Author Archives: Azuriel
Teanautica
Do you enjoy some gaming drama? What am I asking, who doesn’t? Pull up a chair and let’s spill it.
First, set the stage. Subnautica was a much-beloved underwater indie breakout hit created by Unknown Worlds. The follow-up semi-sequel, Below Zero… not so much. Nevertheless, the actual sequel Subnautica 2 is the second-most wishlisted game on Steam, trailing Hollow Knight: Silksong. Krafton buys Unknown Worlds in 2021. Subnautica 2 was revealed to be in development since April 2022, had a cinematic video released October 2024, and reports it would have an Early Access release sometime in 2025. In April of this year, there was even a few gameplay trailers.
And then a shoe dropped: Krafton, the company that purchased Unknown Worlds for $500m had fired the entire executive leadership, and delayed the game until 2026. Why? “It wasn’t ready.”
Charlie Cleveland, now-former head of Unknown Worlds, said it was ready for Early Access. Which, okay, just a leadership spat, right? But then came the juice: a Bloomberg report that highlighted special “earn-in” terms of the Unknown Worlds buyout. Specifically, if Unknown Worlds was able to meet certain sales targets by the end of 2025, they would get a $250m bonus. All of a sudden, it became obvious that Krafton sacked the leadership team and delayed Subnautica 2 just to avoid the payout.
…or was it?
Krafton resurfaced to hang all the dirty laundry out to dry:
[…] Specifically, in addition to the initial $500 million purchase price, we allocated approximately 90% of the up to $250 million earn-out compensation to the three former executives, with the expectation that they would demonstrate leadership and active involvement in the development of Subnautica 2.
However, regrettably, the former leadership abandoned the responsibilities entrusted to them. Subnautica 2 was originally planned for an Early Access launch in early 2024, but the timeline has since been significantly delayed. KRAFTON made multiple requests to Charlie and Max to resume their roles as Game Director and Technical Director, respectively, but both declined to do so. In particular, following the failure of Moonbreaker, KRAFTON asked Charlie to devote himself to the development of Subnautica 2. However, instead of participating in the game development, he chose to focus on a personal film project.
KRAFTON believes that the absence of core leadership has resulted in repeated confusion in direction and significant delays in the overall project schedule. The current Early Access version also falls short in terms of content volume. We are deeply disappointed by the former leadership’s conduct, and above all, we feel a profound sense of betrayal by their failure to honor the trust placed in them by our fans.
Incidentally, there’s an additional paragraph down towards the end that says Krafton “reaffirm our commitment to provide the rewards [the remaining devs] were promised.” It remains to be seen whether that is indeed $25m, whether it is still dependent on the same targets, and so on. Now that everything is in the open, I think it will be harder for the working devs to be screwed, but we’ll see.
As you can imagine, Reddit and a lot of the internet is awash in hot takes. Most of which are bad.
“Krafton is clearly lying!” “Obvious corporate fuckery.” “They are just trying to get out from paying $250m.” “Krafton is using weasel words and won’t be paying the other devs money either.”
I sympathize with these notions. At least, I did until I found out that Charlie Cleveland really was taking the piss. Krafton’s statement of “chose to focus on a personal film project” comically undersells it:
That’s from Charlie’s website. Also from his website, in the About section:
I’m Charlie Cleveland and I’ve been designing video games for over 25 years. I founded Unknown Worlds and built games like Natural Selection, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica and Moonbreaker. I absolutely love making games but wanted to try something new.
At the end of 2023, I left San Francisco after almost 20 years and moved to Los Angeles to reset my life. Instead of taking it easy, I now find myself working on multiple film projects. It’s amazing how fast it’s all happening – being right in the thick of things makes it so much easier to meet like-minded people!
What else should have been taking place at the end of 2023? Maybe… working on your fucking game?
Don’t want to trust Krafton’s motives? Fine, don’t. But let’s not pretend ole Cleveland Steamer over here was doing anything other than quiet quitting and waiting for his cut of $225m off the backs of devs who were otherwise floundering.
The leaked presentation slides claim that between Q2 2023 and Q2 2025, Unknown Worlds removed two biomes, one Leviathan type, multiple creatures and tools, one vehicle (Trident), character customization features, the custom game mode, and six hours’ worth of story content. While many of those elements were merely delayed rather than completely cut, their omissions have scaled down the early access build significantly, “making it necessary to reassess the feasibility of the planned launch,” one of the leaked slides reads.
