Category Archives: Commentary
Valheim’s Subtle, Genius Design
I am going to complain about Valheim later, but before I do so, I wanted to get some words out in praise of some of its subtler elements of genius design. Specifically, there are two main elements: food and base-building. I’m going to talk about both as someone still in the Plains biome.
Counter-intuitively, in many survival-crafting games food is usually an afterthought. There might be a time period right at the beginning where you are scrounging for edibles anywhere you can, but thereafter hunger is just another meter you manage. Or more accurately, a meter you forget about completely until it is actively flashing at you. Certain “late-game” foods might provide specific buffs to damage or whatever, but it is clearly a bonus reward to encourage you to treat the design with more seriousness than it ever truly merits.
This is not at all the case with Valheim: your next meal is always top of mind at every stage of the game. And it achieves this, ironically, with no technical penalty for not eating. You will never starve to death in Valheim. Instead, you will… just have the default amount of HP and Stamina. Which is fine for a minute in the early game, but becomes a brutal setback nearly anywhere else.
In Valheim, you have three “slots” for food. Each piece of food grants you some amount of extra HP, Stamina, and healing per interval. However, you can’t just eat the same thing three times, as the food slots are mutually exclusive. This automatically elevates the food/cooking system way past almost all traditional survival crafting games, into the realm of Green Hell and similar ones that track individual macros like Protein and Carbs. Unlike the super technical ones though, Valheim doesn’t care if you eat the same three (unique) dishes each day, nor does it bear the same burden of UI overhead. Food just gives the same three stats in varying amounts, for varying amounts of time. Want to subsist on just Turnips and Onions and Onion Soup? Go for it… but good luck not getting one-shot in the next biome.
As a sidebar, I also appreciate what Valheim does (thus far) when it comes to obsoletion of materials as you progress. After defeating a boss, you typically unlock something that allows you to process the next biome’s materials, which you need in order to take on the next boss. That’s pretty standard. What has been nice though, is that food/equipment still makes use of older ingredients in fairly rational ways. Some might find this grindy to have to head back into the Swamp for Iron or Blood Bags or whatever, but I appreciate the (usually) measured approach of some items requiring older mats.
Finally, I want to talk about the meat (ahem) of the genius design: the campfire.
Real talk, Valheim slaughtered the sacred cow that almost every survival game raised without even knowing it, e.g. fires producing smoke. In almost every other game, you start by building a 2×2 box for a base, and throw everything inside… including the campfire. After all, rain will put a camp fire out, and you cannot fast-forward the night without being within a certain radius of a lit fire. In Valheim, however, unventilated fires also produce smoke, which creates a damaging debuff which can kill you.
And that’s it. One simple change elevates the game beyond many of its peers in the genre. Not because it’s realistic (it is), but because of what it changes about how the player approaches base design. My own progression went something like this:
- Builds a 2×2 square box… ouch, getting smoked out
- Builds a 3×3 box with the center tile open… and it rained
- Get annoyed, place the campfire outside with a janky lean-to protecting it
- Get annoyed standing in the rain to cook my own food. Hmm.
- Put campfire back in the middle of 3×3 box, create a 1×1 elevated roof. It works!
- Get annoyed accidentally walking into campfire so many times
- Tear down wall in back corner, place campfire there, with a “range hood”. It works!
- ???
- Realize why (fantasy) Viking architecture all looks like the way it does
It may not seem revolutionary that a game with Viking-themed set pieces ends up encouraging players to build Viking-looking bases. But consider how the genre’s bar for successfully encouraging anything beyond a wooden survival cube is practically nonexistent. The closest I have felt to such an inspired synergy between mechanics and aesthetics was Nightingale, which wore its Valheim inspirations on its lanternpunk sleeve.
In any case, my compliments to the devs on these two, specific points.
Digital License Transfer
This is kind of a “summarize a Youtube video” post, but since I have talked about digital ownership in the past, I felt it prudent to mark the occasion.
