Signs of the Sojourner #1--How to Make a Map

I just played thirty minutes of Signs of the Sojourner. It rocks: https://www.echodoggames.com/

One of my favorite mechanics in Signs is unlocking new areas on the map. What’s so striking is how, even after playing only for half-and-hour, the process of guiding conversations towards discovering new locations feels special. 

Some background: Signs of the Sojourner is a deck-building card game about conversation; you’re part of a caravan traveling the country, and as you meet new people, they tell you about new towns you should travel to. You can play cards successfully to create a “concordant” conversation, or blow it for a “discordant” dialogue.

Unlocking new locations is a result of successful conversation. While Signs encourages freedom in its dialogue mechanic, you can theoretically tank every conversation in the game, there needs to be a barrier to keep you from “trolling” conversations. Tying game progression to successful displays of empathy and diplomacy does this tremendously well. 

Narratively, what I like: each citizen tells you about the roads to each town; not specific coordinates. This dialogue is special; a character giving you relatable landmarks, or warnings about a bumpy road or vicious beasts, is a very conversational way to tell someone where to go. I can’t help but think of all the open-world games, which want to be about long-distance travel, but are content to mark a map with a precise location. But in Signs, before you even reach a new destination, you have to infer what kind of place you’ll be traveling to with these clues. Every moment of the journey feels special because characters guide you; not tell you where to go. And they’re not intervening with their expectations for your journey, or their impressions of a place--it’s up to you to discover and understand a new town. 

Signs of the Sojourner has one of the best in-game maps because it so successfully ties the unlocking mechanic to narrative consequence. This is so much better than trawling through a mini-map in Red Dead or Metro to find where X marks the spot. 

My Last of Us Pt. II Review

At this point, there's been so many quality takes about the Last of Us Pt. II, that my thoughts feel redundant--go read Rob Zacny's review on Vice Games, or follow any progressive, left-leaning games critic to get a sense of why this game is a slog.

But one word keeps coming to mind for me: studious. 

The Last of Us Pt. II emerges from this era of mid-2000s to late-2010s era of game design study: what produced the book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, the wave of GDC talks about player usability, and the rise of game design education--pacing, systems design, and analytics all being codified in academia. This era when, after people realized money and prestige could be found in this industry, decided: "Shit, we need to write this down."

This game is virtually unchanged from its predecessor--just fine-tuned. The game-world, Seattle, sometimes becomes more open when the narrative calls for it. All routes lead to a visual landmark; the "Disneyworld" benchmark of good level design. Every enemy encounter ends with a dialogue cue so you know combat has ended and you're safe to proceed. This game generally gets that stuff right. But that's why this game feels so lifeless. 

Nothing seems to happen by accident. Nothing feels off about character interactions or story beats. This game is so afraid to be a video game, afraid of feeling technology producing a visual bug, or that the design treats you improperly, that all excitement is sucked from it.

 

Dev Log #1 -- Visions VR

A dev log update today: about my mobile VR demo I'm (hopefully) submitting next week--Visions VR.

Built for iOS, in Unity, with Google Cardboard integration. Visions VR is a demo consisting of three levels, all showcasing different visual directions for first-person VR. 

Level 1, "Planet," is a colorful, cel-shaded look into a colonized planet:

Level 2--"Bath": the most "realistic" level as all the textures are more photorealistic, made in Substance Painter. Gaze out onto a mysterious horizon from your warm bath:

Level 3--"Cave": Soft geometric shapes make up this series of spider-laden caves and foggy forest:

Judgement #1--Wall Running

Kazuma Kiryu, protagonist of the Yakuza series. And a big bulky dude. 

If you ever played the Yakuza series, playing as Kazuma could be a struggle--getting into back alley brawls meant being put up against the ropes. The tight alleys and streets of downtown Tokyo means limited room to maneuver. Kazuma’s wide frame and slow movement puts the player at a disadvantage. An enemy backing Kazuma into a corner is the worst: there’s no easy way to avoid a full frontal assault, save for blocking until your enemy tires out.

But then there’s Yagami--protagonist of Yakuza spin-off Judgment. And purveyor of tight shirts and skinny jeans. 

Compared to Kazuma’s commanding physique, Yagami is slender and light-footed. Whereas I always wondered how Kazuma could grapple thugs while keeping a perfectly ironed suit, I wonder about Yagami’s ability to leapfrog dudes while wearing form-fitting jeans. 

At the core of playing as Yagami is one of my favorite mechanics in recent games: wall running. In Judgment’s battles, you can, at any point, break into a sprint and run up a wall to land a drop kick, pull off a finishing grapple, or simply evade. This last use-case has made Judgment much less tedious for me. Yakuza’s combat system has always been robust, but felt too rigid and locked in. Being effective as Kazuma meant playing a certain way. Specifically, just avoid getting trapped in a corner. 

