Silent Hill: Ascension provides our laughs for the week…
Blizzcon! Let’s see what got announced.
Wow a new Call of Duty! Is it worth the hype?
Fortnite turns back time in attempts to rekindle a little nostalgia scented chatter
Ascending the ranks in the ‘out of touch’ scale this week…
Silent Hill: Ascension, something I’ve written about here previously, launched on the 31st and it’s…. well, really not great. I first mentioned this a couple of issues back - it looked promising! A new form of interactive media experience, they looked to really be trying something fun and interesting; a live stream experience with an app that allowed viewers to solve puzzles and get involved in making choices that would affect the outcome of the storyline. At the end of the series airing there would be a finalised, unchangeable storyline chosen by the community that would be immortalised in Silent Hill lore forever.
Now. The reality
Episode One aired on the 31st.
The app has a battle pass.
I have to be absolutely honest here, when I first saw screenshots of the interactive app I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a mockup to mock the actual, less bad but still not great battlepass. But what we see here is the actual offering. There is a chat along the side of the screen that is spammed with insanity, the battle pass simply adds to that by giving the option to use special stickers and emotes in said chat, which is clunky and retro. You can even ‘BLAST’ messages which makes them appear on screen with a message while the video is playing in a really obtrusive way.
And actually, weirdly, I sort of like the retro vibe we’ve got going on here in the UI. It’s really really weird but it sort of makes sense?
As you watch, or if you buy the Battle Pass, you’ll earn ‘Influence Points’, so when you vote on a choice in game, you can spend these points to… well obviously, influence the decision more. There are even community based Quick Time Events that you can participate in to earn more IP (and fail! as a community!), and it looks like the aforementioned ‘puzzles’ and minigames are also all intended to provide ways to earn IP. The CEO of Genvid (creators of the experience) insist the Battle Pass is simply there for those people who don’t want to do puzzles to earn IP and that there is no ‘pay to win’ aspect to this. Which seems a little odd to me. What are you paying for? Chat interaction? I don’t believe this sort of experience should be pay to win by any means, but if you’re paying money to gain ‘Influence points’ and the CEO is on record saying you can’t actually influence anything individually that much, it seems like a very odd choice at a high price point, you can skip out on half of the offered content by not participating in the puzzles/minigames and buy your influence points that really don’t do that much influencing anyway.
There are even ‘cameo contests’ in the launcher that give you the opportunity to actually be in the show! Or, well, your avatar anyway. You can’t type ‘Hideo Kojima’ or ‘scam’ into the chat as it will be censored, but of course, intrepid chatters found a way around that immediately… because this is the internet and we’ve been doing this for over two decades.
The series is planned to be 16 parts and judging by the amount of memes we’ve had come out of this already, this could be ripe for more laughs.
Now I’ve done a fair few brand streams where the brand seem to entirely ignore absolutely any advice they’re given about the online gaming community and their quirks because they either think they know better or they simply can’t be bothered to look into the nuances of the problems. Moderation, is apparently, just something you can do online, and not something you absolutely 100% need to prioritise when offering a live chat environment. At least in the minds of many live show coordinators and producers who seem to spend zero time online in the gaming sphere every week. Or maybe they just like the chaos. Anyones guess, really.
Some outlets are stil reporting on this and calling it a ‘game’, which I think sets a certain amount of expectation that absolutely should not be set for this… experience. And it’s a shame! Because the format has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but the thing we often overlook while shaking our head in disbelief at how much a mark has been missed in these situations, is that if this was just an average and acceptable experience it probably wouldn’t be spoken about as much. The very ridiculous nature of this will be what keeps the posts coming on social media, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of this was deliberate simply to get the Silent Hill name trending and in the forefront of our minds a little longer.
Episode 2 should be out by the time this publishes so… I guess we’ll check in on this next week! What are your thoughts on the offering so far?
BLIZZCON!
This past weekend saw the biggest celebration of games-we-keep-playing-despite-having-deepset-grievances-with; Blizzcon! And this year the gamers aren’t completely upset, which is definitely impressive considering the absolute whiplash the release of Diablo 4 seemed to give.
Among the announcements were One brand new Hero for Overwatch, Mauga, a Tank type set to be released December 5th:
Two other new Heroes were also teased and i’m slightly in love with the one on the left, named ‘Venture’, due to launch sometime in 2024.
Additionally there will be a new map (based on an old map) and a new game mode, ‘Clash’ coming at some point next year also.
DIABLO 4 also saw some news, with a brand new expansion called VESSEL OF HATRED due late in 2024, whose name may have taken inspiration from the form the Diablo 4 subreddit took upon release of their seasonal content around a month after the principle game release. Badum-tssssh. It’s pretty far off from dropping so they’re certainly looking to hold our interest in the intervening time to drip feed news and information to keep the hopium rolling in. And while this text may have a derisory tone, just know I am also slave to the hype machine and I am extremely aware of that, so it’s really just myself I’m laughing at. VESSEL OF HATRED (I’m not sure why I insist on writing it in all Caps, it isn’t formatted that way officially, it just feels like it should be) will drop with a new class and brand new area. Will it be enough for forgiveness and forgetness? Time will tell.