Legendary Drops has a recent video talking about how Xbox is rolling out a new feature that allows players with physical discs to effectively “claim” a bonus digital license of that same game to use with Play Anywhere and cloud streaming. If you then sell the game disc to someone else, that new person can claim the game instead, thereby revoking your own license. You can watch the video below:
I didn’t actually think too much about the Xbox announcement until Legendary Drops spelled it out for me, and he is exactly correct: this is the beginnings of true digital ownership. Well, “ownership*.” You cannot directly sell the digital license to another person, and none of these benefits apply to someone who straight-up bought the game digitally. And it’s still possible that Xbox follows in Sony’s footsteps and says no physical discs will be made for the next-gen console. It’d be weird to do so right after an announcement like this, but it’s Microsoft, they’ve hurt themselves in confusion more than once.
But. BUT. They’re doing the thing. A transferrable digital license… tied to a physical disc… but still a transferrable digital license. Nobody can make the argument anymore that the infrastructure necessary to support transferrable licenses would be too complicated or onerous. Microsoft is starting this whole thing right now.
Who is next? Nintendo? God, I would love that. Maybe… Steam?!
Realistically, probably not. It may just end up being Microsoft flapping alone in the wind here, as they are certainly the most desperate and in need for any angle to get them back into (and selling) the game(s). Still, it’s something, and certainly more than we had two months ago.
Vacation Over
I have survived another vacation.
As part of the packing for the trip, I brought the Switch 2, the Retroid Pocket 6, the RG35XXSP, and of course our phones. A full week away from my PC and typical setup would be a perfect use-case scenario for all these retro machines, right? And I would have been very happy to report how much use they had gotten given how much money was spent on their purchases.
…if I they had gotten much use.
In reality, what happened during the copious amount of downtime was… playing games on my phone. Specifically, a game called Slice & Dice, which I reviewed four years ago . It’s basically a dice-rolling roguelike where you have a selection of party members facing a variety of enemies, you have a choice between a few random items or class upgrade after each fight, and yeah, that’s basically it. I had “beaten” most everything a few years ago, but apparently the devs had released some more content since then, so I spent some considerable hours going through it again.
The other game I played the most of was actually Pokémon Pokopia on the Switch 2. This was purchased by my wife just prior to the trip, as she had a hankering for something similar to her Harvest Moon nostalgia of yore. To be clear, Pokopia is nothing like Harvest Moon, aside from the vibe. Anyway, I started up my own save – we have separate Switch profiles already – and played two longish sessions.
Pokopia a very weird game. You are actually a Ditto pokemon who becomes the image of the human you loved, in a sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland area devoid of both humans and pokemon, aside from a “professor”-looking one. Another pokemon appears in a near-death state (implied), you gain the ability to copy a sort of watering can-like ability to save them, and things start improving. As you heal the environment with the water, you can help start setting up specific pokemon habitats (four squares of tall grass, four squares of tall grass near a tree, etc) that will cause certain pokemon to spontaneously appear. The more pokemon, the more abilities you can copy, the more lively the world gets, the more building options open up, and so on and so forth.
The whole setup sorta reminded me of My Time at Portia, wherein there was certainly a cataclysmic event in the past that resulted in widespread death and destruction, but the event itself is not the focus. You can see the effects, but no one is especially dwelling on what was lost. That is a surprisingly ripe narrative juxtaposition, and I’m for it.
With Pokopia though, the childlike angle makes it particularly grim, IMO. The professor pokemon asks you to help restore the environment and destroyed human houses because, as evidenced by the returning pokemon, maybe the humans will come back too if only you restore their “habitat.” Maybe this will be played straight, with the humans emerging from underground bunkers or whatever once the entire wasteland is green once more or whatever. I could also imagine it not being directly resolved at all in a sort of Hachikō situation, because Japanese devs sometimes like crushing melancholy.
We shall see.
