As a school teacher, the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation is something I face on a day to day basis. You cannot teach a student to be intrinsically motivated, but you can force them to be extrinsically motivated. Grades, parental pressure, peer to peer comparisons, even compliments from the authority figure. These methods do not get students to suddenly become invested in learning about math, science, literature, etc. They do, however, get them to put effort into learning regardless of what little joy they find in it.
Such is the way of public education. A constant push and pull between individualized education for the diverse group of students in the world as well as ensuring their skills and knowledge is apt for the future of our society. The best thing a teacher can do then within said system is create an environment for the students to find a love of learning regardless of the exams, grades, and other negatives. If you think back to your favorite teachers in school there is likely something they did to instill a level of passion or joy for just coming into the classroom each day. If they matched really well with you perhaps they got you invested in a new topic or career path.

In many ways I find that the AAA game landscape is similar to public education in how its goal is to appeal to the masses. Public education serves everyone who does not have the opportunity to choose a private school or homeschooled education. Those situations end up being highly specialized areas where the expectations and results can be controlled due to the individual interests of the stakeholders being more considered. AAA games try to make experiences that are broadly appealing and interesting, niche appeals and interests can’t be catered to as to get the most people involved as possible. So like in public education they overcorrect the expectations for the player and try to implement rigid and clear methods of both punishment and reward with the ultimate goal of getting to the end.

Nintendo, the video game industry’s local House of Mouse, is a notable producer due to their seemingly massive amounts of Quality Control put into their top titles. They are a system built to get people from all backgrounds interested in games, as Disney is the same with animation. Though realistically most games they make are still reliant on very cheap extrinsic design. One does not have to look much further than this same year’s Super Mario Odyssey as a game whose core loop is based on an empty, extrinsic “grab all the moons” open world style. A game whose mechanics bore much discussion but there isn’t really much to say about the middling open world design of the game.

Breath of the Wild of course stands as a sharp difference to most AAA games on the market, even those created by the Japanese Michael Mouse itself. It is a game when discussed is about free flowing decision making as opposed to an accomplishment of objectives. For this review I will simply point to the current third most liked review of the game on the site by @JimTheSchoolGirl which will be my cheap short hand to show why many people love this game. The game itself is less focused on you, the player, beating it but instead giving you different opportunities to interact with systems and create your own creative solution to multiple problem solving situations. Jimminy was never told to do the things he listed here as a goal or a scripted sequence, this was meaningful because he decided to do this himself.
This is Intrinsic Motivation at work. This is something most game designers (and teachers) find nearly impossible to discover naturally but not only did this work for Jimminy, it has worked for hundreds of thousands of other people who salivate at the mere idea of this game. How in the world did they do it?

That’s not any easy question to dissect and give a short answer. It begins with things like the art style and music along with other aesthetic elements having that draw that appeals to many people. That part is the Disney effect so to speak. The game simply looks appealing and accessible without any fluff. That isn’t something to be said about most games especially for Immersive Sims which BOTW is often compared to.
That’s step one. Give people the invitation into the game. If we continue with the Public School Analogy this is the mandatory attendance, the part that gets butts in seats. Except for the fact that games are profit driven and not really meant to raise the next generation (oh dear god hopefully).

The next step is expressed easiest in the intro. You cannot begin a free form adventure in chaos. Most games that do not give you much advice in the beginning are doomed to not appeal to the masses. The developers solution to this was to have a restrictive tutorial with clear objectives before putting the foot on the gas. Much ado has been said about the tutorial island so I won’t dive too deeply into how it was designed, but I will say there are two pulling factors here that cause it to pull in everyone who has begun playing it.
One: A clear problem to solve. 4 shrines, 4 items, one area.
Two: Multifaceted solutions along with many smaller problems existing in the same area (temperature, guardians, weapon durability, etc.)
These combine together to form something similar to what is referred to as Problem Based Learning (PBL) in education. I am not an expert in this subject to be honest, but I will do my best to point out how these function in terms of building Intrinsic Motivation.

