Architect Address May 2021 (Patreon)

Hello! And welcome to the Architect Address for the month of may 2021. Rather than my usual aimless rambling I do before I talk about the videos I’ve done recently, I thought I’d talk about the after the video segment because I noticed a youtube comment that I’ve since lost asked me why I make a point of shouting out random people who’ve never heard of me in every video, and probably don’t care.

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that… deep down I feel sort of incredibly out of place being able to do this for a living. When I look around on youtube and other places on the internet, I see so many people making things that are much funnier or more insightful or from a more interesting perspective than anything I’ve ever done and I can’t help but feel like I got incredibly lucky to be in the position I’m in. Whilst I am of course incredibly grateful for all the support you lot have given me, I personally can’t see any of my videos as anything more than basically pretty rubbish

And yet, all those talented people and interesting projects aren’t as popular as they should be for a variety of reasons, chief among which is bad luck. So I sort of see it as my responsibility to not just promote interesting games that I think offer a new perspective or a new way of doing things, but also to help elevate new voices and interesting ideas in the internet media sphere as well. Basically it’s all the result of crippling impostor syndrome but if marginalized, obscure or just plain underappreciated cool stuff can benefit as a result of my mental illness then I’m going to call that a win.

Anyway, what about those videos, eh? The first one I’d like to talk about is Breaking the trinity: or why do so many games have tanks healers and DPS. This is a subject that I feel like comes up all the time in discussion threads for various games, but people rarely think to widen the lens and analyse this pattern from a broader perspective, which more often than not just leads to petty squabbling that goes nowhere. The holy trinity isn’t bad, per-se, but I think that several companies, in particular those bastards over at blizzard lean on it so hard that the holy trinity style of gameplay ends up swallowing everything else.

One game I didn’t think to mention but got brought up to me is Monster Hunter, which despite having group content and classic big boss encounters, doesn’t really adhere to the trinity at all. I think there are two main reasons for this, and that’s that a) the game doesn’t really have an aggro system, meaning that the controlling power of tanks is severely weakened and b) because everyone has access to a buttload of healing items, dedicated supports aren’t really needed. Even the lance and hunting horn, which are the tankiest and supportiest weapon classes in the game respectively are ultimately just a different flavour of DPS, and I think the selfsufficiency monsterhunter offers helps to really shake up its group play, although that does come at the price of limiting teamwork - you’re all just sort of bashing away at monsters next to eachother rather than actually working as a team a lot of the time. Still, it’s an interesting take.

And yeah, I played a lot of games and saw even more mentioned in the comments that claim to shake the trinity up with summoning classes, or debuff classes or yadda yadda yadda but they’re invariably just an abstracted version of those classic three archetypes. I’d be really interested to see if it’s even possible for a game to have a both a traditional RPG setup that doesn’t slide into either the trinity or everyone being a mostly independent jack of all trades - i’m not entirely sure if it is possible, who knows, it’s an interesting thought experiment for sure!

The other video was the art of tension, and honestly it was one big excuse to gush about resident evil because I love it - and uniquely amongst my videos, that was the topic from the start and I didn’t change my mind and refocus on something else midway through like I usually do.  I do think that Resi does have a unique edge over other horror games that have sort of died off or never been as consistently popular because it treats the suspense as much more important than the actual scares. Hell, resi 4, one of the best games in the franchise has maybe one moment which is actually scary, and that’s about it. All the emotional weight comes from the systems and the way they force you to play the game rather than just a monster jumping out and going boo.

I think that, especially when it comes to games that draw a lot from cinematic tradition, particularly horror and linear setpeice action games like uncharted, there’s this tendency to copy the structure and pacing of a two hour movie you enjoy in a single sitting and try and make it fit a twenty hour game you play in multiple sittings, which never quite works. Games need little breaks between rising peaks of tension to give you a place to take a break and stop playing or at least mentally reset yourself before continuing -  if games fail to do that then players will just burn out.

In addition, I think there really is something for the power of the unknown in games heightening the experience, in survival games, we’ve been quite justifiably conditioned into scouring the wikipedia of whatever game we’re playing just to understand what we’re supposed to be doing, but a lot of the time that can remove the sense of awe and mystery that makes not just exploration, but also the survival itself so compelling, and that need to be in control can be a very difficult habit to break, even if it ultimately makes the experience worse.

There’s probably space for a whole video on that but I’ve got to be careful to avoid stepping on my own toes and repeating myself too much, so I think I’ll leave that topic for a while and move onto other stuff, what will that be? Who knows!

Alright I think I’ll leave this there - in case you can't tell I’ve been a bit fast and loose with this one I've not really written a script, just some talking points I’m going to have to clean up later. I hope this wasn’t too messy or in the case of that first bit too TMI. I might have to rerecord some stuff - who knows. Anyway, have a fun June I suppose, I’ll have the next video out when it’s done and…. Yeah, have fun in the meantime - bye!