World of Warcraft fans may have been the recipients of the hype-st news drop of the convention however; we may finally see some story payoff for a narrative that has been building for around 7 years now after the end of the ‘Legion’ Expac in 2016/17. The plans were revealed by none other than ex-Head Writer Chris Metzen, whose recent reinstatement at Blizzard under the title ‘Creative Advisor’ has widely been regarded as A Good Idea™. The 3-part mega expansion is set to add four new zones, a playable race for both Alliance and Horde and has been teased to FINALLY give us some answers and story about Sargeras’ giant-ass sword that has been firmly implanted into the butt of Azeroth since the end of Legion. I mean, it’s hard to ignore, and yet Blizzard have managed to do so somehow for years, spurning the production of many memes.
Not only that, but ‘Warbands’ were also announced - now if you’ve spent ANY time at all playing World of Warcraft on a couple of different characters (which is vital in my humble opinion, to experience the breadth of the game) you’ll know what an absolute pain in the ass it is to have to grind for reknown and other character-only currencies and collections on each and every character you level. It’s offputting and annoying and Warbands finally promise to resolve that, by unifying those systems to be shared across all your characters associated with your battle.net account. And that also means Transmogs, which is really the most important and celebrated part of this - you get to share transmogs! It’s a significant change that looks pretty promising to help ease the grind and let you enjoy the game a little more.
All of this news and hype gives me visions of my imminent crawl back to WoW.
If I could turn back time….
IF I COULD FINDDDD A WAY. I’d go back to pre-season 1 Fortnite and experience the absolute joy that came with wasting hours of my life on that unique little builder shooter, before everything changed. Before Dusty Depot became Dusty Divot. Before there was a Tilted Towers. Before swimming and chug jugs and Battle Passes. In fact, the concept of a Battle Pass at all was largely unheard of, Fortnite didn’t invent the concept but they did popularise it, creating a system that would be copied and reimagined in every other game release from that year on.
I digress. Fortnite was extremely fun before the age-entry barrier decreased with every passing month - I could keep up for a while, but eventually the task of simultaneously building and editing a monument while fighting off half of the lobby became too much for my slow reaction times, and I moved on to other, more geriatrically appropriate games. Fortnite was the insane smash hit that corporate games execs can only dream of (though in recent months we have seen mass layoffs from Epic due to the weird expectations that this growth should be both permanent and sustainable being unmet), and the game began to evolve rapidly, adding new locations, zones, items, lore, everything with each seasonal change. They did some things right, some changes were very welcome, and truly the way they managed to dominate the market is remarkable, but there were still a lot of people left yearning for the simpler times. So they’ve delivered - the ‘OG’ map has been brought things back to the way they were, which is markedly tame compared to what the game is like now. Many of the newer gadgets are still present which does alter the gameplay somewhat compared to the actual original experience. According to the stats, people have returned in droves to check it out, but I would be surprised if that lasts too long.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 932 released…
Ok it’s actually Modern Warfare 3 (remake), but with all of the remakes and remasters and continuations and reimaginings I’ve given up entirely keeping track. MW3 features a whopping 97GB campaign that takes around… four hours to complete. And most of that seems to be recycled offerings from Verdansk, the original Warzone map, rather than brand new content. IGN gave it a 4/10 rating, which is fairly damning, citing the cartoonishness of the main villian Makarov and underbaked story as being partly at fault for contributing towards what is overall just a boring campaign.
Call of Duty isn’t necessarily known for its campaigns, after all most people are just interested in the rinse and repeat of the multiplayer (myself included, I don’t want to think about how much time I put into the original MW2 and beyond but my GOD did I love just running around with the same damn loadout for hours on end), but some of the CoD campaigns have historically been quite alright, pretty good in fact.
IGN’s review of the boring campaign feeling like a watered down version of a bunch of stuff we’ve seen before really highlights something interesting that I’ve been noticing creep in more and more in my enjoyment of nearly all types of media. The internet lets us access just about every story imaginable, and just as a new third person melee game will invariably be compared to Dark Souls, all narratives will find a comparison point in existing media somewhere. And once you find enough comparison points, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll find a movie, book, game, poem, song, SOMETHING, that has already done that interesting concept but better.
Is that necessarily true? I think there’s a little psychology to it - we develop ‘Schemas’ as we go through life that sort of let us put things into little boxes inside our heads. They outline expectations for a thing - if we see a wool sweater, eventually we may expect it to feel the same way as every other similar looking sweater, and we will make further assumptions based on this as well. It’s kind of fascinating really, wondering how deep the rabbithole goes - how much of our experiences of the world is just what our brain has filled in. So, I wonder how much of storyline fatigue simply comes from us having experienced something similar enough that we fill in a few of the blanks and deem it to be lacking.
This is a half baked thought that perhaps you can finish in the comments.
I think that sums up a fair bit of the news from this week! Let me know if I missed anything major and I’ll see you next week!
One thing MW2 introduced was more open maps where you could choose a position better but it was still pretty strict. MW3 loosens the grip but doesn't give you the tools to play how you want. If they improved DMZ instead of copy paste the gameplay side would of been more bearable. The story just had no meat which isn't new for COD but to me it's just bones at this point. For me campaign is one of the highlights of COD but MW3 falls flat on all fronts Zombies is the only thing redeeming if even. There is no reality where selling this level of copy past is ok at a 70$ price point
If you're interested in that kind of interactive storytelling but without all the nonsense check out, if you haven't yet, Black Mirror's interactive episode: Bandersnatch