann was fired because he wrote a bad review of Kane & Lynch, whose publisher Eidos had advertised heavily on Gamespot, there’s been a growing demand for games journalism that players could trust.

As YouTube has democratized previously specialized professions, many of today’s professional game journalists are finding themselves usurped in viewership by lone YouTubers operating out of the bedrooms. Unlike mainstream gaming media sites, all of which have coalesced into the same bland flavor, these YouTubers have diverging styles and personalities. On one hand, you have the vibrant, energetic types like theradbrad and Markiplier, who appeal to younger viewers, and on the other, you have The Quartering, Upper Echelon Gamers and LegacyKillaHD, whose no-nonsense working joe, man-on-the-ground analysis appeals to older gamers like myself. A great deal of these personalities’ appeal is that, for the most part, it is self-evident in their work that they genuinely love games. The things they like about games are far more in line with gamers in general: good gameplay, good stories, and a player-first design philosophy.

The weird thing about the gaming media today is that they are so intricately wound around the industry itself, and therefore their ability to present objective coverage is inherently compromised. PC Gamer, for instance, did a live show last month that was sponsored by Epic Games. They, and many other media platforms, gain exclusive access to game previews based on favorable relations with the game publishers offering them. Of course, many of these same publishers offer the same deal to the bigger indie YouTubers, but commentary-based ones like The Quartering live and die by the trustworthiness of their opinions and not the access they have. The moment that trust is lost, it is incredibly easy for a viewer to take their patronage somewhere else. In short, these guys are one of us, and they just so happen to have a talent for articulating their interest in gaming far better than most of us can. If we want them to stick around, it behooves us to support them with clicks, views and donations.

VILLAINS

Electronic Arts

Since roughly 2007, EA have rapidly established themselves as the bad guy of the gaming industry and have done just about every shitty thing a major game publisher can do. Here’s a short list of some greatest hits I can recall simply off the top of my head:

-Acquired beloved studios like Westwood Studios, Pandemic, Bullfrog, and Maxis, leading to their shutdowns through greed and mismanagement.

-Sabotaged Star Wars: Battlefront II with pay-to-win lootboxes and tried to deceptively sugercoat it to the community.

-Mismanaged the production of Anthem by, among other things, forcing Bioware to use the Frostbite engine, leading to a broken game delivered by an overworked developer.

-Completely botched the launch of SimCity 2013 and lied about its online-only functionality.

For such a high profile company with seemingly all the money in the world, many of EA’s biggest game releases have been mediocre at best and total goatfucks at worst. Anthem, Battlefront II, SimCity 2013, The Sims 4, Battlefield V, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Mass Effect Andromeda all failed to deliver on the lofty expectations foisted on them with center stage coverage and triple-A production values, and it’s not hard to see why. The suits behind EA see videogames through the lens of businessmen, not gamers, and when deadlines and microtransactions take precedence over wholesome game design, no amount of money will ever hide the inevitable shit-show that follows.

Ever since Andrew Wilson became CEO in 2013, EA have only innovated ways to generate more revenue from all their releases, adopting a Games-As-Service mantra that has faced a lot of pushback from the community. The end result is that they haven’t put out a remotely interesting game in the last three years, and given their business model as of late, this is not likely to change anytime soon.

Activision

Next on this list is EA’s evil cousin, Activision. For the longest time, Activision’s biggest crime in my mind was milking the Call of Duty franchise to death, with three entire studios dedicated to making nothing but CoD games every year, each one getting progressively less interesting as the well of ideas runs dry. However, it was a rather disgusting development from earlier this year that put them on many gamers’ shitlists, and that was its laying off of nearly 800 employees despite record-breaking profits from 2018. No, you’re not misreading that. Literally in the same month that it announced it would be firing 8% of its workforce, Activision announced it had $7.5 billion in revenue, a 7.1% increase from the previous year, and that it had hired a new CFO, Dennis Durkin, giving him a $15 million signing bonus (!). They also hired a new President, Rob Kostich, with CEO Bob Kotick (what is with these names?) offering this vomit-inducing statement to go along with it:

With these proven, principled leaders at the helm, we will continue to invest in the strategic growth drivers of our business; our talented people, and creating the world’s best videogames, live services, mobile experiences, and new and growing franchise engagement models.

Reading shit like that, it’s hard to imagine that gaming was once championed by ordinary guys with a lot of passion working out of their homes.

