Leah's gaming digest, October 31st.

It’s Halloween! Is there such a thing as a Halloween scrooge? That’s what I feel like I am, really. Admittedly I am coming around to enjoying Halloween, but the fervent obsession with decorating and theming your whole household and dedicating life to spooky season never really appealed to me. Maybe because I don’t have kids, maybe simply because Halloween culture was never quite as big in the UK as it is in America, maybe I’m just boring!

Either way, it’s always a good excuse to check out some horror games on some scale or another, with friends or without.

In todays issue:

1. Alan Wake 2 released this week! I’ll take a quick look at the reviews and a rundown of how people are recieving it so far.

2. Whatever happened to Skull and Bones…?

3. Payday 3 seems to be having a ‘worst nightmare’ scenario launch…

4. New FPS from Battlefield Devs drops, with some controversy…

5. More mass layoffs from some big names…

6. My Elgato Prompter arrived! My first impressions and a quick review based on what I’ve experienced so far.

Alan Wake 2 looks…

Well, quite phenomenal. I wish I had the balls to actually play it, but I know I’ll thoroughly enjoy watching someone else play it instead. From a technical perspective, the game seems to be praised for the thorough usage of current and next gen tech that really takes advantage of many of the newer settings in a way that doesn’t just feel gimmicky.

(System requirements for Alan wake 2)

The downside of this is of course that if you’re running on an older system, you’re likely left in the dust. It should be playable, but you will miss out on a lot of the charm and atmopshere they’ve managed to build with the resource heavy tools like Ray Tracing and Frame Generation (only available on 40-series Nvidia cards and up). The minimum recommendation is a 20-series or equivalent, which in fairness IS a 5 year old graphics card at this point, quite outdated by current standards considering the leaps Nvidia have been making with each generation. Even so, especially if you’re more of an old school gamer, to be priced out of a new game does sting when you think 5 years ago was only 2018…. but there is the option to play on PS5 or Xbox Series X or S if upgrading isn’t an option.

Aside from the actual technical playability, the word ‘Masterpiece’ has been thrown around by Gamespot for the gameplay and plot, IGN considers it a triumphant build on the first game, and across the board there has been no score lower than a 9/10. Which is damned impressive for such a highly regarded survival horror sequel.

Pirates Treasure buried so deep even the devs can’t seem to find it…

Honestly if you had absolutely no idea what Skull and Bones even was I’d totally forgive you. Could you believe this was a game set to rival Sea of Thieves? Yes - that’s how long it has been since this beleagured title was SUPPOSED to launch. Revealed in 2017 at E3, there was a fair amount of hype ahead of its supposed 2018 release, but the date came… and then went amid the waves of troubled development. Sea of Thieves of course released in 2018 as planned, and, well, it had a bit of a mixed reaction upon release because there just wasn’t enough content. It was truly a unique and very fun game, but if you’d played the beta, you’d played the full game, something that bothered me greatly. In the intervening FIVE years, Sea of Thieves has seen a litany of updates and additions that have bolstered a dedicated community, and it still continues to get new content and roadmaps.

Meanwhile… Skull and Bones, apparently at this point at a cost of $120 MILLION, was still sat in development hell following a number of re-imaginings (It originally began as a spin of Assassins Creed: Black Flag), with a ‘new vision’ emerging in 2020.

Eventually a new date of March 2023 was set, but once again, the game was pushed back. We did see a closed beta in August of this year, which left IGN quite impressed. And now it seems there is a new release date planned for around March 2024, so if you’ve been intrigued by the potential of a ship-to-ship combat game with heavy RPG systems that is truly unlike much on the market right now, well you might be in luck soon. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that.

Interestingly while doing some light research I noted that as of 2019, Ubisoft was partnering with Atlas Entertainment to adapt Skull and Bones into a television show. The game that is not yet released is already marked for adaptation for television, is that cleverly ambitious or absolutely absurd? You decide. I’m erring on the absurd for this one.

Payday 3 still isn’t paying off…

Are you sick of these cheesy bylines yet?

It hurts me to say this as Plaion took me to New York on a lovely, lively outing to promote the release of Payday 3, but the launch has been nothing short of an absolute disaster, competing strongly for the title of ‘Worst Launch of 2023’ and possibly even this decade.

