I’m watching some really weird anime lately. It’s absolutely hilarious and cannot possibly be summarized in a way that makes any sense to most of the people I know.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong a few months back. He’s staying in the States for a while and wanted to know if I could recommend any TV shows– whatever’s highly rated lately. I don’t really watch a lot of TV, so I passed on recommendations to him from what I know other people watch. True Detective, Daredevil, Game of Thrones, Orange Is The New Black, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Parks and Recreation, Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead– the kind of stuff I hear about even as someone who doesn’t watch pretty much any TV. I’ve probably forgotten someone’s favorite, but it’s a pretty wide smattering of things that are all highly recommended by a lot of people, and on a variety of topics.

I spoke to him yesterday. He’d watched at least three episodes of everything I recommended, and his take on them was fascinating to me. He found all of them extremely violent, far, far more violent than anything he was used to seeing. At the same time, he thought it was interesting that the romances were (as he put it) so underdeveloped, even in the ones he watched all the way through. He had a number of other comments, and I found his perspective really eye-opening. At first, I had a hard time relating with some of the things he described, and he had a hard time articulating his point of view, not because he isn’t well-spoken, but because it’s difficult to put words to a concept like “this is violent at a very deep level, even when violence isn’t actively happening on screen”.

He described, for example, True Detective as an extremely violent show, not just in the actual acts of violence that are depicted, but in the ways the character move and talk to one another. He said he found the tension extreme, where there was the chance of everything coming to blows at any given moment. I actually have watched True Detective, and I didn’t find it stressful in the same way. He referred me to a number of stories he particularly liked, and while I haven’t had time to watch/read them, I found the references interesting.

I mentioned I’ve been watching some “really weird” anime lately. After talking to my friend, I’m not sure if it’s that the anime is weird or if I just have a skewed perspective. Certainly I can’t in good conscience recommend Scott Pilgrim vs The World to someone who has never played a video game in their life, because an entire cultural subtext is missing that makes the movie charming rather than disjointed and random. I’ve tried to watch Bollywood musicals (they’re all musicals) in the past, and they haven’t clicked, but I see how excited some of my friends get about them and I have to imagine that what’s missing there is the cultural context that makes them click.

I’ve started making an effort to expand my entertainment horizons and try things that aren’t in my usual American framework. The easiest thus far has been anime, just because I already had a foot in that door and it’s easier to get into it here in the States, but I’ve been looking for other things as well. I’ve felt my tastes slowly shifting– I have a continuing disagreement with a friend about the ending of The Wind Rises (I think it’s cathartic and amazing; he thinks it’s disjointed and unsatisfying) and I’ve found myself more seriously evaluating why I like the things I do, and what it is about how I think that makes some things resonate with me and some things not.

That same friend made a comment that really stuck with me, while I was talking about finding ways of enjoying as many different things as possible, finding ways to forge those neural pathways that make certain things resonate with you. He brought up that ever-so-apt adage: “You can’t please everyone”. He’s absolutely right, no single thing will please everyone; it’s more or less impossible.

I don’t think it’s possible for something to please everyone. I do think, however, that it’s possible to become the kind of someone who is pleased by almost everything. I haven’t decided if I think that’s better, or even a worthy goal, but it’s certainly an interesting thought. You would, at least, have a lot of entertainment to choose from.

I talked a bit yesterday about FFXIV and how it’s set up like a TV series, with distinct arcs that are broadly akin to seasons, playing out over months until the next one starts up. The first season is the 1-50 game, and like many first seasons, it takes a while to find its feet and, in some cases, loses a lot of people along the way.

The second season has been much stronger, and it ends on a powerful cliffhanger that left me extremely excited about the expansion (the “third season”). I want to talk a little bit about the setup for this, because it’s important to put things in context. If you’re worried about pre-expansion spoilers (and the first few hours of the expansion), here’s a spoiler tag for you, just scroll past to the kitty:

I mentioned previously that you’re a pretty much unstoppable powerhouse by the end of the first couple of major story arcs. It’s something that the game reinforces over and over again– you’re often accompanying diplomats because the people they’re talking to are more likely to listen if they have the world’s most notable badass at their side. In at least one situation, you’re tasked with making a delivery on foot specifically because previous couriers have been ambushed and killed and you’re known to be able to stand up to pretty much anyone. You predictably get ambushed, even your attackers freak out a bit at who they just attacked, and you dispatch them all with contemputous ease, able to identify the assailants for further investigation.

You’re well known, and eventually have a significant reputation. Right at the end of the second arc, just before the expansion, this is all turned on its head. Your reputation is used to put you in a position where you can be framed for a very public crime, and your associates are targeted as accomplices. It’s set up extremely delicately, with the game not telling you what’s going on until it’s too late. For emphasis: the game doesn’t tell you what’s going on until it’s too late. It’s meant to leave you stunned and angry, and it accomplishes this brilliantly. A heinous crime is pinned on you and things go bad quickly, forcing you and your remaining associates to flee. You’re essentially a criminal… except that, as previously mentioned, you’re the most powerful individual anyone knows, and the guards in most cities are terrified of having to face you; they KNOW what you’re capable of, and their masters know their grip on things is tenuous at best, so you’re left to your own devices, just without your organization’s headquarters or resources.

It’s a very effective situation, especially because you can’t protect your associates, and the expansion opens with you fleeing to another country. It’s a brilliant setup, giving you the perfect justification for rebuilding in a new place without robbing you of your previous accomplishments. Some people here know you, most don’t, and you can carve out a reputation here once more, all while taking the occasional trip back to your homelands to work on fixing what you lost.

There are a lot of things that the game could have strung you along with– there are plenty of loose ends left just prior to the expansion, but the story does a good job of tying them up without making you wait. Each one has a build, and there’s an overall arc to things– it doesn’t feel like you do your time in the expansion and then get the payoff at the end, nor is everything neatly wrapped up leaving you to explore this strange new world for unknown reasons.

