Chrono Cross

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My feeds of late are chocked full of speculation that SquareEnix is working on a remake of Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is an absolutely astounding gaming achievement, one of those markers where you can see games before, and games after. When Chrono Cross came out, it had some massive shoes to fill, and didn’t really hit it all the way out of the park. It is still highly regarded, no question!

First, the art style was a whole lot different, what with it being on Playstation. The relatively seamless battles of CT, where replaced with the more FF variant of an overworld, and a battle view. There was a whole lot of RNG here, compared to CT.

Not bad for 1999

Second, the battles themselves had a somewhat complicated mechanic of chaining elemental effects. So complicated in fact, that the true ending requires you to get 7 elemental attacks in order – including the enemy attacks. The leveling an skill system also added some complexity. I loved the strategic elements, way more than in CT.

Third, the story was no longer about time travelling but travel across 2 dimensions. You still had actions in one area that impacted another, but they were harder to detect and understand. There are 2 story quirks along the path as well that can be really hard to follow when they immediately show up. You really need to play the game twice to get the full picture – not something everyone is willing to do.

Fourth, there are 45 playable characters. That’s insane. And it will take at least 3 playthroughs to get them all. Each has a specific nuance to the story and will impact a future playthrough. It’s just wild when I write this out, that I actually collected all of those multiple times.

Fifth, there are 12 endings in Chrono Cross. 12! Only 2 you can get on the first playthrough. That feels like a giant hurdle.

I have tried to play Chrono Cross over the years; I still have the disks. Unfortunately, the scaling is wonky between the game and the menu, as the latter appears hard-coded. Which is honestly a shame, since the game really is quite good. Even in the emulation scene, CC is notoriously hard to configure.

The last bit here is if this is a remaster or a remake. From a resource perspective, I don’t see how they would have a team to remake the game, in secret, while also working on FF7. Nor that the sales would ever justify that investment, unless it was a pitch to get a new entry in the series (like with Mass Effect). Remaster seems the more reasonable approach, where the interface has a simple update, and we get the overlay boosts (faster combat/travel/etc…)

It’s no secret that SquareEnix is looking to recoup some money after recent financial hurdles. Pixel remasters of 1-6 abound. FF12 Zodiac Age made mint. Given the recent re-release of FF9, it’s certainly feasible to remaster Chrono Cross for today’s PC / Switch crowd. I’d certainly give it a go.

When the Bottom Falls Out

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All civilizations are predicated on a disposable workforce. The measure of how disposable has changed, but it takes only a minor look across the globe to see how well that has worked out. Your Nike shoes aren’t made by adults with retirement plans…

The way most of this works is that a pyramid of financial power has things go forwards. People at the top do next to nothing of use in the day to day work, and yet share a massive amount of the financial rewards. The people at the bottom are what makes the world go round. Lose the board of a company, things still roll for quite a while. Lose the people running the store, then there’s no money coming in at all.

The workforce has undergone a massive shift due to the pandemic, with dozens of causes, a few of which below.