I did boot up the RP6 a few times, but only actually got into any games one time. I’ve talked about it before, but one of the problems with these retro machines is the fact that you have to be prepared to play them. In my case, that means headphones and the desire of solitude to put them on. For example, I got past the title screen of Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger on two occasions, and turned them off because what is the point if you aren’t listening to the music too? It’s like eating without a sense of smell. Slice & Dice can easily be played without sound, turned off at a moment’s notice and easily gotten back into. These other games were never designed for quick, silent sessions.
Anyway, the two games on the RP6 I gave an honest college try with was Thomas Was Alone and Donut County. The former was utterly unplayable via GameNative despite being “compatible,” but the latter was perfectly fine. I got through some levels, which involves moving a hole around the map to swallow increasingly-large items, had some laughs at the dialog, and then turned it off. If shit really does hit the fan, I’ll be glad I can game on something that draws 6 watts instead of 600, but until then? Maybe not the most prudent purchases I have ever done.
I’m banking on Little Man eventually wanting his own console in his own room eventually, and maybe they’ll get a second (or first) life then.
In-Game Ads
I was doomscrolling today and came across this Youtube Short from Legendary Drops concerning in-game advertising being more fully explored by EA, Microsoft, and Sony, all practically at once:
I actually watch quite a bit of Legendary Drops, as he has some rather humorous (and compelling) takedowns of AAA studios and the nonsense they are engaging with these days. Which, apparently, includes feeling the temperature on including advertising within the games they are selling. The Short itself does not contain links to specific articles, so I had to do some digging around for the links.
- Introducing EA Advertising
- Beginning Ad-supported Game Streaming Test & Learn (Xbox)
- Sony is scaling up its Playstation advertising ambitions
As the Sony article points out, this is not everyone’s first rodeo:
This isn’t the first time Sony has tried to build an ads business around its video games division. It’s made three prior runs at monetizing PlayStation’s audience through advertising rather than hardware or subscriptions. In 2008, it launched dynamic in-game advertising on PS3. That same year, Sony opened PlayStation Home, a virtual world that doubled as branded real estate. Then in 2022, Bloomberg reported Sony had spent 18 months quietly developing a system to insert ads directly into PlayStation games, aiming to launch a private marketplace by the end of that year. None of them became a durable, scaled ads business.
It is 2026 and we are probably all well past this being a particular shock. F2P mobile games have had advertising since forever, including more pernicious gameplay-affecting ones. Indeed, one of my most-played mobile games is Tavern Rumble, a roguelite deck-builder that will give you the equivalent of +2 Strength, healing, etc, if you watch some ads after each fight. That’s… not OK. I ended up buying the “ad remover” for the game for $10 or whatever years ago, but even now, it’s hard to say whether the boosts are just extra, or whether the game was specifically balanced around them. For example, having played Candy Crush, you could not possibly convince me that some of the RNG in certain levels are beatable without power-ups, whether accrued for free over time or purchased directly.
And don’t forget the weird shit too, like Monster Energy drinks in Death Stranding:
At the moment, it is not entirely clear the exact direction the enshittification is going. When looking at the EA page, they are talking about “dynamic, real-time placements, from stadium signage to custom in-game content.” Any sort of sports game would probably look uncanny without real-ish ads plastered about, considering that is what everyone sees IRL watching from home. Same with the hoods of racing cars, etc. With XBox, it sounds a lot more like a “free with ads” subscription tier rather than seeing a Microsoft Copilot banner in the Master Chief’s visor. With Sony… who even knows, to be honest. Sony has been losing so much money lately that it would not surprise me that they end up being the worst ad offenders eventually.
Steam sometimes gets touted as a bulwark of consumer protection… and it’s true, to a point. Steam does not run ads in the client, and specifically forbids games from having mobile-esque ads:
- Developers should not utilize paid advertising as a business model in their game, such as requiring players to watch or otherwise engage with advertising in order to play, or gating gameplay behind advertising. If your game’s business model relies on advertising on other platforms, you will need to remove those elements before shipping on Steam. Some options you could consider include switching to a single purchase “paid app,” or making your game free to play with optional upgrades sold via Microtransactions or Downloadable Content (DLC).
