The problem of player choice: A Warcraft retrospective

I've been an off-and-on player of World of Warcraft since the very beginning, dating all the way back to the game's open beta just before launch in 2004. I can still recall how the final hours of the beta turned into a chaotic clusterfuck of Horde and Alliance players invading each other's starting zones before they all had to start anew again at launch. In the early days of WoW following its release, Blizzard had not yet patched out text communication via special characters when speaking to the opposing faction. This was an especially useful tool for me being on a PVP server, where everyone was at risk of being ganked at nearly any time. I was able to leet speak my way out of potential conflicts and into making friends with my enemy. I remember when Gadgetzan was truly a hive of scum and villainy, as players would jump on top of buildings and take pot-shots at opposing AFK players with the guards unable to do anything, so Blizzard finally patched in boomsticks for the guards that would knock players off the rooftops. I have a lot of fond memories of this game.

I remember a lot of random stuff, and it was a lot of silly fun, but there was also the dark side of early WoW. Disjointed quest design that would have you traveling across multiple regions just to turn in a single fetch quest that offers a paltry amount of experience. An endgame that is woefully grindy and a source of endless guild drama fighting over who gets what armor piece that dropped. So as someone with a far-reaching perspective on the game over the years that neither has rose-tinted glasses for the past nor immediately jumps on the hype train whenever a new expansion gets announced, I thought I might be able to offer a balanced look at the game throughout its tumultuous history, and describe why I feel it is headed in the wrong direction for reasons that don't simply amount to "it just needs to be more like vanilla WoW". Maybe even offer some solutions on how it could be fixed. Although I'm personally a PVP player to the core, I'm sure many of my experiences and sentiments mirror that of other former WoW players regardless of your background with the game. If nothing else, maybe you will gain some insights seeing the game from a different perspective, so strap in, because this is going to be a long journey.

Vanilla

As previously mentioned, classic World of Warcraft was prohibitively grindy. Not only in terms of the endgame, but even to a lesser extent with the quest design. A lot of quests did simply amount to a thinly-veiled excuse for killing X baddies over here or fetching Y goodies over there with no real story to invest you. The PVP endgame in particular was especially atrocious, basing your PVP rank on how well you perform against other players in farming for honor points. Keep in mind that these points aren't based on how well you perform in terms of kill-to-death ratio or anything like that, but rather just how long you can endure farming battlegrounds for hours on end. Then at the end of the week, the game would compare the amount of points you earned against other players and adjust your rank accordingly. Looking at the top of the leaderboards on the mini games of Super Mario Odyssey should already tell you how this is going to turn out. You can basically forget about becoming High Warlord or Grand Marshall and rolling around Azeroth in your epic PVP gear. Someone is always going to out-grind you, and since only the highest officer ranks were the ones that offered worthwhile gear, basically anyone who didn't farm their character 24/7 and hire someone to play for them while they sleep at night shouldn't even bother with it. Just stick to raiding. Of course, some old school players would tell you that this extreme "no pain, no gain" approach to design is part of the game, and that's just how it should be. And if that's the case, great, then the upcoming World of Warcraft Classic servers will be an excellent fit for you, but I think the majority of players would reasonably ask for a fairer system while still respecting the desire for challenge and reward. In spite of all these frustrations though, there was a certain charm to classic Warcraft that made the whole experience feel worth it. You felt connected to its world and its community, and at the end of the day, I can't say that I regret my time with it. For the most part, that is. The old honor system can still blow me. :)

Burning Crusade

Thankfully, Warcraft's early expansions sought to address many of these more obnoxiously tedious elements of the gameplay. The first expansion, Burning Crusade, started off mainly with minor tweaks around the edges, lightly speeding up the leveling from 1 to 60 to accommodate for the new increased level cap, and introducing arenas as an alternative option for PVP. I'll be honest, I can't go into much detail here because I largely skipped over this expansion after being burned out from the grind of vanilla WoW, so I'm just going to jump straight ahead to Wrath of the Lich King where the changes were considerably more noticeable. All that needs to be said about Burning Crusade is that it introduced the blood elves, which are super animu, so it's an improvement by default.

Wrath of the Lich King

With the release of Wrath, many consider this to be the game's "peak", offering a plethora of high quality endgame content, and dolling out rewards at a much steadier, reasonable pace. It felt like you had to work for your gear, but it was manageable and also felt like you made a decent chunk of progress by the end of the week. The refined arena system was a fucking godsend for PVP, and miles improvement over the old honor system. Now you could buy PVP gear through cumulative currency you earned that was not compared against other players. As long as you played a certain number of matches each week, you were practically guaranteed to earn something by the end of it. Only the highest tier of PVP gear was placed behind a tough arena ranking to reach, but you could still get some really powerful stuff even if you could never perform to that level. Moreover, your arena ranking was based on your victory ratio rather than farming endlessly through hundreds of matches, so you actually had to improve your strategy to earn rewards, not spend more sleepless nights grinding out the fights. There was even a full-on world PVP raid zone added to the game complete with controllable siege vehicles, which the Horde and Alliance would fight back and forth over for access to a dungeon with some nice rewards inside. In the PVE department, Northrend was also a beautifully-realized continent, with quest designs that actually started to have a few interesting stories, and scripted events which added character and context to the objectives. Raid dungeons received a similar currency system to PVP where even if you didn't get any good drops from bosses, you could eventually buy them from a vendor in the city with enough earned points. Wrath had improved on the game in nearly every way and made it infinitely more accessible, but without sacrificing too much of the balancing act between progression, challenge, and reward, so it's no wonder that this expansion saw some of the highest subscriber numbers that the game had ever experienced up until this point.

Cataclysm

The release of Cataclysm was a controversial turning point in the game's history; one that marked the first major rift among the playerbase. This is chiefly because of its complete revamping of old world content, which had started to feel neglected after the past two expansions, as well as some streamlining decisions that not all were comfortable with. For the most part though, I personally still consider this expansion to be a step in the right direction. Cataclysm cleaned up a lot of little lingering pet peeves for me, like the fact that some classes were seriously gimped during the early leveling phase. Rogues used to be heavily RNG-based because of how high their miss rate was, so you could miss a critical backstab when engaging an enemy, causing the exchange to be annoyingly prolonged, and in some cases even resulting in you dying to a trash mob that was only a single level above you when it should have been easily dispatched. Meanwhile, hunters could just steamroll through everything with their pets and give no fucks. Cataclysm fixed all this by rebalancing the early leveling experience and buffing classes that desperately needed reworking. And holy fuck those new water effects. I know I'm kinda making a big deal out of nothing, but WoW went from having some of the shittiest water graphics to being a top-tier modern game in this department. Furthermore, with the old world being revamped, this also means they brought the questing design up to par with the rest of the expansions, adding in more diverse objectives, less pointless travel, and more scripted events and backstories that contextualized what you were doing. For me, the overall leveling experience felt like an improvement, albeit perhaps slightly too easy at times. Some of the newly-added zones were my favorites too, like Vashj'ir, WoW's first completely underwater zone, and Uldum, an Indiana Jones-esque desert adventure. One of my absolute favorite new features to the game however was definitely transmogrification. Suddenly all gear was valuable again regardless of level and stat ranges, because transmog would allow you to change your appearance to whatever piece of gear you want it to look like while still keeping your stats. The only caveat being of course that you still need to actually acquire the item that you want to have the look of, but this allowed everyone to customize their appearance however they liked without having to sacrifice viability in combat. My only real issue with Cataclysm was that it marked the point where some aspects of streamlining the game were starting to overreach and leading to unforeseen consequences, which I will get into later.