Being laid off because your company is struggling to make ends meet sucks, but is understandable. Being laid off because your company did amazingly well, thanks in part to your hard work, borders on inhumane. Although many of those laid off were working on Destiny, which no longer belongs to Activision, there’s no reason they couldn’t have been re-purposed to work on the company’s existing franchises or other new initiatives. Regardless of how justified they were, this is really, really bad optics for Activision, a company that already exemplifies all the worst manifestations of greed in the gaming industry.

Epic Games

In the HBO crime show The Wire, one of the key antagonists is a drug gang informally known as the Stanfield Organization. Compared to their rival, the Barksdales, the Stanfields have low-quality drugs, but plenty of muscle, and so they use that muscle to beat the Barksdales and their high-quality drugs off the streets and force the drug addicts of Baltimore to accept their inferior product. This is basically what Epic Games are doing with their much-despised Epic Games Store.

Not content to let Valve rake in the lion’s share of digital game purchases, Epic have muscled in with their own storefront, a product that, to put it mildly, sucks. It has no reviews feature for players to gauge the quality of a game, barebones game management, threadbare customer support, no discussion sections, no screenshot function, no cloud saves, no achievements, and no offline play. It is a Flintstones car compared to the Dodge Ram that is Steam, and Epic knows this. This is why they’ve used their enormous warchest from Fortnite to basically throw money at publishers, developers, and media platforms like PC Gamer, making the Epic Store a developer-centric platform, rather than a player-centric one. This is thanks to the generous 88% revenue cut Epic gives to developers compared to Valve’s 70%, along with various subsidies for smaller developers to ease the financial burden of publishing games. While this has proven beneficial for indie developers, it has also resulted in Epic aggressively negotiating exclusivity deals for games players were expecting on Steam, such as Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and Shenmue III.

There’s nothing wrong with making a developer-friendly digital storefront. The problem lies in the principle of Epic’s approach, which runs counter to the customer-focused approach that has defined all capitalistic industries. More than any with other industry, gamers are highly aware of the innumerable ways publishers, developers and platforms try to hoodwink us with shady practices. Epic doesn’t even bother to pretend; they know they have a bad product, they know we know they have a bad product, and they don’t care. That’s why they’re on this list.

Deep Silver

Deep Silver’s on this list specifically because of two games under their wing: Metro Exodus and Shenmue III. Within the space of six months, the relatively low profile German publisher has managed to piss off the entire PC gaming community by abruptly committing the two hotly anticipated games to the Epic Games Store (Metro’s would be a timed 1-year exclusivity). In the case of Metro, it was advertised for several months on Steam before Deep Silver declared that they would exclusively publish it on the Epic Games store. The game was suddenly unavailable for purchase on Steam (though players who pre-ordered it beforehand were safe) and now the only place to get it for the PC is Epic’s junk-grade storefront. Shenmue’s case is even worse. The game was crowdfunded by thousands of fans who expected Steam keys upon release, only for Deep Silver to not only switch the game to the Epic Store, but outright refuse refunds for backers. Epic would later agree to foot the bill for all refunds.

The kindest way to describe Deep Silver’s actions would be consumer-unfriendly. Their defiance in the face of near-universal anger from the PC community is so startling that you kind of have to give them credit; not even EA or Activision would have the gall to try the same dirty trick twice within half a year. In the case of Shenmue, they have dealt a huge, long lasting blow to future games that will seek crowdfunding. Kickstarter is a great way to create games that old-school gamers like myself want to play, but without legal constraints to obligate developers to stick to their end of the deal, the concept of a crowdfunded game is built entirely on trust between creator and consumer, much like a society in which everyone can leave their front doors and car doors unlocked. Deep Silver broke that trust and couldn’t give a damn what their players thought. Not only have they so masterfully tarnished their reputation, they have also dissuaded many from investing time and energy in supporting crowdfunded games in general. Assholes.

Mainstream Gaming Media

Note: Many of the issues discussed below are written of in greater detail here.