I think we’re good on the spoilers I need; here’s the kitty:

Heavensward could easily have ignored everything that came before it; that old content doesn’t matter, you don’t need to bother with it, feel free to move onto the new cool stuff and forget the old. It’s been the WoW expansion model for a decade now, with very, very little that players do actually carrying over from one expansion to the next. If you’re lucky, an NPC or two will “remember you from somewhere”, but if you opted to, say, do dungeons from 1-80 and then pick up the 80-90 game, odds are good the story starting at level 80 and carrying you to 90 will make perfect sense.

The message in FFXIV is that you are powerful, and you take part in a lot of interesting things, but you’re still only one person, and it’s very difficult to change the entire world as just one person. It’s a narrative that suits the overall feel of the game, when there are hundreds or thousands of other players around you. There isn’t a sense that you’re a unique snowflake– you’re clearly special, but there are many people in the world who are special. It keeps the MMO conceit functional without making you feel irrelevant.

Archeage got me thinking down this path. In Archeage, your part in things is special, but you’re one special person out of many, and in some cases not even necessarily that significant. It suits the open-world sandbox game style, where maybe you strike out and become an adventurer or maybe you settle down on a farm and raise chickens. It’s a big world with a lot of moving parts that you are not the center of, and as a result it’s much more believable as a world. More specifically, it’s a world you can be a part of, not necessarily a game you can play and beat.

FFXIV doesn’t do the sandbox thing, but it does a lot of work and pays a lot of attention to the little details that make it feel more like a world. The narrative outright tells you that while you’re an important player in the world, you’re not the center of the universe and things are happening that you aren’t necessarily a part of, and in some cases can’t contribute meaningfully to. Some of the best moments are ones where you, despite your unstoppable badassery, can’t actually DO anything, because you aren’t in a position to talk politics, or move vast sums of money, or conjure food from nothingness for ten thousand hungry people.

The game lets you gently sway from feeling powerful to feeling powerless, and so the moments in the story where a target appears– where you can flex your muscles and punch/stab/blast faces– are extremely satisfying. This… THIS is a problem you can solve, and you are the best in the world at it. It’s a form of friction, only in the narrative rather than the gameplay. You don’t always have control, so you appreciate the times when you can seize control for yourself.

I talk a lot about how important friction is to games. Too much and players get frustrated, too little and they get bored. The very best storytelling, like the very best games, strike a balance where you’re not just being fed victory after victory on a silver platter and are hailed as a Big Damn Hero everywhere you go, nor are you forever stymied as a fourth-string player in a production you’re barely even noticed in. FFXIV straddles the line magnificently, providing genuine but believable frustration and moments of catharsis. There may be ten thousand starving people, but there’s also an invading army at their doorstep. I can’t feed them, but I can sure as hell go fight an army. I’m aware that there are problems I can’t fix, so I appreciate the ones I can, and it makes the world feel more real.

The player doesn’t need to constantly be the hero, the center of the universe. It’s an ego trip that works in a shorter-form game, but in a longer game, one that lasts months or years, that center-of-the-universe schtick wears thin.

Right, okay, Heavensward. It thoroughly consumed my weekend; I have not played that much of a game at once in years. I’ve spend a lot of the weekend trying to articulate what I like about it so much, but it’s difficult. It’s easier to point at the things that frustrate me (flight, see recent podcast) and the things I find interesting (new class abilities, new mechanics, etc), but those aren’t the heart and soul of Heavensward for me.

I can finally articulate what’s going on with Final Fantasy XIV and its expansion that is so compelling, and perhaps ironically, I needed Archeage to put it into perspective. Let me take a few steps back.

Two years ago, I was looking into FF14 for the second time. I’d jumped into the beta of the original release and it was frankly awful– so bad I gave it less than my usual ten-hour chance and bailed. I put it firmly out of my mind and moved on. When the re-release came out, I was intrigued. This was a fatally doomed game that had had a legendarily bad release, and Square-Enix, in the throes of what I felt like were some immensely disappointing entries into its flagship series, had decided beyond reason to pour more money into this sinking ship. It felt like throwing good money after bad in the worst way, and I wanted to see what was up.

I know a number of people who jumped into the beta at the same time I did, many of whom had starkly poorer experiences with it than I did. I was able to get to level 13 or 14, not quite high enough to see the first instance, but enough to see some class mechanics and some storytelling. The game was, essentially, World of Warcraft. Same “go here, click this” quests, same “kill things here” quests, and a few semi-interesting new mechanics from other games. FATEs were public quests from Warhammer Online, which are now ubiquitous, there were a few other little details (like the Hunt Log and the class system) that I thought were interesting additions, but all in all it was pretty standard fare. A good many people I know picked up the beta or even the live game, gave it a week or so, and left, not seeing what the fuss was about.

I didn’t leave the game with a sense that I was about to play The Next Big Thing– certainly what I experienced wasn’t that, not initially. Instead, what captured me was the potential. I saw standard MMO quests, sure, but delivered with astoundingly thorough attention to detail. Animations were crisp and satisfying, the music was amazing, effects screamed Final Fantasy; down to the very smallest details the game felt like a Final Fantasy game– the exact Final Fantasy game I’d been missing for years. I’ve said on a number of occasions that the MMO is the evolution of the JRPG in a lot of ways, and FFXIV felt like a confirmation of that belief.

MMOs are hard to judge. They’re slow burns, not quick flashes. I’m immediately suspicious of any MMO that shows me flash and bang and fancy things in the first few hours of gameplay. They ultimately tend to disappoint me. FFXIV is a slow starter– you’re doing frankly menial work and have little sense of where you fit into the world, and while you have a couple of interesting encounters, the whole thing feels very small, like you don’t really matter much in the scheme of things. Sure, maybe you helped this miner out, but you aren’t a hero, at least not for more than a day.

