What On Earth is Bethesda Softworks Up To? : An Addendum

Armed with somewhat more knowledge and the time, experience, and distance to not just be astonished at what I feel was a weird lack of business savvy from a multi-million if not billion dollar company, and some news stories that help explain things I can perhaps offer a guess at what was going on at Bethesda that they released a Fallout show without a single hint even of a game from the same IP capitalizing on the hotness that only a streaming series can deliver in this day and age.

I think it can be traced back, given all the news stories about studio closures, to Microsoft itself. With the recent studio closures being the talk of the gaming world this past week, a new vista opened up that suggested extreme pressure, duress, and managerial issues probably responsible IN PART for the boring space game and the lack of any project 'on deck' for launch or reveal with the show's debut.  

(I myself have always had ideas for a more rogue-like Fallout game where you set out from the same town or vault, your character can die permanently and is randomly chosen, you can play as mutants or ghouls or robots in addition to humans, and levelling up and character builds are fast and fun. It could be modded onto Fallout 4, by the skillful and talented professionals who made that game, in about 8 months granted effective organzation and leadership and vision.) - [I am available for creative direction at frankly irresponsibly low prices, if anyone from Bethesday is reading this, leave a comment with your email let's make a hit]

As BSG is part of Microsoft XBox Games Studio (?) now, and was probably being banked on to quickly drop a genre-defining game in support of the console, the recent releases start to make more sense and their shift into more lucrative attempts (Fallout 76, real money shop stuff) at software can be explained as being tied to the balance sheet that investors froth at the mouth about. 

That same dedication to the financial aspect of making games has pretty much cratered the entire industry in the past 10 years and has also led to a lot of sloppy behaviour from big companies that should know better but have a fiduciary responsibility (yes this is a reference to real life, but also the game streaming series Fallout!) to make poor decisions that pay the maximum posssible return to investors and shareholders. 

It's why EA became a piece of shit, it's why Activision Blizzard lost all the goodwill either non-agglomerated company ever had, and it's part of the drawing of blood from the stone of reality that delusional capitalism excels at. EVs are greenwashing writ large, cap and trade was a noxious scam to steal from the public while polluting at an equal pace, NFTs were such a baldfaced scheme they sunk without a whimper, eCommerce is designed to empoverish all communities more rapidly than even Reagan's most based neoconservatism, and AI is mostly an orobourous generative scam built on the promise of esoteric, exploitative technologies of the future that is specifically designed to appeal to the sci-fi fantasies of computer understanders, but if you want to see the deleterious effects of capitalism, the bona fide premium examples have always been in video game entertainment, since E.T. in the 80s at least.

Still, let's not suggest it's all just due to the meandering will of a division of a 3 trillion dollar company, Bethesda have their own issues. In my opinion they've been making straight up pabulum since Oblivion, and as a Morrowind head (who first played Oblivion in 2010) I didn't find that game particularly  compelling. Skyrim had typoes, broken quests, and dozens of other design issues and bugs that put me off of it. Plus it was gorgeous but utterly boring, and I had played Mount and Blade by that time, a game with bugs, design issues, and actually interesting gameplay.

The Bethesda-era Fallout series started Oblivionesquely with Fallout 3, which was outstanding and stunning if you played it right then. I found it janky and kind of boring, and beat it one time and never went back. New Vegas was broken and buggy but an absolute treat to play and explore. Even the shitty DLCs each had something interesting to offer or examine (including, and I shudder, Old World Blues—the lowest of the low).

Fallout 4 was really a step forward in so many ways, from the presentation to the moment to moment gameplay. The first 10 hours with that game were revelatory and so compelling I just couldn't stay away. And yet FO4 was also a step backwards in terms of narrative, writing, systems, and long term appeal. Everything was there for a good game and then they had to smash their dumbass railroaded storytelling and quests into it, while making it a more open-ended experience could have made it an all time great. I don't understand how the masters of open world games fail to understand the premise and make players start each playthrough in a 15 to 45 minute tutorial. By the 11th hour doubts crept in, and by the end of the game the shitty conclusions of the quests and frustrations had me feeling not just crestfallen but really bitterly disappointed. The game world seemed like the hollow place it was, with no reason to return.

