Opening Baldur's Gate

This is something of a first-and-continued impressions of the phenomenally successful Baldur’s Gate 3, released by Larian Studios in 2023. I delayed writing anything on the game for several weeks because I was simply not having a very good time with it, but I was pretty sure the game wasn’t to blame. To put it bluntly: I sucked, and it made the game deeply unfun to play. After persevering for around 20 in-game hours (with probably 5-8 hours lost in reloading saves after various failures) I finally started to get it, and find the fun.

New Cycle: Humanity on the Brink

New Cycle entered early-access a few days ago and I was tempted enough to take a look at the latest in an ever-growing niche of mid-size city-builders. What I found was a startling, melancholy requiem for humanity, teetering on the brink of disaster, yet stoically carrying on, perhaps in vain. 

New Cycle fits into a genre of colony-management and/or city-building games that operate at the scale of individual citizens and buildings. At the far end of the city simulation genre you have, of course, SimCity and Cities: Skylines, which set as their target a mimesis of the North American urban-suburban sprawl configured around freeway interchanges and zoning laws. At the other end of the simulation genre is the Sims franchise, which simulates the daily lives of individual people, their ambitions and trials, along with the exact placement of dining tables and stairs inside each home.

Aloy’s Heroic Feminism in Horizon: Forbidden West

 

The image above represents two of the first results in Google when searching “Horizon Zero Dawn feminism” and clearly depicts how any art criticism works. On one hand we have an example touting Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD) as a breakthrough, and on the other, as a disappointment. As it ever was, and probably always will be – but where does that leave us when looking at the sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West (HFW)?

The criticism of “Matt C.” from Digitally Downloaded noted above centers on the assessment of Aloy as the female equivalent of a space marine trope who doesn’t feel multifaceted and human. She is, he says “robbed her of any sort of sexual identity." 

In erasing the entire concept of sexuality, [from the game world] Horizon denies Aloy – and every other character in that game – any sense of sexual identity and agency. That’s fundamentally at odds with a pillar of feminist ideology. (Digitally Downloaded)

Matt C. is also critical of the Nora tribe’s matriarchal system of leadership, saying that the game does little or nothing with it, and certainly does not explore or interrogate the differences between the matriarchal Nora and other tribes in the game.

This criticism is misguided, and unfortunately narrows the concept of feminism in media to merely the task of an overt discussion of sexuality and sexism as plot points. This reminds me of the tendency in the games industry to reduce the speaking opportunities of women in the industry to panels about being a woman in the industry, rather than speaking to their technical, creative or professional expertise. This view suggests the ideal (perhaps only?) feminist action that a woman (real or fictional) can take is to talk about female sexuality or otherwise being female.

Horizon: Forbidden West - Kinesthetics of Combat

In Horizon: Forbidden West, Guerilla Games have created the most satisfying combat experience that I’ve had in a game—maybe ever. I will try not to stray into hyperbole in this piece, but clearly, HFW hit almost every note right for me, and I will have more to say about the rest of the game in the coming weeks. For now, though, we will concentrate on the kinesthetics of Aloy, her combat abilities, and the enemies she faces.

Years ago, I questioned the common wisdom that first-person games are more immersive and ‘visceral’ than third-person games. Supposedly, the camera-through-the-eyes experience places the player more squarely in the shoes of the player-character, and creates a deeper sense of immersion. For me, however, I find myself distracted by the way the incorporeality of the character affects movement and vision, and the extremely strange way that one’s hands are almost always visible. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim in particular suffers from this, in that the player-character can be sprinting across an open field, not even carrying a weapon, and still their hands are held out in front like a cartoon mummy’s.

Far Cry New Dawn: All in the Family

Far Cry New Dawn was released in 2019 as a spin off of Far Cry 5. The game was initially priced at about $40 which reflects its limited scope. Speaking broadly, I am strongly in favor of developers making further use of already-developed assets such as the world of Hope County, the dialog and weapon systems, and whatever else they can repurpose. Developing new open world games is a massive undertaking, and supposing that each one can hold only one story, only one game experience, is absurd. 

That said, the Hope County presented by New Dawn is in fact fairly reworked, both to reflect time’s passage after the apocalyptic end of FC5, and to, I suspect, give the game an aesthetic recognizably distinct in single screen shots. That aesthetic can be summed up in a single word: pink. Everything is pink! From the rolling fields of blossoms to the many train carriages, storage containers, cars both derelict and running, and even the game’s interface, everything glows with a hot neon pink. I was immediately reminded of the similar spin-off-expansion: inFAMOUS First Light, which bears a similar style.

New Dawn barrels right into the contradictions in tone that Far Cry is famous for. On one hand we have an overarching narrative theme of “family” – everyone is related to someone in this game. Our main quest-giving guide is none other than Kim Rye, whose daughter Carmina was born during the events of Far Cry 5 (with the player’s help of course). We will rescue the pilot and father Nick Rye early on as well. Our main antagonists are twin sisters: Mickey and Lou, who constantly refer to their Old Man. Hurk Drubman Jr. has a child, who is apparently under the care of his cousin Sharky Boshaw. Joseph Seed, it turns out, also has had a son who has taken up leadership of New Eden, remnants of the Project at Eden’s Gate cult.

