With the the upcoming Mass Effect remaster coming (March?), it brings back to mind an interesting stat that 92% of people played the Paragon line of game. I think it somewhat obvious, but if 92% of people do something, then it’s not really a choice. Or at best, it’s an un-interesting choice.

I think this is a general problem with RPGs, in that the “evil” path is actually more like “hard mode”. In many cases, the Paragon choice keeps all options on the table AND rewards you. Like taking out a group of bandits terrorizing a village. Side with the village and you get the bandit loot and more village quests. Side with the bandits, and you get the scraps of the village and nothing else from the bandits. It’s not so much bad design, as years of training.

Look at any list of best RPGs. Do any of them provide a viable evil path? The only one I can think of is New Vegas. Even Divinity 2’s “bad choices” have bad outcomes. Every time you take an evil decision, you reduce your rewards, or add some sort of difficulty marker to the game. Maybe townsfolk all attack on sight. Maybe you can only walk around during the night. Whatever it is, you’re making a trade from safety to unknowns.

Which, if reality is any comparison, is a fair view on the choice. Or rather, we hope it to be. (It would be great if bad choices came with costs to powerful people, huh?). Yet this only works in a world of absolutes, of binary cause and effect. The world is more complex than this, and only a few games accurately reflect they natural grey of reality. Stealing bread is bad. Stealing bread to feed a starving kid, not so bad. Stealing bread from a millionaire who’s hoarding bread in order to feed a starving kid, that’s good. The context matters.

Short tangent here, but this is what really gets under my skin when looking at WoW. It does a really poor job at building grey characters. In nearly 15 years, it has two. Illidan and Saurfang. There were other attempts, I can grant that. But they ended up as pure good or pure evil (what they did to Garrosh still irks me). At no point would anyone ever argue that the Alliance was the bad guys and the Horde the good guys. That ~75% of the player base is Horde is a different topic I can get into.

Back to main topic. The concept of good/bad choices is inherently flawed if the game reflects normal life. It works in Star Wars, because that world is entirely focused on the dichotomy of the world (at least until the Mandalorian came about). Lucas, in all his wisdom, posited that to achieve full power you have to commit to one side or the other. There’s very little grey, and in turn, that makes everyone the bad guy. How many times do we see the “good” Jedi make insanely poor decisions because of their rules?

Instead the games where we find the most attachment are the ones that live in the grey. Where hard choices are present, where it’s often the lesser of two evils. Outer Worlds has tons of these quests, where the choices are really not obvious at first glance. Energy stolen by rebels who don’t want to live under company oppression? Someone is gonna die, no matter what you do. Ghost of Tsushima starts with the obvious good/bad choices, but as you progress you realize that these choices get harder and harder to make. The sacrifices you have to make to combat an opponent with no morals.

Tyranny is a game which is great because it explores the complexity of implementing order after the bad guys win. With few exceptions, there are no lawful good choices to make, and a couple chaotic evil ones as well. Since there are no “good guys”, everything is pretty much the lesser of two evils. And the impacts of those decisions have long term consequences. Areas become hostile, entire quest lines are changed, and your final list of options to close the story are changed. There’s no obvious answer to any of them, as they are more ethical than power based. How do you see the world going? That’s way more important than saving the puppies.

I’d be remiss to not mention Red Dead Redemption 2. You’re a crook from the start, but focused more on survival than anything else. There are no decisions to be made here, as they are all scripted, but the story does an excellent job of showing the snowball effect of bad decisions and not accepting the consequences. That final bank shootout seems really black and white, but the context leading up to that situation is really the juicy bit.

As more games come along, our palettes are also expecting more nuanced and complex storytelling. Not to say that grade school storytelling doesn’t have value…. there’s plenty of room for that. It’s more than the potential for great storytelling is at an all-time high, and if a dev wants to put a feather in their cap on that thread then they have a much higher bar to reach. I for one, greatly appreciate it!

I had something else scheduled for today, but given yesterday’s insanity, that is pushed.

There’s a psychology term that is sometimes thrown about, a monkeysphere. This is the outer limit on the number of people with whom you can empathize as individuals. Outside that number, it’s not that you don’t care about them, it’s just really hard to get there.

Like if your 8yr old kid was making sweaters for a company, you would take issue. But if that kid is halfway around the world, then that sweater is a great bargain! It’s not like there’s a tag on that thing that says “hey, this is made by child labour”. People are just ignorant of something unless its in their backyard – it’s work to care.

When your monkeysphere is made up of similar people to yourself (e.g. an echo chamber) then those outside that sphere are hard to relate towards. Sometimes that builds resentment. There’s an infamous clip of two very rich people guessing the price of common grocery items. Where some people have trouble putting food on the table, others have trouble keeping track of their millions. There’s no way for someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to have any concept of this. Both of them are not self-made, both of them took hundreds of thousands of dollars from their parents to “build their dreams”. Same goes for someone in the rural parts of Georgia… they have next to nothing in common from someone in urban California.

I’m not excluded. I can’t relate to being a visibility minority because I’m not. As a white male, I’ve been given every opportunity to succeed, regardless of my low-income housing beginnings. I try to be conscious of that bias and work entirely on merit, but cripes there are days where it’s not easy.