But Judgment’s combat system encourages me to experiment in a way Yakuza never did. Wall running not only solves the issue of feeling stuck, but gives me a greater control of the battlefield. Enemies scatter to avoid wall-mounted attacks. So even if I leap from a wall, and fail to land a kick, the battlefield has been widened for combat. 

GTA Online #1 -- Horrific

I hopped into GTA Online for the first time in six years--what I played was awful and racist. 

I joined a match type called 'Survival'; a Gears of War-esque horde mode where you have to survive waves of enemies by shooting them. 

However, in GTA Online's Survival mode, all these enemies were Black men storming in with guns. After each wave, the street was a layer of dead Black men. 

The game does escape a "worse" framing; protecting a more gentrified neighborhood from Black men. This round of Survival I joined was played on 'Grove Street', canonized as the poorer, Black neighborhood in the GTA series. Yet, for all of us players portrayed as white avatars, we participated in the racist trope of staying away from the hood.

To further this atrocity, you can put a filter over the spectate mode which turns the viewing into breaking news report:

The explicit framing here is this is a 'Weazel News' broadcast, GTA's parody of Fox News. My issue is there's no explicit parody in using this filter: this survival mode doesn't display an understanding of Fox's history of racist reportage. Putting a Weazel News filter over the video game massacre of Black men doesn't have enough built-in commentary. If you were to argue there's subtext... it's too "sub." To understand Weazel is a parody requires hours of listening to the in-game radio station *outside* of this Survival mode. Given the long history of racism in national/local news coverage, this framing is inappropriate without more explicit commentary.

I understand the want of the horde mode and also understand this may be an "algorithm issue" (that replaying this mode may spawn different types, or skin colors, of enemies). But that doesn't excuse the easy fix to what I saw: eliminating any code which causes all Black men to be spawned. 

Metro Exodus #2

I think it’s worth it to note that the last two games I’ve played about the post-apocalypse are about the collective effort to survive. 

The first game, Metro Exodus, functions as a single-player experience, but makes it continually known you’re operating as part of a whole family of survivors--your wife, her father, and your militia friends. But your band of survivors lacks the capacity to make the journey to eden. The Volga section of the game focuses on recruiting a medic and mechanic to your team. Your team has the whole ‘we carry and shoot a bunch of guns’ thing down. So seeing your team’s humility, acknowledging you need more than guns to survive only, is a welcome sight. This hasn’t come across in a mechanically satisfying way yet. Artyom’s only function is exploring and shooting. But I’m still really interested in this lore. 

Another thing I like about Metro Exodus; your missions in the open-world are one piece of a larger operation. Every mission is being completed alongside other characters doing their own work-- as you’re briefed on completing Mission A, so-and-so will start on Mission B. Mind you, you never see your support characters roaming around the game world, but this framing is still in the back of your mind. 

I’d compare this surviving-the-post-apocalypse-as-collective-endeavour to The Last of Us, and what I’m assuming will be true of Pt. II: games which lacks this interesting dynamic of Metro Exodus. The post-apocalypse in The Last of Us is individualistic. Your characters can snipe, kill in close quarters, repair vehicles, and patch up a zombie scratch or bullet wound. Joel and Ellie are the ideal self-sufficient post-apocalypse survivors.

The second game I’ve been playing, Umarangi Generation, is still great! And it really takes the dump on other games. 

Metro Exodus #1 -- Thoughts On...

• Physicality is there. Pulling up a map means your character holds a map in real-time. Upgrading your gun means setting your backpack down and unloading materials. Guns need to be regularly cleaned; the first area, Volga, is a snowy wasteland caking your weapons in mud.

• I think the game got *worse* the more open it became. For me, Metro 2033 was great for its constraints. Surviving in the tunnels meant fighting through the normalcy of the post-apocalypse. This is now a game about design--its thesis is “making a competent modern open-world game.” I think the highlights so far have been the dark, irradiated chambers. Zombies climbing from the bowels of the earth. Spawning out of sight so you have no idea how many are left to stalk you. Ironically, the game feels more inventive when it works with smaller space.

• The throwing weapons upgrade is a masterpiece of nonsense:

  

• The shotgun feels good. I don’t know if it’s actually that unique in its handling, or its effect feels amplified because ammo is so precious. When bullets are scarce, anything with that kind of punch feels incredible. In this game, the standard shotgun is the BFG from Doom.

• That being said, I haven’t felt like I’m scraping by. Volga hasn’t pushed me to my limits. Rest points are plenty, healing at these pit stops is unlimited, and the throwing knives are incredibly easy to craft (these are one-hit kills anywhere on an enemy’s body--stealth is a non-issue with these). So far, the wasteland just seems like decoration for modern open-world philosophy: make the player feel good at all times.