The three fired founders are suing, of course, so perhaps we’ll get more salacious details in discovery. Or maybe it will just be settled out of court. Whatever the case, what I do think is abundantly clear and not nearly communicated enough is this: the founders of Unknown Worlds very clearly fucked off and were waiting for a second paycheck they did not earn. Did Krafton suddenly fire them to prevent Subnautica 2 from entering (a premature) Early Access and thus likely getting enough revenue to trigger a $250m payout? Yeah. Clearly, yes. But was that wrong? No, clearly no.
Charlie elsewhere claims they always shared the profits and would have shared the $225m payout with the actual employees building Subnautica 2 and rah rah rah. That’s a cute sentiment, and I’d almost believe it if he hadn’t abandoned the team. “Subnautica has been my life’s work and I would never willingly abandon it or the amazing team that has poured their hearts into it.” So… were ya working on Subnautica 2 or were ya not, homeslice? Attended the meetings? Signed off on the ever-reducing Early Access scope? Got any receipts, my friend? Or just mad you’re in the Find Out phase?
I’m about as anti-corporate as it comes – feel free to read any of the 1500+ posts from over a decade to confirm. But what I have realized time and time again, is two things:
- M. Night Shymalan
- The corporate call is coming from inside the corporate house
Don’t take Charlie’s side just because you really liked Subnautica. It’s a beautiful flower in a sea of shit and should be celebrated. The same dev team went on to make Below Zero, and Charlie fucked off to make Moonbreaker. They are not gods, they are not heroes, and chances are none of them have any idea how or why the games they made were any good in the first place. Some games are simply products of their time and would have not have been as successful had they come earlier or later. If they really had the secret sauce, every game would be better than the last. And that is rare.
Also, after you get bought out for $500m with another $250m queued up in a couple of years, if you cared maybe you can sit your ass behind a desk for a minute to ensure your team gets the cut. Or, you know… don’t, and then quit out of principle and go make your AI-seeded Christmas movie. Pick a lane.
Anyway, little ranty at the end there, but it’s Drama with the capital D. You’re welcome.
Egregious
Hearthstone recently announced a new feature coming soon: pets! As in, little animated avatars that sit in the lower-left corner of the game board and do cute things and react to emotes, dealing damage, and so on. Pets are purely cosmetic with no gameplay elements whatsoever. Blizzard has introduced a lot of cosmetic enhancements to the game over the years, so this would not be especially noteworthy.
What is noteworthy this time around is the fact that this pet will cost most people $160.
(Most coverage says $158 because it takes 15,800 Runestones, but you can’t buy that specific amount.)
The only way to unlock this first pet is to participate in the new Darkmoon Faire gacha machine – only available for a limited time! – which features 10 prizes. The first pull is free, because of course it is. Thereafter, there is an escalating cost for some reason, and a weighted score that puts the odds of getting the pet at between 0.1% and 7%, even after eight prior pulls… for nefarious reasons. This is certainly some of the most ridiculous gacha bullshit I have seen ever recently.
…at least, until I remembered some of the other “sales” Blizzard has had.
For reference, here is what my shop looks like currently:
You don’t really need to know what Golden packs are or the value of Signature Legendary cards – just look at the dollar totals. Not pictured are some of the “Mythic” alternative hero portraits, which turn the typical JPGs into 3D models with special animations and such for the low, low price of $60. Several months ago, there was a “bundle” of two different colors of the Kerrigan model for $80. So, while doubling the upper floor to $160 certainly feels egregious, I cannot say it came out of nowhere.
Plus, if I were feeling onery, I would point out that technically the pet only costs $158 if you value the remaining items at zero. Signature Legendary cards in the shop are sold for $30 as seen above. Hero portraits are usually $10 apiece and there are two. It’s hard to value a Diamond Legendary since you only get those in special ways, but I think I’ve seen them go for $40-$50. A single Golden pack costs $4. I’m not going to speculate on the other Signature cards or the card back, but already we’re back down to $54 taking the other stuff into account.
Is this rollout still a PR disaster? Yes. Is it indicative of cynical, pernicious monetization? Yes. Does it bring up legitimate fears about the future direction and longevity of the game as a whole? Yes.
