Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 4

Disappointment Around Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Warning: This post will contain spoilers for the full Dragon Age franchise to date, including spoilers currently released for The Veilguard.

I’ve had an inconsistent relationship with the Dragon Age franchise. I didn’t enjoy Origins much at all, and if not for a free demo and a deep discount, I’d never have played Dragon Age 2. I liked its story much better, but still didn’t enjoy the combat much.

It wasn’t until Inquisition that I was fully converted to being a fan, and even then I’ll grant Inquisition had plenty of flaws, mostly in the form of way too much filler content. It was really the DLC that impressed me. The Descent was spectacular, but Trespasser was what really rocked my world.

I’m gonna say it: Solas being Fen’harel may well be the “Luke, I am your father”* of gaming in terms of being an iconic plot twist. Virtually no one saw it coming, even though in hindsight there were tonnes of hints, and combined with the focus on character relationships that BioWare does so well, it makes for an incredibly powerful narrative moment.

*(I know that isn’t the actual line, but you get my point.)

Of course a lot of people romanced Solas, which adds a whole new dimension to the dynamic, but even as someone who only had Solas as a friend, this felt like an incredibly personal conflict. My first inquisitor was also an Elf, and she became close friends with Solas. She wants everything he wants: a return of the mystery and magic of the ancient world and to rescue the Elves of today from their miserable fate. She just can’t quite agree with his methods. I can’t think of a single better implementation of this kind of tragic protagonist/antagonist relationship anywhere in fiction.

Trespasser was basically a giant ad for the next Dragon Age game, and I was sold. I’ve had lots of problems with this franchise over the years, but I was 110% invested in the conflict between the inquisitor and Solas, and I was ready to follow wherever that story took us.

I stayed hyped for many, many years, but after nearly a decade of development hell, it’s starting to look like all my hopes were for naught.

Even early on, there were some red flags. It didn’t take them long to start hinting that DA4 would feature a new protagonist. Surely they couldn’t be that foolish, I thought. The personal connection between Solas and the inquisitor is what makes this story special. If you take that away, it loses most of its appeal.

But hey, BioWare has rarely disappointed me. Even Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem were aces in my book, no matter what anyone else says, so my faith remained largely unshaken.

But it didn’t stop there. A few months back we got the bizarre news that the game had been renamed from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf to the awkwardly titled Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It was here that a real chill started to run down my spine, and since then the hits have just kept coming.

The initial trailer was just awful. Its MCU-style quipiness and general camp vibe were a shocking change in direction from the wonderfully moody teaser trailer Dreadwolf had, and while subsequent reveals haven’t looked quite that bad, my impression of the game has never really recovered.

We now have confirmation that both the inquisitor and Solas have been sidelined. The new protagonist is called Rook, and while the story starts with hunting Solas, he is quickly fridged to focus on a new threat in the form of two other returned Elven gods. Which is pretty much my worst fears about this game come to life.

We know Solas will still have a role in the game past that opening sequence, but it sounds like it’s going to be pretty small. He’s barely even mentioned in the marketing. The ads and teasers are all about the other Elven gods.

Under other circumstances, a game about fighting the Evanuris is something I’d be all for, but not if it comes at the cost of the inquisitor versus Solas game I’ve spent a decade waiting for.

The inquisitor looks to be even more irrelevant. I got some hope back when we found out Veilguard’s character creator also allows you to build your inquisitor, and I thought maybe we’d get some kind of dual protagonist twist, but it’s since been confirmed that the inquisitor is not playable, and moreover you can’t even choose their class, so presumably they won’t appear in any scenes where they might have to fight, which limits their potential role severely.

(I also want to say again that sidelining the inquisitor after they lose their arm feels very ableist, especially in a fantasy setting where they could have gotten any number of badass prosthetics. It stands out especially when World of Warcraft has just launched an expansion featuring a one-armed paladin who kicks ass and takes names.)

