playing skyrim is a weirdly pliant experience, like wrestling a giant man who has no bones, every time you push and expect some resistance he just bends easily into a new uncomfortable-looking shape, all the while wearing the same expression and emitting goopy jeremy soule muzak. you push and pull an all the time you’re going, why did i do that? why am i doing this?
very essence-of-videogames feeling, i played a lot of that game and don’t feel like it’s a stretch to say the thing i found comforting about it was the sense of total nullity. there was no sense of a thing which had traces of other people’s consciousness in it for your own to bounce off of. it never managed to feign meaning either on an emotional or gameplay level and so never felt “closed”, any effort you put into it felt diffused and wasted. like crawling on a mirror in the road. i wouldn’t say it’s a good experience or one i have any good memories of but maybe better than similar types of thing that are more effective at pushing the player’s buttons or simulating purposefulness. maybe that’s why it’s always so tempting as a reference point, the sense of something closest to the real heart of these things.
yeah, weirdly i think this sensation is the best part of the game to me? like if the premise of an open world game is to simulate the experience of being able to explore an unknown realm, streamlining the experience of actually traveling through space, while at the same time making so many aspects of that space feel so impersonal and arbitrary actually makes it better. the problem i have with open world action games in the witcher 3 mold is that it is too easy for travel/exploration to feel too directed. it’s like an easter egg hunt and the game designers are your parents, but they want you to think they’re the easter bunny? but you know they aren’t. skyrim is so impersonal that it feels like the easter bunny is still fake, but is like, a malfunctioning AI rather than your parents.
this is weird to articulate because i actually find procedurally generated stuff to be totally uninteresting. it’s like i need it to be designed by humans, but i need those humans to be more interested in doing something other than hiding little curated experiences for me to discover. i don’t know, it’s pretty incoherent the more i think about it.
but i do think a big part of the reason skyrim worked for me is the way experience and leveling is tied to actions you take, not objectives you complete. i know there are issues with that, too, and figuring out how to exploit it to level up certain things quickly is kind of gimmicky, but it does make the game feel less like you are just relentlessly scanning every quadrant of the map looking for new things to interact with. something about that kind of gameplay loop just makes me feel like i’d rather read a book instead
you know what else the people are starved for https://twitter.com/pukicho/status/1505697250885861376
select button doctrine. there are kids out there who want a better way to think but they have to reinvent the wheel in their heads because who is going to help them out there, kotaku? kotaku is where you go to find out hard hitting news and insights like, “Elden Ring Fans Are Using Cheats To Equip Notorious Cut Underwear.”
yeah i’m increasingly feeling like i dodged a bullet even with the assumption that i wouldn’t have to work too closely with hunicke
seeing a bunch of faculty come out with words that are essentially “yes, the video is accurate and more”
nothing internally in the CM email list yet, maybe i’ll just throw it in there before i dip to san diego
it’s been hard to fight this increasing feeling of games just like, not having room for me; after the phd rejection i started applying to jobs and some of those were games jobs and they were the only ones that got back to me with resounding rejections despite me being a pretty spot-on fit for the job description
that and the ever-increasing consolidation such that all roads lead to amazon or facebook eventually is really solidifying that i probably should not have even applied to things even industry-adjacent like the cm phd program, no place is free from this kind of thing, and the worst part is that i feel like i had the correct read and still tried anyway
i’m still trying to pull a daniel kaluuya and get out but i need to figure out how to do that kind of all over again
I was the first skyrim hater on the internet (please don’t look up my badly written skyrim review) and I can’t imagine playing skyrim when enderal exists to take the skyrim experience into never before seen eurojank directions.
enderal with the engarde mod and true directional movement mod is a better open world souls game than elden ring
Enderal is really fucking good and despite petering out without finishing due to eventual overleveling making all the systems even out and become meaningless I still think about restarting it all the time.
Still surprised to see the Canon Films method (create a trailer for a game that doesn’t exist, start making the game if it gets enough wishlists) working for these companies.
my sister just explained to me how she carefully examined this image for an hour and determined that is a cat school medallion, though it doesn’t look like the cat school medallion in witcher 3, it looks like a lynx and the cat school armor in the game is described as being a lynx, and this is good because the cat school is banned from kaer morhen, which keeps them away from any geralt shit, and they are known for recruiting elves and even, sometimes, women, and their imperfect mutation regimen exacerbates mental illness, therefore: female mentally ill protagonist confirmed.
