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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to spin off of a topic that started on the Blaugust Discord. Side note and a bit of a plug… every single day there are discussions like this happening there. Ultimately a conversation thread spun up in the Post Discussion channel about what actually denotes the title “Indie Game” and to a lesser extent what makes something a “AAA Game”. These two terms are often times bandied about as opposite ends of some sliding spectrum. What I present to you today is that we often use terms with concrete certainty like “hardcore” or “casual” without them really having any concrete meaning associated with them. I feel the same is entirely true for what we think of as “Indie Games”.

I first heard the term “indie” as referred to record labels or bands. I remember listening to a lot of great albums on Sub Pop or SST. Collectively it was agreed that this term meant any band or label that did not get big label support and as a result was not getting much in the way of airplay on the radio. This sort of music was largely relegated to college radio stations or other smaller independently owned stations that had programming other than “Top 40”. I still remember the weird feeling when Red Hot Chili Peppers crossed over from being a very underground phenomena to being on a major label and that you could find cassette singles in Walmart or hear them on the local rock radio station. However just as the fact that radio has no real relevance anymore, I would suggest that “Indie” doesn’t mean a whole lot in gaming terms either.

To illustrate this point, let’s have a thought experiment. I present to you four games that all have had fairly wide success. Which of these are independent games? How do you even quantify what independent means? I see lots of twitter accounts for example heralding that they only play Indie games to give Indie developers airtime… but what does that even mean really? Does “Indie” denote a design ethic or an art style, or does it simply mean an independently held studio not owned by a large publisher or first party platform? Let’s break down each of these four games and present the information we know about each of them.

• Hades – Developed by Supergiant Games which is a studio of around 20 people. Supergiant originally had a publishing contract with Warner Bro.s Interactive Software, but more recently they entered into an exclusive publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive that relates specifically to physical game editions.
• Valheim – Developed by Iron Gate Studio which at the time of creating the game had around 5 employees. This was published through Coffee Stain Publishing, which was acquired by Embracer Group in 2018.
• Death Stranding – Developed by Kojima Productions LLC which is an independently held studio reformed out of the ashes of a similarly named studio once owned by Konami. It has around 80 employees and the development of Death Stranding was in part funded through a timed exclusive deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Additionally there is a publishing deal with 505 Games to handle the PC release only.
• Cuphead – Developed by Studio MDHR with a staff of around 20 people. This was funded in part due to an exclusivity deal with Microsoft that lasted a little over a year.

So again I ask you, which of these games is an “Indie”? The truth is I really do not know. Before this thought experiment I would have said Death Stranding was not but Valheim was… however in truth the data could flip in the opposite direction given that Embracer Group is now one of the largest publishers. My original definition of what made an Indie studio would fall along these lines:

An Independent Games studio is any studio not owned exclusively by a first party platform or is not the exclusive subsidiary of one of the major games publishers.

So under that language if you were not owned by one of the platforms of publishers that held big ticket E3 shows… you were an Indie. By that specific verbiage every game in the above list would qualify as “Indie”. However I feel like that might be disingenuous as often times there is another criteria that folks bring into the mix. That of course is budget and the truth is I could not find any reasonable numbers surrounding the budget of any of the titles above. My gut reaction would be that Death Stranding had the highest production budget and Valheim the lowest… with the others taking the middle ground and probably Hades having a higher budget than Cuphead.

I still say that right now, with the way that games work and publishing in general happens between the assorted platforms… that none of these titles have any real meaning. I would say the same is true with AAA games… which is a term I found out yesterday apparently comes from the ratings of financial bonds. We are going through a really weird phase, especially with Microsoft acquiring what used to be large publishers to turn them into semi-exclusive vassal states. I think in the coming years the differentiators between all of these terms will become more meaningless. While we as human beings love to classify things into silos, I submit that the only meaningful designation right now is “games I enjoyed” and “games I did not enjoy”.

I know I am riding on the fumes of a discussion that has already died down on the Blaugust Discord, but if you have any more thoughts to add to the mix I would love to see them below.