Even more worrying, the list of choices you can import from past games is extremely short and mostly seems to boil down to whether you disbanded the inquisition and what your inquisitor’s attitude toward Solas was. Even the Well of Sorrows decision isn’t included, and I can’t imagine how they plan to do a game about the Elven pantheon without addressing that.

It’s clear that Solas’ story is no longer the focus, and they just want a fresh start for newcomers to the franchise.

I just can’t get over what an unbelievable waste this is. They had one of the most unique and powerful stories in gaming, and they dropped it in favour of a generic evil gods apocalypse story.

There comes a time when a big franchise needs to reset a little to bring in new fans, but the direct sequel to one of the biggest cliffhangers in gaming history is not that time. Continuing the Star Wars comparison, it’s like if Return of the Jedi had introduced a whole new cast and featured Luke and Vader only in brief cameos.

This reminds me so much of Diablo IV. Both sequels to games that ended on cliffhangers. Both games that are doing their level best to pretend the previous entry in their respective franchises never existed, despite those entries being wildly successful. It’s so frustrating, and so weird.

Even more so in Veilguard’s case. While the blowback to Diablo III didn’t hurt its financial success, I will at least grant it was widespread in online discussions. Inquisition meanwhile may have its haters among the die-hard Origins fans, but it enjoyed widespread favourable reviews from the large majority of the gaming community. Trying to run from that legacy makes no sense.

There’s other things I don’t like about Veilguard, too. The graphics are very poor, for one thing. The characters all look like they’re made of plastic, and their body proportions are all wrong. The hair physics are impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not convinced they actually look good. Considering how cartoony everything else looks, the hyper-realistic hair creates a bit of an uncanny valley effect for me.

I’m a little iffy on the combat, too. The early previews looked pretty bad, with constant pausing to use companion abilities, but I’ve seen learned there is an option to command companions in real time, though it looks a bit clunky. I think the combat will probably be good enough, but it’s not looking like it’s going to be a particular strength of the game, either.

It’s funny because action combat and more stylized graphics are both things I’ve wanted from Dragon Age since day one, but bad execution can still ruin good ideas.

It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’m also surprisingly off-put by the faction choice mechanic that serves as Rook’s backstory. All but one (maybe two if you count the Grey Wardens) are explicitly human organizations heavily tied to human nations and cultures. Veil Rangers seems to be the only valid choice for anyone who wants to play a Dalish Elf, and Dwarves and Qunari seem to have been given no consideration at all.

We’ve also seen the backstory blurbs for each faction, and they’re all pretty much the same. They all establish Rook as a born rebel who defies authority and breaks all the rules but still gets the job done because they’re just that good. It’s a tired trope, and one of my absolute most hated tropes at that.

So between that and their replacing the inquisitor, I’m already at a point where not only do I not care about Rook, but I actively dislike them and resent their presence in the story. That’s not a good starting point.

Finally, I do want to make mention of the prequel audio drama series, Vows and Vengeance. It’s terrible. The writing is awful, and the decision to not have a narrator in a purely audio format is baffling. The action sequences are just thirty seconds of the voice actors grunting with no context, like it’s the world’s worst ASMR video.

To be fair, Vows and Vengeance was contracted out and has different writers than Veilguard, so it isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of the game. But on top of everything else, it’s not helping.

About the only good news is that the companion cast still looks promising. That’s the one thing BioWare always gets right, and I have no reason to believe this will be an exception. Bellara and Emmrich in particular look like characters I’d love.

I’m not sure that’s enough on its own, though. I think Veilguard will probably work out to an okay standalone RPG, but it’s looking to be a terrible sequel to Inquistion, and that’s all I really cared about.

I take no pleasure in writing this post. I almost didn’t write it at all. But I wanted to get this all off my chest, and considering all the gushing and hopeful speculation I did on this blog after Trespasser all those years ago, it felt like I needed express how all that hope came crashing down.