  • The largest one is simply death. 5.3m people have died. Not all of them are working age granted, but it’s still a massive global impact.
  • Retirement. When sh!t goes sideways, people take a sober look around them. A lot of people simply decided to nope their way out and move on out of the market. The age curve has a massive amount of baby boomers all leaving the market within a very small window. The lack of training/information sharing also means the people retiring are creating gaps in the ability for a business to conduct business.
  • Birth rates. The replacement rate is 2.1 In 1990, the global rate was 3.2, primarily driven through massive medical breakthroughs in 3rd world countries (lower child death rates). Today, it’s 2.3 globally. In the US it is currently 1.64.
  • Immigration reforms. This one is touchier… but if there are less country-born people to replace the workforce, those people need to come from somewhere. There are very few people in Canada/US that are willing to pick fruit in an orchard for 10 hours a day for $50. If these jobs are not filled, then food rots and doesn’t get to the supermarket/table. Global travel restrictions and reforms have certainly dropped overall immigration rates.
  • Stimulus packages have dramatically favoured the already financially stable, especially in the US. Even in Canada, the stimulus package was substantially higher than minimum wage and allowed people the time to assess their state.
  • Abusive practices are highlighted. The restaurant industry is a big one, where people are paid minimum (or less), have shifting hours, often work evenings/weekends, and have to put up with Karens on a daily basis. Many people have taken the opportunity during the closure to gain a new skill or new job, and found a better life balance. In particular replacing that other group that finally retired. I would be remiss not to point out r/antiwork
  • Employer/Employee relationships are transactional. Corporations have made it clear that money matters more than people, and the current generation of workers has very little attachment to the company they work for. Maybe the people, or the tasks, but not the company.
  • Wages vs inflation are not reflective of wage vs cost of living.
  • Remote work allows people to perform many types of tasks from anywhere. Particularly in locations where the cost of living is much lower than an urban setting. This increases the number of jobs available to an individual, and therefore choice.

The ‘bottom’ of the workforce therefore has less workers available to do the jobs, and the businesses now need to compete with the market. If Burger King offered $100,000 to flip burger, they wouldn’t have a staffing issue. Combine that with less company loyalty, people aren’t exactly willing to take any amount of stress when they can easily find somewhere else for either better hours or more money, or even both.

Seems like the disposable workforce has been disposed of. Fancy that.

10 Year Project

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In 2011 I underwent a rather significant career change – from a medium sized organization to one with a very large scope of work. I was somewhat bored at the time, having completed pretty much all I wanted to at the time, and was hunting for an interesting project. I had a couple names, called around, and ended up taking a very interesting project that allowed me to work remotely for 6 months. I still recall sitting in my car, along a remote highway, just being happy to have 1 bar on my tethered cell phone.

The success on that activity opened some doors to an even larger project, one that was both transformational and made more than enough turns in the national media. I went very deep into that project, taking some gambles that both burned me and turned out well. I suffered a burnout in that period, and learned where that proverbial line is. I spent nearly 6 years on that project, in a direct fashion, before making a pitch for a tangent project.

I tend to get antsy when things are operational, I need to have very hard challenges and love to build teams to get through it. This new project was wilder than the first one, a group had tried for 2 years prior on a technical issue and wasn’t able to get over the hump. My team was able to solve that in a few weeks after having scoured the globe for options. It’s hard to describe the feeling of launching a global-first service, and having done so twice by this point, it’s a rush is like a drug.

I remained a consult on the national project during this time, and was moved around the organization to take on similar ‘impossible’ tasks. I butted heads more than once, but with some people, process, and tool changes, was able to find some success on those challenges. At various points I was asked to come back to the project core, but for a pile of reasons I wanted to do something else. Eventually, I had reached a point where that particular project had to close out, a new one established to replace it, and then this whole pandemic hit us hard.

I guess the tangent here is that our organization supported virtual teams (I’ve clearly supported it for years), while also requiring that management be physically on site. The larger support group also required on site work, typically due to the ‘grey hair effect’, where the older generation didn’t see how it could work otherwise. When the pandemic hit, the organization needed to rapidly pivot to support a fully remote workforce, and that caused a bunch of fires.

Sure enough, I eventually land back into the main project fire to both close out and start something new. And now we’re in the final phases of the original close out – taking up the month of December. I am happy that we are moving to something more modern and sustainable… there are issues of course, the grass is never greener, but it’s where we need to be. Yet I am also finding it bittersweet to close out such a large chapter of my life. I’ve made most of my career off the shoulders of that particular project, met a ton of great people, and delivered what felt like miracles.

It’s making for a very interesting month, at least in the mental space. I opened a major chapter 10 years ago, and this is where the next one is going to begin. Looking back as to where I started, I never would have guessed I’d end up here. What a run.

