Setting Sail For The Horizon

Where's my head at?

The last month or so has been quite surreal for me. Back in July, I had a job within the games industry, following a path that I'd been able to find and cling to, while learning what I could about game design and production. Today marks the end of a period of constant stress and concern about my financial future as I try to find a job anywhere, from the tippity-top of the UK's game development scene to returning to my old stomping ground of high-street retail and bar work. I've been able to catch a toe-hold at the moment, and at least for the foreseeable future, I don't have to worry about the dole office.

I know that if you come here looking to read about games, this is perhaps a bit heavy and I apologise for that, but I promise that this is relevant. It will come as no surprise to most people reading this (if anyone still is) that my passion for videogames goes beyond a hobby. When my wife Kara convinced me to "go for it" and pursue my dream to become a game developer back in 2011, I threw myself heart & soul into working towards becoming a valuable asset to the kind of studio I'd like to work in, or maybe even start my own one day. I was fortunate enough to scramble my way out of the retail work I'd been doing since high school and got my foot in the door at a games studio. I've never wanted to look back since.

The past few weeks have been the first time I've ever had the feeling of true investment in a job hunt, with the aim being to pursue my career, as opposed to simply making enough to shelter and feed myself. It's simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating, as you weigh the pros and cons of working in certain places, all the while desperately hoping to hear back with good news from one of your many applications. I have had what can only be described as "mixed success" and while every rejection has been understandable, it pushes a person's impostor syndrome into overdrive as you attempt to predict what it was that made you fall short. Of course, this is the downside to being so truly invested in a job hunt; every rejection stings a little bit more than if it were for a job that was solely for monetary gain. On the other-hand, the feeling you get when you have positive feedback or an interview that seems to have gone well feels like a small step on the road to success, where success is getting back on course and with any luck, ending up slightly better-off than you were when you fell away.

So yeah, that's a small taste of where my mind's been at this past wee while. I really hope that I have some positive news to share with you guys in the near future, but for now; wish me luck.

Can we talk about games now?

Sure, let's leave my professional videogame chatter aside while I discuss my personal videogame experiences in the last couple of weeks, shall we? In the last post, I mentioned that I had been playing three games; Rainbow Six: Siege, Assassin's Creed: Rogue and Hard West. 

Cowboys + Satan = Hard West

Hard west is a strange game, for sure. I was sold on the concept while listening to (surprise surprise) an episode of an IGN games podcast, likening the gameplay mechanics to X-Com: Enemy Unknown, which was my #1 game of 2012. I had been waiting for it to drop in price, and then a friend was kind enough to purchase it as a birthday gift (thank you, Alice!) so I decided to spin it up and give it a shot.

Damn, this game's story and setting is bleak. It combines the general hostility and mercenary nature of living as a member of an early American settler in the west with the very acute hostility of satan himself. The player controls a character who dies and is resurrected on a mission of vengeance, vowing to destroy the people responsible for the death of...well himself, and his wife too. This grants him a certain set of supernatural powers, while he still does all his killin' at the end of a rifle/shotgun/six shooter. I'm not finished the game yet, but I thought I would give a quick rundown to anyone else who enjoys turn-based isometric strategy games (we really need to find a snappy word for that, don't we?) like X-Com or even Final Fantasy Tactics.

I think that the environment's aesthetic design is absolutely fantastic, with a range of locations that are straight out of the "gritty western playbook". There's saloons, farmsteads, sandy streets with wooden buildings on either side and plenty of cool props like horse troughs and barrels to take cover behind. While there's plenty of cover, the game uses a luck-based system to adjust your simulated dice rolls when attacking and defending yourself. It basically forces you to consider how focused you want to be on certain enemies, requiring you to reposition or hide your wounded characters as you attempt to pick off the stragglers. As enemy players shoot at your characters, their chances to hit will dictate how likely you are to take damage. If you take damage, then your luck will increase to compensate for the fact that you've already taken damage, and vice versa. I don't know why, but a game that openly displays its "luck factor" as a game mechanic has a tendency to make me feel like the outcomes of gunfights can be a bit arbitrary, but then again; nobody said the wild west was a fair place.

If you ever watched "Hang 'em High" and thought "You know what? They should have Clint Eastwood's character be a demon, hell-bent (pun intended) on vengeance!" then give Hard West a shot. (Pun not intended)

Breaking the siege

I love, love, love Rainbow Six Vegas 1 & 2. The last time I was able to properly dedicate myself to a small pool of games was when I was still in my late teens, living at home with my mum and working in a games shop as I tried (and failed) to save enough money to move in with friends in Edinburgh. It was the perfect cross-over of "Not enough money to buy more games" and "No real responsibilities in the evening" that allowed me to really sink my teeth into Rainbow 6 Vegas 1 & 2. I relished the opportunity to punish players who were coming from faster paced games, who weren't cautious, never expected traps and would find themselves running into a hail of gunfire from a concealed source behind a door. I got so good at playing the game that I could bounce an incendiary grenade off two surfaces and get people behind a door, just from listening to their footsteps on the floor above me.