Mists of Pandaria

While for many it was Cataclysm that sowed the first seeds of discontent, for me it was the release of Mists of Pandaria that marked my first major disappointment with the direction of the game. From a story and theming perspective, I feel like it is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the franchise. Sure, Warcraft has always had an underlying sense of humor to it, but it was still always at its core a high fantasy franchise with some darker themes sprinkled in, and it treated itself at the very least with a modicum of seriousness and urgency. With Pandaria, it marked the first expansion where the main focus was a humorous light-hearted detour based on what was originally supposed to be an April fools joke in Warcraft 3. It's true that Blizzard later officially canonized it, but even then pandarens were always kind of treated as a goofy background race that isn't central to the story. Their treatment was akin to murlocs, so that still doesn't excuse it for me, as I wouldn't want an expansion called Mists of Murlocia either, much less have murlocs actually be a playable race. Nonetheless, even all that could be set aside if at least the core gameplay remained intact, but sadly by this point in the game's development, Warcraft had reached a tipping point where Wrath and Cataclysm had already struck a strong balance between challenge and reward, so any further streamlining would only break the balance and unnecessarily change things for the sake of changing things, yet unfortunately Blizzard felt the desire to press onward anyways, judging that players don't have the attention span for this type of game anymore. When the first pre-launch Pandaria patch hit at the end of Cataclysm, I immediately noticed a huge boost in damage with my warrior I was playing at the time. I was wrecking baddies like nobody's business, and at first I was feeling pretty pumped at how powerful I felt, but then those aforementioned unforeseen consequences started to settle in.

There really wasn't any challenge to questing anymore. I pretty much never died, and I just wrecking-balled my way through everything without the slightest hint of effort. That feels pretty good at first but gets old fast. More importantly, it led to deeper consequences for the social aspect of the game. Since enemies had become such complete pushovers, there was no need to interact and group with other players anymore to gain an advantage. Old WoW was always technically capable of being soloed, but you still felt drawn to other players because some quests were considerably more difficult to try and manage on your own. That led to some great times making new friends, cracking jokes, and coordinating together. By the time Pandaria had hit the scene though, that experience had been so diluted by lack of challenge that it was becoming a distant memory. It was more efficient to solo to the endgame, so why bother talking to other players? I need to get to the max level, and they would only be slowing me down. When given the choice, players will always choose the path of least resistance. On top of this, despite that each expansion was successively increasing the size of the game, it was actually beginning to feel smaller from all of the convenient portals and instant teleports warping you to nearly every conceivable location in the game. That might seem like another improvement at first, but again, this creates its own set of unintended consequences. The sense of scale was lost. You don't feel like you're part of a big living and breathing world anymore, but instead a series of isolated zones that you teleport to on-command. Everything is immediate gratification with no buildup or anticipation. The small skirmishes and games of cat and mouse that would dynamically break out between factions were gone; replaced by teleports directly into the instances once you had assembled your group from the dungeon finder. Yes, it's true that sometimes I could get a little frustrated by these old encounters and just wanted to run my dungeon, but the dynamic and unpredictable nature of these skirmishes made for great storytelling experiences and always built a sense of camaraderie with my team. The world had grown barren and empty, save for sparse concentrations of players in the major cities. Pandaria was probably not the first expansion to begin suffering from the effects of these changes, but it all felt like it really came to a head for me with this release when these problems had been so especially exacerbated in it.

Warlords of Draenor

At first glance, Warlords of Draenor seemed like it might be a return to form for the long-running MMO. Moving away from the silliness of pandas and returning to a focus on major events from the game's lore sounded great on paper. In practice however, the expansion's implementation of it felt somewhat clumsy and convoluted, opting for a time traveling plot that now creates two different versions of Outland; one set in the present (Burning Crusade) and one set in the past (Draenor). As a result, players had to travel through the Dark Portal again, but this time taking them to the past version of Draenor. As for "old" (but also technically new) Outland? That's just relegated to an awkward little mage portal now which unceremoniously teleports you there from one of the major cities. I'm not really sure it was necessary to have us going back to Outland again in this way. It might have been a better alternative to expand on the already existing version of Outland with new regions rather than creating this awkward split that makes the lore confusing. To the game's credit though, we were now beginning to see some pretty cool uses of in-game cut scenes in quests that really showed how far WoW's engine has come, and seeing old characters from Warcraft's history was a treat. Unfortunately there's little else I can say positively about it. Instead of fixing WoW's pervasive easy-mode problem, Draenor doubled down on it, with typical encounters amounting to carelessly rounding up five or six NPCs at once and slaughtering them en masse. What little danger and challenge was still left from Pandaria had been removed at this point.

Garrisons were yet another cool idea on paper but half-baked in practice. It's clear Blizzard wanted to create this feeling that you're a commander overseeing the establishment of a new base of operations in Draenor, giving the player an increased sense of importance and agency in the war effort. However the restrictive nature of garrisons mostly killed this feeling, as you aren't really allowed to choose where you build your garrison, and managing the garrison itself just felt like an exercise in spreadsheets, menu navigation, and added busywork. Worse still, garrisons effectively turned endgame gear progression into a joke, allowing the game to play itself and hand me free stuff without even needing to lift a finger. By placing bones that I collected from PVP on my gladiator sanctum, it would automatically spit out gear and currency over time even while I'm not logged into the game. The bones themselves were pathetically easy to acquire. They dropped by the hundreds in the designated world PVP zone, which basically rendered the old battlegrounds obsolete as a means for farming gear. I was more or less able to complete my PVP set in under a month, and with that I was done with Draenor and unsubscribed. Warlords of Draenor was quite possibly the peak of Warcraft's casualization, taking all the wrong lessons from previous expansions and expanding on them in the worst ways. The garrisons were boring and played the game for you, PVE combat required no effort, the new zones were forgettable, and the time travel story was messy.

Legion

Surely Blizzard couldn't do any more damage than they had already done with Draenor, right? Haha, ahah, ahahaha! Wrong again sir. Blizzard just can't stop tinkering with stuff that aint even broken. With the release of Legion, we saw the introduction of level scaling as a new feature. This means that as you're leveling up your character in a region and supposedly "increasing" your strength, in actuality enemies get buffed along with you, which in practice means that you aren't really progressing. Now Blizzard is messing with fundamental mechanics that underpin the core feedback loop of the game. You fight stuff, you get stronger, and you move on to the next greater challenge, creating a sense of satisfaction where once-challenging foes no longer pose a threat to you, and enemies that previously were beyond your abilities are now capable of being overcome. This has always been an integral part of the experience, but now even this was on the chopping block. There are few things that annoy me more than a game trying to fake progression with meaningless stats that only give the illusion of growth. I may be hitting that ogre for 6000 damage instead of 5000 now, but since his health increased along with my damage, I'm not really killing him any faster. This frankly comes off as dishonest, like the game is trying to tell you that you've been rewarded for your effort when all it really did was pat you on the head and tell you "Good job!" I get that this feature does offer some benefits like being able to play where you want instead of being limited to certain regions, and being able to play with your friends who might have out-leveled you, but are these gains really worth essentially ripping apart a core motivational component of the gameplay just to achieve? I think there are much healthier ways to address these issues that don't require effectively rendering the leveling system meaningless and arbitrary.