I can justify a New Vegas playthrough and I think about doing one—the build I'd try, the new perk to examine, the factions to align with, the quests or companions to pursue—about once or twice a year. I haven't gone back to that game in a bit over a decade but I still think about it and then the idea of modding it into stability and figuring out my Nexus password again just kills my desire, but the game itself draws me back... wait it's not time for an unarmed explosives survivalist run! I'm getting distracted.

What does this have to do with what's currently going on at Bethesda? Well, good question. It seems I got carried away doing some sloppy blogging. But it's only possible to see some cultural shifts in terms of one's own experience of it, and use that perspective as the guide. What happened to the company that led to less interesting titles was its success and growth. Larger teams were making larger and more technically impressive games that with each iteration strayed from the very open-world principles that (with Morrowind specifically) launched their success and gained them the interest, admiration, and money of a large audience.

Then they released Fallout 76, which was a Games as a Service product and also horrifically and well-documentedly a terrible release. The product was yanked out of the oven like the Fire Giant in Nausicaa and forced to do battle only to melt sadly after one big belch of radioactive sales. Since, I'm told that the game has been improved and fixed, and it works more or less properly, and some people even like it. I'm like I'm good, though, I played FO4 and I don't need more of the same. 

The grand freedom which allowed a new player to jump over the entire island of Vvardenfell and die on the landing is gone, it's flown the damn coop even. You can't abuse crafting or spellcasting or potionmaking to briefly become a demigod anymore in any game of Bethesda's. You can't even levitate anymore. 

The freedom is over. But that's not just for the player at one end, it's also true for the designer, the programmer, the maker on the other end, and that's not just a capitalism problem, or a sickness of success, or a super uncritical audience of gamers (who are so easily parted from their money that it's sad and also why institutional money moved in on games so predatorily),  it's a problem of management, of seeing easy money and guaranteed fat paycheque or bonus, of company culture trending towards a flat plateau, of being risk-averse, uncreative, uncritical, bloated, and too big and confident to switch tack on anything.

And the audience has rewarded it every time. This is why they got a boring space game rushed out the door, because when they sold a slightly more expensive version so they could do final beta testing and play three days early, they bought it and forgot about the game a week or two later. The business moves according to the cardinal rule of any over-financialized industry: risk not the investor's dividend and ye shall be rewarded. The only problem is, that was never true at all. 

Massive layoffs seem to happen whether or not games are successful and seem to have more to do with labyrinthine internal politics. Profits have skyrocketed, the industry is worth more than it ever was in the past, and those profits are funnelled ever more aggressively into the hands of people who did none of the work. (And they say capital gains taxes put innovation at RISK, one could cry from laughter if it wasn't so sad). And in the case of Arkane Studios, they were sabotaged by upper management and lost a lot of their more senior and talented people which led to the collapse of a recent project not even worth a vampirically circumspect mention. 

Senior and talented people are more costly because they have earned the right to ask for more, having experience, and having built success and generated profits for their employers. In traditional work-capital relations, these people are afforded more responsibility by an upper management that values loyalty, and then rewarded by increased salaries for their efforts and successes. In the hypercapitalism of today, where accountants run pretty much everything, the price of talent and experience are unconscionable. 

Replace them with idealistic and youthful people who can be ground down through overwork, poor management, and synthetic crises and thrown out before they get senior enough to affect the bottom line—or when they burn out. This isn't just true in games studios, it's true in every sector from advertising to zebra husbandry. 

So while I can certainly scoff at Bethesda and speciously ask why they make pabulum, it's probably healthier and more realistic to see them as a victim of the free market, one who will probably become yet more bloated, and release less remarkable games, until the original core of people are shuffled out and replaced and it too collapses and is scrapped for IP value, because outside of independent or private companies, that is the only future now.

What on Earth is Bethesda Softworks Up To?