It’s possible the marketing for the game has just severely misrepresented it. Maybe it will actually provide a satisfying resolution to the story that started with Inquisition, somehow. But I don’t think I want to pay $80 to find out when it’s just been one red flag after another.

You know, in the darkest depths of my depression, a conclusion to Trespasser has oftentimes been the only thing I had in my future to look forward to. Turns out I didn’t even have that.

This is one of the worst disappointments in my entire thirty years of gaming.

Do It for Her

Recently one of the members of Simpsons Bortposting on Facebook, one Karl Tryggvason, created a tool to create your very own demotivational plague plaque. I decided to use it to honour the most important woman in my life, Mai the rogue.

I have a pretty sad life.

Song of the Month: Metric, Dressed to Suppress

Time for me to fill my “post a Metric song at least once every couple months” quota.

WoW: Beyond Death

I’m currently knee deep in The War Within, but before it launched, I took a few weeks to catch up on what I’d missed in World of Warcraft by running through all the story content of Shadowlands (minus the raids, but I was able to get the jist of them from a combination of in-game resources and YouTube).

I planned to do this entirely with my new Dark Iron Dwarf shaman, but due to some issues with Chromie Time too complex and confusing to get into here, I ended up exploring Shadowlands with a mix of her, my Tauren death knight, and my Worgen druid. Which mostly served to remind me why I don’t play druids more.

Before the Worldsoul Saga announcement, Shadowlands was almost what brought me back to the game. I thought the premise of delving into the afterlife was intriguingly different. Ultimately my distaste for the Pathfinder system and general feeling of being done with WoW kept me away, but my curiosity about it never entirely faded.

Of course, Shadowlands ultimately proved to be possibly the most hated expansion in WoW’s history, but my opinions are often outside of the mainstream, so I wanted to know if I’d agree with the hate or not.

Yes and no.

When it comes to game systems and reward structures, yes, Shadowlands deserved the hate. I dodged the worst of it by coming in after the fact and benefiting from quickly unlocked flying, a wealth of catch up mechanics, and the luxury of being able to mostly ignore its various borrowed power systems, but even so, it was a slog at times.

There’s a tonne of really cool cosmetic rewards you can get from Covenants, and the good news is you do get a lot of them for free just by doing the campaign and getting to max renown (that much at least is pretty much effortless at this point), but if you want anything more than that, it gets real bad real fast.

Everything costs anima, which is shockingly slow to acquire, and most things also cost another currency called grateful offerings, which is almost as hard to get. Thankfully I’m not a completionist and only wanted a tiny fraction of what was on offer, but even that took a few days of grinding. If I’d tried to get everything, it would have broken me.

There is a lot more I could say about all the ways Shadowlands went wrong on the gameplay front — Torghast alone deserves a mighty tongue-lashing — but it’s old news, and I don’t feel like beating a dead horse. Suffice it to say I was continually taken aback by the sheer amount of misery baked into every aspect of this expansion.

When it comes to the story, though, I’m not sure I agree with the scorn.

For one thing, it has one of the better leveling campaigns of any expansion. There’s a real sense of mystery, and it was the first time since Pandaria I felt like I was truly exploring the unknown (thankfully a vibe War Within has also delivered in spades). This is helped along by some amazing zone design; Bastion and Zereth Mortis especially are breathtakingly gorgeous.

I’m a little lukewarm on the Jailer as a villain overall, but the concept of him using his eons of imprisonment to hijack and weaponize his own chains and binding enchantments is unbelievably badass, and the story should have put on a finer point on that.

There’s some side stories I liked, too. I love that Kael’thas finally got the redemption he has long deserved (narratively if not morally), and I love that Vol’jin finally got some respect.

Also Garrosh’s soul got erased from existence, so that’s nice.

I’m also going to drop a really hot take here: I like what they did with Sylvanas. I think the revelation of her splintered soul is a good way to square the circle of the hero she once was with the monster she became, without totally excusing the choices she made.