As if the previous feature wasn't bad enough, Blizzard wasted no time gutting PVP gear progression as well. Now in Legion, gear stats are totally ignored in PVP. Yes, you read that correctly. They do absolutely nothing. When you engage with another player of equal level to you, your stats automatically adjust on-the-fly to be nearly identical to theirs. The only bonus you may receive is a slight stat boost based on your gear's item level, but the difference is so negligible it might as well be useless when you crunch the numbers. Once again, I understand the reasons behind this. Players can now stand on equal footing and be judged solely on their skill. Except there's several problems with this. First of all, imbalances due to stat differences were never really that big of an issue, as all players already had the same potential to obtain the same gear. It's not like once someone claimed their epic PVP set, no one else was allowed to buy it after that point; giving this player an unfair advantage over others. Everyone eventually could reach the same level if they worked for it. This potential for growth was what used to serve as a primary motivator for progressing in PVP. So in essence, these changes eliminate incentives to progress in PVP in order to solve a problem that was never much of a problem to begin with. Secondly, these imbalances used to create interesting dynamic situations in world PVP. One of my favorite moments in WoW was when I encountered a fully decked hunter who was so powerful that he mopped the floor with both my brother and myself when we tried to engage him. We couldn't take him on our own, so we found a new group member to help bring him down. He started attacking me again before we could regroup though, so I hopped on my flying mount before he could score another kill. I distracted him on a long chase from Duskwood over to Westfall while my brother and our newfound friend positioned themselves for an ambush. They hid behind a large tree that obscured themselves from his vision. Then when they were ready, I deliberately dismounted near the tree, giving the impression to the hunter that I was going to try and fight him solo. He took the bait, sealing his fate as my brother and our friend quickly sprung the trap and joined the battle. We were finally able to take him down, and it was a satisfying moment of outwitting an overpowered foe. These are the kinds of moments that were only possible because of the varied range of stat differences created by gear progression, which Legion now just destroyed.

As much as several of Legion's changes enraged me, admittedly there are at least a few redeeming qualities about it. The new class specialization system is fantastic. Now when you pick between your three specializations, each feels incredibly distinct, giving you completely different ability sets to suit your playstyle. They're so versatile in fact, that if you want to play a melee hunter now, it is a viable option via the survival specialization. With specializations feeling so unique now, it's effectively like having three different subclasses for each class. The new nightfallen race was a nice addition to the lore too, with an interesting backstory and essentially introducing dark elves to the Warcraft universe. They're unfortunately not playable yet, but I imagine that may change in the future. Legion also finally took a step back on casualizing PVE combat, as I actually found myself dying a few times in the early quests, and it wasn't quite as easy anymore to just round up packs of NPCs and obliterate them. However, I still found that once the game fell into its regular rhythm, Blizzard seemed to have quickly given up on maintaining that vanilla-style challenge, and quests were still relatively easy to complete by soloing the whole expansion. And furthermore, outside of the nightfallen, Legion's storytelling was outright dreadful, with major characters speaking almost exclusively in platitudes and cliches. It was one cliche after another back-to-back, seriously bordering on parody of itself. I get that Blizzard wants the plot to feel epic, but when your characters speak like every moment is the end times, it just comes off as hammy and loses its impact. Overall, I found that none of the steps forward that Legion achieved were nearly enough to make up for the disastrous changes that have accumulated post-Cataclysm.

Battle for Azeroth

And now we finally arrive at Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard's latest announced expansion. If there was ever any sliver of hope I had that Blizzard might change course, it was quickly squashed with this announcement, as they yet again doubled down on their current design philosophy. Level scaling will now spread to every zone across the game; continuing to strip away meaningful progression. Unsatisfied with already destroying PVP progression, Blizzard now sees fit to take away PVP servers altogether. The new PVP system works by throwing everybody into the same servers, and to engage in PVP, you must flag yourself to enable it. Blizzard says this change allows for them to provide a new foundation from which they can improve the world PVP experience. That's all fine and dandy, until you realize that this system is nearly identical to how it already works on PVE servers, so their great solution for improving PVP servers is by forcing everyone to play on PVE servers. Brilliant!

The whole point of PVP servers is that it's not optional content. If you play on a PVP server, you have to deal with other players, especially in the open world. How is this at all supposed to improve the PVP experience for people who like it this way? Blizzard seems intent on wanting to improve the PVP experience by catering to PVE players instead of, you know, the people who actually want to do PVP. I suppose it's worth noting that there is one small compromise which differentiates this system from traditional PVE servers. Now you can't just flag yourself for PVP combat anywhere you want; you can only do it in major cities, so to a certain extent, players can't just choose to opt out of PVP whenever they feel like. However, what did I say about players earlier in this analysis? When given the choice, they will always choose the path of least resistance. Since players no longer have to make a commitment to PVP from level 1, why would anyone willingly subject themselves to risk of ganks when they know that other players on the same server don't have to deal with it? Put this another way with a more extreme example. If Blizzard just gave you the option of receiving full epic gear at the start of the game and faceroll your way to max level, why would anyone willingly handicap themselves without it, even if they normally prefer to earn their gear? The mere existence of such an option for more casual players would devalue the experience for everyone else. So sure, the traditional PVP server experience is still supposedly there as an "option", but almost no one is probably going to take it. They'll either wait until max level or just unflag themselves whenever the going gets tough. Instead of having to think creatively on how to deal with enemy players encroaching on their questing area, they'll just hearthstone back to Stormwind and be back in action in no time. This makes for an incredibly flat and boring world PVP experience.

Now critics of my assessment might say, "You just want to gank lowbies." To which I say, uh, yep. It's fun and hilarious, and players opted into this experience when they joined a PVP server. They knew what they signed up for. Moreover, I have to start at level 1 too, and have to go through the same thing, so I'm not getting a free lunch here either. This is the experience I want; I see no reason to be ashamed of it. The diverse range of power levels is what makes the experience interesting to me. There are players weaker than me, and there are players who can kick my ass too. The power imbalances are what drive me to continue growing stronger as a player. If I want to play a perfectly balanced skill-based game, I've got plenty of other options besides WoW to fulfill that need.