Sales-a-palooza

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There are countries where by law they cannot mark an item on sale, unless said item was actually sold at the original price for a set period of time. The concept of MSRP (suggested price) is irrelevant. If the sale price lists 20% off, then the product had to have sold at that price prior.

We’re in the middle of Black Friday, which comes with “sales” everywhere. In the dark ages (pre-interwebs), you really weren’t able to tell if it actually was a sale or not. Today, sites like camelcamelcamel give easy reference to historical price point. So that 4K streaming stick at 50% off… well that’s the actual regular price. For most physical assets, you’re actually better off buying at a different time of year – perhaps of benefit if you’re trying to close off some holiday shopping. It’s a bit like COSTCO… if you need a lot of stuff now at a good price, great option. If you are looking for better price points, then a regular grocery store sale is a much better deal.

Virtual assets aren’t a whole lot different. Nearly all stores allow you to build wishlists, and they will let you know when there’s a sale on that item. Cyberpunk2077 is on sale, but it’s also on sale every month. Disco Elysium as well – $2 cheaper than 2 weeks ago. Epic Games, Steam, GMG, GOG are all having big sales, and my library of unplayed games is feeling a bit “meh”. If history repeats, the boxing day sales, in 1 month, will be an even lower set of prices.

Tangent – I still remember the joy of being a kid and unwrapping a game for my birthday or Christmas. I will forever remember unwrapping Hero’s Quest (Quest for Glory 1) at my grandparents. Today, I can still by a virtual game as a gift and delay delivery… well on some platforms at least.

Look at this awesome box art!

The slight exception to all this is the Nintendo e-shop. There are very rarely any 1st party sales… in fact most games are still selling for brand new prices. Breath of the Wild launched in March 2017 and still sells for full price. It doesn’t help that the e-shop itself was designed by drunk monkeys in 2011, and has the least useful interface since AOL. You still can’t buy a gift for anyone on the store. In a fun time travelling twist, your best bet for a Switch game is to rummage through a sales bin, or a used games rack. If you want to buy for yourself, there are “sales” in the concept that BotW is on sale for more than the base price of Cyberpunk2077.

If you’re looking to get a bunch of stuff in a short time window, Black Friday/Cyber Monday may scratch that itch. If you’re not bound by time, you’re better off just creating a watchlist and checking other sales. And obviously, if you don’t need it, the best sales price is when you don’t actually buy it.

Tim Hortons

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Tim Hortons is an iconic Canadian establishment. A village turns into a town when it gets a Tim Hortons (and then a city when it gets a Canadian Tire). It’s been around since the 60s, and currently operates in 14 countries. Roll up the Rim was a matter of parliamentary debate in terms of odds of wining (it actually changed some of our laws).

From ’67 until ’90 it remained a rather small scale operation – Canada wide for sure, but really focused on coffee & donuts. In the mid-90s it merged with Wendy’s, which main benefit was figuring out how to get hot meals into the pipeline. It was not viewed as a positive by the Canadian public. Early ’00s, Timmy’s overtook McDonalds as the fast food location of choice in Canada, split off from Wendy’s and owned 76% of baked goods and 63% of the coffee market. That’s damn big.

In 2009 Cold Stone Creamery (ice cream) was put into 50 stores. That shut down in 2014. The coffee chain continued to grow, and in 2014 was merged with Burger King, or more accurately an international conglomerate of faceless capitalists. By 2018, its reputation had fallen to 67th in terms of Canada’s most reputable companies.

Now you’re asking, what the heck does this have to do with anything? Well, it’s related to yesterday’s post about nostalgia and the feeling of friendship with a company.

Timmy’s grew on a very simple concept. Decent coffee and baked goods, served quickly, at an affordable price, and early in the morning to boot. There were certainly donut shops prior to this, as well as diners, but the sheer brand appeal of a consistent experience was the seller. I mean, that’s why brands exist in the first place, right? There aren’t too many non-franchised donut shops around, right?