The first part is the clear meaningful problem to the participant. Oftentimes a PBL uses some local phenomena (forgive me if I use too many education terms lmao) to anchor itself in the minds of the student, similar to how the island creates a clear and immediate issue in the mind of the player. Secondly there’s many smaller issues in the way that the individual must consider in completing their final task. The game splits up the task into four shrines, each with their own smaller problems surrounding them, however often in Education it requires the students to go through an engineering process of design and redesign. The loop is similar enough to compare them since the player must constantly rebuild their knowledge base with each issue that comes up along the way from dealing with various enemies, climbing, dealing with cold weather, and interacting with natural objects like trees.
The goal of a PBL is that the student is self-sufficient. It stands in stark contrast to the sort of null hypothesis of Teacher Centered learning. Things like lectures and rote memorization as opposed to giving the students agency to investigate solutions on their own end and learn what they need to know at their own pace. This, as you can probably guess, is the line between Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation. Being able to give an individual their own agency to solve a given, relevant issue makes it far easier for someone to get invested in something. In education that is what is called Student Centered Learning, and in Breath of the Wild that is the interaction with many systems that is exemplified in the Tutorial Island.

The benefit of the player learning this other than a sense of pride, is that the designers are able to give them different complex problems within the same system and it is up to the player to engage and figure out solutions. This knowledge base can grow for new problems and new experiences, from riding horses, dealing with more complex enemies, the glider, and the dungeons in the game. A PBL exists to get students invested for the duration of the topic before the class starts again with something new to move on to. However the skills gained in the process are invaluable as the topics become more complex.

Of course on the other hand, many people fall off of Breath of the Wild. I know I stopped playing once I hit about 20 hours in and I have no intention to return. It isn’t really hard to see why either in this case. While it manages to draw in a massive amount of people to be naturally entranced to explore the world it creates that won’t ever work for everyone. In fact, to say that most gamers are intrinsically motivated to play games is foolish bait. I have many a person in my Twitter circle that will claim x game/genre is better because of what the player can invest themselves into, but that’s ultimately a very narrow view of the appeal of Video Games. Much of the appeal of gaming can be the rigidity of systems based in extrinsic motivation, hence why the mobile market is the most popular and successful. It is nice to have a simple goal with clear success and failure states (the discourse around Vampire Survivors has made this much more apparent lately).

One of the main issues of Breath of the Wild is that the developers and the game itself do not trust themselves. The core hook, while wonderful, will not keep everyone engaged to the very end. There is never much growth in how the game builds it’s problem solving. The comparison of a PBL often becomes tenuous particularly when it comes to time. A given PBL lesson will last typically around 4-7 hours spread throughout a week or so, this game lasts 30+ hours. There is no growth in these systems as they are introduced early on. There are very few new systems that are introduced as well, and often the ones that are introduced often only take a few moments to solve. There are many extrinsic rewards and objectives littering the game, however you do not do the shrines or divine beasts because they appeal to the feeling of beauty and exploration the game holds within. You do them because there are rewards or because the sensation of checking off an objective on a list is appealing. In so the game does not create objectives to enhance its core experience, but instead to attempt to distract from the flaws of its lack of dynamism.
After 20 hours you may not have seen everything the game has to offer but you certainly can feel like you have. That mileage depends on the person too. Some people will drop Twitter clips in the year of our lord 2022 showing crazy interactions in the game, others like myself will drop it to never pick it up again part way through. The truth is that the game does not build upon its core. It takes a very big “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach which, while respectable, did not entrance me in the way it did for many other players. Once I hit that 20 hour mark I said to myself “This game’s sequel will be straight up bussin’.” Jury’s out to see if that’s really true, but I would imagine the designers are more aware of what I discussed here than I am fr fr.

Breath of the Wild is a fascinating game that causes many regular people to fall in love with its world through Intrinsic Motivation. It fails often because outside of the core systems it does not provide any quality content for the players to engage in, things such as shrines and dungeons exist to fill time rather than improve the experience. I would certainly go so far as to call Breath of the Wild a classic, but it fails in so many ways I won’t gas it up like everyone else on the planet.
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Hey what's up gamers. I don’t really vibe with the author’s note but I will say this is the start of a “series” of sorts where I compare game design and Pedagogy since I think there’s more overlap than people readily consider. Really though this is my Copium of focusing on my career at the moment rather than trying to actually make a game haha. Eventually I will make that sweet game though and hopefully it’ll be good. Ideally it involves punching Dracula but we’ll see what happens.