So to come from that level of confidence in my own abilities to "pwn n00bs", I was brought crashing right back down to earth when I started playing Rainbow 6: Siege recently. Holy shit, there are players that know every nook and cranny of every map, and the array of gadgets that you can use and be forced to counter are wide-ranging and difficult to predict. I find myself getting gunned down in embarrassing situations, where I have camped a corner, as is an expected tactic for defenders in a Rainbow 6 game, then stood up to move down the corridor and have my head blown off by a guy who has had me zeroed in all this time. It's humbling, frustrating and it makes me really sad to think that there's no way I'm ever going to have the same amount of time to dedicate to Siege, the same way I did for the Vegas games.

The game itself is great, though. The maps are almost completely dynamic, with well appointed areas for destruction, that I haven't utilised so extensively since Battlefield 2:Bad Company. The gunplay is top-notch, as you might expect from a Tom Clancy game, and the Terrorist Hunt missions are as you probably remember them, although there's now a much heavier emphasis on objectives and multiplayer, but that just seems to be the way the games industry is moving these days. If you can get a crew together to play T-hunt, it's a good team building experience. Be warned however, the people that lurk around the multiplayer arenas are capable and they appear to be unusually well organised. I like to take "Sledge" who tellingly enough, is a burly Scottish guy whose special ability involves putting holes in walls with a giant sledgehammer. While I am capable of quite literally "making an entrance", it's often a case that any entrance I happen to make becomes host to a hailstorm of bullets, sending me sprawling to my death. Maybe I just ought to "get gud".

Going rogue felt like standing still

While I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an "Assassin's Creed Apologist", I remain a fan of the games despite some considerable design choices that leave me feeling burnt out half-way through. I found 3 to be an uphill slog, and Unity's beautiful rendering of Paris wasn't enough to negate the same game mechanics I've been using in the AC franchise for almost a decade now. AC4: Black Flag was a breath of fresh air, largely because it took players out into the sea to explore on a much grander scale, with epic ship battles that I would have paid for on their own.

With these factors in mind, I held off on playing AC: Syndicate (which I've heard lots of good things about) so I could play through Rogue, which seemed to be the red-headed stepchild of the franchise, as it was brought out on "last-gen consoles" while Unity was given the bigger marketing push. By all accounts, Rogue was basically a palette swap with Black Flag, trading the sunny climes of the Caribbean for the frigid waters of the north Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Unfortunately, Black Flag's protagonist Edward Kenway has also been replaced with Shay Patrick Cormack, an ex-assassin who has joined the Templar cause and sets out to restore order to the area by killing off members of his old cell.

It's the stark contrast between the life of a pirate like Kenway and the straight-laced and often unpleasant Cormack that made me pause to consider the differences between one game and the other. While the combat, environments and sailing are much the same as they were before, I found myself having a really hard time getting into the story. This was a shame as the story itself fills in some really interesting gaps in the Assassins vs Templar story, but it's just not enough to make me like Shay. His motives are seemingly coming from a benign place, and I suppose it's fair to say that his change in loyalties in the early game is a good microcosm of the differences between the two factions. Both want peace, but on their own terms and they're both entirely certain that the other is only going to hurt the human race if it gets its way.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the whole "employee at Abstergo entertainment" thing that forms the framework around the story in Rogue, in much the same was as it did during Black Flag. I know it's a super divisive framing mechanic, but as someone who dreams of working in a studio like that (sans the whole murder and genocide angle) I always found it super-cool to wander around Ubisoft Montreal's meta-version of itself. It plays much like the Black Flag meta campaign does, but with less oomph. Dialogue and animation has been replaced with hidden soundbytes, reducing engagement with the story in a way that makes the Abstergo offices seem a little...empty?

Anyway, I did enjoy Rogue for its ability to fill in little bits of story that had fallen away in the main AC plot, but for the most part the game suffers from a weaker central protagonist and modern-day story. The sailing and combat feels the same, and while it was super-fun to get out there on the high seas again, it felt like DLC as opposed to a new game. I'd recommend giving it a shot if you loved Black Flag and just want more of the same, with a little bit of back-story in there too.

That's all for this post, but I hope you guys enjoyed it. As always, any comments or feedback is valuable, but I am mostly writing these to chart my own thoughts.

Until next time, thanks for reading!