The fast-food boom of the 90s was not lost on them, and the partnership with Wendy’s allowed them to integrate processes to quickly get food to customers. When I say quickly, I don’t mean the 5 minute wait at a burger joint. I mean 90sec and you are served and out. This mattered most at the drive through, where people were used to ordering, showing up at the window with all the items prepared, and simply paying. The time it took to process payment was the time it took to get food prepared for the next person. The logistics in this are impressive… but for another topic.

This worked for a very long time, as the choices made on what food items to serve fit within the service standards – at least for a while. The ice cream integration is a really good example of poor planning. DQ gives you ice cream cones in 20 seconds, soft-serve. SCC uses a mixing palette to get you ice cream, a process that takes 2-3 minutes per order. While the novelty was interesting at the start, it eventually caused massive queues in the stores that prevented the “coffee and donuts” folks from getting what they wanted. It also cost a pile to keep things cold and clean (it’s much more space than keeping things warm).

This experimental phase of adding and removing complex menu items kept going. A sandwich seems like an easy thing to manage, but when you have options and substitutes, things get complicated. The workers are doing an amazing job, given the area to work in, but it’s nearly as much effort to make a Timmys sandwich as a Subway version. At low demand, this is manageable. When someone orders 4 different sandwiches in one go… things buckle.

Further, the need to increase franchises means that the quality of ingredients has to suffer. It’s a matter of scaling… there is only so much AAA product available on the market after all. If you mix with AA or A level products, it’s still comestible but will costs WAY less. Price points are important in quick serve food joints, so those businesses need to work on volume with smaller margins to make a profit. Starbucks can sell a $9 coffee, and 4x slower speed of Tim Hortons $2 version.

The value of Tim Hortons was based on food quality, speed of delivery, and price point. As the menu and franchises expanded, the quality of the food suffered. As more complex menus abound, the speed of delivery suffered. As other companies started to offer alternative options for coffee, the price point itself became a debate. As a result, the opinion today of Tim Hortons a lot lower than it once was, and sales are down. They still do great work in the community (TimBits hockey is a sort of ritual passage), but as a company, the type of loyalty they used to command has long since moved on. There are no boycotts here… simply that people have seen alternative options that meet their needs and shopped elsewhere.

Which begs the question, would Tim Hortons have taken a different path if they opted not to enter the food market? Time travel is the only way to answer that one.

What does merit discussion is how this particular thought process, of growth for the bottom line impacted the client’s perspective of the company. They have moved from the conceptual mom and pop family friendly location to a cleaner corporate image. That has distanced people’s attachment to the company, and once trust is lost, it’s incredibly hard to regain. That particular nuance is something that we are clearly seeing in the AAA game space… Will Tim’s take a different approach here, with a return to a more customer focused experience, or stay with the corporate objectives? Will we see that in the video game industry?

Nostalgia Bias

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rant-ish post here…

I was at the US/Canada women’s hockey game last night, quite a good show. It was at full capacity and about 90% women. Normally when I got to any sporting event, the lineup for the men is extremely long – this time I was the only person in the washroom. Felt odd.

The rink we were in was the OHL (top junior level in Canada) and I went to quite a few games as a child with my grandfather. I’ve also played in the rink quite a bit. I remember it being bigger, with a specific set of sounds and smells. I’m not saying that my memory is accurate, simply that it was an odd feeling of broken deja vu. I expected a certain experience and got something different – still good, just different.

We tend to use nostalgia as a safety blanket of sorts, to be wrapped in the familiar. Folks trying to make money certainly do capitalize on this – the mini-NES, pretty much every movie remake, heck Stranger Things is pulled right out of the glamorized childhood. Which is all fine and dandy when you only look at the good parts. You may listen to a playlist of the “best songs of the 70s” but that is ignoring every bad song that was also released. We look at the gold standard and just cut and paste it again.