Is it completely unexpected for Hearthstone? …ehh, kinda sorta maybe yes. But also no.
I Get No Respec
The Outer Worlds 2’s game director believes implementing 90+ perks with no respec option will lead to role-playing consequences.
“There’s a lot of times where you’ll see games where they allow infinite respec, and at that point I’m not really role-playing a character, because I’m jumping between — well my guy is a really great assassin that snipes from long range, and then oh, y’know, now I’m going to be a speech person, then respec again, and it’s like–” […]
“We want to respect people’s time and for me in a role-playing game this is respecting somebody’s time,” Adler argues. “Saying your choices matter, so take that seriously – and we’re going to respect that by making sure that we give you cool reactivity for those choices that you’re making. That’s respecting your time.
Nah, dawg, having an exit strategy for designer hubris and incompetence is respecting my time.
Imagine starting up Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and wanting to role-play a knife-throwing guy… and then being stuck for 14 months (until patch 1.5) before the designers get around to fixing the problem of having included knife-throwing abilities with no way to retrieve the knives. As in, whatever you threw – which could have been a Legendary knife! – just evaporated into the ether. Or if you dedicated yourself to be a Tech-based weapon user only to find out the capstone ability that allows tech-based weapons to ignore enemy armor does nothing because enemies didn’t actually have an armor attribute. Or that crafting anything in general is an insane waste of time, assuming you didn’t want to just print infinite amounts of currency to purchase better-than-you-can-craft items.
Or how about in the original release Deus Ex: Human Revolution when you go down the hacking/sneaking route. Only… surprise! There are boss fights in which hacking/sneaking is useless. Very nice role-playing consequences there. Devs eventually fixed this two years later.
The Outer Worlds 2 will not be released in a balanced state; practically no game is, much less ones directed by apparent morons. Undoubtedly we will get the option for inane perks like +50% Explosive Damage without any information about how 99% of the endgame foes will have resistances to Explosive Damage or whatever. In the strictest (and dumbest) interpretation I suppose you could argue that “role-playing” an inept demolition man is still a meaningful choice. But is it really a meaningful choice when you have to trap players into making it? If players wanted a harder time, they could always increase the game difficulty or intentionally play poorly.
Which honestly gets to the heart of the matter: who are you doing this for? Not actual role-players, because guess what… they can (and should) just ignore the ability to respec even if it is available. Commitment is kind of their whole schtick, is it not? No, this reeks of old-school elitist game dev bullshit that was pulled from the garbage bin of history and proudly mounted over the fireplace.
But I’ll tell you, not every game is for every single person. Sometimes you have to pick a lane.”
And yet out of all the available options, you picked the dumbass lane.
It’s funny, because normally I am one to admire a game developer sticking to their strong vision for a particular game. You would never get a Dark Souls or Death Stranding designed by a committee. But by specifically presenting the arguments he did, it is clear to me that “no respecs” is not actually a vision, it’s an absurdist pet peeve. Obsidian is going to give us “cool reactivity” for the choices we make? You mean like… what? If I choose the Bullets Cause Bleed perk my character will say “I’ll make them bleed”? Or my party members will openly worry that I will blow everyone up when I pick the Explosion Damage+ perk? You can’t see it, but I’m pressing X to Doubt.
[Fake Edit]
I just came across developer interviews on Flaws and Character Building. Flaws are bonus/penalty choices you get presented with after a specific criteria is met during gameplay. One example was Sungazer, where you after looking at the sun too many times, you can choose permanent vision damage (bloom and/or lens flair all the time), +100% ranged damage spread, but you can passively heal to 50% HP when outside in the daytime. The other is Foot-In-Mouth where if the game notices you quickly breezing through dialog options, you can opt to get a permanent +15% XP gain in exchange for only having a 15-second timer to make dialog options, after which everything is picked randomly.
While those are probably supposed to be “fun” and goofy examples, this is exactly the sort of shit I was talking about. Sungazer is obviously not something a ranged character would ever select, but suppose I was already committing to a melee build. OK… how often will I be outside? Does the healing work even in combat? How expensive/rare are healing items going to be? Will the final dungeon be, well, a dungeon? I doubt potentially ruining the visuals for the entire rest of the game will ever be worth it – and we can’t know how bad that’s going to be until we experience it! – but even if that portion was removed, I would still need more information before I could call that a meaningful choice.