The criticisms of this story I’ve seen don’t hold a lot of water to me. A lot of people seem to think her turning on the Jailer came out of nowhere, but it’s pretty clear he simply lied to her about his plans, and she rebelled once she realized she’d been deceived. There’s no inconsistency there.

It’s certainly not perfect. I think her “redemption” (for lack of a better term as I don’t consider it a redemption arc in the traditional sense) was a bit rushed, but that’s hard to avoid given WoW’s game design isn’t well-suited to depicting deep character introspection. I also think they could have been clearer about what she thought the Jailer’s plan was and how it was supposed to be a positive (and what his actual plan was, for that matter). But by and large I think the story provides a satisfying resolution to her long and tortured history.

I find it a little fishy that the male villains and anti-heroes of Blizzard games always seem to be viewed with sympathy by the fanbase — even when it’s wildly undeserved, IE Arthas — but the female villains/anti-heroes mainly seem to be viewed as beyond forgiveness — even if they weren’t in control of themselves for their worst actions, IE Kerrigan.

I know it’s easy to wave off any criticism as some form of ‘ism these days, and I’m not saying this is true of everyone who’s critical of these stories or even necessarily a majority, but it does feel like there’s some degree of double standard at play here.

Ultimately, I think — and have thought for over a decade now — that Sylvanas has been so controversial for so long that people were going to be furious no matter what they did with her. This seems like as good a path as any.

There’s definitely lots of other rough edges, though I think their severity can be overstated. I don’t love the revelation that the Jailer (via the Nathrezim) was ostensibly behind almost everything that’s happened in the history of the setting, but it also doesn’t really change anything when you think about it. Even if the Nathrezim nudged events one way or the other, all the other characters’ actions were still their own. It’s more of a weird historical footnote than something that ruins all the lore to date.

I wasn’t initially happy with the retcon that Frostmourne was only stealing pieces of people’s souls instead of the whole thing, but on reflection having your soul ripped apart such that you are forever broken in this life and the next is actually even more horrifying, so I’m fine with it.

It is a very dense expansion narratively with a lot of new info being thrown at you at all times, and I think that could have made it hard to follow for a lot of people. I also think they laid the drama on too thick at times; hearing the Jailer described as a worse threat than the Burning Legion right off the bat was a definite eye-roll moment.

And the Covenant campaigns were a disappointment, being rambly and generally dull across the board. This is especially disappointing in the case of the Kyrian campaign, which had a very good premise in the conflict with the Forsworn but never really did it justice.

I think my biggest complaint is there’s no explanation of what happens to the Scourge now that there’s no Lich King. You know, the undefeatable undead army that must be kept contained for all time? I understand the pre-expansion event dealt with it a bit, but the expansion itself ignores it altogether, and I don’t think there’s any clear explanation of what the new status quo is. Bolvar’s sacrifice to keep the Scourge contained is one of my favourite moments in WoW’s story, so I’d really like some follow up here.

So I don’t think it’s one of the best expansion stories, but I also think it’s unfair to say it’s one of the worst. It feels pretty comfortably in the “okay, not great” category for me. It’s certainly far better than Dragonflight’s story, at least.

Quick and Dirty Age of Mythology: Retold Impressions

When last we discussed Age of Mythology: Retold, I was pretty disappointed with its lack of new content and removal of the Tale of the Dragon content from the Extended Edition. Since then I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to buy it, but I did end up grabbing the premium edition mainly due to a discount for Extended Edition owners and the promise of extra content.

Specifically, the premium edition includes a new “god pack” for the Norse and two additional civilizations to be added at a later date, the first of which will be Chinese. So even if we’re not getting the exact Tale of the Dragon content, we are at least getting a Chinese civilization in some form, which mollified me a bit.

It’s unclear if these civilizations will include campaign content. Recent history of the franchise has me pessimistic, but if they do feature some campaigns of decent size and quality it would definitely do a lot to turn around my opinion of the game.