Video games are there too, what with progression servers on EQ, or emulated UO realms. They purport to be clones of the time, but the reality is that these are nigh unplayable today if they took their original ruleset. WoW Classic had to rejig a pile of rules to fit modern game expectations. The entire FF series has been relaunched more times than Skyrim at this point… and all sorts of quality issues abound.

But nostalgia relates to more than the game itself, but the idea of a relationship with the developer. There was a time, believe it or not, where you could just talk to the developers of a game! Or that they wanted to talk to you. Lord British’ infamous speech / firewall death is a great example of that perception of “one of us”, or even Brad McQuaid’s approach to community development. The Blizzard mantra of “it’s done when it’s done” actually meant something. There was an agreement between the players that the devs put something out, and we’d just assume it was good.

Then we got horse armor. I’ll pick on this particular event, because it best exemplifies the act of a developer moving away from being gamers and into the mechanics of game development. When development matured from a passion to a business.

From that point forward, we’ve had the DLC revolution, the MTX/F2P craziness, and the pre-order shenanigans to get the most amount of money out of gamer pockets as possible. But why? How can indie studios be “successful” in today’s age, where the AAA studios can’t seem to launch anything without it looking like Anthem? The problem is us.

We keep rewarding the behaviour. Gamers continue to pre-order. They continue to support companies that have absolutely horrendous practices, holding out hope that they will change. Why would they? They only want your money, and once they have it, then don’t really care much past that point. “Oh, next time they will actually do what’s right.” Please, let me know where this actually occurs. Let me know when “positive messages” to a cancerous tumour had an actual effect, or that “thoughts and prayers” actually did something.

There’s a false equivalency that says gamers supporting bad company practices are as guilty as the companies themselves. That’s certainly not true, just like the getaway driver for bank robber didn’t actually commit the crime. Are gamers an accessory if they have knowledge and still make the decision? Yes, that’s rather clear as well. If a company made the absolute best cookies in the world, but you knew that they needed to use kittens to make the machines work, a lot of people would still buy them. If they used children instead?

Yes, it sucks that the things you enjoy are often made by people with no actual morals or ethics. Yes it sucks that the things you used to love are now controlled by capitalists who will do anything to make a dollar. But none of these things are actually required to live. This isn’t a choice between heating a home and putting food on the plate.

But what about the employees? Won’t they lose their jobs? Do you think any doctor goes “well, it would be a shame to amputate this leg, the toenails are painted so pretty, let’s just let that cancer be ok?” Should you give time to see if there’s a treatment that can be applied? For sure, and it’s up to gamers to determine when that clock is due. People take chemo before giving up after all, they fight until the last edge. But there’s a point where chemo/treatment stops working and people simple have to accept their fate. And good golly does it suck to lose someone to an indiscriminate disease, through no fault of their own. And it sucks to have to give up a part of our past, the joy that a game can bring.

Nostalgia only gets you so far. At some point, reality hits and decisions need to be made. You want things to change, be that agent of change. “Thoughts and prayers” don’t count.

Wheel of Time – Series

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Where LotR was the fantasy foundation for, well, pretty much everything, Wheel of Time (WoT) can be seen as the major precursor to the sprawling epics of today (think what Game of Thrones should have been). I read the series multiple times, re-reading every book when a new one came out – fair to say it’s been formative in my understanding of fantasy literature.

WoT spans 13 (!!) novels, and close to 12,000 pages in paperback. It took 23 years to get it all out, and the main author (Robert Jordan) passed away before the final 3 novels could go out. Others have tried to emulate this structure (Sword of Truth is next up, which is a long post itself) with varying levels of success. The logistical nightmare of building something this large, with this many meaningful characters is astonishing. And to actually be able to finish the storyline with some level of quality is astounding. The most meaningful part of this series is the approach to magic use in fantasy settings – a setting of its time. Both men and women have access to magic, though the men have to pass through a taint in order to access that power – eventually rendering them mad. While I am certain there are plenty of ‘woke’ people who will see this as a bad setting, actually reading the books demonstrates a continuous level of grey at all levels. From that initial separation and frankly, stereotype, the world needs to find some balance. Rarely does it work out.