Rounding out this rogue’s gallery is perhaps the worst of them all, mainstream gaming news outlets like PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, and Polygon. Much like journalism in general, game journalism across these platforms has been experiencing a steady slide in quality, become more detached from their target readers and driving many gamers to seek out alternative news sources. Many of today’s game journalists are cut from the same cloth and their reportage often drips with the politics of social justice and wokeness, pouncing to paint gamers in general as racist sexist bigots the instant a pre-pubescent teen in a Call of Duty lobby says something stupid. Below is a gem from Rock Paper Shotgun’s Graham Smith, in an article about Mordhau developer Triternion stating that their game would not have a toggle function to disable female character skins to maintain a realistic medieval warfare setting:

It’s good that they’re not doing the on/off toggle on women, but bad that the only reason they cite is that to do so would undermine player’s character customisation. A better reason would be: because our medieval brawling game is silly, not realistic, and to claim “realism” in this one single instance and offer an option to erase women would serve only to pander to sexists and embolden the toxic elements of our community.

In the 25-something years I’ve patronized gaming magazines and websites, I don’t think I’ve ever read something so sneering and arrogant. If I read a news article to find out what’s happening with a game, I shouldn’t come away feeling genuine anger at the asshole who wrote it. Yet this is what’s happening with great frequency in the gaming press, particularly when they cover developers from Eastern Europe, where woke politics aren’t in vogue compared to the US and Western Europe. Though these news sites do still cover gaming news reasonably well, like with Kotaku’s expose of Anthem‘s troubled development cycle, much of their editorial content has devolved into holier-than-thou finger-wagging SJW platitudes in which entire swathes of the gaming community are painted as bigoted young men infected with toxic masculinity. The problem, I think, is that many of these so-called game journalists live in their own echo chamber, where a complete lack of ideological diversity has led them to believe that their political viewpoints aren’t viewpoints, but universal fact. Therefore, there isn’t anything wrong with propagating them in what should otherwise be objective coverage, because after all, how could you possibly disagree that CD Projekt Red are transphobic bigots and Cyberpunk 2077 has racist depictions of minorities?

There’s the argument that as games become more sophisticated and touch on more social issues, so must game journalism. I agree, but so far many of the afore-mentioned platforms aren’t doing a great job at this. Their commentary is contemptuous, monolithic, and heavily skewed towards an ideology that wants to conjure social outrage out of games and communities that aren’t asking for it. Rather than offer sophisticated commentary, these journalists offer ham-fisted political agendas that serve as little else but distractions from the games we want to play.

That rounds up my Heroes and Villains of 2019 so far. Keep in mind that, with the ever-changing gaming landscape, there will always be shifting heroes and villains. Maybe the Epic Game Store will receive loads of improvements and become a worthy competitor to Steam. Maybe Ubisoft will shoot themselves in the foot with some microtransaction-related fracas. Maybe EA turn over a new leaf, or maybe they’ll just wind up on The Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America” list again. Plenty of time to find out…

There Is Something Terribly Wrong With Game Journalism

Ever since I started reading gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro in the 1990s, and then eventually moved onto online outlets like GameSpy and Gamespot, I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews, commentary and coverage from a variety of game media outlets. Much like the relatively young gaming medium, game journalism always stood out to me as more youthful, fun, and vibrant than the hoity-toitiness of more established mediums like film. Guys like Greg Kasavin, Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro were some of my favorites, and it really felt like both gamers and game journalists were part of the same community, experiencing this fascinating and burgeoning world of videogaming together as it forged its own brave new world.

Unfortunately, somewhere around 2014, I began to notice a growing disconnect between today’s generation of game journalists and the gamers that formed the bulk of their readership. It seemed like many game journalists were coalescing into some kind of elite private club that was increasingly out of touch with the game community at large, sneering at them from up high while allowing their political biases to contaminate their game coverage.

The first time I noticed this was with the worst game I have ever played in my life, Gone Home. I had read many reviews from the likes of Kotaku and PC Gamer about how amazing this indie title was, and the Metacritic Critics’ Score was also exceptionally high. Gone Home was quite expensive for an indie game, but I mean hell, it was supposed to be amazing, so why not? As it turns out, not only did I beat the game in slightly over 90 minutes, but it was a ferociously boring experience with a weak story that may have been interesting in the 1960s, but definitely not in 2013. I felt like I had been lied to by everyone; this was, by every conceivable objective standard, nowhere close to a 9/10 or 10/10 game. The most likely explanation for the disproportionately high critic scores for this at-best-mediocre game was its LGBT-centric storyline.