“Life is full of meaningful choices with imperfect information.” Yeah, no, there’s a difference between imperfect information because the information is unknowable and when the devs know exactly how they planned the rest of the game to go. Letting players specialize in poison damage and then making all bosses immune to poison is called a Noob Trap.
The second video touches more directly on respecs and choices, and… it’s pretty bad. They do their best and everything sounds fine up until the last thirty seconds or so.
Yes, you can experiment and play with it a bit. And you may find something… ‘I try this out and I don’t really like it too much’ you know… you might load a save. You might want to do something different, you might try a different playthrough.
This was right after the other guy was suggesting that if you discover you like using Gadgets (instead of whatever you were doing previously), your now-wasted skill points are “part of your story, part of your experience that no one else had.” Oh, you mean like part of my bad experience that can be avoided by seeing other players warning me that X Skill is useless in the endgame or that Y Skill doesn’t work like it says it does in-game?
Ultimately, none of this is going to matter much, of course. There will be a respec mod out there on Day 1 and the mEaNiNgFuL cHoIcEs crowd will get what they want, those who can mod will get what we want, and everyone else just kind of gets fucked by asinine developers who feel like they know better than the ones who made Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Witcher 3.
Laika: Aged in Blood
About a month ago, I was hesitant to pick up Laika: Aged in Blood (Laika) because I was not certain whether I already had it as part of a random bundle. After a while, I decided to just go for it. And what I discovered is a extremely brutal and brutally difficult metroidvania with impressive artwork and a ridiculously great soundtrack.
In Laika, you control the eponymous anthropomorphized coyote as she rides around the 2D post-apocalypse wasteland on a motorcycle. The game’s marketing really struck home with the “motorvania” tag, but it’s accurate. On a keyboard, W makes you drive forward, A & D will tilt you forwards or backwards, Spacebar will turn you around, and you use the mouse to aim in any direction and fire. If that sounds clunky… it is. Playing this game will require you to rewire your brain a bit. Especially considering you can only reload your guns by doing a backflip (!!). Yes, every time.
That is only the half of it though. Laika does not have a health bar because every bullet is fatal. Landing upside down is fatal. Hitting your head on a ledge is fatal. If you forget how the controls work, just pressing D for more than 2 seconds is fatal as you flip your bike over, even at a dead stop. Luckily, Laika takes a sort of Super Meat Boy/Hotline Miami approach where you respawn almost instantly… back at whatever checkpoint totem you last activated. Unfortunately, it also takes a halfway Dark Souls approach where you drop 50% of your upgrade currency in a bag at the location of your death.
With the exception of a few boss fights, I eventually just vibed with the (death) experience. Your bike will protect you from incoming shots from the bottom and there’s an extremely generous bullet-time feature. It was quite satisfying seeing myself go from timidly seeking out obvious ramps to reload my pistol after every encounter, to trying to backflip from every bump in the road, to eventually just driving into encounters with only one in the chamber knowing I would be spinning around in the air deflecting bullets and reloading automatically anyway. I would still die to dumb shit all the time, of course, but my reaction was mostly on the “haha, oh man!” side rather than frustration. Considering I died 336 times (per Steam achievements), you kinda have to.
As for the rest of the game, it’s equal parts bleak, ultra-violence and touching melancholy. Indeed, the opening sequence has Laika discovering the horrific torture and crucifixion (with his own guts) of her young daughter’s friend at the hands of Birds. And yes, you do see Poochie hanging there. Considering the rest of the game is not nearly as gory and violent – guns and blood and bodies notwithstanding – I assume the devs wanted something extra brutal at the beginning to justify Laika killing all the Birds. Which was not all that needed, IMO, as the Birds were clearly a continued menace to everyone.
The final aspect I wanted to highlight is the soundtrack. Good Christ is the soundtrack fantastic. It is a lo-fi jazz-bar Western experience that perfectly fits the feeling of the game, or perhaps defines it. Even if you have no desire to play the rest of the game, I highly recommend browsing the soundtrack. The only negative is how some of these songs are collected or purchased from vendors in-game, which means after 18 hours of playing, you might be tired of the ones you heard more than others. Although I never seem to tire of The Whisper, or My Destiny, or even Bloody Sunset. There are technically “normal” non-voiced songs too, but they are more limited to certain locations, boss fights, and such.