Important thing to note is I’m a Master’s student in Education and have only taught for one year so far. I’m not really an expert, but I do have a lot of observations so please feel free to critique me and ask pedagogical questions. I’m always happy to tell people about how Teaching works haha.

Also shout outs to my homie @SimonDedalus for his review of Resident Evil 4 which certainly influenced my writing here in more ways than one.

The concept of the depths were very exciting to me but once I explored it and realised there is nothing there all of the charm and magic of the game disappeared. The building mechanics are cool and exciting at first too, thinking of all the stuff you could do with them until you realise the game never challenges you to think outside the box with anything. An empty canvas is boring and bland , back me into a corner and make me think and something interesting might happen. I hated the Divine Beast dungeons in BotW and the dungeons in this one are as bad/worse, an exercise in tedium.

Tears of the Kingdom is radically and unintentionally about intrinsic motivation. All the building blocks are placed right in front of you, but you'll have to assemble them yourself. This is nothing new for pure sandbox games, but TOTK isn't supposed to be a pure sandbox game! In its best moments, it harnesses this: even mundane challenges are an opportunity to spark creativity. In its worst, it resents this, and will fight your agency tooth-and-nail.

Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.

This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.

But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?

Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!

These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.

But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.

And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.

Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.

The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.

Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!

Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!

For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.

Fallout 3 is a vast space of solitude one can live deep inside. There is a strange rule of god to its ecosystem, hundreds of NPCs left to their own devices, choppy sentience peaking though the random encounters, schrodinger's iguana on a stick disappearing and reappearing in your oven, mole rat corpses glitchily migrating through the walls of your sewer home, the exact missile launcher you left stashed on the floor clips a block away to be discovered days later.

By the time I reached the robobrain simulation vault, I had 300 hours into the game, and holy fuck...

This won best writing at the GDC Awards if you want to understand how dire video game writing and what's considered good writing has been. Emil Pagliarulo is the enemy of the written word, there is no clumsy piece of dialogue or ham-fisted theme he can't make worse beyond your wildest imagination.

The morality and gameplay have been completely gutted of previous Fallout complexity, and in its place the Bethesda formula has been injected. For what it's worth, it's not a bad formula. Exploration guarantees you finding something weird and interesting. Once you abandon the hope of finding something meaningful and thought-provoking and accept it as a series of vignettes of bizarre stuff it goes down cleaner.

It does abandon the Monty Python jokes of Fallout 2 though, which is a net improvement. Very much a mixed bag.

There was some serious work put into crafting its levels and making its arsenal fun to use, but it's held back by a number of issues in other areas, namely repetition, enemy variety and humor.

The Good:

Good workhorse weapons with plenty of ammo - Quality level design

The Bad:

Irritating enemy types - Uneven arsenal - Bugs and glitches - Repetitive and overstays its welcome - Poor humor
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Announced in 2018 as a sequel to the underwhelming Bombshell, the legally embattled Ion Maiden (which I will henceforth refuse to refer to by its lawyer-compliant name "Ion Fury") decided to abandon the generic look and gameplay of its predecessor to boldly go where no one had gone in about 20 years: back to making a fully original shooter on the Build Engine that powered classics such as Duke 3D, Blood and Shadow Warrior (the "holy trinity" of build), as well as lesser productions like Powerslave DOS, Redneck Rampage, Witchaven and more. Released in 2019 to generally positive reviews, it significantly contributed to the 90s throwback shooter resurgence, along with games such as Dusk and Amid Evil.