My overall take on Retold is still a bit lukewarm currently. To be honest, another remaster of AoM wasn’t something I felt a huge amount of need for to begin with. I would have been much more interested in an Age of Mythology 2. The Extended Edition’s graphics and gameplay still held up pretty well all things considered. I still want a mythology based Age of X game, but I want something fresher, with content I haven’t already done a dozen times.

The new graphics are very pretty, and I do like the resuable god powers, but the favour costs are so high you won’t be able to recast them very often, so it doesn’t change too much. The new voice actors for the campaign are mostly worse than the originals, too. At least they got the original Arkantos back.

Arena of the Gods has been delayed until an unspecified date after launch, so that’s a further disappointment. And we still don’t even know what it is.

The only new content we’ve got so far is the Freyr god pack, which includes one new major god, three new minor gods, and a single “mythological battle” (this does at least imply we’ll be getting other mythological battles in future). Like Retold as a whole, the DLC is a bit mediocre overall.

Freyr himself is underwhelming. The fact the lord of Alfheim has no Alfar units feels like a big oversight, and I feel like a defensively focused Norse major god should have some way to boost favour generation when not fighting. The cost to recast his golden boar god power is also absurdly high for something that can only be used to fight off a single attack, and only at one of your town centres.

I was also a bit unimpressed by the mythological battle. Trying to shoehorn the story into the timeline of the original campaign felt awkward, and the gameplay was pretty basic.

The minor gods are a bit more fun, though. I particularly enjoyed the rock giants and ice storm god power offered by Aegir. I’m a little grumpy that both those things are so totally disconnected from Aegir’s actual identity in mythology, but they definitely offer some fun gameplay. Been loving building up an army of ranged attackers and letting them snipe the enemy with impunity while the rock giants taunt all the enemy units into attacking them.

I think once the DLCs start rolling in Retold has a decent chance evolve into a worthy continuation of the original, but I have the distinct feeling it was rushed out the door before it was ready. I’m taking a leap of faith that it will eventually justify its own existence because the current state of the game doesn’t feel worth the price tag.

I think also my recent experiences with Immortal: Gates of Pyre have ruined me for older RTS games a bit. I’m ready to start seeing some evolution in the genre.

Thoughts on Star Trek: Prodigy’s Second Season

I recently got done watching the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy, the franchise’s entry into the realm of children’s cartoons. Despite my ambivalence towards kids’ media and disdain for the current direction of the franchise, the first season blew me away, and I was glad to see the show saved by Netflix after it was axed by Paramount. Given Netflix’s recent history, I’m assuming this will be the show’s final season, but we’ll see.

Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed by this season. It’s still more good than bad to be sure, but it’s definitely a more uneven experience than season one.

My biggest issue is that they went all-in on fan service this season, to a really excessive degree. To be clear, I think playing to nostalgia is a perfectly fine thing for a story to do — I’ve sunk thousands of hours into World of Warcraft almost entirely on the basis of Warcraft III nostalgia — but it has to be done the right, and anything can be toxic when taken to excess.

Prodigy’s tie-ins to other Trek shows this season are problematic both because there’s so many of them, to the point of crowding out Prodigy’s own stories, and because a lot of it feels unnecessary.

I’m a huge fan of the Doctor, so I was super hyped when I heard Robert Picardo was coming back to reprise the role, but to be honest… he didn’t really need to be there. The Doctor is clearly just there for the sake of nostalgia bait, and in nearly all of his scenes he could be replaced with any other random Starfleet officer without changing the plot in any meaningful way. There are only a handful of exceptions, such as a lovely but all too brief scene in which he bonds with Zero over their shared experiences as beings of pure energy.

By comparison, I was never that big a fan of Janeway or Chakotay, but because they’ve been woven into Prodigy’s story from the start, their presence feels earned and natural, and I ended up loving all the stories with them this season. That’s an example of nostalgia bait done the right way.