Yesterday Blizzard released a recruitment pitch looking for new talent to work on a currently unannounced survival game. We know almost nothing about this other than based on the concept art provided that it appears to be leaning into a more fantasy world/through the looking glass feel. Though at this stage I am doubting you can really read much into this one. It makes sense that Blizzard would be exploring this genre because it isn’t one that they have a game in. For decades the Blizzard model has been to take a game genre that is reaching maturity, and then release a highly polished version of it that leans on the best features of everything else out on the market. If the company still has any of its magic dust left, survival is absolutely a genre that could use coalescing into a better game.

One of the challenges with survival games as a whole is there are already a good number of pillars of that landscape. Ark, Rust, and The Forest are likely the biggest players, but you have a number of smaller games that have had their own “phenomena” moments like Valheim where everyone seemed to be playing them. Most recently New World has proven that there is still a lot of interest in the genre and that folks are looking for a more complete game experience. Unfortunately also in the case of New World it has been proven that players will not put up with a crappy game experience as its player base has dwindled to a peak of just under a million players to a current peak of just over seventy thousand.

New World however is a tale of mismanagement pure and simple. From the short sighted server design, to the history of patches that destroy entire chunks of the game, to the questionable reliance on a game ethos that appears to be counter to what the players wanted. I feel like if New World were a game that could support large communities and had an interesting progression that did not feel openly antagonistic towards its player base… it would have been a multi million player game. So if Blizzard can come along behind something like New World and learn from its mistakes, then I fully expect it would be a success. Pending of course that the company is able to deal with all of its hostile working conditions bullshit in a reasonable manner.

I do however wonder if this might be one of the first changes we have seen as a result of the Microsoft acquisition plans. No matter how successful a Blizzard Survival game might be, it was never going to be a success on the order of magnitude of the Call of Duty franchise. Activision Blizzard seemed to only care about games that would be that level of success, given how many studios were lashed to the support of that single franchise. Phil Spencer has already shown interest in breaking up that Call of Duty machine and letting studios create different sorts of games. So I am wondering if this is creating an environment where it is okay to move forward with smaller games. Based on some comments from Mike Ybarra it sounds like maybe this game has been in pre-production for a bit. I just wonder if the talk of the acquisition is creating breathing room for games that might be ideal for Game Pass.

It is way the hell too early to tell if I would be interested in a Blizzard Survival game, but I will say what I am very interested in is someone making good on the potential that New World had. Amazon Game Studios has proven time and time again that they do not have what it takes to make that game a success. Proof of this comes again within the last 24 hours when a patch has broken a good number of the games systems including storage and crafting and produced at last count 267 significant bugs. In addition to actual bugs they took measures to obfuscate the player count, so that the player base would have a harder time seeing drops in population which is never a good sign. So essentially I want someone to make good on the promise of this genre and present something that is stable and designed in a manner as not to fragment the player base and prevent us from all playing together.

When a survival game is good, it is this blissful experience of exploration and discovery. When it is bad it is a frustrating skinner box designed to focus grinding of the player base and create a flytrap of forced engagement. I would love to see Blizzard bring with them knowledge they have learned from other genres and produce a leap forward in the survival game genre. I am just not entirely certain if I believe that Blizzard is still a company that can do this. Shadowlands has been a miserable experience, and I have serious doubts about if Diablo 4 is going to be the game I hope it might be. I am still holding out a glimmer of hope though that the Microsoft Acquisition will create a lot of net positive effects within the company that will ultimately improve the quality of their products.

So what are your thoughts about the prospect of a Blizzard Survival Game? Drop me a line below.

This weekend I wrapped up my play-through of Guardians of the Galaxy and had a pretty great time with the game. I started the game up on Thursday and last night early in the evening I finished the final chapter. All told if steam is to be believed it was a little over fifteen hours worth of game-play. I have to admit I had initially shown zero interest in this game because I fully expected it to be similar to Marvels Avengers since it has that same sort of feel to it. If someone would have told me that this was originally intended to be an expansion for that game but was spun off into a single player adventure… I probably would have believed them because it is going for the same “almost MCU” graphical style.