And it's a mostly correct reception, since all the key components are there: they clearly understand the basics of what makes a fun shooter, as they provide a pair of great workhorse weapons with plenty of ammo lying around for both of them, namely a revolver that can lock on to multiple enemies for a Red Dead-style deadeye execution, along with one of the best shotguns you are likely to see in a recent first-person shooter and a fun homing grenade that can be rolled around corners, vents or gaps in the walls; it has huge intricate levels that twist and wind on themselves, filled with an outrageous number of secrets and shortcuts to find and a bestiary of enemies that are reasonably fun to shoot. Is it so good then that the Build trinity needs a fourth spot though? No, it's not, for a variety of reasons that will make you wish you were simply playing Duke or Blood instead.

First of all it overstays its welcome by being overlong: with 26 levels (plus one boss stage) separated into multiple sub-levels it will take you 12 to 15 hours to get through, depending on how thorough (compulsive?) you are in hunting down secrets. This would be fine if the pacing and variety were better but sadly it starts to get repetitive very very quickly: the same handful of enemy types with the same three or four voice lines repeated every single time they see you, dispatched in the same exact ways every time, especially since some weapons work far better on some enemies, which pretty much forces your hand on which to use on what.

It also features some outright infuriating enemy types, chiefly the spider-head things that hide in the corners or hang from ceilings, get the drop on you and start biting at your ankles bypassing armor and chipping away at your health directly: they're hard to spot, blending in with the environment, and annoying to kill, since they hop around almost incessantly, unless you leave autoaim on (which you shouldn't, since locational damage matters as do headshots). They are easily eliminated with one whack of your electric baton, but the hit detection is erratic and when they are too close it becomes impossible, since this is the build engine and you can only look up and down at a 45 degrees angle. Sniping them with the revolver lock becomes the only viable strategy but considering the spiders are literally everywhere, it will become quite taxing on your revolver ammo. Similarly irritating are the flying drone enemies, which have the nasty habits of spawning in half a dozen at a time, hovering just out of reach of your revolver's lock and pelting you with aggravating accuracy from far away, and that's when they're not the rocket variant, which can melt your life away with one wuick salvo the moment you see them, or the spongy androids that teleport around and turn invisible. same gues for the bosses, which are are few and far between and are scarcely any more fun to play.

These enemies would be far less aggravating if the game worked properly, unfortunately it suffers from bad AI (enemies get stuck on level geometry and furniture, making them unpredictable) and a number of irritating glitches, such as the revolver being unable to lock onto enemies through doors, which requires entering a room (and often getting ambushed) while fiddling to get it to work. the game's signature weapon, the bowling bombs that seek out enemies when you roll them, also suffer from wonky pathfinding, making them less useful than they should be: you can throw them like Blood's dynamite but you can only achieve the homing effect if you roll them on the ground, which means even a tiny irregularity on the floor like a step or a crack negates their intended use. They also tend to lock onto the wrong enemy (you have no control over which), leading to frustration: you might be trying to blast an automated turret on the other side of a room and your bombs will be steering elsewhere trying (and often failing) to kill some other enemy, usually one of the many, many spiders. When they do lock on it's not too rare to see them spaz out around an enemy instead of exploding, or even doing so to no effect. Clearly a weapon that needed more work before release, despite being prominently featured in the promo material.

The rest of the arsenal is hit and miss: incendiary akimbo SMGs that feel like they don't have enough ammo for the damage they deal, a minigun whose ammo is usually hidden in secret areas, a good crossbow that hits enemies in a line and sometimes can't land all-important headshots even if the crosshairs are dead on the target and an explosive disc weapon that can be thrown or placed on a wall as a proximity mine, even though the game fails to explain that in any way, so it wouldn't be a surprise if many players didn't even know that was a thing. There is no rocket launcher, but the shotgun doubles as a grenade launcher, which you can (a bit slowly) switch to by right clicking. Unfortunately these grenades do not explode on impact with the environment, rather bouncing around usually exploding where they do no damage to anything. they do explode when hitting enemies at least, which rewards precision but again makes them less useful than a nice rocket with predictable splash damage as a viable strategy.