It’s certainly a filmable series, but the sheer size would make this closer to 600 episodes without some amazing writing and editing. Amazon has taken that bet. Amazon released the first 3 episodes of 8 for season 1 last week. New episodes every week until Christmas.

Something was there before…

First 3 Episodes

I don’t think it’s possible to spoil a 20 year old story, but I guess there are people who don’t know King Kong loses in the end, or that the Titanic sinks.

The focus for these is really exposition, setting the stage for what comes. You meet the main characters of import – Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Nynaeve, Moiraine, and Lan. There are quite a few others along the way, and generally if they have more than a few lines of dialogue, they will be important later on. You get a quick overview of what happened an age ago, see Two Rivers, the trolloc battle, Shadar Logoth and the tinkers.

The army of shadow is well done, with the faceless in particular quite ominous. Think of the orcish army from LotR, but on serious evil steroids. The character learn quickly enough that they have been quite sheltered and that life outside their town is much more complicated. The major factions are put into play in some fashion, and the episodes generally follows the flow of the first novel.

There are no sex changes here, which makes sense given that this concept is sort of fundamental to the story capacity. They are multi-cultural, which works out just fine in the short term. It will be interesting to see how the Seachan are approached in future seasons… but that’s a while to go still. The actors do a serviceable job, with rather apt representations of their novel versions. Rand and Mat are easy enough to run with… Perrin is going to be interesting to see develop. In the novels, he has continual self-doubt that defines his character for a very long time. I’m quite curious to see how the actual Forsaken are cast and played through – they tend to be written as exaggerations of character flaws, with centuries of experience to plan ahead.

Now, is it a great series, with amazing production values and tight writing? It is not. It lacks the discovery element of modern writing style (think the wonder of Harry Potter), a martial approach to pretty much everything (like GoT at the start), and the need to set up dozens of threads for future tugs. How many series are able to knock it out of the park in the first season?

Is it worth watching? I would certainly recommend it, and for two reasons. First, so that you can experience the foundation for modern fantasy stories. You may think it’s a trope now, but it probably became one because of this series of novels. Second, because we could all use more series in this genre where the characters and plot are aligned. For every Expanse or Handmaid’s Tale, we get a Red Notice, or Warrior Nun.

I’ll have a fulsome review once all 8 episodes are out.

Busy Busy

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Blogging is a type of therapy for me. It organizes my ideas and provides some much needed clarity. When I don’t blog, things start getting mixed in my head, and I feel unbalanced. I haven’t had a post up in quite a few days, and I’m really feeling it.

Work

I’m at the tail end of a multi-year project, and we’ve had enough success that we’ve been able to shave off a few weeks from the schedule. Perhaps best framed like “we’ve removed all the contingency”. This weekend has an absolute massive milestone that’s been in the works for nearly 10 years, and then some weeks of soak to make sure everything lines up. There’s high confidence but still some significant anxiety that it goes through.

It’s been an absolutely chaotic run since the pandemic hit, and this will be a major capstone to that period. There are high odds that my body just crumbles once this crosses the finish line as the stress won’t be there to keep it together. Fingers crossed I’m able to deflect that enough prior.

Coaching

Had an out of town tourney with both kids, and that meant 8 hockey games in 2 days – coaching one of them too. I had a blast, as the groups are really quite fun to be with and the girls really came together for some team bonding. Doesn’t stop the schedule though with regular hockey still taking up 4-6 time slots a week, and some rather significant administrative challenges to boot. I’m also mentoring some new coaches in this process, and making some efforts to build a package for new coaches in the future. A sort of “pay it forward” mindset.