Indeed, in the years since then, many of today’s professional game journalists have become more flagrant in allowing their political views to infect their game coverage and reviews. Here are some notable examples that I can recall simply off the top of my head:

Grand Theft Auto V was marked down by Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit because of its misogynistic characters, completely missing the point that the GTA series has always been a visceral satire of the worst elements of modern society.
A writer for Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez, described the indie game Papers Please, in which you play an immigration officer in Soviet Russia, as a white male power fantasy of deporting Mexicans.
The #gamergate controversy, in which the gaming media used incidents of sexist harassment and death threats towards game journos to paint the gaming community as a whole as being bigoted thugs.
Nathan Grayson of Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku criticized Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a historical RPG set in medieval Europe, for its uniformly white cast.
Far Cry 5 was also criticized by many in the gaming media, such as PC Gamer, for not using its rural America setting to make a political statement on their favorite topic of white supremacy in the age of Trump.
VentureBeat journalist Dean Takahashi, often regarded as a joke in the gaming community for his inability to get past the Cuphead tutorial, openly advocated for the censorship of the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare because he felt the game’s real-world violence had no place in a game.
CNet journalist Ian Sherr wrote a hit piece on several independent gaming YouTubers such as The Quartering and Upper Echelon Gamers that was designed to pull advertising revenue from those channels.
Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer journalists Jay Castello and Andy Chalk openly criticized a statement from Ubisoft regarding their refusal to politicize their games, opining that such impartiality could lead to sympathy for slavery, Nazism and homophobia.

Note: The last three examples alone happened in the span of the past week.

One could argue that, as games become more sophisticated and touch on real-world topics, it behooves game journalists to offer more “mature” commentary in turn. The problem is that many of today’s so-called game “journalists” are losing sight of the difference between being a professional journalist and being a political activist. As shown in some of the above examples, you have cases in which journalists are openly advocating for certain political causes, most particularly LGBT and Net Neutrality, and even going after independent creators by targeting their sources of funding. The sneering, condescending attitude a number of these journos have towards gamers, many of whom are young men, does not make the case for continued patronage, either. When gamers complain that Battlefield V has included ahistorical female soldiers in frontline combat, it’s not a good look when gaming outlets dismiss these gamers, many of whom form their readership, as sexist bigots filled with toxic masculinity, rather than gamers who just can’t buy into the notion of black female Nazi soldiers.

It’s also worth pointing out the monolithic nature of these political views in the gaming media; they cut in one direction only, and I cannot recall having ever read an editorial from any of these outlets that argued from a more conservative or even centrist point of view. There is virtually nothing that distinguishes the political and social commentary of Kotaku, Polygon, PC Gamer, and virtually every other major game media outlet, which is kind of ironic considering that they all champion diversity in gaming.

This is all a far cry (no pun intended) from the days when gaming coverage and commentary were much more in-line with the expectations of the people who consumed such media. It’s not necessarily that the political viewpoints today’s gaming journos are expressing are right or wrong; it’s that they are so vastly removed from their target audience, and expose these journos as biased and unreliable at doing their one job: covering and reviewing games fairly.

This is not to say there is no room for political and/or LGBT commentary in gaming media; of course there is. That kind of commentary should be relegated to games that inherently want to deal with those topics (of which there are very few), and not more mass-marketed games like Far Cry 5, which use real-world topics to set the stage for story and gameplay, not to define them. Most game developers are not looking for this kind of trouble; they just want to create games that are fun and generate profit. It’s the responsibility of game media platforms to cover these games fairly and expose poor gameplay and narrative design as well as shady business practices in order to keep gamers informed and push the industry to higher standards. It is not the responsibility of these journalists to use games to promote their political activism, call for censorship, disparage their own readers, and threaten the livelihoods of independent competitors.

Of course, if these media platforms knew this, they wouldn’t be losing their audience to independent creators like Pewdiepie, Markiplier, The Quartering, and Upper Echelon Gamers. Some of them, like Markiplier, have a sense of youthful wonder and excitement that reminds me of the game journos from when I was growing up. Others, like Upper Echelon, have highly nuanced, relatively apolitical commentary on the industry that is in increasing short supply in mainstream outlets. Part of this, I think, is because these creators are a lot closer to their audience than, say, an editor at Polygon is, and are better able to get a feel for their audience through livechats and comments.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still great content from major media outlets such as Game Informer’s Replay series, which is an absolute hoot, and Giant Bomb, which has alumni from Gamespot’s best days. It’s just that after all that I have seen and read, I think more old-school gamers like myself need to stop sitting around, being spoonfed politically inept garbage from the likes of Ian Sherr. We have to be more proactive in seeking out indie creators who love games like we do, and show them our support both through continued viewership/readership and donations.