For a game that shouldn’t really be all that tricky to do well - after all, it’s just a continuation of the previous game with a shiny coat of paint and a few additions, its difficult to understand how things have gone so damn wrong.

My first impression of the game was that it was fun, but it seemed to be lacking a lot of the sort of detail you might expect from a game in development since 2016, and leads me to honestly ask: where did all that development time go? One thing that stuck out to me was the sheer lack of interaction between, say, robbers and their potential hostages, the animations and options were just so basic in a world where we are blessed with the attention to detail Red Dead Redemption 2 offers, and I know the two can’t fairly be compared, but there was a hollowness, an unreality, to much of the world that only feels more obvious now than ever. I hoped more interaction options may open up as the skill trees were progressed, but I haven’t seen much to suggest there’s any significant improvement in the depth of the game really. I want to intimidate hostages into running into a certain direction to cause a distraction, I want to be able to put a bunch of them in a room or line them up in the front of the bank like some sort of horrifically bizarre tableau. I suppose my hope was that the world would be more sandbox-y, and I don’t think that’s entirely unfair.

And you know, sure, that’s okay, not every game will be an immersive, deep masterpiece. Quite frankly, not every game should be. Sometimes a simple, fun romp around a cool environment being sneaky little stealthers, or being loud dumbasses trying to pull off an ambitious heist is enough. But for that to land, the game needs to be fun, needs to have enough content to make that repetition enjoyable, and needs to actually work properly.

Unfortunately, Payday 3 fell short on every single one of those, but the one that stuck out like a poppy seed in a smile was the requirement for the game to actually work. Because Payday 3 just didn’t. Launching as an ‘always-online’ game is always an incredibly divisive and risky decision, many gamers simply don’t have the capabilities to enjoy an always online game properly, but that element might be somewhat forgotten about if you’re having a good time regardless, and unfortunately, the game LITERALLY did not work for… weeks. Server issues halted heists every single day, getting into a game was extremely difficult, and getting into the game was only the first hurdle; often your heist-mates didn’t load in with you - meaning you’d have to go back to the lobby and hope you were allowed to try matchmaking again (yes, you’d need to do this process even if you had a full team in the lobby). According to Kotaku the reasons for these issues were twofold - a technical issue on the games side caused the original problems but a third party service provider supposedly pushed a faulty update which compounded problems further.

Not only did connection issues make the online only game unplayable, but the games content was also just incredibly light on the ground… while the initial heist offerings were decent when you could actually play them, there just weren’t enough of them. On launch there are only 8 heists and realistically, two approaches to each, far from depth of games like Hitman where your options seem far more numerous. The heists vary a little bit between attempts - security rooms might change location like some Hogwarts-esque madhouse, there is an element of randomness to spawns and such that certainly doesn’t make every run a copy-paste of the last, but really, is that enough?

And if you aren’t blessed enough to have a group of friends to consistently play with to fill out your squad, you’re completely at the mercy of randoms to fill your team, randoms who often will have varying levels of playstyle preference and dare I say it, intelligence. (I’m allowed to say that because I have enough self awareness to know that at some point in time, I, and every single person reading this, will be ‘THAT guy’ to some random gamer in our squad as we misunderstand a mechanic or play impatiently or poorly. Some more often than others.) Oh, and there’s somehow no team chat.

Following these issues, a major patch was promised in October bringing with it over 200 improvements… but as players looked forward to the date of the patches deployment we were met with radio silence, and eventually told there were issues with the ‘update pipeline’ that they’d been forced to resolve first - if they didn’t resolve them, there was a high chance player progression would have been entirely wiped… which would have been just another kick in the teeth for all the paying players out there.

Payday 3 is marketed at around $40 for the base edition, so not a full price game and certainly short of the $70 playstation are charging as standard now, but there are still quality expectations when spending that much cash. Luckily it is available on Xbox Game Pass for PC and console, so you can check it out risk-free if you have a subscription.

Plaion have claimed there will be free content updates for the end of the year, once they’ve fixed their update pipeline and are able to actually patch the game. I guess we’ll see if they’ll be enough to salvage a disastrous launch and give the game legs for a few more years. Hopefully not another 8 of them until Payday 4 releases, though.