Perhaps I'm wrong though. Perhaps players will still fully dedicate themselves to the world PVP experience under this new system. There's still a lot that Blizzard hasn't elaborated on as to how it might work, and the devil is in the details. If the PVP flag mechanic has something like a steep 24-hour timer before it acknowledges a player's desire to opt out, this could deter lazy tactics like hearthing back to town to exit PVP, but we'll have to wait and see. However, given Blizzard's current trend of always erring on the side of caution over ambition and catering to PVE players over PVP, my outlook is decidedly grim for the future of PVP in WoW.

The Problem of Player Choice

Much of modern WoW's major problems seem to stem from one central idea, and that is the philosophy of player choice. Blizzard consistently calls back to this phrase as their reasoning behind many of the decisions they've made. At a glance, it does seem noble to want to accommodate all types of players. Unfortunately though, there comes a point where in your efforts to please everyone, you can't execute a vision, because you're stuck trying to please a widely diverse range of players whose desires run directly in conflict with it. What you're left with is a watered down experience; directionless in its efforts to juggle too many things at once and failing to excel at any particular thing that it tries to do. Furthermore, there also comes a point where you need to recognize the limitations of your demographics and stop trying to futilely pull in new audiences who in all likelihood wouldn't enjoy this type of game anyway. Granny and grandpa, much as we love them, are simply never going to play WoW. It's not their thing. The same for Johnny who loves the outdoors and dreams of becoming a professional football player one day. You're never going to capture these types of players; this isn't WiiSports. MMORPGs appeal to a specific demographic, and no amount of making the game more accessible to newcomers is going to entice people who fundamentally have no interest in this type of game, much less video games in general. After a certain point, continually trying to expand your demographic runs an unnecessary risk of alienating your existing audience while failing to pull in any new ones. No matter what decision Blizzard makes, there is always a price to pay, and they will never be everything to everyone. There is no such thing as infinite growth.

So if Blizzard truly wants to get serious about fixing world PVP, they should start by recognizing who it actually appeals to and make the experience fun for them rather than worrying about everyone else. And who are the people most likely to appreciate this sort of experience? Bombshell: that would be PVP players. Wow, that was really hard to figure out. Glad you're able to keep up with me here and follow along. Want to know another way to improve the PVP experience? Take a page from Nintendo: execute an ambitious vision, and even if it isn't what many wanted or expected, they'll learn to appreciate it anyway when they see how well it is realized. Imagine a world where the PVP experience is fully intertwined with every stage of the game. The Horde and Alliance must juggle completing quest objectives while also having to fend off opposing faction invaders. Towns and regions are conquerable with bonuses and rewards for having the territory under your control. The landscape is always dynamically shifting and you never know what challenges you'll run into. Humans would be encouraged to band together for safety in bigger numbers when invading orcs encroach on their land for loot and plunder. These are the kinds of experiences that I'm sure many PVP players would find enticing, reveling in the spontaneous nature of player interactions and the chaos that unfolds from battling over territories. All of this would require treating PVP as an integral part of the WoW experience though, not optional side content that you just turn off with the flip of a switch. If Blizzard wants to make world PVP something interesting, they can't just make it into something inconsequential that half the players can simply ignore. In order for world PVP to be meaningful, it should leave an impact on the world.

Of course, much of these changes could potentially alienate some PVE players, but like I said, there's always a price to pay for every decision you make, and at least with this approach you've got potential to grow your demographic by tapping into audiences who already have an interest in MMOs; those audiences being former MMO players who craved the PVP emphasis of games like Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online. At the bare minimum though, if Blizzard is going to continue to insist on half-hearted compromises in the name of "player choice", then at least give me the choice to keep playing in the way that WoW has already been providing for over a decade. I see no benefit in what they're currently planning on doing with their merging of PVP and PVE servers.

Finding Balance

This post is quickly turning into a rant about how Warcraft has been failing me for the past several years, so let's change course and discuss how it might be fixed. Stepping away from the upcoming expansion now, let's talk about more general changes that could be done to address WoW's contemporary problems. Unfortunately with WoW being in the current state that it's in, many of the features that have been implemented over the years have become a genie-out-of-bottle situation. They're difficult to roll back. However, with a few concessions here and there, I think players would be receptive to changes that could be done to restore WoW back to some semblance of balance.

Charisma Bonus - Instead of enemies scaling to your level while questing, why not scale your stats to your friend's level when they are online? Essentially when you're in a group with a friend who is too high level for you to quest with, they can activate their "charisma bonus" which will buff your stats to be at the same level as theirs. While this bonus is active, you will be able to quest together and earn experience at the same rate as they do, while items and loot that are dropped still only reflect your current level. The bonus would be ignored in PVP though, and caps could still apply like if your friend is more than 20 levels ahead of you, it can no longer be activated (similar to how Battle for Azeroth already plans to implement global level scaling). This feature would effectively allow you to keep questing with friends even when you grow apart from each other in level, while still having enough restrictions on it that you feel encouraged to keep progressing when you're flying it solo. I think this would work much better than just blanket level scaling at all times because you can keep the more granular sense of progression, whereas in Battle for Azeroth it will take grinding out chunks of levels in increments of 20 to notice any real difference in power.

Meeting Stones - These were already implemented before at one point in WoW's history, but were eventually made obsolete by the dungeon finder. While I'm not suggesting that the dungeon finder should be totally scrapped in order to bring meeting stones back, what I would instead like to see is the removal of the instant teleportation feature in the dungeon finder. You can still assemble a group with it, but once your group is ready, you have to manually travel to the dungeon and summon the rest of your group via the meeting stones. The point of this is mainly to bring back opportunities for Horde and Alliance skirmishes to break out while heading to dungeons, as well as increasing the sense of immersion and adventure; that feeling that WoW is one giant living world. Although at times it may feel tedious having to travel across Azeroth's expansive landscapes, this really did add a sense of immersion back in the day and built up my anticipation for whatever destination I was heading to. In addition, some degree of mandatory traveling helps ensure that the world feels populated instead of largely empty outside of the major cities like WoW has been for quite some time. I think meeting stones are a great compromise that still allow for travel but without waiting too long for the group to get together. Once enough group members have arrived, the rest can be summoned through the stones.

Reduced Portals - As a corollary to my points regarding meeting stones, Blizzard should similarly reduce the number of instant teleportation portals across the world, which have slowly accumulated over the course of so many expansions. Now there are so many portals that players can practically get to anywhere they need with little to no traveling at all, which again negatively impacts the sense of immersion as I described earlier. I'm not looking to turn every trip into an hour-long trek, but again, some level a balance here would be nice.

Flying Mount Fatigue - Once again, at first glance I'm sure many would find the implementation of this feature annoying, but even Blizzard has acknowledged that the impact of flying mounts on the game has led to some negative consequences. It's something of an overpowered ability to be able to just fly anywhere and everywhere at any time. It reduces the sense of danger in the world, and adds to the sense of emptiness when no one has to actually travel through regions and instead can just fly right over them. Adding flying mount fatigue is one way I think this issue could be addressed without totally scrapping flying mounts, and it would help make ground mounts relevant again too. The way it would work is that a fatigue meter would appear that slowly accumulates over time while flying. Once your mount reaches maximum fatigue, it descends to the ground and can't be flown again until it is taken to a flight master to be stabled and nourished for a period of time. You can retrieve your flying mount from any flight master in the world once its resting period has completed. There are already numerous flight masters scattered throughout the world, so this wouldn't be too difficult of a feature to implement.