Yesterday appears to be a day where one group disenfranchised from society were supported by the highest office in the US to march. The world got to watch the supposed beacon of democracy fail on its basic elements. I for one was not at all surprised by the events, it’s been pretty clear that this was a logical step in the process. And not the last one either. On the one hand, I’m happy it happened because this releases some pressure and forces people to look in the mirror. On the other, it’s an interesting quirk that had these people not been white, we may not have seen barriers opened by the police or selfies being taken. Again, another look in the mirror for the US.

The wife and I watched with a lot of interest. It appeared that some decorum had been found in the senate, with only 1 person with greater aspirations continuing to press a dead point (dead in the sense that its entirely outside of their power to manage, as was made clear). The house though, wow. That’s clearly a group that despises each other. The whole thing looks like an episode of Jerry Springer. That’s the leadership team.

I do get that some people are going to say “they don’t represent me”. As a group they may not, but the person you voted for does. That’s the whole point. Maybe it’s the lesser of two evils? I’m sure everyone has their own justification, but again that whole mirror thing.

As we continue to watch from the outside, the question is what’s next for the US? Or maybe, who’s next given that the best of us can’t make it work. Shitty start to the year, that’s for sure.

I really need to learn to make simple headlines… a whole lot easier to find them later!

2020 was a real crapshoot when it comes to predictions. The only one I consider that held true is that cross-play is the expectation for multiplayer games (Destiny is getting it in 2021). Now, I’m not saying Marvel Avengers tanked because it didn’t support cross-play, but I am saying that it’s a massive factor when the foundation of end-game activity is group-making.

For 2021, I do expect a lot of stuff from 2020 simply shifts to the right. I don’t see much happening until after March, otherwise

• High speed internet moves further towards commodity (like running water) than a luxury. This will mean more competition and more municipal offerings.
• Netflix will lose subscribers to alternative services, who don’t end up cancelling series on cliffhangers.
• The break-up of Ant/Alibaba will spread to other large IT companies, with Alphabet/Facebook the next global targets
• There will be no repeal of section 230, and no further progress of holding liability to internet falsehoods. The general lack of a spotlight on a mediocre boy-child peddling conspiracy theories will be put into a corner, where it will fester and grow.
  • Section 230 is the bit of US law that protects IT companies from being sued from what their posters put up. The only alternative to 230 is to have the Blizzard RealID (remember that?) on the majority of the internet. The companies would validate your real identity, and hold you liable for posting. What this means is that if THEY get sued, YOU get sued. And by proxy, would mean that only people that CAN get sued have access to the service. E.g. Twitter would no longer be global, and the user base would drop by ~90%. The only winners here are the lawyers.
• 2021 will be the death of the western movie going experience, which was already struggling before the pandemic. Does mean that global filmmaking will come into a larger being.
• Related, 2021 is the year of affordable 4K and smaller audio equipment, allowing for a cinema-like experience at home.
• This is not the year of 5G, because there’s no incentive for it to be deployed anymore. 5G’s major benefits are in the mesh network, allowing for high speed connections while travelling. Everyone’s home network is 5G already, just that your provider doesn’t give you the speed needed.
• Life will get back to normal in time for the new school year. The summer months will be a massive vaccine push to the masses, and in some places, you’re going to get “a card” to prove you’re vaccinated. Cue the outrage.
• The dumpster fire in the US does not go quietly into that good night. “Whatabout-ism” becomes a default policy.

Games are a different beast. Large dev shops are learning to work effectively remotely, though the serendipity aspects of development are going to be harder to figure out.

• Diablo Immortal will launch, make the news for a month or so, then go away.
• Blizzcon will focus on Overwatch 2, and give a target date for Diablo 4 (2022). WoW will have a Classic BC launch this summer. Pathfinder in retail will come out in the first major patch.
• Blizzard implements a “social score” system for Acti-Blizz games. It works similar to ranked matchmaking, so that similar scored people play together. Player PvP ranking would take precedence.
• The Fall of 2021 will be the major launch window for most big-budget games (God of War, Horizon, FarCry, Hogwarts)
• Sony will continue to dominate the first party exclusives domain for the foreseeable future. Bethesda won’t release anything until 2022 at the earliest.
• An updated Nintendo Switch will be announced in the spring, or at least a console that plays Switch games. Long shot – but Nintendo finds a way to make game streaming work for the masses.
• The PC equipment shortage continues until the summer, due primarily to supply chain disruptions from the pandemic. This will leave consoles as the available and importantly, cheaper alternative.
• Star Citizen won’t launch.
• BioWare gets a new lead after the launch of the Mass Effect remaster, then they are rebranded. Anthem NEXT is confirmed vapourware.
• Crystal Dyamics pulls a Hail Mary and launches a working expansion of content for Marvel Avengers that rewards group play.
• Everquest (1&2) each launch a new expansion, while LOTRO goes into permanent maintenance mode.
• Monster Hunter Rise will sell a ton and see a related spike of Switch sales. (MH:World is still in the top of Steam charts.)
• The New World will launch. And it will close in 2021, joining the other Amazon game studio projects.
• 2021 will continue the trend of indie/small devs creating some knockouts that make you question why AAA studios can’t do the same.
• Ubisoft will the first company to support a developers union, if only to protect itself from the chain of lawsuits of harassment from nearly every person in a leadership position.
• 2021 won’t be the year of VR, driven primarily from Occulus’ insistence of a Facebook account.

Relatively safe bets all around, with the union entry the real longshot. It’s going to be an interesting year.