So, yeah, that is Laika: Aged in Blood. It’s not a great game, and certainly not something I would play over again. But it joins that gnostic pantheon of games like LISA or Undertale where I am equal parts glad to have experienced it and glad it is over. Sometimes you just need the pathos.
Thought Process: OG Switch
Woot currently has a deal up for a brand new OLED Switch for $250. The sale is going until June 18th, or until they sell out, the latter of which seems more likely. Should I pull the trigger?
First question: why?
It’s a good question. For one thing, the Switch 2 just came out and it costs “only” $450. Right now, there aren’t very many actual Switch 2 games beyond Mario Kart World, so no real killer apps. Also, I have clearly sat out the entirety of the Switch’s original lifespan, so why jump in now? Also also, the Switch Lite appears to retail for around $180ish, which is even less, if it were somehow super important for me to play Switch games. Then again, $70 is probably reasonably enough to justify an OLED upgrade plus being able to dock it to a TV.
Not for nothing, the Retroid Pocket 5 can be bought from Amazon for $260. It would be even cheaper if not for the tariffs. It can emulate everything up through Gamecube, and even a few Switch titles. However, the process by which one acquires emulation-ready Switch games is the same for just playing them on the PC, so the only real benefit of one over the other is for gaming on the go. Which, as it turns out, I generally don’t do.
Second question: what would I play?
There are a few titles that immediately come to mind:
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
- …?
When I was trying to think about the last Mario game I played, I realized that I hadn’t played one for a long time. The last Nintendo console I bought was Gamecube back in my college days, but it was primarily to play Super Smash Bros Melee and Mario Kart Double Dash. So, Super Mario… Sunshine, I never played. Nor Galaxy or Galaxy 2. Presumably they would be fun. But fun enough to justify $40 purchases of decades-old games? Ehhhh. Nintendo does have a subscription feature with classic games to play, but the Gamecube offerings right now are like 3 games (only for Switch 2).
Final question: what will I do?
After a long, exhaustive mental exercise, the answer is… Nothing. I will do nothing. I am not super convinced the OLED Switch will get any less expensive in the future, but that does not seem to matter much to me. Which makes sense, given all of my other gaming “obligations.” If anything, I would be more inclined for the Switch 2 simply because Mario Kart World does seem fun, and it’s backwards compatible, etc. Or the Retroid Pocket 5, honestly.
Or I can just continue to do waffle and whaff and do nothing until/unless some other solution releases that makes things more obviously clear. Like maybe a Steam Deck 2 or something.
More Impressions: FF7 Rebirth
I am still plugging away at Rebirth. Don’t worry, no story spoilers here.
What I did want to talk about (again) is just how baffling the game systems are. There are some things that are just awkward and annoying, but true to the original, like having to meticulously move Materia around every time your party is forced to change. Mercifully, the devs do allow you to equip Materia into a slot from someone else, eliminating some of the tedium.
But then there is all the new stuff. Which exists for… some reason, to the detriment of the game.
Weapons have Weapon Skill slots, which act like Materia (e.g. slot them), but I honestly have no clue where they come from. Maybe I missed the tutorial for that part and they automatically unlock? Anyway, they are pretty minor and largely inconsequential fiddly bits you have to mess with on occasion. Then you have the Folios, which reminds me of the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Or would if any choices there mattered either. Yes, the Folios are where you unlock Synergy Abilities and special magic attacks that don’t require MP. But along the way you have to spent points on things like “increase MP by 3” and “increase whatever by 5%.” Filler by itself is not always bad, but this is just one of a myriad of new systems introduced, again, for what reason?
And by the way, what Rebirth has done with spellcasting makes me wonder why they bothered with it at all. One of the issues of the first game (Remake) is wandering into a boss fight that hinges on you exploiting an elemental weakness that none of your team has equipped. With the Folios, all characters can unlock specific abilities that allow them to cast most elements without needing the Materia or even MP. That’s cool. However, the introduction of Synergy Abilities – which require two characters to perform ~3 ATB actions apiece – places a huge emphasis on executing actions that “count” towards them. What doesn’t count? Spells and those abilities that cast spells. Which… why not? Seriously. Combined with characters that have elemental-based ATB attacks like Cloud’s Firebrand, the whole spell system feels de-emphasized.