Upper Echelon Gamers

The Quartering

Downward Thrust

Sekiro Pushes Difficulty As Far As It Has Ever Gone

From Software’s newest title, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, is perhaps the most teeth-gnashingly, controller-flingingly difficult game I have played since the first Dark Souls. Of course, this being a From Software game, this shouldn’t come as any surprise, but the level to which Sekiro pushes the challenge to new frontiers has made me think about the concept of these ‘Souls-Like’ games.

Back in the mid-1980s to late-1990s, during the fourth generation console era, many games were so difficult that just finishing them was quite an accomplishment. Games like Battletoads, Ecco the Dolphin and Comix Zone required genuine dedication and fast reflexes to even get halfway through, and gaming in general was an activity based around skill.

As gaming has now become a mass-marketed industry, game design philosophy has shifted to appeal to a much wider audience that would be less inclined to engage in the level of difficulty in older games. It wasn’t so much about challenging players as much as it was about creating a smooth gameplay experience, where players didn’t spent hours failing over and over again as the game unflinchingly refused to budge. In other words, game design has adapted itself around the player. An obvious example of this is the RPG-like systems that are in many games now, such as the Far Cry series, in which you can enhance yourself with skills and upgrades to such a degree that gameplay becomes progressively smoother and faster. It’s ironic, then, that Sekiro is published by Activision, which has for the past decade been at the forefront of this mass-appeal game design with the Call of Duty and Destiny franchises.

From Software has carved a niche for itself in the modern gaming market with its Souls-Like games, including the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and now Sekiro. In these games, only the most necessary gameplay information is relayed to you; the rest you have to figure out yourself by playing and dying a lot. The Dark Souls series perfected this formula of old-fashioned game design for modern gamers. The bosses and enemies were tough, sure, but studying enemy attack patterns and building up muscle memory were surefire paths to victory. These games were good at showing you what you needed to do without outright telling you; the onus was on you to dedicate yourself to the task. The world of Dark Souls has its own logic, its own challenges and dangers, and it didn’t care if you found it too difficult or alienating.

Sekiro, released a few weeks ago, takes much of the gameplay design of Dark Souls and ramps up the difficulty (as if such a thing was possible). Gameplay is much faster now, and you must now rely on a larger palette of tools. While combat in Dark Souls was focused on judiciously attacking and dodging, Sekiro forces you to put yourself directly in harm’s way to relentlessly engage your enemy head-on, blocking and deflecting attacks instead of dodging them in order to wear them down. On top of that, the game’s more numerous bosses and mini-bosses are more aggressive than ever, some of them capable of slaughtering you in under 10 seconds.

The crucial element that makes Sekiro‘s bosses so much harder than Dark Souls is the complete lack of multiplayer. There are no helpful hints that players can drop before a boss fight, and you can’t summon friends to assist you in the actual fight. In Sekiro, you are on your own, and most of the bosses can murder you so quickly that there isn’t time to properly study their attacks and get a feel for their rhythm. The only way is to die, journey back to them, fight, die again, and repeat.

Such was the extreme difficulty that I found myself reaching outside the confines of the game and relying on YouTube guides to get through most bosses. Without these guides, I can safely say I would have lost interest in Sekiro purely through impenetrable difficulty, and this is coming from someone who has beaten all three Dark Souls games twice. There are players who are happy to take enormous punishment and try again without ever turning to outside help. I believe I reached my limit with Sekiro. In the absence of Dark Souls‘ in-game community-driven guides, Sekiro’s fan-driven guides that permeate YouTube and Wikias have filled the gap and for some players like myself, are an inseparable part of the experience.

From Software’s Souls-Like games have emphasized players working out how to overcome challenges through repetition. This was balanced by a slower pace that allows for an almost tactical decision making process. Sekiro pushes the concept to its absolute limit, thanks to its dramatically faster combat. Trying to study enemy attack patterns while simultaneously keeping up with the game’s frantic pace is a challenge unlike anything I’ve encountered, and there were numerous points at which I doubted I could even finish the game. This is the zenith of From Software’s commitment to old-fashioned game difficulty, and I’m glad they’re keeping up at it, even though desires of the opposite sometimes boil up within me during Sekiro‘s many unforgiving moments.

