Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Marvel Rivals is this year’s current free-to-play PC game success story, attracting many millions of players over its opening weekend and making regular appearances in the Steam Most Played top 10 ever since. It garnered an estimated $136 million in January. So naturally, it’s time to start laying people off.

Last night, one of the project’s game directors, Thaddeus Sasser, revealed that an undisclosed number of US-based NetEase Games employees had been dismissed, including level designers Gary McGee and Jack Burrows. NetEase have now confirmed the news, calling it a move to “optimize development efficiency” and assuring players that they “are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game”. Just not so much the people working on it.

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This article contains moderate spoilers for the closing events of the Wedding Crashers quest in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

It’s impossible, I think, to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 without playing a boozer, even if you’re only boozing in cutscenes. The game’s 15th century world is greased by many splendours of hooch, from the wine used in potion-brewing through the finer vintages at banqueting tables to the viral pondwater they sell in seedier taverns. A lot of the time, the writing views alcohol as a means of teeing up some slapstick debauchery reminiscent of Paul Bettany’s character in A Knight’s Tale. It venerates the spectacle of having a large one, with custom dialogue and voice-acting for protagonist Henry when you woozily explain your antics to guards. But sometimes, perhaps despite itself, it expresses something about the culture of drinking and the unpleasantness of being militantly exhorted to drink.

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The psychology of people who cheat in competitive games remains deeply mysterious to me, but I’ll hazard a guess it stems from a love of ruining someone’s day rather than any real sense of accomplishment. Something I am interested in, however, is the idea of play as transgression.

There is, for example, a subset of people who get very irritated at the concept of speedruns. I suspect this is because, even if we aren’t consciously engaged with a game’s story, there’s an underlying sense of what I’m going to very clumsily call ‘narrative correctness’ that’s absolutely shattered when, say, Leon Kennedy starts shuffling up stairs at superhuman speeds. Glitches, warps, and other exploits expose the shroud of storytelling conjured by every little piece of a game’s design, pulling off the mask so the underlying grey box is painfully visible. They call art a liar.

Competitive FPS Cheaters Cheetah initially seems like pure transgression against any sense of fair play or even level design, but the key here is that everyone gets cheats like aimbots, wallhacks, and spinbots. “This creates a unique dynamic,” reads the game’s Steam page, “where everyone knows everyone else’s position, leading to intense mind games and thrilling battles”. It sounds like it’s either going to be a complete disaster or incredibly interesting, probably both.

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Monster Hunter Wilds adds various new tinctures of wyvern, toad monster and arachnid to the fantasy creature chopper’s vaunted eco-stew, but that additional variety isn’t quite apparent from the weapon types. They’re fancier-looking with tweaked or expanded movesets, but it’s a familiar line-up beneath the extra layers of flesh and metal. I recognise most from my ancient PSP copy of Monster Hunter Freedom 2, released in 2007.

Capcom have thrown in a few novelties such as Monster Hunter 4’s Insect Glaive over the intervening years, but according to Wilds director Yuya Tokuda, the developers currently feel it’s more important to trick out and rebalance the existing wargear than give you entire new ways to play.

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It was only last week that newly Sega-less Company Of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment announced plans for various smaller strategy game projects. Now, here we are with Earth Vs Mars, a boldly-coloured B-movie homage to Advance Wars in which you can splice units with animals to create tactical monstrosities such as “Squirrel-Cows” and “Cheetah-Flies”. Advance Wars aside, the new game harkens back to Relic’s 2003 RTS oddity Impossible Creatures. The trailer below doesn’t contain any Chihuahua Whales, but it’s hopefully just a matter of time.

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I was completely hooked the first time I played Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The stealth mechanics, brutal survival elements, and insane Cold War espionage plot felt like no other game at the time. I still remember crawling through the jungle with my camo set, hoping to avoid an enemy patrol only to get spotted by a guard and have the entire area on high alert.

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I really, really like Is This Seat Taken? It might just be that this logic puzzler stick its thumb out noticeably from the omnipresent gaggle of post-roguelite survivalyptic soulsbuilder decklikes, but I suspect it’s also down to the deeply satisfying bloopy twinkle dink that plays whenever you drop someone into a seat with your floating hand cursor.

You’ve got a limited number of seats and a bunch of jolly demand-os, and it’s your job to make them all happy. “I want to sit with Bob”. “I need a window seat”. “I forgot to shower”. “I do not like bad smells”. So you quarantine the nostril bombers in the back of your limo, make sure everyone else is happy, and drive off to the next level. There, you’ll take the role of a cinema usher. Some punters want to sit next to someone with popcorn so they can steal it, and some want to wear massive cowboy hats that block those behind them. It’s all quite simple, but robust, and just thoughtful enough to lightly tickle your synapses, like a gentle grizzly bear wielding an illustrious peacock feather.

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During a house clearout I recently discovered a cache of creative writing from my teenage years. Naturally, I now consider most of it to be unbearable. Reading certain notebooks makes me feel as though my stomach is mounting an upwards assault on my brain. BURN IT, scream the parts of said brain that have learned the perils of starting poems with “O Muse”. BURN IT ALL. Nonetheless, I felt bad about being mean towards my adolescent self, so I popped all those misbegotten papers in a giant suitcase. It squats next to me right now as I type these words, like a mausoleum filled with dead albatrosses.

Similarly mixed emotions appear to inform Amphora Hell, in which you play an amphora (read: ancient species of vase) with legs. The amphora is the work of the Kilnmaster, a terrible Olympian force who is sort of one part Hephaestus to one part shmup villain. The Kilnmaster has just decided that he hates his amphora with legs and wishes to destroy it with flying hammers. “No evidence of my failure must remain,” he bellows in the Itch preamble. “Prepare to be scrapped!”

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Most writing tries to avoid cliché, understanding that an overused idea is one that has lost its power. It often feels as if video games take the opposite approach, gleefully piling tropes high upon their back like Labyrinth’s junk lady. Sure, they sacrifice the opportunity to say anything affecting or which feels true, but presumably the theory is that reminding you of a dozen other films, TV shows, books and games you like is just as good.

Enter Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, hunched over from the weight of all the teen TV shows and young adult novels stacked atop its shoulders.

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Sometimes to chill out I watch timelapse videos of ocean creatures such as starfish colonising patches of sea floor. Perhaps they’re gracefully devouring a seal’s carcass, or moving to escape a lethal descending finger of ice. Look, I’m quite a morbid guy, but ‘beauty of nature’ and all that.

It turns out there’s an equivalent in Warhorse’s recent RPG-palooza Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: drop dozens of items in a random town square, and passing NPCs will gradually gather them all up according to preferences dictated by class. Here’s a video showing that in action, created by Redditor Mcloganator, with three thousand groschen worth of goods to harvest.

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