The other element (har har) that is becoming more annoying to me over time is the disparity between the characters themselves. Specifically, Tifa and Red XIII versus Yuffie. Both Tifa and Red XIII are melee-only characters that end up facing what feels like 80% flying enemies thus far. Not only can they not hit these flying mobs to gain ATB, many of their abilities won’t hit either. Enter Yuffie: primarily a melee character, that can also throw her Shuriken at distant/flying foes as a secondary attack. If it hits, a second tap of the button will teleport her to the Shuriken and allow her to start melee attacking the target, even in mid-air. Alternatively, if you start hitting the regular attack button, Yuffie will start attacking with her elemental ninjitsu, which is an instantaneous ranged attack. Did I mention she can change the element of the ninjitsu to target weaknesses?
I will concede that perhaps the devs feel a bit boxed in here. Tifa has the same attacks she did in the first game, as does Yuffie… who was released as a solo DLC character, and thus needed to have a broad spectrum of attacks to make up for it. At the same time, with all the craziness of Remake, I don’t think anyone would bat an eye at Tifa/Red having some way of engaging flying foes. Whatever the case, the end result is that while I want my party to be Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith, the classical trio is way outclassed by Cloud, Yuffie, and Barret. Sure, I could just do what I want and just take the OG crew, but that will make the enormously boring fights take even longer.
There are two final things I wanted to talk about, that are possibly only “me” problems. I’m very important, of course, so these are major issues. Those issues are Pacing and Tone.
From a Pacing perspective, Rebirth effectively has none. What typically happens is that you get to a new area, have a few Main Story Quests (MSQ), and then the next stage is far away into a blank map. Some of the time it is possible to make a direct approach and ignore the 20+ map icons and side quests and towers and collectibles and so on and so forth. There was even a time when the MSQ was almost directly in sight and you had to go out of your way to leave the area to hit up all the extraneous stuff. Other times you do have to unlock a certain amount of things and/or need to hit certain level milestones to not be stomped by the next boss. Regardless, I’m not a completionist or an achievement hunter, but I do actually care about extracting every drop of interaction I can from these characters that occupied so much of my youth, so I end up finishing everything I can stand.
Unfortunately, the end result is that I spend 2-3 play sessions doing busywork with this awful combat system and just can’t bring myself to push further into the story until I mentally recharge.
Double-unfortunately for me, the Tone for this game is all over the place. The original FF7 had extremely weird sections and comic relief at regular intervals, of course – the entire Wall Market sequence, for example. But I feel like the devs decided that every air pocket created from stretching the game into a trilogy needed to filled with nonsense. And not just a little nonsense, but ridiculous nonsense. Which again, fine, comic relief is a thing. However, the game isn’t that heavy to justify this amount of relief. Indeed, it’s hard to take much of anything seriously based on the in-game presentation. For example, there is a section in which Shrina soldiers are gunned down and everyone is somber and clutching pearls. Fast-forward past a bunch of filler quests (god, I wish I could have), you face off against a bunch of Shrina soldiers… that you gun down. What.
If it sounds like I’m not having a good time, you would be correct. I am currently sitting at 46 hours and sort of wish things had ended 30 hours ago. In the interest of plowing ahead, I have started to actually ignore the more Ubisoft-styled busywork, but it’s still tough.
This game is not the follow-up to Remake I was hoping for.
Review: Dawncaster
Dawncaster is mobile deckbuilding roguelite that is in the esteemed company of Slay the Spire and Balatro for how many hours I have played, and how willing I was to pay real dollars for the privilege. While it does have some design choices that limit its depth, I can consistently find myself playing runs lasting for hours while also experimenting with different strategies.
As mentioned, Dawncaster is a deckbuilding roguelite. At the beginning of each run, you can choose between one of six classes, which is then customized with a selection of Basic Attacks, a Weapon Ability, and then a special Starting Card. Alternative options can be unlocked using in-game currency earned from daily quests and completing runs (win or lose). Once you begin a run, you enter “Canto 1” (of 9) and are presented with three encounter options from a “deck,” which can include treasures, shrines, NPCs, or monsters. With the exception of treasures, the two non-selected encounter cards are then reshuffled into the deck. Your goal is to work your way to the boss of the Canto and defeat them.