Fresh off a hit streaming show on Amazon Prime Video (paid with ads much???) based on the venerable Fallout series, you'd think Bethesda Softworks was about to hit a their stride in an absolutely titanic way, but instead they seem to be foundering aroundering and chilling and vibing.

It's insane they didn't have a game (or at least trailer) in the chamber for when the show dropped. Oh, they had a patch for Fallout 4? Inexcusable. Plus it broke all previous modding attempts? Par for the course. Fallout 76 integration at least? Oh, no? Ok. It's like they don't want to do any of the things to capitalize on a hugely lucrative opportunity that most companies could only dream of, and they have almost unlimited resources too. 

They could've sold a million copies of Fallout 5, or a spinoff set in the show, and it would have been successful even if they half assed it, and instead they sunk a decade into a janky boring space game and released a small next-gen patch. 

Shows take a while to plan, produce, and release, at least enough time to produce (and asking for too much: fine tune) the first chapter in an episodic reboot of the Fallout series based wherever they'd like. They can use the old engine even. It wouldn't take a huge amount of resources and would build up goodwill and excitement again. An independent team of modders has created and nearly finished a FO4 total conversion set in London (there's one slated for Miami as well), meanwhile, and what exactly is the copyright holder doing? Releasing one patch with a couple of new assets and some 'next gen' stuff that's opaque and questionable at best.

This guy gulps.

Maybe they're waiting till next week to announce they've actually been doing something but it boggles my mind how they're operating. Stodgy, clumsy, and way too big to do anything quickly. I guess once there's been 18 meetings about the show's success they'll greenlight some kind of exploratory committee to discuss the possibility of a spinoff game? And we'll get it a few years after the show is done? 

At some point even the dullest dullard on Earth is going to realize that Bethesda have been resting on their laurels. But to lack business sense, to let things slide as they have done, really does puzzle this humble blogger. Bethesda are lucky people still consume their pabulum so eagerly, but that could change if they don't do what any sane company would do and capitalize on their opportunities. Many of us regular people would be slapped and insulted if we had a golden goose and just let it walk away.

Is this the endpoint of capitalism? Success so pure it turns you into a burned out failure who prints money anyway? That's quite the indictment of hustle culture when the world's strivers labour in obscurity on passion projects and the biggest brands and companies just ooze around pointlessly like vast amoeboids, consuming everything in their path and taking up all the air.

Canada's 2021 COVID-19 Special Edition Snap Election

It's the big day in Canada this September 20th, 2021, as voters decide who will govern the nation through whatever the next years have in store. Oh yeah, and there's a big pandemic. And literally everyone is going crazy. There's anger, bitterness, and increasingly unhinged people all over the streets, the internet comment sections, the sidewalks outside of hospitals and the sidewalks outside of restaurants. Trudeau got gravel thrown at him, and a lot of abuse, at several campaign stops. Libraries aren't even safe. People are getting run over on the side of the road, like animals. The stakes have never been higher, and yet nobody knows what the hell, and even the smart money's confused.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for an election mere weeks (was it weeks? really?) ago there was a collective late-summer sigh in the air, as Canadians of all political stripes wondered why the hell he couldn't wait until after the global pandemic had subsided a bit more. The last election was only two years ago, in October 2019, which feels like a million years ago, so there's strategies at play here that most won't be able to grasp until the dust settles. The reason Trudeau called the election? To cement a legacy that his backers hope will keep Canada on the path forward... to the future! For everyone! (We have our doubts, too.)

The Overdue Watch_Dogs 2 Review Nobody Asked For

Capturing the zeitgeist of the mid 2010s is a tough prospect. The indy music revolution was dying, dubstep was a joke, EDM had finished merging with top 40 pop, the problems of the 2000s were almost far enough the past that you couldn't reasonably get angry about them anymore, and data was the biggest business there was. 

Computers were interwoven into everything so that everyone was finally using them, generating reams of data that could either save us from ourselves or sell us deeper into consumerist bondage, and moreover, the biggest developing narrative was how computer companies were controlling and selling user data.