Aggro Management - Enemies across the world should be buffed in difficulty again to be on par with the threat they once were during WoW's early days. Believe it or not, back then it still wasn't that hard to bring down a baddie. The main difference was that you had to be more aware and cautious of your surroundings, because picking up one extra aggro could be life-threatening. With certain spawn areas being more claustrophobic than others, it could get trickier to complete your quest objectives. Rarely was it outright impossible without other players though, but because of the steeper difficulty, you felt more inclined to group up with others to get the job done. It was a delicate balance that was well-executed, as it allowed players to solo if they had to but still encouraged them to group up whenever possible. MMORPGs are a social experience, and any opportunity to facilitate more cooperative play is usually a good thing.

Arena Stat Scaling - If players still crave a highly competitive PVP experience, arenas would be the ideal place to facilitate this, as they're already designed with competitive play in mind. Keeping stat scaling in arenas while removing it for all other PVP content would be a nice compromise in bringing back gear progression to PVP while still supporting the competitive scene.

Resource Management - It used to be the case that when you ran out of mana, you were actually out of mana. Nowadays Warcraft seems to rely more on cooldowns than resources as a means of limiting your abilities, as there's always a quick and cheap way to get your resource back even if you're running low. Resource management can add an element of tension to combat when you're running low, and it makes you more carefully consider when to use certain moves rather than just immediately spamming buttons once their cooldowns have expired.

Remove the Fucking Pandas - OK, I'm just being a dreamer and a dick on this one. Does anyone even play pandarens anymore to begin with? I never see them walking around.

These are just a few ideas that I think could go a long way toward adding back some actual challenge, progression, and social interaction to WoW without being too punishing or restrictive.

When WoW originally launched, it was in many ways already a significant evolution from previous games in its genre, reducing much of the tedium and annoyances that had plagued MMORPGs for years. It is understandable that in keeping with this trend, Blizzard saw fit to continue honing their craft and streamlining the experience. Somewhere along the way though, it seems Blizzard never stopped to ask whether continually making the experience easier necessarily makes it more fun. All the hyper-streamlining of the game over the years ironically has exposed the progression treadmill even more thoroughly than vanilla WoW's repetition ever did, because at least the earlier days of WoW offset the tedium with the sense of reward from overcoming a difficult feat and having a good time with friends. Now everything is so automated and so immediate in gratification that it feels perfunctory. In Blizzard's endless pursuit to be everything to every player, it is actually compromising many things that players loved about the game in the first place. If Warcraft is to save itself in the long run, it can't keep compromising what it is to try and become something that it will never be. WoW is a MMORPG and always will be. Blizzard should be mindful of this and not forget the fundamentals that originally made World of Warcraft such a captivating game.

Remembering the Wii U: Nintendo's Dreamcast

With the Switch now officially launched and several months into the next generation of Nintendo games, I thought it might be a good time to look back on its troubled older sibling. Nintendo certainly has been quick to sweep the Wii U under the rug following the Switch's release, and who could blame them given how abysmally it under-performed? The system struggled immensely out of the gate, with Nintendo heavily banking on the repeat success of the Wii by using the same branding and packing in another party game in the form of Nintendo Land. Unfortunately as we all know, it backfired spectacularly on them, with Nintendo vastly underestimating consumer fatigue toward the Wii brand and running a lackluster marketing campaign that failed to communicate what the system even was.

However as the Dreamcast has demonstrated, just because a console wasn't popular doesn't mean that it wasn't good. In fact, over time the Wii U brought out some of the best in Nintendo, perhaps serving as an important learning experience that helped them in some ways rediscover their roots. As time progressed, it seems Nintendo was forced to reconsider their strategy and recognize that they could not take the core market for granted anymore. Whereas the Wii often took classic Nintendo franchises and tried to make them more accessible to casual audiences by sacrificing depth and challenge, the Wii U instead opted for tried-and-true easy to learn but difficult to master gameplay, or in some cases just outright demanded your full commitment with no hand-holding whatsoever. Their philosophy had shifted toward the idea that ultimately challenging but rewarding gameplay will speak for itself, and you don't have to sacrifice challenge in order to be fun or accessible. After all, the original Super Mario Bros was a brutally difficult game, and that game sold like... well, Super Mario Bros. Which is to say, it sold a lot of fucking copies. So people can handle more heat than we give them credit for.

Still, even with Nintendo's renewed focus, it was unfortunately too little too late. By the time we began to see the company return to form, the Wii U had already been branded as under-powered, uncool, for children only, and a failure by the public at large, even if many of these criticisms were unfair or misleading. I remember particularly with the release of the open world JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles X, the hatred toward the system was so great that I saw numerous comments along the lines of "the Wii U doesn't deserve this game" and there was legitimate anger and frustration expressed that players could not buy it on another system of their choice. To me this was always puzzling as from my perspective it's always been the games that determined the quality of the system, not the other way around. But nonetheless there was this nebulous feeling that seemed to have ingrained itself in gaming culture that the Wii U was just uncool no matter what it did.

Well I'm here ladies and gentlemen to tell you fuck that noise. This shit was awesome, and it deserves to be recognized for the comeback it made, so let's take a look at some of the excellent games that came to the system.

Super Mario 3D World

Kicking things off with Nintendo's return to form, we saw the release of Super Mario 3D World in November of 2013. As someone who was personally not as impressed by the Galaxy series, I was caught completely off guard when I sat down to try this one out. Expecting just another serviceable but forgettable Mario platformer, instead I found it to be a near-perfect merging of old and new school Mario. The isometric camera angle gives it some added old school charm, while still functioning very much like more modern Mario titles from a gameplay perspective. However, with the addition of Luigi, Peach and Toad as fully playable characters that can also easily jump into the fray for some couch co-op, there's another entire layer of replayability and fun factor that hearkens back to Super Mario Bros 2. Each world in this game features a diverse range of obstacles with just the right amount of increasing challenge as you progress towards the inevitable face-off with Bowser. 3D World never lingers too long on any one concept and is constantly throwing new things at you. And to top it off, there's a secret unlockable character that turned out to be a very pleasant surprise for me at the end. This game ended up as my favorite Mario title since the legend that was Super Mario 64. It may not have the same sense of exploration and adventure, but more than makes up for it in tightly-crafted, meticulously-designed gameplay.