Monster combat is fairly typical for the genre. Each turn, you gain energy of a specific type (Blue, Green, Red, etc) for your class and draw 5 cards; leftover energy is carried over into future turns, but cards are discarded. From this base, a wide variety of scenarios and strategies develop. There are debuffs like Bleeding, Poison, Doom, and buffs like Armor, Barrier, Focus. There are cards that draw cards, cards that discard cards, cards that stay in your hand from turn to turn, curses that go into your deck or the enemy’s deck, enchantments, temporary cards, and so on and so forth. Also, cards can be upgraded and even have keywords added to them.
If anything, the sheer breadth of options is one of the shortcomings of Dawncaster. And, paradoxically, that same breadth leads to many runs feeling the same.
As mentioned previously, there are six classes… but there are no specific class cards, only color cards. Certain classes start locked to a specific color, such as the Arcanist and Blue energy. After each successful combat encounter, you get to select one of three card rewards that are tied to what energy you have access to. Generally speaking, the mechanics within each color are synergistic, but even when they aren’t, at least you can try to focus on the one you want. The problem is when you gain access to other colors, which can happen at class selection or even during a given run depending on your choices. At that point, you still only get three card rewards after each encounter, but now the card pool expands to include both colors. Sometimes this can be a good thing – some colors are better at card draw or specific debuffs, etc – but often this means you will be offered useless rewards for most of a run, leading to failed decks. Alternatively, even when things go perfectly, it usually does so because a specific combo is so much better than the other available options.
Dawncaster has multiple DLCs available for purchase, which adds more cards, enemies, encounters, and bosses. Tragically, the additional cards do not feel all that good because of the specific issue above: if they are not directly related to your strategy, they just pollute your limited card choices. There is a shopkeeper NPC that gives you a bunch of card choices, but again, there are so many cards out there that you can hit them up a half dozen times and still never find the necessary cards to make your strategy work. Of course, targeting a specific strategy is probably not the best idea; I would never start a Slay the Spire run and say “I’m doing a Poison build this time” before seeing some good Poison cards. But at least with Slay the Spire, I would only see The Silent cards as rewards, rather than every class.
Anyway, this is the quibble I have with Dawncaster after literally a hundred hours or more of gameplay. I still feel like Slay the Spire is the better deck-building roguelike, but Dawncaster is in the top 5 for the genre, if not directly second place (especially on mobile). If you are looking for something to play on your phone that isn’t F2P and/or gacha, I can definitely recommend this game.
N(AI)hilism
Wilhelm has a post up about how society has essentially given up the future to AI at this point. One of the anecdotes in there is about how the Chicago Sun-Times had a top-15 book lists that only included 5 real books. The other is about how some students at Columbia University admitted they complete all of their course-work via AI, to make more time for the true reason they enrolled in an Ivy League school: marriage and networking. Which, to be honest, is probably the only real reason to be going to college for most people. But at least “back in the day” one may have accidentally learned something.
From a concern perspective, all of this is almost old news. Back in December I had a post up about how the Project Zomboid folks went out of their way to hire a human artist who turned around and (likely) used AI to produce some or all of the work. Which you would think speaks to a profound lack of self-preservation, but apparently not. Maybe they were just ahead of the curve.
Which leads me to the one silver-lining when it comes to the way AI has washed over and eroded the foundations of our society: at least it did so in a manner that destroys its own competitive advantage.
For example, have you see the latest coming from Google’s Veo 3 video AI generation? Among the examples of people goofing around was this pharmaceutical ad for “Puppramin,” a drug to treat depression by encouraging puppies to arrive at your doorstep.
Is it perfect? Of course not. But as the… uh, prompt engineer pointed out on Twitter, these sort of ads used to cost $500,000 and take a team of people to produce over months, but this one took a day and $500 in AI credits. Thing is, you have to ask what is eventual outcome? If one company can reduce their ad creation costs by leveraging AI, so can all the others. You can’t even say that the $499,500 saved could be used to purchase more ad space, because everyone in the industry is going to have that extra cash, so bids on timeslots or whatever will increase accordingly.