That ongoing story, by now, sometimes seems so old as to be quaint. Occasionally the embers of resentment are fanned back into flame by documentaries or particular revelations, but the terms of service are often a trifling speedbump in using anything digital. The majority of us have welcomed the digital world with a weird blend of weary mistrust and gee-whiz enthusiasm.

We pay our personal data sacrifice so we can access the bonanza of the digital frontier, and mountains of e-waste are the new burgeoning concern. Each electric car that's saving the world's atmosphere has other steep environmental and social costs which it's profitable to downplay... and all those chips put into disposable products end up in landfills.

2016 was a busy year, with many alarming events, during which I still posted on this blog (but with a decreasing semi-regularity), but it also brought the world the underappreciated open world hacking game Watch_Dogs 2, which was almost immediately (and if you consider No Man's Sky, unfairly) overshadowed by pretty much every other title from 2016.

It was the sequel to a much-maligned game I never played. In 2020, I got a free copy from the Epic Games Store, which wouldn't install through that launcher, so I had to delete the package from my pitifully overcrowded SSD, then install it through Ubisoft Connect. I wasn't off to a good start, but I was in the mood for some open-world hacking excitement. 

Watch_Dogs 2 mostly delivered on the excitement and the hacking, with some interesting and welcome surprises, and some expected shortcomings. Want to read a big ass review that nobody asked for about one of the least-talked-about games of 2016? Then you've come to the right blog!

The Real Thematic Core of Indie Gaming Darling Outer Wilds

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

Outer Wilds is a game that respects your time and your curiosity. Though I’m going to argue the theme is letting go, you should hold on to the experience of playing it yourself before knowing anything and spoiling it! Stumble around blindly like a cool 4 eyed space amphibian, then come back for some thematic discussion.

 

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

All Your Favorite Social Media Channels Are Going To Hell

This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.

Stalker: COP, Fallout 4 and Philosophical Divergences in Design

I've been able to get back into playing computer games after a fairly lengthy absence where I only had Terraria, Starcraft & Brood War (which were/are free), and a great little game called Dungeon Warfare to distract me from professional and other pressures. Of course the first thing I did after a 3+ year absence is get a cheap computer together to play fairly modern games. Of course I started with Fallout 4, because I had only played a few hours on a friend's PS4 and enjoyed it enough to want to give it a full go. Then the Stalker series went on sale, and since I'd been meaning to play a Stalker game since the original was released, I grabbed Call of Pripyat.

Playing both more or less side by side when time allowed has been interesting. There is a real divide in development philosophies between each that is kind of useful for examining the differences in Western and Post-Bloc thought. The differences in narrative style and game mechanics tell a wider story that's kind of interesting to me, and since I almost never blog anymore, and nobody reads this blog anyway, I thought I'd put my thoughts into the internet right now. Plus both games are post apocalyptic in a sense: Fallout in the global sense, and Stalker in the more local sense (already food for thought). There are significant differences between these two 'shoot a gun at a mutant'-type games.

The Borderlands Series in Retrospect: Actually Mostly Bullshit

Borderlands is a computer game series that is in many ways symptomatic of the 'malaise of modern gaming' (which is not 100% true and therefore a theory) especially considering how style has trumped substance (which is a problem modern gaming shares with many other modern things). The gist of a Borderlands game is:

It is a first person shooter set on a richy detailed, busted cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic wasteland/junkyard alien planet with cool monsters and villainous humans and it's also a bit of an RPG (because those are hot right now) in that you have experience points, skills, and criticals (and also a vast, grim, and forboding numerical grind). All weapons and equipment are randomly generated with varying stats, there are multiple protagonists with different powers, persistent account wide bonuses, and a variety of challenges and accomplishments. Also the series likes to use hit songs in advertising as well as in-game!

All of this, and it's arguably less fun than even Doom 1 or 2, which are a million times less complex or intricate. To my mind the Borderlands series is a perfect example of the pretty, lifeless, grindy, downright boring and chore-like video games proliferating in 'serious' gaming. I finished the first game a couple of times (to my eternal discredit) and only played around 8 hours of Borderlands 2 (so far I haven't gotten a single interesting weapon and the fights haven't been fun). So the most important things in FPS games, the guns, are randomized. Generally the randomized guns are excessively useless. The inventory system is yet another terrible console/PC crossover abortion, so good luck selling the random loot guns the game is stingy about dropping.

