Architect Address May 2020 (Patreon)

Hey! What’s up? It’s time for another fascinating instalment of The Architect Address, wowee! 

Let’s talk about some videos that came out recently, huh? Well the first one would be, yeah that’s right, In Defence of Randomness, a video that has kind of been a long time coming. Work on this one started way back when during the video about into the breach and perfect information - I decided when writing that one that doing both a video on randomness and on uncertainty was going to be impossible in the space of fifteen minutes or so. They’re closely related topics but doing them both justice would take… longer than I’d like.

In the end though, I think it was worth the wait, letting the topic stew for a few years gave me time to collect a bunch of fun examples and really think this topic through. I’ve tried to sketch out my vision for codifying how randomness works a few times now and I THINK the two by two grid is the best of both worlds. Something about the input and output distinction never quite stood right with me because it just doesn’t quite make sense from the subjective perspective of a player. If you’re making games with randomness, go nuts and just use those, but I think controllable and reactable randomness are crucial for understanding how players are going to interact with this system.

Luckily, the video did pretty well so it was nice to see that I was meaningfully contributing to the discussion. Also, it was a really nice excuse to play a bit of XCOM Chimera Squad which is… really good! It’s not the XCOM I remember but if you’re looking for a way to see what all the fuss is about without the commitment of a 50 hour campaign or with the punishing difficulty it’s a good place to start.

I have a few gripes with the game and most of them stem from the fact that it’s built in the XCOM 2 engine but with the inclusion of a few rules changes that make it substantially easier. Giving everyone a melee attack is groundbreaking, and they’ve made action compression and bonus moves really easy to get, which have historically been hard  to come by. Still, The world they’ve set up is really fun and the character’s unique abilities all push the envelope in interesting ways that the hero classes from XCOM 2 couldn’t quite do as well. Protip, if you’re thinking of playing this game, don’t pick Axiom to go on your squad, he’s complete junk, and definitely get blueblood because he just deletes entire rooms holy crap.

The other video released was Building Better Villains, originally called Building Better Baddies or Borderlands 3’s villain’s suck let’s fix them - it went through a lot of iterations and I’m still not totally happy with the final name because it’s a bit clickbaity but oh well. The video itself was born, as you might expect, out of me playing Borderlands 3 and finding that… wow, this story kind of stocks when it was basically the entire draw of the previous game.

The writing in borderlands 3 is.... Very weird. The game sort of made a name for itself by being wacky and a bit edgy and over the top, but they’ve sanded down so much of that identity that there’s not really anything left. Don’t get me wrong I think renaming the breed of small bandits from midgets to something less slurry is a smart move, but without the jabs at consumerism or the slightly grotesque sense of humour and even the dumb ironic reference jokes you’re left with.... Toilet humour? That’s about it. 

The characters are weird too, everyone’s your best friend, you’ll meet these characters who have no reason to like you and have these massive business empires but you meet them in a cutscene and you’re instantly promoted to right hand man and secret confidant instantly. There’s a weird sort of Saturday morning cartoon vibe to the game and… not in a good way.

As for the actual video, it was a bit of a bastard to put together between needing loads of different bits of footage to use as examples and trying to wrangle adobe 2020 into behaving but I’m fairly happy with it. I always like doing more writing-centric episodes because they’re my actual area of expertise and I think video games for the most part are written pretty badly so it’s good to lay into some bad ones from a perspective of authority for a change.

I think that this particular video was needed because something I see a lot of on the internet is people getting really attached to or annoyed by certain characters, in particular villains and not really being able to articulate why, so they end up falling back on quite frankly wrong ideas like “show don’t tell” or ludonarrative dissonance that sound clever, but don’t really get to the core of why they feel the way they do, and what is my job if not to tell you how to feel about videogames, right?

Anyway, that’s it for this architect address, have fun until I, err, see you again I suppose, oh and play monster train it’s good! I’m having fun with that right now.

Okay, bye!