A few more assorted annoyances: the save system is retro to a fault, making the quicksave and quickload buttons save and load over the most recent used save as opposed to a dedicated quicksave file like all modern games do. Imagine wanting to make a backup save before a difficult section and finding out that all your subsequent quicksaves have been saving over that one, which is not what you you wanted: what you need to do in that case is open the save/load menu, save on the backup file, then open the menu again and save again to the file you are using for quicksaves before you can continue. Saving is fiddly too, requiring hitting the Y and then enter keys to confirm twice, and this has to be done manually every time you boot up the game. It's also glitched, as it adds the letter Y to your save file every time you save (my quicksave file was named "quickyyyyyyyyyyy" after a while. There is also an occasional save bug that reverts all your saves you back to the start of a level for no apparent reason, forcing you to start that stage over. It happened to me twice, and made loading after booting up the game a tense affair as i never knew if the game would negate the last hour of progress on a whim.

Lastly, a mention to the humor: it is sort of expected that this kind of game will have to feature the sort of crass jokes and visual gags that started with Duke 3D, and that's all well and good, but Ion Maiden fails to produce anything that's even remotely funny, from the dated internet memes and pop culture references to the cringeworthy one liners that the protagonist spouts on a constant basis, which are never, ever, entertaining in the slightest. They are a far cry from the funny quips that Duke or the original Lo Wang blurt out and especially the clever, well acted one liners from Blood, that is for sure. If nothing else the developers must have been aware of it, since they have an option for "silent protagonist", which is highly advised to be set to on.

In conclusion, Ion Maiden is a decent game, but you can have a far, far better experience just sticking to the classics, especially since no effort was put into modernizing the game via the QOL improvements we've had in the intervening two decades, which is the opposite that can be said about the many, many free source ports and total conversions that Doom enjoys.

I’m a real fairweather Star Wars fan in the sense that I was deeply obsessed with it as a kid who was the prime age for prequel era stuff to be hitting real hard but how I interact with media and my relationship to concepts like fandom have radically changed over the years so that I’m not really the kind of person that big Disney franchise stuff appeals to. That said, I’m not like, anti-Star Wars; I had a great time with Andor and I’m the world’s only Cal Kestis liker (he’s nice! His ponchos are cool shut the fuck up!!). Something that’s really Activated the latent Star Wars fan in me like the world’s most annoying Manchurian Cnadidate, though, is that last year I started a podcast with a friend, a monthly book club where we read through all of the books by Matthew Stover, who has a lot of very good original work but is best known for the handful of Star Wars books he wrote, most famously the well-liked novelization of Revenge of the Sith.

So in the last three months I’ve read and talked about three really good books with my cohost who is a much bigger Star Wars person than me and they’re all occupying the old no-longer-canon extended universe stuff and man that shit really just scratches your brain. In particular was New Jedi Order: Traitor, the thirteenth book in its series set long after the original movies, occupying a similar narrative space that the current films and tv shows do but instead of interminable Disney franchise pipeline stuff they are trashy 90s sci fi schlock novels. Which is still generally very stupid, and very bad, but the WAY that they’re stupid is so much more unique, so much more propulsive and compelling as dumb art than anything anyone has made in the last decade for a franchise this big. It puts you in a mood.

Kyle Katarn.

This guy is that vibe personified. Kind of edgy but not really fake ass han solo luke skywalker in one dude ass guy in a doom game fighting What If Stormtroopers Had Black Armor And Were Big?? Fuck yeah dude this is the gamer’s star wars guy. His name’s fucking Kyle. But he does have a lot of character to him, even if it’s articulated mostly through voice lines during missions and the rare cutscene where he appears prominently. A lot of the story of this game happens around Kyle rather than to him or because of him.