ISLANDS: Non-places #1

I played this game today: https://carlburton.itch.io/islands

ISLANDS: Non-Places is an "interactive artscape": “Explore ten scenes inspired by the everyday and let your expectations of reality be transformed.”

What this is, is ten distinct scenes with a central prop--a lamp, a water fountain, or a bus stop, centered in the camera. You can rotate each prop, view it at different angles, and sometimes click on them to get different reactions. And sometimes scripted sequences happen. The second ‘level’ started out with a bus stop. But at some point, a bus came along and dropped off passengers (I’m not actually sure if I triggered this). 

I do like the minimal colorscapes and composition--they make this the kind of game which makes you go “oh, this is an art piece.” And the uncertain cause-and-effect--I’m not actually sure which mouse clicks do what and when--makes it clear there’s an auteur behind each set piece. ISLANDS does a good job of conveying prestige.

But it still feels like too much. I would have rather the game omit interactivity or changes to its landscapes. I’d rather it have the confidence to show the mundane without having to justify it with surreal consequences. I liked looking at and rotating the bus stop. Admiring its geometric frames and packed surface area. So I’m not quite sure why a bus needed to come by and interrupt my quiet observation. The passengers it dropped off were floating eggs, packing themselves into the tight space. I already understood the bus stop to be a tight architectural space. Ham-fisted surrealism didn’t need to convince me of that further. 

The Last of Us Pt. II #2--Metacritic is a Disease

Comments from the ResetEra thread, "The Last of Us Part II - Review Thread":

Shazz: "Oh no no its my bad i did the math wrong, i was on Meta and instead of taking the reviews i took the percentages because apparently on mobile they show the percentage and added the percentages and divided the positive by the total and that gave me a 96.9% which is wrong, i did the math again with the review scores right now (on meta) and the total positive reviews are 81 of the total 84(so far) so 81/84(for now) = 96.4% hence the 96, for it to get to 97 it needs to have 97 positive reviews out of 100 considering we dont get another mixed/bad review. I'm Sorry for spreading misinformation.

If anyone can tell me the number of positive reviews on opencritic i can tell how much it needs to get to 97 on there."

Fanboy: "has it reached 97 at some point? Honestly hoping it sticks with 97... that would be great."

ABIC: "I don't understand some posters just posting reviewers' negative opinions of the game. It's not a substitute for having your own opinion." (This is a fun rhetorical strategy by ABIC--criticizing dissenting opinions by imploring commenters to utilize free-thinking).

Rzaretka: "You must be upset at this 96 Metacritic now huh? LOL nice try though. Anyway, ND did the impossible and topped last generation's best game. Amazing."

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As has been widely documented, game developers are often rewarded and punished over Metacritic thresholds. It truly bums me out that fans often ignore or don't see this as a very specific and deranged labor issue. These commenters will build their identity around studio prestige and Metacritic scores to justify their investment. 

The Last of Us. Pt. II #1--Dumbing it down

I think The Last of Us Pt. II will be bad, y'all. Here's an excerpt from a GQ interview with Neil Druckmann, director of the game (from a vg247 article): 

In part, [the game] was inspired by a news event creative director Neil Druckmann witnessed as a child.

“I don’t want to go into specifics about it, but I saw a video of a lynching when I was much younger. It was like an actual… like a news thing. And then, feeling intense hatred for the people that committed the lynching and thinking, like, ‘oh man if I could hurt these people in some horrible ways then I could.’”

While writing the story for Part 2, Druckmann spent some time reflecting on those feelings, that intense hatred he felt at the time. “I was like, oh we can make the player feel that,” he explained. “We can make you experience this thirst for revenge. This thirst for retribution, and having you actually like commit the acts of finding it. And then showing you the other side to make you regret it. To make you feel dirty for everything you’ve done in the game, making you realize ‘I’m actually the villain of the story.’”

(https://www.vg247.com/2020/06/09/the-last-of-us-part-2-lynching-neil-druckmann-witnessed/)

I can't emphasize enough how bad it is, that Druckmann's takeaway from racist violence, is "both sides are evil." Three more things to note:

1. Why are families, friends, or people who want justice for lynchings, needing a 'thirst for revenge [or] retribution." Why are these people, and if we're speaking historically about American lynchings (where The Last of Us is set), Black people given uncontrollable and animalistic behaviors? 

2. It's bizarre that Druckmann was struck by "a video of lynching when I was much younger." Has he remained in a stasis where racism hasn't penetrated him after that? What about American states where lynching is still legal?