- Developers should not use advertising as a way to provide value to players, such as giving players a reward for watching or engaging with advertising in their game.
That same policy does allow “product placements,” which is largely reasonable. As jarring as seeing Monster Energy drinks in your videogame can be, it is difficult to draw a distinction between that and the fact that a very Norman Reedus is the one doing so. As long as you don’t have to drink a verification can, I guess it can slide. Christ, was that really 13 years ago?
In any case, as odious as advertising is generally and how annoying it is seeing it infiltrate yet another facet of our lives, I feel like it may end up working itself out. If a particular game is festooned with ads, and it breaks immersion, don’t buy that game. If there are ads in the storefront, well, yeah… stores often do. Just about the worse-case scenario might be forcing ads to display prior to playing a game, which sounds like what Microsoft is testing in the context of a “free streaming” offering. Which is a tradeoff you ostensively signed up for.
Ultimately though, the days for any kind of corporate shenanigans may be numbered. The entire business model around AAA gaming is on the verge of collapse, so I kinda doubt even the C-suite are going to gamble throwing ads into their next 6-year, $300+ million game and have that be the reason it failed. Sony can take their toys off Steam and go home, but hilariously, their ability to output said toys within their own console generation has the same upper limits as everyone else. Let them release a $1000+ PS6 with five exclusive games, a locked-down storefront, and sprinkle some intrusive ads for flavor and see what happens.
Switch to Switch 2
Longtime readers may recall that I was debating between the Switch vs Switch 2 last year, once Little Man came to a videogame awakening. I ended up purchasing a new Switch OLED bundle with Mario Kart 8 for $275 total last July. Plus, a kinda dumb amount of games… almost all of which got played! He’s not quite ready for Smash Bros yet. I am overall pleased with how that situation shook out.
Now, a year later and almost exactly to the day, I also bought (and since received) a Switch 2.
The Switch 2 bundle cost a total of $426.60, which is obviously much higher than the original Switch. Plus, you know, I still have the original Switch. What gives? Several kinda sorta related things.
- There is a pending $50 price hike for the console in September
- Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake releasing in 2026
- I already own Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom plus have Nintendo expansion pass subscription, meaning I could get upgraded graphics/fps for when we start playing that
- Super Mario Sunshine is coming to the GameCube emulator (requires expansion pass)
- Missed the most recent Costco eShop gift card sale, e.g. $500 credit for $400 spent
- Donkey Kong Bananza is closest to Mario Odyssey, so Little Man may enjoy that
- Switch 2 version of Minecraft releasing in October
That, no doubt, sounds like a lot of explanation concerning a topic that should warrant none.
“Who you trying to convince?” Yes, me, myself. I routinely agonize over $15 game purchases, and whether 67% off is worth it considering the all-time-low was 70% three months ago. I once bought a game from an overseas storefront and ended up getting my bank account frozen “out of caution,” all trying to save $3 versus just buying it on Steam. I was not in any way depending on that $3, it was just the principle of the thing. I mean, hell, it was a Steam code in the first place!
Whatever. It’s done. The Switch 2 is fully functional – the refurbishment tag apparently referred to the box having beat-up corners – and has replaced the original Switch in all ways. I could sell the original for… looks like $160 on eBay at the moment, but my assumption is that it will stick around. Partly as a backup device, partly as an inheritable device, and partly because my wife mentioned she may want to play stuff on it. Theoretically, I could do local co-op with some games, but I have not yet done the research for which games require two copies and which can be shared.