Mario Kart 8

2014 was the year when Nintendo really brought out the big guns, beginning with Mario Kart 8 in May. While for many their first experience with this racing masterpiece ended up being on the Switch, they may be quick to forget that its first release was actually on the Wii U, and it's already been lobbing turtle shells at unsuspecting drivers for three years now. Although I've always casually enjoyed the Mario Kart franchise as a whole, I never could have anticipated just how much polish and care would be put into this game to the point that it ended up being my choice for Game of the Year. It's especially surprising given that I'm not a particular fan of the racing genre in general, but the sheer fun factor and attention to detail put into this racer is unlike anything I've seen before. Characters are given lots of lively gestures and facial expressions that react based on the situation. The racing mechanics as a whole also just feel cleaned up, with drifting and mini turbos being much easier to control and pull off. Those who had previously shared gripes with Mario Kart Wii's excessive RNG factor from spammy blue shells and punishing items will be pleased to know that MK8 addresses many of these problems; reducing downtimes when you get knocked off track or slammed by a projectile, as well as providing the air horn as a direct counter to blue shells. The game's central new gimmick, the antigravity tracks, don't exactly revolutionize the gameplay, but they do make for some inventive track designs, and they allow for even many of the reused tracks from previous games to be given some new twists with alternate routes and redesigned sections. And finally, the DLC was an amazing steal, costing only $12 while expanding the number of tracks in the game by 50% and even throwing in Link as a playable racer. If for whatever reason you missed out on this game when it released for Wii U, you owe it to yourself to play it now on Switch.

Bayonetta 2

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises up Nintendo's sleeve was the release of Bayonetta 2 in October of 2014. Originally expected to be a cancelled title, Bayonetta 2 was a violent and hyper-sexualized action game that was suddenly picked up and revived by Nintendo to make into a Wii U exclusive. An odd choice for sure, given Nintendo's reputation. Critically it worked in their favor though, with the game being overwhelmingly well-received. I personally didn't expect just how much of a likeness it had to the original Devil May Cry on PS2, both in terms of gameplay and atmosphere. So close in fact, that I have a hunch some of those developers must have been former Capcom employees. It was a pleasant surprise for me, as I enjoyed the refined DMC-style hack and slash mechanics, as well as the moody demons and angels atmosphere. I couldn't tell you what the hell was going on with its whacked out story however, and those slideshow cutscenes were questionable, but I had a blast cutting down foes in fashionable style regardless. Bayonetta 2 may not have shared as much success financially as it did critically, but it was an earnest showing from Nintendo that they can diversify and they're serious about offering titles for all types of players.

Hyrule Warriors

Yet another out-of-left-field release, Hyrule Warriors combines Zelda with Dynasty Warriors gameplay. As my first foray into this subgenre of action games, I can certainly see where the criticisms come from that it's pretty shallow. Hyrule Warriors does a number of things to help mitigate this though, with each character given unique move sets, and swapping weapon types changes their moves completely again. On top of this, you have various equippable Zelda items at your disposal to overcome obstacles. The game introduces a number of fun new characters to the Zelda universe that feel like they fit quite seamlessly alongside other classic characters, and the story follows an intriguing premise that involves Link traveling to different eras across Hyrule's history. The most fun component to this game however is definitely the adventure mode. It's like the equivalent of Star Wars Battlefront's galactic conquest mode but adapted to the Warriors formula, with near-endless replayability and a satisfying progression system. Hyrule Warriors doesn't fundamentally shake up the Warriors recipe or totally escape its shortcomings, but its sheer amount of content and free shit they give you makes it worthwhile for anyone who just wants to beat stuff up and look cool while doing it with their favorite Zelda characters.

Super Smash Bros for Wii U

Still determined to knock it out of the park in 2014, Nintendo unleashed Super Smash Bros in November. Much like other iterations of long-running franchises on the Wii U, they continued to listen to criticisms and stripped out Brawl's infamous tripping mechanic, which used to trigger itself completely at random and leave players open to attacks. In addition, the overall speed and responsiveness to character actions had been increased, making the combat more fast-paced and competitive like the previous fan favorite, Super Smash Bros Melee. I'll be honest here, I'm still super butthurt about the complete lack of an adventure mode, but the game does make a number of refinements and fixes to the core mechanics from Brawl, boasts a plethora of new characters, and is sure to please anyone who just wants a good fighting game. There's still no other fighting games that offer both accessibility and depth in the way that Smash Bros does, and most can't offer as much content either, even with a few notably missing features this time around.

Xenoblade Chronicles X

Giant mechs and cool anime characters were enough to sell me on this behemoth RPG. With a world that is larger than the size of Fallout 4, Skyrim, and The Witcher 3 combined, you'll have no shortage of content to explore either. Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game that demands your full attention, as much like the latest Zelda title, it pretty much just dumps you off in the wilderness and leaves you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you happen to come across a level 60 monster that decimates you in one hit, well tough shit. It's both a refreshing and occasionally frustrating game in this regard, as I often found it exhilarating to stumble upon massive alien creatures roaming the landscape that I had to carefully navigate around, lest I face nature's retribution at my feeble attempts to challenge it. However, the game has so many different mechanics and moving parts to it, none of which is adequately explained, so navigating the numerous menus and maximizing your characters' potential can be a real chore. But if you're willing to put in the effort, Xenoblade is a rewarding game with breathtaking visuals and challenging gameplay. And also mechs. Can't forget that. Mechs make everything cooler. Did I mention this game really sells the functionality of the Wii U gamepad too? This was the only game on the Wii U where I genuinely preferred the gamepad over the Pro controller. Being able to navigate the mini map and execute commands on it was pretty handy, and it also could pull up a screen full of fun emote buttons that you could express yourself with. Being able to create extra buttons on the fly is a pretty cool feature of the tablet.

Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD

You could say it's cheating to include these titles being that they're just remasters, but they are notable in that they do a better job than most offerings of this type. Wind Waker's cel shading aesthetic already helped the game a lot in maintaining its charm over the years, but improvements to lighting further enhanced the color and vibrance in its HD release, and while Twilight Princess perhaps didn't benefit as much from its visual upgrades as Wind Waker did, it still got a nice overhaul on all of its previously muddy textures. More importantly, Twilight Princess ditched the tacked on motion controls that originally hamstrung its Wii release, which combined altogether make it into a title that's deserving of a second chance at life. Twilight Princess was always kind of viewed as somewhat of a disappointment by fans, but I submit to you that when played with a proper control scheme, it takes the Ocarina of Time formula and refines it in nearly every way. Midna is an infinitely better assistant than Navi, complete with a full character arc where she naturally grows from a mischievous imp who just wanted to use you for her own personal gain, to someone who truly cares about the inhabitants of Hyrule and wants to do whatever she can to save it. It's also a more story-heavy game in general, which I think lends itself in a good way to providing motivation and context for what you're doing, as it feels like there's more purpose behind why you're risking life and limb through all these dungeons. And finally, the new techniques that you acquire throughout the game add some much-welcome diversity to the combat that I was sad to see never returned in later iterations. TL;DR it's Zelda. Buy it.

There's plenty more of course that I could talk about, like Super Mario Maker, Wonderful 101, Splatoon, Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, Star Fox Zero, and so on. The Wii U technically even got Breath of the Wild, but these were just some of the highlights from my experience. Feel free to share some of your own.