Flash forward thirty levels. You’ve done some notable things, fought powerful beings and have a more solid place in the world, as part of a secretive organization dedicated to dealing with the aforementioned powerful beings. You’ve built this up over thirty levels; you’re still not a fantastic hero, but you have the respect of a few, and you’ve got a valuable role. The burn continues, slowly. At about this point, you’re resolving your class story, the mini-arc that encompasses the class you chose to play, versus the overarching story of the game. A new “job” story picks up, bringing you a new story to go with your expanded power. These are bigger, and feel more important than what you were doing before. You’re still not a hero, but you can start to see the path.

Flash forward to level 50. You are an accomplished powerful-being-hunter and have almost singlehandedly put an end to a major, nation-threatening event. You are a Big Damn Hero, and the credits roll, and you continue going off to do Big Damn Hero things that no one else would even consider. At some point, the main storyline picks back up, and I want to break here for emphasis.

You are an immensely powerful individual, you have seen the credits roll, and when you come back for more story, the game absolutely respects that and moves forward with it. The only people who ask you to do menial tasks are people who have no idea who you are, and they’re often horrified when they find out. Alternately, some people who DO know who you are ask you for menial things, but apologize for taking up your valuable time. It’s a small detail, but it keeps those sidequests functional without insulting you.

However, that main storyline. The story is good up until 50. There are some funny points, some highs and lows, some cool moments, and a neat Final Fantasy third-act twist that feels right but doesn’t go too far. After that arc, though, is when the game’s storytelling flexes its wings and flies. There are HOURS of main storyline following the “end” of the game, the final level-50 credit roll. There is, in fact, more post-50 content than pre-50 content in the main story. In every single one of these quests, you are respected as the powerful individual that you are, but you’re still given problems that are compelling and interesting to untangle. It’s accomplished through that first 50 levels of story, the politics and world that you’ve been slowly introduced to over your levelling career. You meet characters and stick with them, and learn about places and relationships and politics that affect what you’re doing. Mostly these things aren’t at the forefront of your mind– you’re doing some stuff for this guy who hates these other rich guys and something something yeah. What the story’s doing is leaving little hooks for you, little things that it’ll tug on 40 levels later. You’ll seen an NPC and the story will give you just enough information to remind you of who they are, enough to trigger that “Oh YEAH! THAT GUY!”

MMOs are a slow burn, but so many of them try to tell you flash-in-the-pan stories. You get a start, a brief arc, and a resolution all in one play session, then move onto the next thing. You move through space and the game moves with you– don’t bother with that old zone, it’s not important anymore, that’s Old News. Play this new zone, the one appropriate to your level, because those are the stories that matter. FFXIV doesn’t do this. It cheerfully sends you back to old zones, to do things that are appropriate to those areas. It does a lot of instanced story encounters or simply encounters that are spawned as you enter an area, appropriate to your level even if the zone itself isn’t. You revisit places and they stick in your mind, they aren’t zones you pass through and forget. By the time you’ve finished the main storyline, you’ve returned to basically every zone, often multiple times. FFXIV is 100% dedicated to keeping its older content relevant.

I mentioned thorough attention to detail here, and I’d like to point out the sort of thing I mean. In many MMOs, once you’ve outleveled a dungeon you will never see the inside of it again, unless you’re powering through it with low-level friends to get them through. FFXIV gates content behind group dungeons, which many people balk at. What it also does is heavily incentivize players to play through those dungeons multiple times. It has a roulette system, where you get heavily rewarded for signing up for a random dungeon within certain groupings. Its dungeons scale you down to their level, and you play alongside other players of the appropriate level for the dungeon– giving everyone an experience that’s very much the way the dungeon was intended to be run. As a result, the gated content is rarely overly onerous to get past. The lower-level players who need a specific dungeon will queue up for the dungeon they need, and they’ll often be matched with higher level players who are willing to do any random dungeon for rewards. This is compounded by the fact that if you do a dungeon with a player who’s never done it before, you get a huge bonus, and if you queue up in a role that’s in short supply, you get even more rewards. It’s a highly effective bribe that draws experienced players back to help newer players, but it keeps everything relevant. New “hard mode” dungeons continue the story of the previous dungeons, continuing that thread.

All of these little things add up, and the story leans on this. It knows you have to have done certain things to have reached this point, and it happily references them. You’ve built up your reputation over hours of gameplay, and the story respects that. In a lot of ways, the main story pre-50 is a story about becoming a super badass who can, essentially, punch any problem to death. The content post-50 takes a different look at things– sure, you’re an unstoppable badass, but what can you do about income inequality in a major city? Can you feed thousands of hungry people? Can you delicately negotiate a political minefield? Your previous punch-everything approach sealed your reputation, but then the game introduces problems that can’t be solved by punching, and makes you an important part of things. There are still problems that need badassery to solve, and when those come up you are the number one person, but you’re still relevant in a meaningful way… and that reputation isn’t always helpful to you.

By the end of the storyline, the pre-expansion patch that was meant to prepare me for what was coming, I was absolutely, utterly pumped. I wanted to get into the expansion to see where the story was going to go, because it left off with me wanting more. It reminds me of a really great TV show. The first season is the 1-50 arc: good, and a complete story on its own (because who knows if we’ll get a second season), and that’s about it. The second season is the post-50 to expansion arc: this is when the chains get taken off and they know they’re going to have an expansion, so the story really gets rolling, giving me plenty of buildup and several small, satisfying arcs, but always teasing a little bit more, right up until the suckerpunch that is the season finale, right before the expansion.

The expansion is Season 3, with a little bit of everything. They’re comfortable with their model and they’re making it shine, and it shows. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow; I’ve gone on a while here.

No post today; I am Heavenswarding.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll see you on Monday!

The MMO subscription model is dead, or so they say. So they say despite the two largest MMOs in the world, both of which dwarf their closest competition by 100% or more, being subscription-based games.