It is kind of funny/sad looking at the list of games in the Nintendo eShop and realizing how many I already own on Steam, often for much less. Although, now that I’m looking, maybe not. For example, We Love Katamari REROLL is like $7.50 on Switch and the IsThereAnyDeal lowest was $5.77 two years ago. Donut County is $3.24 versus $2.43. I even bought that last one in a bundle deal like two months ago. Huh. For some reason I thought that something like Hollow Knight: Silksong retailed for more on Switch, but apparently the MSRP is the same.
I still prefer gaming on the PC, and Steam allows for me leverage my Retroid Pocket 6 if I need to go mobile, but this is starting to make me think about some things. Not for now, but perhaps in the future.
Sign of the Times
A few weeks ago, the Ohio State Fair had a poster contest. Grand prize was $1,000. It was won by someone submitting the most banal, directly-copied AI slop imaginable:
You don’t need to take my word for it. The officials came out and posted the following:
When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process. However, we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI. We are committed to celebrating Ohio artists, with a number of other competitions that don’t permit AI, including the fine arts exhibition, creative arts competitions, mural contest, and plein air painting.
To be fair to the artist prompt engineer, there weren’t any rules against it. Which is honestly surprising, considering Colorado had this same exact issue back in 2022 during their State Fair art contest. Also, who in the Boomer fuck was judging this contest in the first place? You can use the original link to see 2nd-5th place, any of which I would argue are objectively better than what was selected.
Of course, I’m kind of assuming the others weren’t just AI themselves. Second place has me suspicious.
Anyway, add it to the pile.
What Would You Say You Do Around Here?
There is a sentiment that some “light” usages of AI are okay because it simply reduces the friction a bit on content creation. For example, Kelly writes:
But if AI can be helpful for things like blog production. I know, for example, that blog posts with an image are several times more likely to attract someone’s attention than one without an image. I lack time and artistic skill to create my own images, but I can craft a prompt and get a suitable illustration in seconds. This is hard to ignore, and I will continue to avail myself of the AI services that provide image generation from time to time.
On the one hand, I get it. If you perceive a gap and there is a tool available to bridge it, why not?
On the other, much larger, much heavier hand, what do you imagine is going to happen next? Not in a “cog in the agentic death-march” kind of way, but on a much more practical level. You generate an image for a blog post to attract more attention. Supposing that that advice still works here in 2026 – I have my doubts – you get the traffic at the expense of blogs that don’t. So, those other blogs start generating images too. Now… what? The competitive advantage is gone. Who gets the clicks?
“Blogging isn’t a competition though!” Then why do you care about having a generated image at all?
Not trying to single Kelly out, or really any of the specific AI enthusiasts still in my Feeds. You do you. It’s a transformative technology for coding and a few other industries, yada yada yada. I just happen to agree with the general sentiment of Anarchae:
If I asked a question on this site and got a response and went back and forth a bit, I had a pleasant interaction with a human being and feel good about the distro and its community.
If I later find out that person just copy pastes questions into an LLM and then copy pastes back in a response, or is a full on bot-run account, there is a feeling of betrayal. I thought I had a genuine human connection, but it wasn’t, it was just a computer program. Now that sours my opinion of the distro and I probably won’t bother coming back. I was given the equivilant of the Customer Service Chatbot, who would be happy about that?
No one with an internet connection is hurting for content. No doubt you could vibe code a blog tonight that automatically prompts ChatGPT to spit out a randomized topic-of-the-day post every 24 hours. Or six hours. Or 15-minutes. We aren’t here for that. We aren’t here for the AI image that is only vaguely related to the topic at hand and is more meant to be clickbait. We aren’t here for the grammatically perfect, literal textbook outlined prose with the phone emojis for some reason. Every single AI refinement makes you less distinguishable from every other (presumed) person also on the gear.
Be human. Have messy human thoughts with the wet meat between your ears. Who are we trying to impress? None of us are making any money on this and it ain’t because we got some syntax wrong.
Or don’t, I guess.