I have been more than fortunate to have an amazing support team through my development – not everyone is in that situation. It takes an army of volunteers to make anything like this look easy, so the more folks we can get involved, the better for everyone.

Family

The “return to normal” for school and hockey has been great for my kids’ metal health. A year to me is like most others. A year to them is a lifetime. We’ve gone to some great lengths to try and replicate the face-to-face experience while doing things remotely… but nothing replaces kids playing with kids. Wife’s mental health is not to be ignore either – she’s a major social butterfly and the outlets now are a HUGE positive.

If anything the pandemic has allowed us to sort of reset on what’s important. There’s less fluff, and more creativity. Less filling time and more filling experience. Hope others have had a similar way.

Games

Pretty much only FF14 for the past while. I’ve got every battle class up to at least 15 now (allowing for easier leveling in PotD). WHM/GNB are at 80, DNC is in the mid-60s. All the harvesters are at 80. Haven’t bothered with any crafters as I expect that Endwalker is going to have some rather major ripple effects on that space.

I did learn to do maps the other weekend. What a surreal experience that’s more in line with an ARPG like Path of Exile or D3. As with many FF14 things, the in-game explanation isn’t super clear. And yet, I am continually amazed at how this game continues to find ways to make you spend time in a group without this massive time pressure to get stuff done.

I also have enough tokens (100) to get that jacket from the Moogle event. I don’t think I would have been able to if not for the 2 week delay.

I will say that this is one of the first expansions I’ll be going through where I have little interest in just plowing through to the end-game. I have months of not years of content that I can get through before the Endwalker stuff is pressing. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly looking forward for the journey, but compared to most MMO’s, I am not so much chasing the destination of hitting level 80.

There’s not much else on the gaming radar otherwise. The Steam winter sale will come along shortly, I’ll likely clear up my wishlist then. And there are certainly enough dumpster fires in the AAA space to fill up blogs-a-plenty in time. I’m curious about Horizon Forbidden West, but not like “let’s buy a PS5” level of curious. Monster Hunter Rise is already on my Switch (you should get it on PC if you don’t have a Switch). Elden Ring means nothing to me. Maybe give Outriders another go, as it announced a DLC coming out. Dyson Sphere Program will get another run through after the holidays.

Misc

I did pick up my first Gundam a few weeks ago. It was about 20 hours to put together, with my eldest daughter. I’ll have a post on that soon enough. It’s like LEGO for adults, and I am still amazed at the engineering required to produce a sprue with 2 different types of plastic.

I’ll have to force myself to blog for the next few days, to get back into the right mindspace. Let’s see what pops out.

FOMO Before an Expansion

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We’re 2 weeks or so from Endwalker releasing, and with any new release to an existing game, there are bits that are made redundant from that launch. In really great expansions, there’s a build on the prior material so that it remains relevant – in particular with single player games. XCOM 2, Witcher 3 and similar games are super examples of this model.

MMOs can be a bit different, especially those that focus on the destination rather than the journey. Themepark MMOs often suffer from this, where the content itself is only relevant for a window of time, primarily due to the power scale problem (the carrot is bigger numbers). When the content is predicated on start and end state (e.g. you have to be between this level and this level), then there comes a point where you either make it irrelevant OR you find a way to ‘hobble’ the player to keep it relevant.

There’s the approach of ‘mandatory’ content in order to access the new stuff. Maybe you need to complete a specific quest chain or achievement. Or maybe as a crafter you need to make the stuff from content A in order to be good enough for content B. There’s a legacy cost when something like that is implemented, where you have gates that extend the experience before the larger player mass. FF14 has like 200 hours of MSQ before you get to the ‘end game’ (which is somewhat of a misnomer). WoW used to force you to go through older content simply to have your levels increase. You hit a number and then left that area. WoW’s current leveling experience is irrelevant now. You can level anywhere, and the sole goal is to hit a magic level – so people all follow the most efficient route (WoD).

