Warning: Contains spoilers pertaining to faction plot-lines. Okay cards on the table: I am one of those insufferable types who will rant your face off about how much better Morrowind was than either Oblivion or Skyrim, and I found myself somewhat mystified by all the glowing praise heaped upon Skyrim on its release when all…
On Creativity and Computers
This is a subject which fascinates me more than many others, and my love of Asimov and other science-fiction authors is either the cause or the effect of this too. If you grew up reading and watching philosophical investigations into what is is to be human, conscious, creative through the lens of robotics then this…
Map markers are the worst development in open-world games
Before I start, I don’t want this to sound like a direct criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 given that it, too, is guilty of this and I wrote about the game just yesterday. This is a broad point about pretty much all open world games to have been released in the last decade or so. I…
Cyberpunk 2077
Oh no, here we go. It’s been a strange old few months hasn’t it? Never have I seen such a high profile game dogged by so much controversy. We had outrage over the release date being moved, then moved again. We had outrage over crunch conditions. We had outrage over the game’s promotion and depictions…
Retrospective: GreedFall
Spiders is one of my favourite developers. According to their website, they currently employ over twenty people which, in the grand scheme of videogames, makes them a pretty minute company but they consistently punch far above their weight. The thing with the games industry is we kind of have AAA Games, some other stuff, Indie…
On Epic, revenue-shares, and manufactured outrage
Many many moons ago, back when I was fifteen or so studying economics at school, I wrote a project for my coursework about the economics of videogames. One diagram I included was a pie-chart I made of the various slices of a game’s RRP that went to each of the various elements involved in getting…
The Problem with Fusing Narrative into Open-World Game Design
How to weave a game’s narrative neatly into its open-world design is a problem every game of that type faces. There is an inherent silliness in having a player spend most of their time rummaging around for collectables while the end of the world is looming, and this issue gets more pronounced the more straight-faced…
Mad Max: Retrospective
I wrote about this game four years ago – I loved it then, and I still love it now. Is it a perfect game? No. Are there things I wish it could have done better? Yes, because this second question is redundant. I wish the survival mechanics were fleshed out – it’s too easy to…
On the next The Elder Scrolls game
In all likelihood, we won’t see another main The Elder Scrolls game for a considerable time since there’s been next-to-no information teased yet. The gap between Morrowind and Oblivion was a quaintly tiny four years, the gap between Oblivion and Skyrim a meagre five years and although the gap between Skyrim and now is already…
The Outer Worlds
Initial impressions after the first few hours Minor Spoilers below Okay I’ve played a bit now – have passed the point of the first moral choiceâ„¢ having been fairly completionist about that area, and a few side missions and what-not beyond that. So I think I’ve played enough to get a flavour for the game…