‘The Finals’ might satisfy an FPS itch, for a short time at least…

Right now on Steam you can request access to the latest playtest, aka basically an open beta because you’ll be accepted immediately, of ‘The Finals’, a brand new FPS coming soon from ex-DICE devs. DICE are mostly known for Battlefield, a franchise with enough ups and downs to rival Rollercoaster Tycoon at this point, and some of the same design principles have followed along with them, mainly the almost entirely destructible environment. The setting is flashy and game-show esque with the promise of something a little more hardcore than more recent FPS offerings - having just seen a trailer for it before playing it reminded me a little of Rainbow Six: Siege, just on a much bigger scale.

After writing this and playing for a while it came to my attention through this Forbes article that The Finals devs are unapologetically using only AI for the majority of their voice lines. Now I know for a lot of people, there will be a resounding chorus of ‘who the fuck cares?’, because for most people this is no big deal. This is surely a sign of progress, to use groundbreaking technology to put money and resources into areas of development some people feel are far more important than simply the voice lines.

Personally, I disagree. I feel voice acting with intent is important and necessary and I don’t want to see a discipline filled with talent and artistry die off because it’s cheaper to use software that is trained dubiously. It’s difficult to be ethical when you use words like ‘in perpetuity’ and ‘across the universe’ in contracts that are designed to make your job a ‘one and done’ effort. I don’t expect everyone to agree, for myself, Voice Acting has elevated games beyond what I expected them to be, has humanised performances and grounded experiences in a relatable way. For others, I’m sure the voicing is simply something that is noticed when it is done poorly, and is otherwise just a small part of the package. An easily replacable part, if the AI is believable enough. As a celebrant of technological progress it is difficult to marry the excitement of embracing new tech with the very real threat of losing skilled, creative professions being considered mere collateral damage.

Mass layoffs happening, AGAIN…

The words I hate saying. Following mass layoffs from Epic, Creative Assembly and more less than a month ago, Bungie have also announced layoffs in the past week across multiple teams.

For a year that has been filled with some incredible games with projected revenues through the roof, thousands of hard working employees being laid off across the industry feels hard to stomach. Bungie, creators of Halo (originally), Destiny and the upcoming Marathon games, were bought by Sony in late 2022 and the contracts included a 1.2 BILLION dollar staff retention fee, which seems to be for the upper management rather than the lowly devs. Or even for the longtime music composer, Michael Salvatori, whose iconic tracks can be heard all throughout Destiny 2, who has also seemingly been let go too. The layoffs extended from artists to devs, community managers, QA and even legal in what seems to be an extensive cull of talent across the board.

The question is, years down the line, will there be a dearth of senior art staff, senior developers, people who’ve been in their roles long enough to earn seniority to even make the gaming titles that are in demand? Gaming as an industry feels like a bubble about to pop in some ways, year after year more money pours in, but the stories of mass layoffs, money mismanagement, poor working environments and crunch just keep increasing with those record profits. I fear for the future in many ways, and this is one of them.

Hopefully those affected are able to find work elsewhere, but finding work doesn’t account for the stress and the upheaval of having to move your entire life to likely a brand new state to start a new job, in an industry where long term employment seems horrifically tenuous. It’s enough to potentially make you reconsider starting a career in gaming, sadly.

Elgato Prompter…

Despite apparently being on pre-order for December, mine surprisingly arrived a couple of days after I bought it. I managed to get it set up just in time for a show I was recording and I’m quite impressed so far! I have only a couple of minor gripes (the monitor itself is bulky so the prompter has to be mounted higher than I would usually like my camera - not a big deal but certainly a consideration for a tight space) but so far I’m quite impressed. I haven’t done a deep dive into the software yet but the options seem prety great at a glance, once I’d figured out my lens was too big for the standard mount I used the other mount they provide and managed to get it all set up just fine. The monitor is very clear and the whole system was basically plug and play.

The mounting system I bought for it is okay, but the mounting arm is too tall for my preferred setup (I’m quite short and like my monitor to be around eye level which complicates things a little), but I’m sure I’ll find some other uses for it.

So far so good!

That’s it from me this week. Happy Halloween and I’ll see you next week!