$60 is too much to pay for a video game. It’s a catch-22; we demand ever higher quality and ever lower prices, despite games being one of the few entertainment media whose cost doesn’t rise noticeably with inflation. The “standard” was $50, up until the release of the Xbox 360, when new console games more or less centered on $60. That was in 2005. As a point of reference, going to see a movie was, on average in the US, $6.41 in 2005. Now, it averages $8.17 (http://natoonline.org/data/ticket-price/). To be entirely frank, I can’t think of a single theatre in my area that sells tickets for eight bucks– try twelve or more.

But, people still buy games, which means that there’s a particular point at which a game (or, really, any kind of entertainment) is worth spending money on. Barring the reductive philosophy that fuels piracy, the “I wasn’t going to pay money for it anyway so it’s okay if I steal it” flawed premise, there’s a certain amount of logic and evaluation that goes into spending money on a game. Everyone has some kind of system that helps them determine whether they’re going to spend money on entertainment or not.

I think having a system is important; it puts things in perspective and helps avoid buyer’s remorse and helps you evaluate whether the purchases you made were worthwhile. This almost certainly changes over time– nearly everyone I know has changed how they determine when something is worth plunking down cash to buy.

My own system takes into account two things: the money I have to buy games and the time I have to play them. I usually have a lot of one and relatively little of the other. When I have a lot of time to play, I tend to look at entertainment purchases from a cost per hour standpoint. Any purchase I make is based on the dollar value per hour I’m getting out of whatever it is. Movies are pretty bad for this sort of thing: $12+ for two hours of entertainment average six dollars an hour. Going out to a bar is even worse: one drink an hour at $3-12 a drink (plus anything I might eat) puts me above even the six dollar standard. A book is okay– I read at about 150-200 pages an hour, so most books take me about three to four hours to read– at about $8-10 for a book, that’s in the two to three dollar per hour range.

Isolated open book

Games are all over the place. $60 for a game that takes me 8 hours to beat doesn’t feel worth it, running $7.50/hour, but a game that takes me 12 hours is looking a lot better. A game like Skyrim, Dragon Age, or Persona, which suck away 100+ hours look great, at pennies per hour of play. The only games that look better are MMOs, where as long as I play 30 hours in the first month and 6 hours every month thereafter are absolutely worth the initial box price and the $15/month thereafter. Any more time I spend on them (and usually, I spend rather more time on them) just drops the price. This weekend is Heavensward, which I spent $60 on, a cost I’m going to recoup in about three days, possibly less.

On the flip side, when I have more money and less time, I want experiences that don’t take too much time to complete. I don’t have the time to spend a hundred hours playing one game; I’d rather play four shorter games in that same window. I’ll be honest, I haven’t devoted the time to come up with a system for this, because to be entirely frank I haven’t been in a situation where I have more money than time in quite a while. I have, however, seen a lot of friends come up with systems for this, and they tend to look for the highest quality experiences they can get for their limited time. It needs to be good, it needs to be polished, and it needs to work out of the box.

I’ve spent more time in the middle, where I have a decent amount of money and a decent amount of time, but not a ton of either. Perhaps bizarrely, this is when I often find myself buying minis and getting into new minis games. Minis, despite being individually expensive, are surprisingly good from a cost-to-time perspective. It takes me some amount of time for assembly, call it an hour to clean, fit, and glue, and then anywhere from two to six hours to paint. Even at the low end, a single mini ($10) is right in the book range, and that’s before I’ve ever put it on the table to play a game. Games take 1-2 hours, so each one of those I play is making the mini more and more worthwhile. There are minis in my collection that have cost me less than a penny per hour that I’ve played them; I have a group of Infinity minis where the entire faction has cost me about fifty cents per hour of entertainment; a really, really good deal.

All of these things help me evaluate whether some piece of entertainment is worth my time. It’s become a sort of instinct, I can tell when I feel like a game is worth me spending money on and when I don’t. It makes price fluctuations affect me a lot less than they otherwise might– there’s occasionally a game in a Steam Sale that goes down to a point where I’m interested, but that’s exceedingly rare. It’s when this instinct fails me, or when I can’t adequately predict if something is going to be worthwhile that I regret my purchases. I honestly have a hard time thinking of many of these– they’re almost all games i literally couldn’t play for one reason or another, or that I bought on someone else’s recommendation and didn’t end up liking.

What kind of systems do you use to determine if a game is worth buying? Are you a price-per-hour sort, or a quality-per-hour sort? Something else entirely?

I played a quest in Archeage yesterday that really stuck with me. I ran across a traveling minstrel at a crossroads. To the east was the faction’s capital city, to the south was a small port town. As the quest went, he was on business towards the city, but wanted me to deliver a message to the port town. He’d been through that town years back, loved a girl while he was there, but hadn’t been in the area since then. He wanted to deliver his best wishes to her, and asked for my help in doing so.

It’s a simple delivery quest. Walk over to the girl in the port town, talk to her to deliver the message. Simple. What stuck with me was her reaction, her quest complete text. She has to struggle to remember the minstrel’s name, then recalls it and wistfully recalls some good times, commenting that her now-husband and the minstrel had gotten into some fights, and the minstrel always won. She ends with a loving comment about her husband and a thank-you for delivering the minstrel’s message. Bam, done.

The formula is incredibly basic. Talk to one NPC, run somewhere, talk to another NPC. It’s the story that kept me paying attention. There wasn’t anything to resolve, it was an errand to run and was presented as such. In return, I got a little slice-of-life snapshot into the virtual lives of some NPCs. They’ll forget me as soon as I leave the area and I may or may not forget them, but this is okay. It’s a very simple, human interaction that makes me feel like the world is bigger than just me. For someone who’s done a lot of research into the differences between Eastern and Western narrative styles, it cleaves much closer to the former than the latter. I feel good about having performed a small task, and the world does not unduly react to the small task I’ve performed.