Gaming is Changing and I Don’t Feel the Same

Just recently, gaming giant Activision announced it was laying off an astonishing 800 employees from its nearly 10,000-strong workforce. Normally a mass layoff like this follows news of falling profits, but Activision’s 2018 financial results were in fact, by its former CEO’s own admission, “the best in our history”.

The news came as a bit of a bombshell in the gaming industry, but over the last 10 years, mass layoffs like this one have been happening to many high profile publishers and developers at an alarming rate. Pandemic, Visceral Games, Maxis, Telltale, Boss Key, and Capcom Vancouver are some high profile names that have experienced closures despite producing well-received titles, most of which were profitable. It’s a symptom of a major shift in the gaming industry, which has expanded into a multi-billion dollar industry in a single generation, from one of ideas and passionate individuals into something that veteran gamers like myself barely recognize anymore.

I’m old enough to remember the days when games were made by small studios that were driven more by a passion for new ideas and games that were fun. These were the days of id Software, Ion Storm, Westwood Studios, Pandemic, Raven Software, and pre-Dota 2 Valve. Many of the games that came from that generation, starting from 1996 to around 2007, have aged extraordinarily well and hold their ground even by today’s standards. Think Red Alert, Deus Ex, Rainbow Six, Half Life, StarCraft, Far Cry, Fallout, and Jagged Alliance. There are still studios that passionately make games like these today, such as IO Interactive (Hitman), 4A Games (Metro), Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun) and CD Projekt (The Witcher), but unlike the good old days, they do so under a dire climate in which one’s employment and livelihood is but one mediocre game away from termination.

The demand for quality games is extraordinarily high today, and there is simply no room for error if you’re working on medium-to-high budget title. Unfortunately, because of the incredible rate at which the gaming industry has expanded, there is a serious lack of wisdom on the part of publishers when it comes to long term planning with their IPs and protecting the employees that work under them. In two recent examples, newly hired employees at Telltale Games and Activision showed up to work on their first days, only to be told that they were being laid off (!). In any major industry, this would be grounds for legal action. In the gaming industry, it’s just “shit happens”.

The threat of Free-to-Play games is another factor influencing the lack of good judgement in the industry. F2P games used to be the domain of the East, with a grocery list of gacha-based titles produced in China, Korea and Japan for their respective audiences. The West had its traditional Buy-to-Play model, and the East had Free-to-Play. However, the release of Epic Games’ Fortnite, EA Games’ Apex Legends, and the advent of Lootboxes in Buy-to-Play games like Star Wars Battlefront and Call of Duty: World War II has changed the calculus considerably in the West. It used to be that Free-to-Play games were shunned in the West because they were shoddily made, emphasizing freemium gameplay design over tasteful aesthetics and tight gameplay mechanics. Fortnite and Apex Legends have shown that you can, in fact, have a well polished, well balanced game that is Free-to-Play.

What does this all mean for the industry? It means that those who work in the trenches will be caught in the crossfire, as the industry as whole, while still trying to adapt to its rapid growing pains, is now faced with another gargantuan change in direction. It very certainly means more layoffs, as major publishers will look to do more with less as the incentive for profit is driven to insane heights thanks to inroads being made in China. Finally and most importantly, it means the industry will be moving towards transforming the very idea of gaming from one of narrative, player agency and immersion, into a perpetual service in which both developers and players engage in the same title indefinitely, sinking money and time into it. One thing I learned studying videogames in college: games are supposed to end.

Where I see hope for the industry to hang onto its original principles is in Europe. Some of my favorite games to come out recently have been from Europe, such as The Witcher 3 (Poland), Metro Exodus (Ukraine), Quantum Break (Finland), Hitman 2 (Denmark) Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Czech Republic), Alien: Isolation (United Kingdom), and Wolfenstein: The New Order (Sweden). The Europeans have always had a more holistic approach to entertainment media, and the same goes for Japan, which also is having a bit of a resurgence in the industry thanks to Capcom (Resident Evil) and Namco Bandai (Dark Souls). Then there’s the bevy of independent game studios turning away from major publishers and using Kickstarter and Steam Early Access to fund passionate and innovative titles (Divinity: Original Sin, FTL, Kerbal Space Program, Battletech).

The way I see it, gamers like myself who have been playing games since before the 2000s have to be more proactive in supporting the kinds of games we want to see. There’s nothing we can do to stop the tide of mass-marketed shit that’s being churned out every month, but we can most certainly use our wallets to support the ideas and the people in the gaming industry who genuinely love what they do and, like us, know what truly makes a great game.