Digital Resell, 2026 Edition
The gaming news of this past week was Sony’s announcement that they are ceasing production of game discs starting in January 2028. In completely unrelated news, Sony is also removing access to ~500ish movies from customer libraries while offering zero refunds for otherwise permanently lost access to movies licenses purchased rented with real money. While the ascent and eventual domination of digital has been a long time coming, it is perhaps an especially ignoble end coming first from the same company that put out this (at the time) devasting advertisement.
There are a lot of different concerns surrounding the upcoming loss of physical media in the game sphere – Bhagpuss and others have shared a few – but I keep circling back to the fundamental, unresolved question of: do we have the right to resell things we purchased, specifically games?
Yes… but also no.
Everyone intuitively understands and accepts that a physical disc or cartridge can be resold. As soon as it becomes exclusively digital though, suddenly it is a wildly different thing… for no particularly good reason. We already have ubiquitous DRM, we already have storefronts capable of revoking access to games on an account level. What’s the hang-up? Other than unabashed corporate greed?
I made post in 2015 about this topic, which also referenced a 2012 legal outcome in the EU that stated software licenses could be resold. Considering that nothing seems to have come from that, suffice it to say there must have been some carve outs that game publishers just sailed their mega-yachts through.
My next follow-up was in 2019 where, spoilers, the issue remains unresolved. Although, at that time there was a new gaming storefront called Robot Cache that was set to revolutionize the market by allowing digital game licenses to be resold, with publishers taking a cut of the profits. I wonder where that ended up…
“Thank you sincerely for joining us on this journey,” reads the screenshot of an email purportedly from the Robot Cache Team. “While we gave it everything we had, we weren’t able to attract the user base and sales traction needed to keep the store running. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Robot Cache store.
“The store will officially close in 30 days. After that point, the platform will no longer be accessible, and users will no longer be able to play games purchased through Robot Cache, even if they’ve downloaded a full copy.” It’s the nightmare scenario of games with DRM. The email continues that the team can’t let people keep their games because the site’s “verification system” will go offline. Any “iron,” the site’s digital currency, will similarly be rendered kaput.
Oh. So the worst possible ending, eh?
I have been a PC gamer for decades now, for which a resell mechanism has not truly existed since the beginning. Why care now? Because we as consumers are losing out. I have specifically purchased almost all my Switch games as physical versions, because there is utility in being able to resell them on eBay or GameStop or whatever else. The only exceptions were Mario Kart 8 that “came with the system,” and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom which were purchased at a discount via Nintendo vouchers. For all the other games, since they cost the same either way, I essentially had a choice: convenience of not having to swap out cartridges, or being able to recapture 50% or more of the value of the original price. Option B was of greater utility to me, so that’s what I went with. Sony will be eliminating that option for everyone on their platform in 2028. That’s a loss, whether you used it or not.
I don’t expect much progress on the digital reselling front in the near future, especially under current regimes, but I do feel like the topic will become increasingly urgent. The industry has been coasting on the (occasionally court-imposed) good graces of Valve and Steam, but Gabe Newell is 63 years old. Already we sort of hand-wave away the inability to bequeath a Steam library upon death, but there’s a future in which Gabe retires/dies, Valve goes public, and all sorts of corporate tomfoolery occurs. Legally, what stops Valve from revoking access to games in your library arbitrarily? A Terms of Service… that can be amended at any time?
Sony already has us trained to accept that entire storefronts can close, such as the PSP and PSOne in 2021, and now the PS3 and Vita stores in 2027. If you previously purchased a game, you can still download it “for the foreseeable future,” but it kinda makes you think. I can still download and install Farcry 2 and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men via Steam, both of which show up as Last Played in 2011. Maybe that is a trivial expense on Steam servers, but we can imagine a scenario in which a public Valve invokes the same “adapt to consumer trends” language to essentially prune the storefront. Again, what stops them? Potentially negative PR?