As a bit of perspective, this is what that same quest might look like in another MMO. If we keep the exact same structure, I’ll run into a minstrel, who wants me to deliver a message to a former lover, who he doesn’t think remembers him. I’ll run the message to his former lover, whose whole life will light up; s/he’s been pining for said minstrel since he left years ago, and this delivery has changed her life. She’ll pack up her things and go find him in the big city, and they’re going to live happily ever after. Thanks so much, kind adventurer! Without you, we would never have found one another again! We owe everything to you, have 2 silver 36 copper and 107 xp!

It would be a story, delivered in media res, with a happy ending where all of the characters we know are together. It wouldn’t be a moment, a snapshot in time; it would be an Event that requires our intercession to be resolved.

I’ve talked before about the frustrations I have with making the player into a Big Damn Hero at every turn, to the point where they can’t walk down the street without saving six people’s lives, reuniting three long lost loves, restoring a faltering business, and mending a broken family, all while saving the world from yet another evil plot. What I’ve noticed more recently is a trend in games from elsewhere, which don’t try to turn everything into a story, and let events unfold without necessarily resolving in a neat and tidy package.

I spoke to a friend from India recently, who was having a hard time taking a certain American MMO seriously. Her comment was that it felt to her like she was being singled out and made fun of, because the game was asking her to do simple things then lavishing praise on her. In talking to her, it was clear that there was a cultural divide between the kinds of stories that made sense to her and the kind I’ve come to expect from my own games. I’d love to play a game that features her kind of stories, where the subtle things that motivate and satisfy are shaped by a culture that isn’t my own.

I’ve felt for a long time like one of the best ways to get a pulse on a culture is through its entertainment. There are very few things that are quite so effective at revealing subtle ideas and cultural differences than seeing what kinds of things resonate with different people, what they watch and listen to for fun. I hope that as globalization continues, I can start to play games that put me not just in the shoes of someone whose life has been wholly unlike mine, but that has been designed from the ground up from a perspective I don’t instantly recognize.

Why does a game from 1997 still matter, almost two decades later?

One of the least expected bombs dropped at E3 this year was the up-and-coming Final Fantasy VII “remake”. The darling of Internet speculation since at least the launch of the PS3, there’s been a persistent rumor of a modern version of the game for an incredibly long time. Two good questions come up when watching the E3 trailer:

— “Why does anyone care still?”

— “What is Square-Enix’s position here; why are they doing this *now*?”

The first answer is easy, though will be unpopular if FF7 wasn’t your thing: Final Fantasy 7 is the most popular Final Fantasy full stop. It has sold, over its lifetime, a bit over ten million copies… for just the base game. There are two spinoffs, pushing the FF7 franchise’s sales up to right around 15 million. None of the games in the setting are newer than 8 years old. There’s also a ton of non-game side content that I’m not counting in that number, but are immensely popular.

There’s a fairly common marketing standard that says that something is “mainstream” when it breaks 10 million sales. At the point at which that many copies have been sold, enough people have experienced [whatever] for it to be a cultural touchstone. FF7 is the only Final Fantasy game to break that number.

Here’s the other thing: there are not a lot of games from the 1990s that are still relevant today. A lot of the stories being told back then were extremely limited, for a variety of reasons, and have been outdated since then. Final Fantasy has been trying to push the storytelling envelope for most of its run, and as a result the overall arc of FF7 (and a lot of its side content) is still pretty reasonable with a facelift. The stuff that wouldn’t pass muster today can be easily removed or updated, and the high points the game couldn’t quite hit (due to technological or space or time limitations) can be fully addressed.

So, what’s Squeenix’s angle? Why now?

The common theory I’ve seen floating around is that Square is worried because its flagship series has been faltering, so dropping a new FF7 is a way to give itself a monetary shot in the arm. Let me dispel that one real fast. A remake of FF7 is an entire new game. The parts that you can port over to a graphical update are the EASY parts; new visuals, new engine, new models, new animations– all of that is expensive, and it’s what a remake needs. Even if the story is kept entirely as-is, and they don’t add voices (both of which are laughable), that’s just text, and text is cheap.

Don’t do this.

We haven’t seen an FF7 remake because doing so is *incredibly* expensive. The game is brutally dated at this point, being a PS1 title with some of the blockiest character models this side of Minecraft. There’s been a lot of work in updating character art and models for things like Advent Children and the other spinoffs, but nothing near the scope of redoing the entire game. Again, the most recent of these games was a PSP release in 2007– even that’s dated by now, if it wasn’t when it originally launched.

The FF7 remake isn’t a sign of money-grabbing on Square-Enix’s part. It’s not a sign of uncertainty or insecurity, mining nostalgia for quick bucks. The scope is just too huge for that.

Here’s the way I see it. Square faltered a while back, with some of the more recent FF games (12, 13, first release of 14), and has taken the time to figure out what they’d been doing wrong and how to fix it. We’ve been seeing the shot-in-the-arm re-releases for years now, as they use their old properties to bolster themselves while they work out what to do next. It’s been extremely successful– they’ve partnered up with external studios and made some acquisitions that have been EXTREMELY well-recieved. Lest we forget, the new Deus Ex, the new Thief, the new Tomb Raider, the new Hitman, and Life is Strange are all games developed under the Square-Enix publishing umbrella. These aren’t minor games.

For a closer-to-the-mark example, Final Fantasy 14 is the second-biggest MMO in the world, right behind WoW. It is closer to WoW’s numbers than any other MMO has ever been, and furthermore it’s closer to WoW’s numbers than its nearest competition is to it, and it’s GROWING. We’ll see how the expansion does, but FFXIV is a game that should be dead and is instead the second biggest game in a hyper-competitive, super saturated genre.

Square has been quietly rebuilding its empire for almost a decade now, recovering from missteps in its major franchise. It had difficulty with the transition to high-fidelity open worlds; when it became de rigeur to have a finely detailed game with HD graphics, Final Fantasy, attempting to maintain its reputation for sitting at the forefront of graphics, tried to keep pace, staying ahead of everyone else with stunning graphical fidelity. It’s how we got FF13’s pretty-but-linear corridors; the cost of doing big worlds with that level of detail rises exponentially, so keeping the big worlds and trying to stay graphically on top is an impossible task. Even the open-world games weren’t doing that at the time.