But my biggest complaint is definitely the extent to which throwbacks to the past left so little room for new stories to flourish. Given how much of the season revolves around Solum, the homeworld of the Vau N’Akat, I was super excited to learn to more about their history and culture… and we got almost none of that.

Instead it felt like fully a quarter of the season was devoted to bringing back an old face from the past that I don’t think many fans even wanted to see again. It bothers me that two seasons in we know almost nothing about Gwyn’s people and even less about Rok’s people, but they found time to devote multiple episodes to one of the franchise’s least popular characters.

I know the (star)ship sailed on this before the first season even finished, and it may not be the most popular opinion, but I think having the crew join up with the Federation so early in the series was a mistake. I loved the angle of a crew who isn’t under the direct guidance of Starfleet but is trying to live by their principles anyway because they see it’s a better way to live. It was such a great way of taking the franchise in a new direction while staying true to its roots, and I wish that had continued for longer.

There’s also a lot of plot holes and sloppy writing this season, both on an individual episode level and a big picture level. Bluntly, the meta plot for this season makes no sense at all. Time travel can always be a bit messy, and it’s never had a totally consistent portrayal in Star Trek, but this season manages to contradict all we’ve seen before while failing to adhere to even the most basic kind of logic.

That said, I do find this a lot more forgivable from Prodigy than it might otherwise be, thanks to the generally light-hearted tone of the show. I’ve said in the past that the problem with modern Trek is not so much that it’s super dumb, but that it doesn’t know it’s super dumb. The most ridiculous, nonsensical plots are treated with such breathless gravitas.

Prodigy doesn’t fall into that trap. It’s not pretending to be anything more than it is: a goofy pulp adventure story. So while I’d prefer something closer to the cerebral Trek of yesteryear, Prodigy failing to live up to that is merely a hiccup, not a fatal flaw.

And there are plenty of other things to like about this season. The core cast remains a delight. I love how Rok-Tahk is the living embodiment of Star Trek’s wholesomeness, and I love how Zero exemplifies the wisdom of, “Beware the just anger of a gentle heart.” There’s also a great new addition to the cast in the form of the Vulcan cadet Maj’el, and I enjoyed seeing her grow into part of the team.

Most importantly, Prodigy remains a show built on the optimism and sense of wonder at the heart of Star Trek. It is not burdened by the depressing cynicism that has defined all other modern incarnations of the franchise. Whatever other flaws it may have, this is the kind of Star Trek I loved growing up.

My favourite episode this season involved the crew setting literal sail across an alien cloud sea. It was whimsical, exciting, and just plain fun — joyful sci-fi adventure at its very best. That’s the spirit of exploration that Trek is all too often missing, especially these days, but Prodigy hasn’t forgotten what it means to boldly go.

Ultimately my complaint is not that the second season wasn’t good, but simply that it missed a lot of opportunities to be better.

Songs of the Month: Major Maker, Rollercoaster and Fratellis, Flathead

My local alternative radio station has been doing throwback top-tens on Sunday afternoons lately. A few weeks back they did their top ten songs from 2007, and I went on a nostalgia trip rediscovering songs I hadn’t heard since my teens, many of which I’d forgotten existed. Of those, these were the two that left the strongest impression.

I seem to remember thinking these songs were just okay back in the day, but now that they remind me of what may have been the only truly good period in my life, they feel like the peak of human cultural achievement.

Saints Row Has Me Feeling Some Kind of Way

I picked up the much-hated Saints Row reboot on the most recent Steam sale. I never played any of the previous entries in the franchise (unless you count Agents of Mayhem), though I’m broadly familiar with the basic concept of being a sillier cousin to Grand Theft Auto. I knew it was widely unpopular, but I’ve liked lots of unpopular games, and it looked fun in the trailers, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

In the end it did end up being another entry on the long list of disliked media that I’ve enjoyed. In fact I downright loved it. Oh, it was a bit buggy, and certainly not highbrow art, but I loved the characters, the totally unexpected wholesomeness, and the general light-hearted vibes of it. I really needed something light and silly right now, and it hit the spot for that super well.