But the fact that Kyle is such a distinct entity here is really noteworthy in and of itself. Dark Forces is a deceptively innovative game for something that looks like any other Doom II or Duke Nukem 3D like. A big part of that is how story driven it is. There aren’t actually that many cutscenes, maybe one every three levels or so, but they contextualize the missions well, and each individual mission has an extensive briefing beforehand that outlines everything in a lot more detail, written in character from your handler’s perspective (except for one mission where she’s captured by the empire and your goal is to rescue her – your briefing is absent because she’s gone it’s a great detail!). Missions have unique objectives and usually multiple per level that are all thematically appropriate to whatever you’re doing whether that’s stealing shit or looking for a guy to take hostage or planting bombs or finding evidence of a secret project or killing someone. This gives the game a different feel from levels that are purely Get To The End affairs, and the end NOT being get to the goal a lot of the time changes the way levels lay themselves out. Lucasarts was first and foremost an adventure game studio at this time and you definiteely feel that in the approach to puzzle design; you get a little bit of red key on the red door but there’s a lot of more esoteric navigational shit here too. Feels way more to me like Doom 64 than Doom II.

This game was actually in development BEFORE the original doom and coming out a year ahead of Duke Nukem, Dark Forces brings a lot to the mid-90s FPS table. It seems likely that Doom coming out would play heavy influence on this bad boy mid-development, but there’s a heavy emphasis on verticality in the level design here that’s explored really thoroughly through the 14 missions. Elevator puzzles, caverns, shafts, loops and cliffs, lots of different ways to explore this whole other axis of space. Platforming is a core part of this experience too and it works well. You can even like, point your gun up and down it’s wild.

The last way Dark Forces I think REALLY separates itself in this category of games (which I’m NOT an expert in and I know some of you reading are – please forgive me for not being a huge 90s shooter know stuff-er) is how aesthetically distinct it is. Levels very rarely reuse assets, and along with their distinct themes and objectives they all have distinct locations and visuals. More importantly than that though, they all try very hard to approximate real environments and the work pays off. These levels are abstract industrial spaces, they’re factories and mines and sewers and ships. Nothing like mind-blowingly innovative but it’s impressive how much these levels work as both 90s PC shooter levels and visibly true Places in a way that’s just not the case for most games like this.

It IS all in service of fighting guys called Darktroopers who are big stupid robots but that’s fine, really, that stupid shmooziness is a charm point, really. That’s the part that I WANTED from this game. The fact that on TOP of that it’s an extremely ambitious and completely successful shooter was a wholly unexpected surprise.

Next Time - STAR WARS: JEDI KNIGHT - DARK FORCES II

Don't think I'll ever really understand what is it about the Witcher series which gets people to gush so hard about it; I guess because fantasy novels have gone by the way side, it can be a bit novel to the general public to have a fantasy story that deals with discrimination, alienation, classism, sexual violence, etc. in an explicit, non-gratuitous way. For me though, it always struck me as if the point of CDPR's Witcher interpretation was that it was a gritty fantasy story, and that was it, rather than the point being that the grittiness is necessary to embolden the themes in the work. Like, one of the main takeaways people have of this series is that life has a whole lot of gray, morality is ambiguous, and every decision we make carries far dire consequences than we can envision.

And it's like yea, no shit buddy that's how the world works lmao. Why do you think those 'simple' fantasy stories were created in the first place? I don't mean to be callous but it's a weird mental schema we have that people in the past were somehow not dealing with as complex lives and problems as we were, and that the solutions and narratives they created were somehow less 'complex' and 'realistic' than ours. You can see this especially with how some people decry medieval policy around executions as 'barbaric'; there's an argument for the sanctity of life, sure, not very compelling but its there.

But if you're going to make that argument, you also have to recognize the fact that political executions were a quick, effective fix to the problem of treason. You can't just expect traitors to just stop spreading their ideas once they've been defeated or caught; there's always a strong possibility that the values of the traitor spread across the region, and you now are no longer looking at treason but a revolution. You can see this particularly with the American South: the Southerners may have "lost", but the culture of anti-black sadism and rigid economic hierarchies has persisted until present-day, to the point where America is just now realizing how odd it is to openly display the Confederate flag. Not to engage in alt-history, but you have to ask yourself if antebellum Southern values would have persisted for so long if we executed all Confederates for high treason, instead of voting them into office.

But I'm digressing; aside from the on-paper plot the Witcher 2 is an interesting case-study of multi-narrative video games, and the fact that this game released with as many branching paths as it did is a minor miracle. Doesn't make the game any funner to play or the plot more insightful, but you have to admire CDPR's technical work.