What happened in 2023? (Patreon)

Well, a lot. But also NOT a lot, depending on where you're looking.

My offline life has kept me extremely busy (physically/mentally/emotionally) for the past few years, but even more so this year, as I shipped my first game in five years: Immortals of Aveum. IoA is a 1st person shooter, but with magic, set in a new world with a bunch of lore. I was a producer (project manager) on the project, but also a technical narrative designer, so I got to do a little writing. The vast majority of the writing was done by a guy named Michael Kirkbride, who you might be familiar with ;) You can check out an interview with him about our world and story here.

The game came out back in August and as the holiday season kicks in you'll be able to find it on sale on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Epic Store, and the EA App. 

Not long after the game's release our studio unfortunately had to lay off a bunch of people. That took a further mental toll on top of the stress of shipping the game, but I'm still employed. It's been an absolutely chaotic year in the games industry in general, with an exceptional crop of amazing video games, but also over 5,000 people laid off across the industry. Vibes are in shambles. 

I'd be really interested in talking about how my modding and lore community work prepared me for gamedev (and doubly so for founding an indie team to make an AAA, new IP title), if anyone's interested in reading about that. 

Outside of work, I'm on BlueSky now almost exclusively. Although there's still some notable missing features, it's got some really nice innovations from Twitter's basic schtick, like the ability to make custom feeds (like this one for Elder Scrolls art), and the overall community is vibrant and growing every day. I have invite codes for folks who want to check it out. 

I also finally collected a bunch of my favorite, and my most influential, work from the last two decades on my own website: ladynerevar.com. I figure that since the internet is getting enshitified by the minute, I ought to finally have a place that isn't going to get paywalled or ruin its search/tag function (looking at you, Tumblr/Twitter). 

I played Starfield, and was thoroughly underwhelmed (sorry, buds at Bethesda). I played Baldur's Gate 3, and was completely blown away. I got really into Destiny. While it's a very different game from the TES titles, the universe has a lot of the same things that drew me to TES in the first place. It also does many things way better than TES does in relation to how the lore is structured and how players experience and shape it. I'll write about that one day. 

Where am I going from here? With Immortals out the door, I'm really trying to focus on getting my brain unscrambled and getting back to creative practice. Maybe take some time to catch up on all the ESO content I've missed. Definitely do some writing about my less-than-enthusiastic thoughts regarding Elder Scrolls 6 in light of some really senior departures at Bethesda and my experience with Starfield.