 

So yeah, the Wii U's gamepad may have looked like a Fisher Price toy, but when properly utilized like it was in Xenoblade Chronicles X, it was actually a quite competent controller, and if it still really rubs you the wrong way, almost every game I played on the system offered multiple ways for you to play, including the Pro controller or even the old Wii remote if you felt so inclined. And while the hardware certainly doesn't stack up to current-gen systems either, it was still a very capable HD console, with many games running at a stable 60 FPS, and Smash Bros even achieved native 1080p to boot. Within its first couple of years on the market, it already had enough exclusives to make it a worthwhile purchase despite its lackluster launch, and if you ask me, that's more than can be said for the PS4 and Xbox One.

And so I bid thee farewell, Wii U. It was a great time while it lasted. You may have been a troubled console, but you never lost your Nintendo charm, and your sacrifice paved the way for a much brighter future in the form of the Switch. In time, I think gamers will see you the way you should be remembered: an underappreciated gem - Nintendo's Dreamcast.

The Error Report: EA unveils physical loot boxes

As if determined to 1-up Activision after the recent revelation that they had filed a patent for matchmaking-based transactions, EA today has announced their own new system for handling loot boxes.

"We've heard your concerns," said EA CEO Andrew Wilson in an official statement. "Many players have expressed discontent with the way we've chosen to implement loot boxes in our upcoming sequel to Star Wars Battlefront, so we've been working diligently to provide more options in order to accommodate all types of players. We are now proud to officially announce that Battlefront II will be the first game to feature our all-new physical loot box service! Physical loot boxes are an exciting new way for you to receive in-game rewards without spending any money at all! Here's how it works: players simply provide a valid home address and then an EA representative can be personally dispatched to you. Once they arrive, they will proceed to fill their loot box with your belongings until a satisfactory value has been determined in exchange for an in-game unlockable. Look forward to this brand new service arriving shortly after launch."

The Error Report had a chance to speak with Mr. Wilson following the statement.

TER: "It's nice that you're trying to provide more options for players, but some would argue that this system could be abused. How would this service be a better alternative for certain players?"

Wilson: "Physical loot boxes are a great way for players to offload unnecessary goods and clear out the clutter in their house, all the while getting nice rewards for your favorite games in return. Rest assured, the exchange values will be fair. For example, a 60-inch 4K HDR Smart TV might net you a nice in-game hat."

TER: "Can someone cancel an exchange once it has started? What if a player decides that they don't agree with the exchange value?"

Wilson: [chuckles] "Then they should have read the Terms of Service more carefully! All transactions are final once initiated. Players can choose to cancel before the representative arrives though. They just pay a small processing fee to cover traveling expenses."

TER: "Can you define 'small' processing fee?"

Wilson: "Oh, yes, of course. As I said, it's just to cover the flight, so about $400 or so? The cost of a cheeseburger or something basically. Not a big deal. At least I think that's what your average person pays for a cheeseburger these days, isn't it?"

TER: "Thanks for your time."

Wilson: "Likewise. As you can see, we just wanted to give our customers more options as part of our new player-first initiative."

[DISCLAIMER: The Error Report is a fictional publication produced for fun and not a real news source.]

The Error Report: Nintendo announces Metroid: Federation Chef

With rumors mounting about multiple Metroid games in development, and following a cryptic statement from Retro Studios that they were working on "Something delicious" earlier this year, today Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime confirms just what they've been cooking up behind the scenes.

"We are proud to announce two new upcoming titles from one of our beloved franchises," Reggie said in an official statement. "As many may know, fans have been craving a new Metroid from Retro Studios for nearly ten years following the critical success of the Prime trilogy. We are pleased to finally meet that demand with Metroid: Federation Chef. In space, no one can hear you ask to pass the sour cream. The galaxy is a big place, and the Federation aint got time to feed. There are too many missions to be carried out, but now with a dedicated chef aboard each vessel, soldiers may rest easy. That is if you can keep up with the demand for deep-fried kraid rangoon. Train under the wing of a seasoned professional and take up arms with your spatula and fork as you hone your skills in the culinary arts. Use the HD rumble to precisely measure how much salt is left in your shaker, and carefully balance your ingredients to produce the perfect buffalo chozo wings. With your help, you can ensure that the galaxy's appetite is at peace."

Reggie also went on to briefly elaborate about the other Metroid title currently in development. "Our other project with Retro Studios takes Metroid in another exciting new direction. Metroid Survive will follow an elite squad of Federation soldiers who were sucked into a portal to an alternate universe where they will be forced to fight for their survival against zombies. Look forward to more details being revealed later this week."

The Error Report caught up with Retro Studios' CEO Michael Kelbaugh for an interview outside their headquarters shortly following the announcement. "We recognize that Other M was problematic in a lot of ways," Michael replied when asked about how Nintendo has learned from previous missteps. "Nintendo was trying to make the game more accessible by simplifying the controls, but aspects of it were clunky and it still felt complicated. That's why we're really simplifying the controls this time. Now with Metroid Survive you will only use a D-pad and one action button instead of two. Also the puzzle-solving and map navigation was too hard, so we're streamlining the game to be less about acquiring new gadgets and more about just shooting zombies in tight corridors. In fact, we've removed the map entirely because quite frankly you won't be needing it anymore."

When asked how this game would bridge the divide with longtime fans, Michael responded, "Oh don't worry, Samus will actually be in the game this time."

When pressed, we could not get Michael to confirm that Samus is actually playable however.

Protesters started appearing on the scene as the interview continued, and Michael was quick to try and alleviate concerns. "I know when you're watching the trailer it's all very action-packed and it doesn't really elicit that feeling, but there will be that sense of atmosphere and isolation, and one of the really interesting things that we will be exploring and playing with is how Metroid and zombies can actually co-exist."

When crowds started forming around the studio parking lot shouting obscenities, Michael made a surprising admission under pressure. "To be honest, Sakamoto kinda has us by the balls. We really wanted to do a HD followup to the Prime trilogy, but when I proposed it to him, he referred to me as a 'baka gaijin' and told me to speak only when spoken to. Ultimately this was his call, not ours."

The interview had to be cut short as a protester was seen tossing a molotov cocktail through the office windows.

[DISCLAIMER: The Error Report is a fictional publication produced for fun and not a real news source.]

Previously on The Error Report: Capcom shocked that game they are famous for does well

Ghost in the Shell is fine, everybody calm down

I'm too lazy to write a proper review of this film right now, but at the same time I really wanted to get some thoughts off my chest regarding it, so here is my semi-half-baked stream of consciousness on Ghost in the Shell: Outrage Complex. AKA the Hollywood bastardization of GITS that's actually... quite faithful and respectful to its source material?

More on this later.

But first: a boring precursor about my experience with the franchise. So my first exposure to GITS began with the Stand Alone Complex TV series that aired on Adult Swim during the early 2000s. The trailers and commercials for it made it look sick as hell, and I was interested to give it a try. Unfortunately when I caught a couple episodes of it on TV, the actual thing came off as rather drab and slow-paced to me, with minimal interesting character interactions or cool sci-fi action sequences to distract from the lack of the former. Now to a certain extent this dry approach to storytelling may be intentional, as it's trying to depict a semi-dystopian world that raises questions about whether there's anything left of your humanity underneath the machine anymore once you've entirely replaced your biological body for a prosthetic one, but regardless to me this excuse essentially translates to "we intentionally made our characters boring," which still doesn't sound too good when you distill it down to that. Then again, I also admittedly caught these episodes at random and didn't start from the beginning, so maybe with a proper sequential viewing I'd find more investment in the characters. Needless to say, unfortunately my initial outing with Ghost in the Shell didn't go so well, and I ended up ignoring the series for the remainder of its run on Cartoon Network.