3. Based on previews and commentary, Druckmann and The Last of Us Pt. II seem obsessed with individual actions and the cycle of violence as it pertains to individuals seeking revenge. But lynching, the horrible act itself, has to be enacted by a group of people hanging an individual. And in the more macro and American way, it's enabled by a political and economic system that values the killing of Black people. Those seeking 'revenge', or justice, against this system inherently can't compete with a capitalistic machine that large.

Umarangi Generation #2 -- One Perfect Shot

A perfectly framed postcard. No adjustments needed. My footing is secure. And… my camera’s fucking stuck?

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Umarangi requires a “reload” between every shot--pulling the camera’s lever to load up the next piece of film.  Everytime you want to take a picture, you have to look through the camera viewfinder and click to shoot. But each time, you have to pull your face away to load the film. To put it in hedonistic gamer terms, it’s like a sniper rifle in any first-person shooter; pulling your face from the scope, and watching your character’s hand chamber a new shot. 

But each reload I make in Umarangi is an exhilarating test of patience. Why is it such a rush to frame a shot, only to realize you can’t take it?

Part of it is the ‘why’-- why you’re looking through the viewfinder: the drama of being a sniper in Call of Duty or Overwatch is dependent on who or what you’re looking at. Waiting with baited breath for an enemy to enter your line of sight, or just waiting for nothing to happen while a match revolves around you, takes a sense of urgency from your play. 

But the drama from being an Umarangi photographer comes from your own patience. The Umarangi world is breathless and weighted down. Characters don’t move. People, animals, cars, trucks won’t move out of your line of sight. So it becomes a test of patience and withholding careless movement. Accidentally moving the mouse or taking an accidental step while you reload will kill your perfectly framed shot.

The other reason this camera-reload mechanic works so well: the lack of an automatic reload. Most sniper rifles, as soon as you shoot, exit the scoped mode automatically to have your character reload. A design choice to ensure the pace of battle doesn’t overwhelm the player; and that a more experienced sniper doesn’t have an advantage in quick reloading/scoping.

Yet Umarangi allows you to get stuck. If you take a picture, but try to snap another picture looking through the viewfinder, nothing will happen. It’s routinely taken me five seconds to fumble around the keyboard, asking myself, “did I break this?” But to make the conscious decision to leave the scoped view, make the reload, and pull the camera back up feels so analog and so manual. This is a lack of handholding. And a distinct connection to the technology in your hand. 

(GIF courtesy of warpdoor.com)

Umarangi Generation #1

I aim my camera at the soldier’s face. They’re stone-faced. Posting in front of a cardboard shanty. A sharpie’s been used to write on the wall. Rain drizzles down. This makeshift shelter is just one corner of a UN outpost. The solar panels have been fit into every nook and cranny of this place. I question if they work--the rain is, of course, coming from cloudy skies. But from where I’m standing, shoulder to shoulder with the soldier, we can’t see the panels behind the cardboard walls. I take my shot.

This is Umurangi Generation, a first-person photography game just released this month. In this game, I’m a freelance photographer exploring a sunkissed roof, a black and neon back alley, or now, a UN camp. The only object on my body is a film camera with interchangeable lenses. As soon as I point and shoot, the photo I just took stays on screen. I can edit it--a series of sliders to change the exposure or saturation pops up. Once I save my changes, the photo plops into my saved roll. And I can’t discard any shot.

Umarangi is a surprisingly face-paced game. My own real-world dabbles in photography have been meant as a ‘break’ from my usual creativity. An excuse to take a walk and explore the world around me with my iPhone camera. But in this game, the clock is constantly ticking. I have to fulfill ten photo ‘bounties’ in ten minutes. A photography scavenger hunt that has me running a mile a minute to frame whatever the bounty requires. And the more I take the better--I get paid for each one.  

Umarangi understands how photography fits into our social media habits. Taking a photo and leaving it on screen for photo manipulation scratches the same itch that Instagram or Snapchat does--the moment I just lived is immediately posted. But as Umurangi removes the option to discard a shot, saying ‘no’ to your whims is forbidden. Everything you shoot will be left in your final roll. Error is rewarded and editing is encouraged. 

What I didn’t expect from playing this game is to calm my anxiety. That my fulfillment from Umarangi is being exposed in the creation process and being okay with that. 

I make art daily, and while I’m fine with friends or strangers seeing my initial process--it’s obvious that my sketches and notes are preliminary--I shudder to think of them hanging about as I edit and refine. That in-between state can derail me. Of everything being *almost* in its place but with final touches making or breaking the product. If I’m 80% finished, I don’t want to hear what’s wrong. My least favorite place might be editing next to a person.

But Umarangi’s pace and choice to merge modern technology of instant editing, with the film medium’s limitations of immediate discarding, puts me in a spot I never thought I would be in. Standing by a person and letting them peer over my shoulder from start to finish.