It all reminds me about the opening salvo in the AI wars: HR departments. When companies receive 180 applications for every job posting, HR started utilizing algorithms to filter candidates. All of a sudden, if you knew the “tricks” and keywords to get your resume past said filter, you had a significant advantage. Now? Every applicant can use AI to construct a filter-perfect resume, tailored cover letter, and apply to 500 companies over their lunch break. No more advantage.
At my own workplace, we have been mandated to take a virtual course on AI use ahead of a deployment of Microsoft Claude. The entire time I was watching the videos, I kept thinking “what’s the use case for this?” Some of the examples in the videos were summarization of long documents, creating reports, generating emails, and the normal sort of office stuff. But, again, it all calls into question what problem is being solved. If I use Claude to generate an email and you use Claude to summarize it, what even happened? Other than a colossal waste of resources, of course.
Near as I can tell, there are only two endgoals available for this level of AI. The first we can see with Musk’s Grok, where the AI-owners can put their thumbs (more obviously) on the scale to direct people towards skinhead conspiracy theories. I can imagine someone with less ketamine-induced brain damage would be more subtle, nudging people towards products/politicians/etc that have bent the knee and/or paid the fee. The second endgoal is presumably to actually make money someday… somehow. Currently, zero of the AI companies out there make any profit. Most of them are free to use right now though, and that could possibly change in the future. If the next generation of students and workers are essentially dependent on AI to function, suddenly making ChatGPT cost $1000 to use would reintroduce the competitive advantage.
…unless the AI cat is already out of the bag, which it appears to be.
In any case, I am largely over it. Not because I foresee no negative consequences from AI, but because there is really nothing to be done at this point. If you are one of the stubborn holdouts, as I have been, then you will be ran over by those who aren’t. Nobody cares about the environmental impacts, the educational impacts, the societal impacts. But what else is new?
We’re all just here treading water until it reaches boiling temperature.
Dumb Problems to Have
Scenario: Fanatical is having another one of their bundle sales. In this specific situation, you want to pick up Backpack Heroes and at least one other game, in order to activate the discount. But which other game? Looking through things, you remember hearing that Laika: Aged Through Blood was an interesting “motorvania”. But wait a minute… do you already have that? Let’s check:
- Steam
- Epic
- GOG
- EA
- Amazon
- Ubisoft Connect
- Xbox Game Pass
Luckily, there are a few aggregators. GOG Galaxy is one, for example. However, for some reason it has got stuck trying to import your Epic games, and thus you can never really trust it. Google searches show you Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris, but after browsing it appears those are Linux-based options intended for the Steam Deck and/or Linux handhelds. Finally, you see Playnite. Will that work?
Yes… and no. Out of the box, Playnite will display every Xbox Game Pass game you have ever played before, even if it is no longer on the service. Very annoying. There is an add-on you can install though, to create a separate button to browse the currently available Game Pass games (under Generic: “Game Pass Catalog Browser”). Additionally, there is still some oddness with Steam, insofar as the 449 hours /played of 7 Days to Die is not registering, which kind of calls into question the validity of any of the other stats. But, at least it’s something.
Of course, all of this is an exceedingly dumb/first-world problem to have. A true “I can’t hold all these games” moment. A double-embarrassment of riches, if you will.
I just wish this modern problem would have a modern solution.
In An Age 
Human Slurry
Jul 16
Posted by Azuriel
Scrolling on my phone, I clicked into and read an article about Yaupon, which is apparently North America’s only native caffeinated plant. Since we’re speed-running the apocalypse over here in the US, the thought is that high tariffs on coffee and tea might revitalize an otherwise ultra-niche “Made in America” product. Huh, interesting.
I scroll down to the end and then see this:
I’ve seen summarized reviews on Amazon, but never comments. Honestly, I just laughed.
It’s long been known that the comments on news articles are trash: filled with bots or humans indistinguishable from bots. But there is something deeply… I don’t know a strong enough word for it. Cynical? Nihilistic? Absurd? Maybe just fucking comedic about inviting your (presumably) human readers to comment on a story and then just blending them all up in a great human slurry summary so no one has to actually read any of them. At what point do you not just cut out the middle(hu)man?
If want a summary of the future, that’s it. Wirehead, but made out of people.
Posted in Commentary, Philosophy
4 Comments
Tags: AI, Comments, Human Slurry, Wirehead