But I’m not here to do my usual thing of staging an impassioned defence of a game everyone else hates. At least not exactly.

What really struck me playing this game was the sheer scale and detail of it, and the incredible amount of effort it must have taken from so many people to make a game this big.

The game world was huge. You can steal and drive every vehicle in the game, from food trucks to military grade aircraft. You can glide, and there’s whole mini-games around it. There are multiple in-game radio stations you can listen to while driving. There’s traffic, pedestrians, a day/night cycle, weather. The skybox realistically models light pollution such that you need to drive out into the desert to see the stars at night.

And the customization! I spent an hour just on character creation. There are eight different potential voices for the main character, eight actors that would have had to record hundreds of hours of dialogue each. Dozens of different clothing pieces, all of which can be dyed any possible colour. You can customize the engine sounds of your car! There’s like forty different kinds of tire rims to choose from!

And people looked at this game and said, “Meh, whatever.”

I know a lot of these features aren’t even unique, that other games even within this franchise have done much the same. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? How did this become ordinary to us?

I grow up with DOS games. If they had any kind of story at all, that was amazing. If they had more than one or two lines of voiced dialogue, that was mind-blowing. The crudest 3D graphics were a revolution when they arrived.

It’s just so bizarre to me that Saints Row can be both an artistic and technical triumph the likes of which would have been unimaginable thirty years ago, and a disastrous flop. It’s heartbreaking the amount of time, effort, creativity, money, and resources that went into building something that everyone immediately tossed away like a mouldy sandwich.

I’m not saying the game’s perfect, not by a long shot. I liked it, but there’s plenty of areas it could have been improved. I can see how you might not be thrilled by it. But the whole “worst game ever, don’t even bother” vibe around it boggles my mind.

It’s the dismissiveness. The completely blase attitude towards something that had so much work put into it. We live in a time where technology has created such wondrous things, and we just let it become so mundane to us so quickly.

I’m not even really sure what point I’m trying to make here. I guess I don’t understand the modern gaming community. I don’t know how people can be so jaded.

I suppose I’m not immune. There’s some very big and impressive games that I think are just plain boring, and gods know I can be critical when I don’t like a game. But I try to remember the people behind these things, and honour the work that went into them. I don’t always succeed, but I do try.

I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I guess I want to take this opportunity to appreciate how far games have come since I was a kid. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a world where a game like Saints Row can be considered a failure.

New World Housing Tour: Brimstone Sands Covenant Chapterhouse

[From a flyer posted in Wikala al-Waha]

Are you down on your luck? Is the endless cycle of death and rebirth wearing at your spirit? Find shelter and solace Convenant chapterhouse in New Corsica!

Nourish your body with a free meal in our public dining area, then nourish your soul with a sermon on the joy of the Spark in our beautiful on-site chapel. Hone your skills to face Aeternum’s challenges in our scenic rooftop dojo, then wash off the sweat of the day in our adjacent bathing area. If you’ve nowhere to lay your head, you can spend the night in one of our comfortable bunk beds (subject to availability).

All services provided free of charge, though donations are welcome. There’s no obligation, but if you’d like to more about the glory of the Spark and the Covenant’s mission to spread its light across the isle, literature can be found at the back of the chapel, and application forms to join the Covenant are located on the sign-in desk next to the dining area.

Remember: The Spark’s light shines within all of us. All we need to do it let it out!

Song of the Month: Aurora, A Soul With no King

Last month saw the release of Aurora’s latest album, What Happened to the Heart? Seems like it hasn’t been very long since the last album; is she that prolific, or am I just losing track of time in my old age?

I don’t know if I would say this is my favourite song on the album per se, but it’s definitely the most interesting, the most unique.

Would like to have been present for the pitch meeting for these videos. “Yeah, so I’m just gonna frolic about with a model heart and a giant dagger in a manner that is simultaneously playful, menacing, and weirdly sexual.”