Now, they’ve found their footing. FFXV’s demo was very well received, FFXIV is quietly the most relevant MMO out there, and they have a stable of strong properties, all gunning for sequels, from satellite studios. Despite all of this, possibly BECAUSE of all of this, Square is seen by many to still be faltering. It’s been rebuilding and galvanizing slowly and quietly, so much so that it’s easy to miss if you aren’t paying close attention.

The Final Fantasy VII remake is Square-Enix dropping a bomb, making a big, loud noise to make people sit up and pay attention. They’re here, they’re back, and they’re relevant. FF7 is not a property they take lightly, and they could gently milk it for a long time– they’ve been doing it highly successfully for a while. A full-blown remake is a show of confidence: they believe they can blow you out of the water with it, and that they have all their cards in the right places to do so. It’s finally worth it to them to spend the exorbitant resources necessary to make the game, because they’re confident they can do it right.

It’s going to be different from the FF7 I played nearly 20 years ago, and I’m okay with that. I want to see what Square can do now.

I’ve put a bunch of time into Archeage over the last week, and it’s been interesting to see what that game is doing systemically vs narratively. Archeage is, at the meta level, a sandbox within which you can forge your own path. What this means is that there are massive systems in place to give you things to do. By necessity, this means that the narrative takes something of a back seat. There’s limited time to make a game, so you lose some fidelity in the process.

Archeage quests fall into a handful of categories: “main story”, “local area”, “travel”, and “busywork”. These are in descending order of quality– the main story quests have voiced cutscenes, a focus on story, and (generally speaking) interesting mechanics at work. The “local area” quests are the side stories, the location-based “what’s going on in this specific area” quests that you’re used to from WoW’s hub-and-spoke model. Travel quests are just that– an excuse to move you from one place to another. Often referred to as FedEx quests, these are used to guide people to the next bit of relevant content, so you aren’t lost and wondering where it might be worthwhile to go next. The last set of quests, the busywork quests, are the straight “kill X” quests– go here, fight mobs, done.

I mentioned that Archeage is a systems game, and you can see it in how their quests are delivered. The “busywork” quests, where you just go out and kill mobs, tend to come from bounty boards or are “hidden” quests– you hit the bounty board (which is a daily) and go do your fighting, and as soon as you kill your last mob, you get the rewards and can move on, no going back to a questgiver and unnecessarily chatting about how you’ve “done us all a great service by thinning the [monsters] in this area”. The game doesn’t waste time with unnecessary storytelling, focusing those efforts instead on the stories it wants to tell. These aren’t always amazing, but they tend to be worth reading. I’m legitimately curious where my main story is going, and I’ve had a few quests in areas that make me want to know more about the world.

That having been said, in terms of pure quest content, Archeage is lighter than many games– by cutting out unnecessary storytelling, it also removes a lot of story content that would be in other games. This is where the sandbox comes in. A game with a lot of interlocking systems that are all working in tandem becomes a story engine; your experiences with the systems become stories you write yourself. It’s also where the PvP comes in, and why it’s important. Almost everyone I’ve talked to that has avoided the game cites “open-world PvP” as their reason not to play. Given the kinds of PvP experiences you get in games that aren’t systemically driven, this is wholly understandable. A lot of people hear “open-world PvP” and imagine wandering around flagged in Stranglethorn Vale, where they’re at risk of being killed at random for some other player’s jollies, and possibly camped and griefed as well, because it provokes a reaction (and given WoW’s mechanism for rezzing, is very easy to do).

Here’s why good systems matter: In WoW, when you die, you have to run back to your body as a ghost and resurrect at low health and mana, then spend some time recovering, or you resurrect at a graveyard at a severe “convenience” penalty. If someone kills you in PvP, in the open world, they are almost certainly assured a second kill if they simply wait around for a bit– the death system and the PvP system are aligned such that this is not only possible, but easy and rewarding. This is systemically rather bad. Compare to a game like Archeage: You die, you are returned (whole!) to a graveyard, and given a significant (10%) stat boost as a pick-me-up after death. Graveyards have a “safe zone” around them, so you can resurrect and restore yourself even if your killer(s) are standing around. You can teleport out of the area and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Rather than death and PvP being disconnected systems, they interlock in such a way as to minimize grief.

To tie this into the storytelling, we can look at those FedEx quests. One extremely popular activity in Archeage is running trade routes. You create a bundle of trade goods and carry them to a different location than you made them in to sell. Some areas want different trade goods than others, and the farther you travel to deliver the goods, the better the reward is. Furthermore, there are significant systems built up around this mechanic– multiple types of vehicles exist to help you cart around goods, and simply carrying goods around slows you immensely, so while you’re carrying a trade pack, you’re vulnerable. You can put down a trade pack at any time, anywhere in the world, but other players can steal it if you do so. As a result, there are different kinds of trade runs: reliable but low-paying ones that run through safe territory and lucrative but dangerous ones that deliver across long distances through contested zones. These are FedEx quests, delivered to you without even quest text for context, and in a game like WoW or FFXIV, they would be incredibly boring. You’d autorun from one location to the next and resent the game every step of the way.

In Archeage, there are decision points to be made. There’s risk in a simple delivery, which makes the event more interesting. The systems in place in the game turn a boring delivery quest into an event that’s both repeatable and potentially interesting every single time. They also bring players together: some groups run trade caravans, bringing large groups of armed players to defend a big group of traders, often covering very long distances for maximum rewards. Smaller groups of players may travel in groups, one or two traders with an armed escort.