Hell and Death and Hell in 2017

With everything getting worse and worse and worse, this year was full of fun entertainment products and 'silver linings' that can only be seen clearly in times of darkness, like the edge of the sun during an eclipse. If you thought 2016 was like a dystopian nightmare, 2017 was a goldmine of things verging way past the noxious, from the full-time resurrection of open Nazism to evidence (that never really leads to action) that foreign actors had meddled in other nations' elections. Democracy was already an outmoded farce facing skepticism from even the most foolish fools, but even with the cover blown off things could still get darker and more scary. Amazing.

Technological progress continued onward, but with the exception of a self-landing rocket and reusable cargo spaceship, and maybe electric cars (more than 100 years of not quite getting there), most technology was either frivolous or part of some nightmarish scheme to either replace or fully entrap humanity. From drones to 'assistants' the technology industry seems to want everyone to rat on themselves constantly, and warnings about hackers are just the tip of the iceberg when you consider that everything you do is already probably monitored. The dystopia is real, and we're just waiting on the cyberpunk aspect.

Sexual misconduct was a hotter topic this year than most, thanks to the revelations that just about all of your heroes abuse their power and lack the self-restraint we typically expect from adults. That actor/comedian you loved? Yep. Though that's kind of a good story, ultimately, that outside of financial fraud and rigging elections and misleading the public, at least the people who are sexual predators get their comeuppance. It's just, yeah, it had to take down at least one man you thought was cool. Solution: stop thinking men are cool, like nearly a full quarter of North America's women already do every day, just to protect themselves and not even from spite (which would be equally righteous).

What could be more fun than the above? How about a proxy war that's created a cholera outbreak and killed thousands of children? Not sad enough for you? Record numbers of murders in South America due to That Drug Problem still not being solved. If you liked natural disasters, this was a fairly average year for those, and they still managed to be astoundingly destructive. Got any more wars, 2017? Of course you do, we're just too exhausted to pay attention anymore.

On the internet I'm sure a bunch of things happened. People complained. Hashtag slacktivism continued to invalidate its own arguments, and the all the nefarious and alienating filter bubbles (which both me and Barack Obama warned about at different times, with my warning several years earlier) came to the surface dispensing gallons of fetid gaseous idiocy and half-baked numbskullery. Delightful! The internet didn't get any smarter but it did manage to make most of us even more stupid and lazy. Plus the internet of things... what a dumb bunch of dumb dumbness. The field of product design managed to shit out a billion turds that all inexplicably connect to the internet to do stupid shit, spy on you, fail to work, and brick once they're no longer supported. And they said the Snake Oil Salesman died in the 1920s!

And if that wasn't enough, the future of America's internet (from which providers across the rest of the free world take their cues) got extremely uncertain and frighteningly extra-dystopic. But 'feminism' was the word of the year, so I guess it all balances out with social media battles being won at the cost of all freedom, decency, and promise in the future.

It was, however, a great year for music, with literally too many future classics being released. So many, in fact, that we'll have trouble looking back to them simply because there were so many and music is such a fractured field dominated by large entities overshadowing interesting efforts from smaller ones that it's like... hell man. It's like hell out there I'm sure.

Essentially, if you were what's referred to as a normal person, odds are this was a year where you went along feeling like your day-to-day was unchanged but everything around you was a nightmare. So you retreated into the filter bubble. Who could blame you. You retreated into whatever refuge you had and waited for the bad dream to pass, for the world to awake and come to its senses. But it didn't. So then you probably decided: well, fuck it, let's drink. Can't blame you there. Maybe you turned to religion. Maybe you killed yourself. That might have been the smartest move of all, given our dismal outlook for the future.

Well. Here's to another year of Hell Lite, overblown vacillation and unrestrained hyperbole. May 2018 be a little less hellish, and may the screeching outraged idiots and their sinister puppet masters all shut up and let the rest of us can get back to the business of improvement.

The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.