I don’t imagine there would be much of a resell market for my copy of Farcry 2 or Kane & Lynch: Dead Men all these years later. And ironically, IsThereAnyDeal shows that people can buy Farcry 2 “new” for like $2.40 right now. But I feel like having some stronger sense of legal ownership even over the license is necessary to dissuade future shenanigans. Or, fine, go all the way the other direction and replace Buy/Purchase with Rent.
Axebox
There is every indication that Microsoft is set to fire a large swath of game developers and/or shut down entire studios in the next few days.
While Microsoft is weighing canceling Blade, it’s also exploring options to sell Arkane Studios. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Microsoft is trying to spin off Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, too. GamesBeat reported this week that Microsoft is actively looking for a buyer for Undead Labs, the developers behind State of Decay. If buyers are found for these studios, then they’ll avoid being closed, but sources stress these talks could take months in some cases.
If some of those studios sound vaguely familiar, it’s because they were showcased in the recent Xbox Games, er, Showcase. Like three weeks ago. Ninja Theory is the one developing Senua and Undead Labs has State of Decay 3, a game series that I have very much enjoyed in the past. If the studios don’t find a buyer soon though, they may be shuttered and the games canceled, no matter how close (or not) to release they were.
What has been interesting about this latest round of layoff news has been the general Reddit sentiment. A few years ago, there was an appropriate level of outrage when Tango Gameworks got axed right after releasing the award-winning Hi Fi Rush. With this latest teaser round of studio closures, the reactions are, at best, ¯\(ツ)/¯. Some are straight-up supportive.
…and more and more, I find myself falling into the latter camp.
To be clear, I find Microsoft generally abhorrent. I shill for Game Pass because I consider it a great value for consumers (for now), but everything else about Microsoft is bog-standard megacorp bullshit. Asking for your games division to have a 30% profit margin like the rest of your monopolies products is absurd. Buying studios and then shutting them down so that the IPs are forever entombed is tragic, let alone the reality of layoffs in this economy generally.
However. HOWEVER. Sometimes… there’s no baby in the bathwater, and you’re hanging on to dirty bathwater for no reason. Sometimes it’s been so fucking long since you’ve checked on the baby that he’s done grown up and moved out of the house. If Undead Labs gets dissolved and we lose State of Decay 3, I will be sad. Or would have been, if I hadn’t done some cursory Google searches:
A 2022 investigation by Kotaku reported on a sexist studio culture, which was abetted by Philip Holt, the new studio head who replaced Strain, and then-head of HR Anne Schlosser.[15] Schlosser was removed after a Microsoft HR investigation. The toxic work environment, which continued after Schlosser’s departure, led to a high employee turnover rate, especially among experienced staff. These issues, combined with a lack of design vision, contributed to extensive delays in the development of State of Decay 3.[15] Employees also blamed Microsoft for not living up to its goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion by not responding to reports of abuse in a timely manner.[15]
Back in April, I wrote Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons. This is the sort of thing I am talking about. Presumably not every studio has the same skeletons in their closets, but the point is that these companies are not releasing games faster because of incompetent (at best) leadership. It does not have to take 6+ years to develop a game. The original Mass Effect trilogy came out in 2007, 2010, and 2012. Can you imagine how long it would take for any other trilogy to come out these days?
Arguably, Microsoft should not have bought all these studios in the first place. Or maybe if they didn’t buy Activision Blizzard, they would have had the time to let the devs cook longer before layoffs. But it could also be true that many of these studios would/should have died on their own via natural selection. We’re used to being outraged by publishers closing studios, but I somehow doubt that Undead Labs could have gone 6+ years without another product to sell without folding on their own. Mayhap it was the Microsoft money that encouraged the foolishness and dulled the scrappy edge.
I dunno. The sympathy I have for game developers in general is at an all-time low. The live-service bubble is for sure popping, and the economics of AAA games in general is collapsing along with it. And it kind of has to, for everyone’s sake. The status quo is being made possible by only the most extreme psychological hacks, FOMO, battle passes, gacha mechanics, etc. Remember when these companies were incentivized by, you know, selling more copies of the game? The indie and AA developers remember because that is pretty much all they have access to. We should get back to that.