This also builds a reason to PvP, rather than just for jollies. It *can* happen anywhere, but because there are good reasons to do it, it’s pretty rare for it to actually happen anywhere. To put it another way, in 25 levels, I have seen precisely zero PvP. There’s no one griefing newbies, there’s no one waiting on the road to gank someone twenty levels below them, nothing. There’s no reason to do so, not when you could be getting real rewards elsewhere.

I’ve often commented that I feel like WoW has poisoned the well on a number of gameplay mechanics– certainly the latest difficulty with flying mounts should say something about how you need to come up with a system for things, rather than just “hit a button, fly wherever you like”. Flight in WoW has serious problems; it’s essentially a GM cheat code that every player gets to use. There’re no systems governing its use, no skills to pick up or decisions to make: just hit button, fly effortlessly. Now they’ve realized how much of a problem that is but can’t throttle it back; their playerbase is raging over the suggestion that they might not be able to have GM cheat codes anymore.

It may seem frustrating to put friction in a system, but it’s that friction that makes the environment that much more compelling, and makes even little things meaningful and interesting. PvP is just a system, it’s effectively that wandering Devilsaur that you didn’t see that aggros you and kills you. The difference between good PvP and bad PvP is what happens next. What do you lose, besides time? What can you do to prevent it happening again? If, as in WoW, the answer is a catch-22 between “take a 10min break with an awful debuff” or “get corpse camped”, that’s a bad decision. If you can more easily wipe your hands clean and move on, it’s that Devilsaur– just say “welp” and move on. You might run into another one again, but it’s unlikely to become a permanent fixture in your playtime.

In one of the very early computer science courses I took, the concept of a “depth-first search” vs a “breadth-first search” came up. It’s something that stuck with me, not because I’m deeply invested into search functions, but because it struck me as a good metaphor for how to approach life.

I am not highly skilled at terribly many of the things I do. I’ve very frequently been second- or third-best in competitions I’m serious about, rarely cracking the top of the charts despite the effort I put in. In my FFXIV raid, I am not the best healer, or the best DPS, and certainly not hte best tank; there are people who are far more focused than I am in all of those categories. I can, however, competently do all three. I have regularly swapped between the healing and DPS roles so much that I’ve lagged behind in gear quality compared to others, simply because I’m splitting my focus. Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I’ve tanked Coil raid content and extreme-mode primals; my avoidance of the tank role is more an affectation at this point than anything. I’m not the best at any of these roles, or even necessarily great, but I can do all of them and I lean on my breadth of knowledge to give me shortcuts.

Kodra sometimes likes to talk about his experience trying to surpass me as a rogue in World of Warcraft, while we were raiding. I was able to regularly and easily put out the most damage of the group at very low risk. This has (not incorrectly) been attributed to my weapon choice– having done some testing, I used a dagger in my off hand as part of a sword-based specialization; counterintuitive at best, suboptimal at worst. It was a specific dagger I used, that essentially let me exploit a particular effect that was rather redundant if the dagger was the primary weapon, but unlocked some obscenely powerful chains if it wasn’t. Where I got the idea from was a discussion I’d read about warriors, a class I didn’t even play, that was talking about the value of accuracy (+hit%) for generating their combat resource. If I could hit more often, I could deal significantly more damage, and one of the special properties of the dagger is that it could, on occasion, cause me to hit perfectly for a very brief window. I focused on my accuracy, getting more of those hits to land and getting the dagger to work its magic more often, and I skyrocketed to the top of the charts, not by becoming a better rogue, but by becoming a better warrior.

Kodra is nodding right about now, but there’s a second half of this story. One of our other rogues spent months trying to imitate my playstyle and finally got the (admittedly extraordinarily rare) dagger to drop. For him, it was a disaster. His damage spiked, but it was unreliable and he would do too much damage, pull the attention of whatever enemy we were fighting, and wind up in the dirt… or the dagger wouldn’t trigger often enough to be worthwhile. He found it very frustrating, and fairly quickly shoved the dagger in the bank and never looked back. What he wasn’t doing was the other half of my strategy. Even though I didn’t play other classes, I made an effort to understand what they were all doing in various fights. I knew when our tanks had plenty of control over the fight and when they had less, I knew when our healers had spare cycles for raid healing and when they didn’t, and I knew which transitions were touchy and which weren’t. I ruthlessly exploited these, often taking unnecessary damage or stacking a debuff further than I should have, pushing harder when I knew it was safe and pulling back (and often, slightly to the side if there were other overzealous rogues around) when it wasn’t. A statistic that was frequently brought up was the number of deaths in the raid– how many times someone had pushed a little bit too hard and failed. What was much less frequently checked on was the amount of damage taken per death. I very rarely died, but I took enormous amounts of damage: far more than almost any other rogue in the group. I knew when healers could afford to heal me and when they couldn’t, and when they could I put myself in harm’s way to keep on the enemy.

I never mastered rogue rotations or timings or specific boss strategies. I relied in instinct and a wide breadth of knowledge about when and how to run risks. Often, this breadth of knowledge acts as a surrogate for depth of experience, letting me pull ideas from many unrelated places to solve a particular problem.

One of my favorite games is Infinity, which makes it easy for me to amass a wide breadth of experience. I’ve rarely if ever played the same list twice, never spending the time and effort to master a particular build, but being able to draw upon a very broad knowledge of the game has given me the ability to take almost any list I run and perform fairly well with it. I still fall short when I face players who are highly skilled and focus and refine a single list to a honed edge, but I’m not so far behind them that I can’t acquit myself respectably.

It’s a large part of the reason I don’t have a lot of patience for bullet hell shooters. They demand a tight, specific focus, that you memorize patterns and execute them. There’s no room for instinct, no room for ad-libbing, and no way for me to draw a breadth of skills in. They’re the antithesis of how I learn and operate, and I have a huge amount of difficulty with them. Fighting games are similar, asking for a very specific focus and a certain amount of depth in specific skills.