Far Cry 5: An Illustrative Mess

When performing criticism of a videogame, I feel that playing it some time after its release presents certain advantages: firstly, we are removed from the marketing hype that has built up some expectations in the player, which may or may not be delivered by the game itself. Next, the game is in a more ‘complete’ state after additions, game of the year editions, and various patches are applied. Lastly, in some cases, there is a removal from the particular social moment of the game’s release which can provide a new lens through which to view the game. This three-part defamiliarization adds up to provide an interesting, and I think, beneficial perspective from which to review a game. This is not to say that this five-years-late review is the proper way to consider a game, certainly I wouldn’t preference one method above the other in absolute terms. However, in my overall pursuit to use criticism to add meaning to games rather than to provide a buyer’s guide, then I feel this approach is just as valid as any other.

Playing Ubisoft's Far Cry 5 (FC5) in 2023 is certainly an experience unlike any other. The game follows the now well-established structure of the Far Cry series which involves a discrete chunk of territory being gradually 'liberated’ from a hostile force through individual, guerilla-style tactics. The silent player-character arrives as an outsider who works with locals to unite a resistance and turn the tide on the enemy forces. In this case the “Project at Eden’s Gate” is a Christian doomsday cult whose charismatic, hipster-styled leader Joseph Seed is bent on preparing his flock for the great collapse of society. He and his three siblings (Jacob, Faith, and John) have taken violent control of the fictitious “Hope County” set in the American state of Montana. 

Before moving any farther, we must reiterate the point here: FC5 positions a group of Christian Americans, led by a quartet of white champions as the enemy. The innumerable members of the cult are not exclusively white (indeed they are perhaps a more diverse racial group than one might expect to find in a real Montana), but these enemies are definitely not presented as a brown-skinned ‘other’ with exotic characteristics and religion. Many, many games are criticized for the facile dehumanization of the enemy through that kind of race-based othering, not least of all the Far Cry series. Whatever else follows, Ubisoft published a game where a group of American Christians are the bad guys. This should not be lost. 

Just Give Me Two Good Reasons

One of the dominant features of open-world games such as FarCry 5 is that they are big. Really big. The scale of the map is an often discussed feature of such games, but so too are the myriad activities and overall "playtime" that a game can offer. Presumably more is better, but I find myself getting bogged down if a game is too big. 

FarCry 5 follows a familiar pattern of dividing Hope County up into several regions. Three are the main areas for play, with two much smaller zones acting as introductory and concluding bookends. Each of the main three regions are controlled by one of the Eden's Gate lieutenants, and feature some gently stylized environmental features and challenges. For example, in Faith's region, the hallucinogenic 'bliss' is manufactured out of the fields of lily-like flowers found around the region. The basic mechanic is that the player character ("Rook" or "Deputy"), takes on each lieutenant in turn through a network of loosely connected 'story' and 'side' missions. They can also destroy various assets and liberate outposts in each region. 

All of this accumulates as "Resistance Points" within the given region. There are a few milestones where the game suddenly intervenes with some strong deus ex machina to advance the overarching plot. The final milestone in each region is that the lieutenant will call the player out in some way, triggering the final boss-like showdown and finally liberating the region. 

With all that exposition out of the way, I can talk about how it worked for me. I find that the story missions can really derail my enthusiasm for these games. Too much talking to minor NPCs of tremendously varied quality and interest, sending me on the archetypal errand quests of some sort or another. Even though this really is the crux of any open world game, I find myself hitting a limit pretty fast. 

What suddenly happened in FarCry 5 was that I realized there were dozens of challenges that would award my character upgrade "perks" depending on how I played. So, as I browsed the challenges, which range from killing a certain number of enemies with a particular weapon, to killing a certain number of enemies from a certain distance, I suddenly had two birds I could address with one stone (or flamethrower, dynamite, or whatever). 

These challenges are not particularly inspired nor are they unique to FarCry 5. In fact, this sort of encouragement to play the game differently based on weapons and approach is almost as ubiquitous as the open world design described above. 

I argue that it is common because it is effective. I could turn my attention more to the 'how' rather than the 'what' when I got a little bored of liberating outposts or defending territory. Instead of my usual sniper and stealth approach, I used a flamethrower up close in a wildly different playstyle. I was making two sorts of progress, then, and that was enough to get my over a certain hump in the overall game. 

As the unlocks started to trickle and then flow, I found the game easier, since not only did I have more tools at my disposal, but I also had practiced a few different techniques for dealing with the game's challenges. That helped me progress faster, which was the problem in the first place. 

This layering of incentives is a crucial element to longer games. Personally, I'd like to see this design feature extrapolated outside of videogame design. The area I always think of is education. How can we make the incentives more varied and explicit in the years-long process of getting a degree? Is there a way we can help students not endure but enjoy the various challenges we throw at them?