However where Avengers felt like a generic rehashing of the looter shooter genre… Guardians of the Galaxy has so much fun and heart packed into this short experience. It does a really excellent job of splitting the difference between the comic book Guardians and the MCU Guardians. If you were a fan of the comics, you get a better version of Starlord and Gamora as well as a lot of interesting easter eggs along the way and characters you likely never expected to encounter. If you were only a fan of the MCU movies, then the characters are close enough to make it feel fairly familiar and still be an enjoyable ride. The story told is extremely enjoyable and has all sorts of twists and turns and chaotic interludes before wrapping up with some pretty damned emotional moments. Each of the characters grows as you travel through this adventure… well minus Groot maybe because we still don’t really know for certain what the hell he is saying.

Probably the worst thing that the game has going for it, is that combat in general is pretty bland. It starts off fun enough and as you unlock additional elemental weapons those sprinkle in some entertaining effects, but ultimately feels very repetitive. Combat tends to come in waves where you encounter a few packs of baddies before moving on to the next area, and there are absolutely times especially towards the end where I wish I could have skipped some of it. The game would have also benefited greatly from an ability to swap your perspective between the Guardians. You are stuck playing shootmans the entire game when it would have been more entertaining if you could have taken over Gamora or Groot and changed up the pace of combat greatly. There is a “skill reload” system where if you time your reload at exactly the right time it fires a pulse of energy that deals a large amount of damage. However after doing this hundreds of times it just feels gimmicky and not really fun anymore.

The game also has a lot of mini-games, where you are asked to do a thing with little to noexplanation of how it works. The worst of these is the Llama puzzle. Essentially Kammy the Space Llama likes it when certain characters sing, and hates it when other character sing… and you have to use this in order to steer her into this target zone. I do not love mini-games in the best of times, but I sincerely wish that there were skip buttons when one of these comes up in a game so that we can resume playing the ACTUAL game. The other problem that I ran into constantly is the fact that ship combat really does not work with a mouse and keyboard. The controls are way the hell too twitchy with the mouse and I wound up having to hook up a controller each time the game decided I needed to dog fight in the Milano.

The other challenge that I encountered constantly is that the game is exceptionally bad at messaging things that you need to do. Often times you learn what you need to do by failing… over and over again until you finally realize where you were supposed to jump at a moments notice. This happens constantly with any section where you are sliding down a chute, and pieces of the ground drop out from under you… and you effectively need to know to jump BEFORE this happens not in reaction to it happening. Generally speaking the game resets you back quickly and you can get into the action and try again. However there are a few cases where this happens AFTER a cutscene and the checkpoint is before the beginning of the cutscene forcing you to sit through the dialog again before trying to do the thing correctly. You can manually save, but these are mostly useless because upon loading the save you will start back at the beginning of the nearest checkpoint rather than the exact moment you saved.

One of my favorite parts about this game is the huddle system. Every so often during the battle a synergy meter will fill and you can “Huddle Up”. During this you talk to your team and based on their current moods you either need to tell them something to bolster the moods or something to calm them down and keep them from getting sloppy. If you make the right decision, they get pumped, gain a buff, and you are treated to a montage set to some 80s song. The music is absolutely one of the highlights of the game, and much like the MCU movie it is a soundtrack picked out from the greatest hits of that era. The huddle theme though can be a little weird at times… like during one boss fight it started playing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” which is not exactly asskicking music.

I get that at this point… you are thinking… Bel you have mostly just talked about negatives here, why should I play this? The truth is, I was sold entirely for the story experience. In fact at some point pretty early into this experience I dialed the difficulty down all the way just so I could get to the next bit of story a little quicker. Honestly for me I probably would have liked this better as a walking simulator or something more akin to the Telltale Style of adventure game. Combat was fine, but not terribly enjoyable and the boss battles often times felt like they drug on two or three times as long as they should have. The story though was a freaking blast and I hope that maybe this same team gives us another Guardians adventure in the future.

So where I land on this game is that I am very glad that I played through it. Would I suggest it to someone who is a fan of the Guardians comic? Absolutely, there are a ton of Easter eggs that you are going to spot along the way. Would I suggest it to someone who has only ever seen the movies? Absolutely, it is going to be close enough to what you remember to still feel familiar. However in both cases I would probably suggest waiting for this to go on sale. The combat is not terribly enjoyable and just feels like busy work to gate you from getting to the next bit of story. If you do pick it up I suggest playing on the lowest difficulty because I think it will be the story that keeps you going rather than the combat that mostly feels the same at the end of the game as it did at the very beginning.