When I’m in charge of a group, I tend to surround myself with people who focus on depth. They’re almost always better at me at the things they choose to do, and it gives me opportunities to learn from them. I benefit both from the depth of their skill and the shortcuts I learn that add to my breadth of experience. Little things fascinate me: how gestures in other countries differ from the ones I’m used to; which turns of phrase in English have analogues in other languages, and how the meanings change; how a tank builds threat and when; where healers prefer to stand relative to everyone else. These little things all give me perspective, so that no matter what I’m doing I can pull in *something* to build on whatever I’m working on and imitate depth.

This habit is something that’s bothered me a lot in the past. I would look at any individual thing I did and be frustrated that I wasn’t better at it. I could be good– good enough that people would respect my abilities, but rarely the best. It took me years to see the bigger picture, that I was good at a lot of things, and that even if I wasn’t the best in any single one, in aggregate I had a very broad skillset and knowledge base. I’ve never been a depth-first person; until something hooks my interest or makes its value apparent, I don’t drill down and focus on something (though on occasion I have done this).

I’ve caught myself thinking this.

I don’t have a particular conclusion to draw from here, just a meditation on how I think and the kinds of things I focus on. I think a source of frustration for me lately has been that I’ve had few opportunities to expand the breadth of my knowledge, partly due to a lack of resources and partly due to a lack of opportunity. I have a new appreciation for the classwork I’m doing and the perspectives it exposes me to; it’s an opportunity that I relish, and in this lull between quarters I quickly find that I miss it.

A friend of mine made a comment recently that really resonated with me. She commented how she found it frustrating that J.K. Rowling was being asked to “clarify” things about the Harry Potter world, and how asking for that kind of clarity devalued imagination.

It’s a thought that’s stuck with me. I think about the stories I’ve gotten deeply invested in, and I realize that so many of them leave questions unanswered, little details left up to the imagination. If the story and setting are rich enough and robust enough, the actual story told feels like a snapshot, a thin line cutting through a much larger unwoven tapestry. All of this blank space leaves room for the imagination to play, where you can tell stories to yourself or other people about what’s going on in that unseen space. Sometimes this is just your own thoughts on what’s happening over there, or a conversation with a friend. Sometimes it’s more involved: some fanfiction, a fan film, Knights of the Old Republic.

I’ve thought a lot about the settings that really hook me, and they’re often ones where I can feel the story spiraling outwards, beyond the bounds of the actual narrative. In media studies, we refer to that ‘actual narrative’ as the text of the work, the actual, literal words and scenes that are happening on the page, or on the screen, or through whatever medium. That uncharted territory that gets filled in by your imagination is whitespace, a blank canvas for you to fill in your mind, based on the snippets given in the text.

http://rochellemoulton.com/

I’ve been watching a lot of anime lately, and it’s striking to me how much whitespace most anime leaves in its worlds. Even very simple worlds are explicit about the scope of their stories, and generate lots of little questions and curiosities that go unanswered– by design. It’s a stark contrast to the way western media does things. We want to know the answers, we want those answers to be the right ones. An offhanded comment by an author about what she thinks might happen off-camera sparks a searing argument, and can drive people from a formerly beloved property. I know many people who were driven away from Star Wars by the prequels. Too much was explained in unsatisfactory ways, and it tainted what had come before; it filled the whitespace when it didn’t need filling.

I think a lot of this was the appeal of early MMOs, and some of what drove that deep attachment I and many others formed. The low fidelity of the storytelling and the world itself left a lot of whitespace for us to fill in our minds, that we could directly play a part in. Even before I started seriously roleplaying, I had an image in my mind of my character– one-dimensional and not fleshed out, but there was a faint persona there that was me filling that whitespace in a small way. In Vanilla WoW, the storytelling was a little more explicit, enough to give me hooks around which to build a fully realized character, and the things I did weaved in and out of the narrative I’d come up with. I felt attached to those characters, enough that I can still tell stories about them, rather than stories about myself as a player.

I find myself sometimes wanting to know too much about a setting, wanting to fill in that whitespace until I’m satisfied that it’s full and “correct”. Sometimes I’m able to do this, and my interest in that setting drops off dramatically. There’s no more room for my imagination to play, and the world seems small. With MMOs, I’ve often felt constrained by the story being told. Rift is a really good example in my case– the introduction of the game establishes a very specific, narrow path that says a lot about my character and his or her background, and separates me from the world. I’m important to the game’s story, but only in the context of me performing heroics and stopping threats; I don’t really belong in that world. As our fidelity in MMO storytelling has risen, we’ve gotten more specific and more personal with our stories, and in so doing we reduce the whitespace we have to play in, and lose that hook that keeps us invested and attached.

It’s been ages since I’ve played an MMO that I’ve seriously roleplayed in, and it’s telling that my attachment to various MMOs has dropped off dramatically. There are other reasons for it, but in the past few months those reasons have evaporated and yet I haven’t returned to one of my favorite hobbies, despite having both the time and the mental energy to do so.

I understand why, from a business standpoint, a lot of MMOs have stopped giving servers explicit “RP” tags, but it’s something I dearly miss. It gave me a space where I knew I could play and fill in that whitespace with my own thoughts. I made a special effort to roll on the (unofficial) RP server in Archeage, just because I think I want to try to find some like-minded folks. I’m a bit worried that I’m coming into things too late to really take part, but the possibility is there.

I like my worlds large, full of uncharted space with stories that are never “officially” told. It sparks the imagination and keeps me thinking about what might be happening elsewhere in that world. I think that’s a big part of why Harry Potter was such a big hit– it painted a small picture of a world that was much, much larger than what you got to see. There were little hints that there was a lot going on that was never explicitly told, so you could fill in those blanks yourself. It’s a world full of stories, in which Harry Potter himself is a relatively small part. It’s a good world, because it’s big. We don’t need that whitespace filled– in fact, it’s better that it’s not filled.

Pursue the stories untold, paint your own pictures in that blank space. Fight the urge to fill it up and make the world you love small and cramped.