Soon enough, there may not be another choice.
Valheim “Exploration”
Oct 5
Posted by Azuriel
I’m going to come out and say it: Valheim’s “exploration” is shit.
It may come as somewhat of a shock, but I am not an Explorer. Per se. I enjoy survival crafting games, and one of the biggest decisions you make in them is where you want to build your base. As such, I will happily traverse the world in search for the perfect location, and am always reevaluating the merits of better ones. Coming across rare resources, especially ones that regenerate, tickles my fancy. Nary a waterfall escapes examination for secret caves. I do pause for sunsets.
At the same time, rearranging a room with four objects doesn’t generate an infinite amount of novelty.
Valheim will procedurally generate a world for you with appropriate biomes scattered about, and then randomly populate those biomes with progression-required resources/POIs (points of interest). It is not enough to find just any Swamp, you must find a Swamp with a Sunken Crypt, before getting access to enough Scrap Iron to build better gear. This particular aspect is annoying, but not backbreaking.
What quickly becomes backbreaking is the additional layer of RNG: locating the randomly-assigned boss-locator tablet, which only appears in certain randomly-distributed POIs a percentage of the time. It is not enough to find an abandoned stone tower in the Mountains, you must find enough to get enough dice rolls to have one spawn the tablet.
The variability is a problem, but not the biggest one. The problem is how you can be “done” with all the progression in a biome and yet still have to spend several real-life hours “exploring” for these POIs. Meanwhile, there is nothing new for you to encounter. Is the terrain different? Sure. But that’s it. Maybe you find a better location for reconstructing a Plains base or whatever, but are you really going to move everything right as you’re looking for the Plains boss so you can head to the next biome? Certain POIs will have treasure chests, but the contents of them are all standard resources. None of the hostile mobs you encounter will be any different than the ones you defeated hours ago with worse gear.
The initial foray in the unknown? Premium tier. Walking into a new biome for the first time is a terrifying experience. What should you be looking for? How deadly could a “Deathsquitto” really be (spoilers: very)? Progression feels good as you slowly upgrade your armor and weapons, making the dangers a little bit less so.
But then… there’s a gap. Sometimes a gulf, between you and even locating the boss you have prepared yourself to tackle. And Valheim nevertheless requires you to drudge around for… some reason. Ambiance? Hubris? Maybe they expect you to die and lose all your gear and then need to re-smelt all the ore and collect all the resources all over again somewhere else? It’s dumb.
I did not think it was possible to create an exploration system worse than Starfield, but the Valheim devs did it. Because at least in Starfield, it wasn’t required.
I’m currently in the Mistlands, and do you know how things have went thus far? The very first place I docked my boat had the POI that you need to raid for progression material. And inside that same POI was the tablet that showed me the boss location. Do you know what it didn’t have? Enough progression material to actually build the crafting tables to make the new weapons/armor/etc. Sounds like the reverse problem to what I had earlier, right? But this time I will be rewarded for my hunt for another POI with access to all kinds of new weapons and armor. Even if I have to go to a completely different Mistlands area, the carrot is still on the stick. In just about every other biome up to this point, the carrot was long gone, and it was just all stick. And that’s shit design, IMO.
I do (thus far) appreciate what the devs have been able to accomplish with Valheim given its spartan design. This does not feel like a game that only takes up 4.23 GB of space. Nevertheless, I do feel like they have hewn things a bit too much to the bone. If it goes against their design principles to have a sort of “pity timer” that will guarantee the boss tablet by the third POI or some way to spend a bunch of resources to divine the location yourself, it would be helpful to at least pepper some random useful shit across these biomes we slog through.
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Tags: Exploration, Game Design, RNG, Starfield, Valheim, What Am I Doing With My Life?