Today, if you had skipped the last 3 expansions in WoW, it wouldn’t matter. Heck, it wouldn’t matter if you never played at all, your experience would be near the same as an existing player re-rolling. It’s like 2 days of playing to get to max level, which negates 8 of 9 pieces of content (Vanilla to BfA). When’s the last time someone did Wailing Caverns? The flipside to this is that content becomes irrelevant means that it’s quite hard to actually complete it. If you wanted to see any raid in BfA, good luck getting a team organized for it. When the next expansion comes out, who in their right mind is going to even set foot in Torghast as group?

FF14 is different, in that the wide majority of content is mandatory. You are going to step foot in 80% of dungeons for sure, a few raids, a bunch of trials, and every zone. Whether you do dungeon A today or wait 6 months, you will still need to do it. It’s practically impossible to miss out on something. Now, there are exceptions. Things like Eureka are not relevant at max level, and Bozja will soon follow. Crafting and gathering is still relevant, all the way through. And even once you reach max level, all the group content forces scaling on the player to keep it relevant. I still run Satasha, the first dungeon from 8 years ago.

There are other MMOs that find a middle ground. You need to go through the dance in LoTR and SWTOR of main quests, but you never really need to do group content to progress… and it doesn’t scale at the end. I really enjoyed the flashpoints at the start of SWTOR, and outgrowing them felt less fun.

I get the idea of FOMO when something new is coming, because we’ve often been trained that the stuff we are doing now won’t be relevant later. Maybe there’s a mount or some cool looking gear to pick up that just won’t be there. I guess the question then comes, “does it really matter?”, and then you kind of realize it doesn’t. So for those playing FF14, there really isn’t much FOMO to be hard. Even if you don’t complete the MSQ to 5.5 prior to launch, it doesn’t matter because all the content will still be there, still accessible to everyone. That’s a super refreshing thought.

Hot Take! Blizzard News

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Quarterly results came out for ABK yesterday. No big surprises. Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 are delayed further (their leadership all left / was fired). Income is not pipeline based but MTX instead. Diablo 2 remake made some bits of money. Stocks are down ~15%. Fine enough, they are getting hit in the bottom line. Maybe something useful will come from it?

Or maybe they will get rid of their BIPOC Blizzard leader instead? Jen Oneal leaves Blizzard, and Mike Ybarra takes over leadership.

Hot take time! (brought to you through knee jerk armchair reactions!)

J Allen Brack left ~90 days ago, replaced in all but title by 2 people, which was really weird at the time. Felt more like grasping at straws with no succession plan in place prior. It was obvious something was going to shake out.

Jen Oneal ran a successful company. Vicarious Visions delivered quite a bit over the years and was good enough at their job that they were bought out by ABK. While there was hope they could stay a studio under the umbrella, the company was fully merged a few days ago. When that happened, it was pretty clear that other changes were coming.

When you’re actively being sued for discriminatory practices, by multiple fronts, perhaps it’s not good optics to lose your BIPOC leadership and go deep with the white male demographic. This isn’t to say Mike Ybarra is a poor leader, at all. But to somehow find a way to lose your first and only Blizzard female leader in 20 years gives a crazy message to the public. What kind of clown show exists where you can’t find a way to make this work? How bad of a work space is it, that you can’t keep an executive on staff?

Again, it was always clear that either Jen or Mike had to move aside to support a restructure. That the concept of a Blizzard President was all but dead, it was too corrupt and incompetent to survive under the Activision “shareholders first” approach. It’s that in all of this mess, where there’s a clear opportunity to implement a more diverse leadership structure Bobby said so: We will increase the percentage of women and non-binary people in our workforce by 50% and will invest $250 million to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent 

There’s enough piling on Blizzard’s missteps these past few weeks. It would be great if they could actually walk the talk for just a little bit. And that’s only the stuff the public gets to see, which is just the tip of the iceberg! It’s a car wreck that just won’t end, and the rubber necking will continue.