Shortly following my first exposure to GITS however, I learned about the original 1995 film after discovering that it was the primary inspiration for one of my favorite films of all-time, The Matrix. This rekindled my interest in the franchise, but it wouldn't be until roughly a decade later that I actually decided to give GITS another go and finally sat down to watch the original movie. While I still felt it suffered from slightly bland characters and lacking execution in its story, it did at least deliver on some cool action setpieces, and all that philosophical masturbation rustled my neurons and made my medulla obschlongata rock hard. I came away from it feeling much more satisfied this time, but I also still felt like there was much room for improvement, and the film doesn't quite stack up as the masterpiece it is sometimes lauded to be. In the end, I've never quite fancied myself a GITS fan, but I've always felt that the franchise's premise has a lot of potential to easily make it one of my faves if the right talent could get their hands on it.

So it was exciting for me to learn that there was a live action Hollywood adaptation coming on the way just shortly after viewing the 1995 film. Here was yet another opportunity for a fresh take on the property. As the initial trailers for it came in though, it seemed apparent that while the film certainly captures the aesthetic of GITS admirably, some cliched dialogue hinted at the possibility that this movie would sacrifice cerebral chills in favor of generic thrills. So did the film inevitably succumb to dumbing down the plot? To a certain extent yes, but not nearly as bad as I feared, and where Ghost in the Shell 2017 makes sacrifices it also returns some gains in other areas. Rupert Sanders' rendition of GITS does unfortunately strip away much of the philosophical dialogue, but the movie does not shy away from exploring the potential consequences of an increasingly technologically dependent society and all the baggage that comes with it. More than the 1995 film before it, I felt this one succeeded at conveying the unsettling feelings it was aiming for as it depicted the merging of technology and humanity. Part of the problem I had with the 95 adaptation was that while it loved to wax philosophical a lot, the philosophy never tied into the actual story too well and felt like it was merely explaining its themes to you rather than exploring them. While I would have preferred that the latest adaptation keeps the philosophy but weaves it into the plot better like The Matrix, nonetheless I still found its showing over telling approach to be a bit more effective, as I was more invested in the characters and the setting. Memory manipulation through exploitation of technology takes center stage in this iteration of GITS, and by also having it personally affect the Major this time instead of just having her witness it from the sidelines, the story becomes much more personal and makes the Major a more relatable character, even if at times the amnesia plot feels a little rote. With the characters having more personal stakes in the narrative, I came away overall feeling better about them in this film than I did with the original.

Speaking of characters, I had never heard of Takeshi Kitano before this film, but I'm sure as hell a fan of him now after seeing his portrayal of Aramaki, the leader of Section 9. He's a straight up badass with the cool and collected sensei presence he gives off while also being able to hold his own in a firefight. What's more, every single line of Aramaki's dialogue is in fact delivered in Japanese. He never speaks English once. It's a rather bold choice I think, even if he may not be the main character. He still plays a pivotal role nevertheless, and for all the talk of Hollywood supposedly being disrespectful to the source material, this was a surprising gesture that clearly shows they care about the film's roots. Togusa similarly is played by another Asian actor, and the sprawling metropolis that the movie takes place in hints strongly at being located somewhere in Asia with the bulk of its street signs and holograms not using English lettering. Many costumes of various side characters include Asian-style robes, and then of course there's the gorgeously-designed geisha robots. A lot of effort went into incorporating eastern culture in this movie that could have been easily ignored if this were just a cash-in attempt.

Even the Major's alleged whitewashing is addressed in the film in a way that I think is appropriate, though I won't go into detail about it due to spoilers. However what I will say is, this controversy was definitely blown way out of proportion, as not only is this a culturally diverse film, but neither the original creators nor Japanese audiences abroad found the casting particularly offensive when asked about it. In fact, here are some exact quotes from Mamoru Oshii, director of the original 1995 film:

"What issue could there possibly be with casting her? The Major is a cyborg and her physical form is an entirely assumed one. The name 'Motoko Kusanagi' and her current body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her. Even if her original body (presuming such a thing existed) were a Japanese one, that would still apply."

And here is a series of street interviews that were conducted in Japan:

The constant outrage machine of the Internet is starting to get out of hand. I welcome diversity whenever Hollywood makes an effort toward it, but the fact of the matter is, anyone who has seen this movie knows that Scarlett Johansson's casting clearly did not come from a place of racism, and Ghost in the Shell's appeal as a franchise has nothing to do with the main character being Japanese. There are likely three key reasons for Scarlett's casting: she has experience with action films, she looks fairly close to the Major's appearance, and most importantly, box office insurance. With a film that costs $110 million to make, it's simply a risky investment, and Johansson's big name star appeal acts as another cushion to ensure a minimum number of sales. Now you can certainly criticize that for putting business before art, but not for being racist or culturally insensitive. In a film full of eastern culture, costumes, and subtitled Japanese dialogue, it's just beyond the bounds of rational debate. Not to say that the film would be racist even if it didn't bother with such considerations. Once again, it seems to be lost on people that this is an American production, and therefore it is entirely expected that they would cast American actors for the parts. In just the same way, despite that Attack on Titan was clearly designed with medieval European aesthetics in mind with European-esque characters, the live action movie was still cast with Japanese actors across the board. Is it because the Japanese are all racists that just hate European culture? Of course not. So please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, can we stop with all the melodramatic outrage every time casting decisions like this are made?

At the end of the day, I am very happy to report that this film doesn't join the ranks of Dragonball Evolution or The Last Airbender. It's the most faithful live action adaptation of an anime I've seen right down to the Major's blueish-purple tinted hair, and it even does multiple impressive shot-for-shot recreations of iconic scenes from the original 1995 movie. It certainly could have used some more cerebral writing with the help of Alex Garland or Christopher Nolan, but it's still an admirable effort nonetheless. I walked away from it wanting more, and I'll be picking up the blu-ray when it comes out. It's unfortunate that it's been mired in unnecessary controversy and derision. I recommend it.

4 ideas for fixing open world games

I have a confession to make: I don't like open worlds. Not to be confused with open world games mind you. I can enjoy an open world game decently well if it manages to overcome its deficiencies in enough ways, but that's the problem. If I'm able to enjoy the game at all, it's always in spite of the open world; never because of it, and this isn't even to say that I don't like the concept of an open world in theory. Obviously the idea of wandering around and exploring a vast landscape discovering hidden secrets and stumbling upon pleasant surprises can be quite tantalizing. The desire to explore and discover is in our nature as human beings; most of us are curious creatures after all. We want to feel like explorers.

The problem with open world games however is that they rarely seem to tap into this desire and actively work against the concept's main strength, instead replacing it with mundane checklist fulfillment. Head to this location here and acquire this thing, traverse across a bunch of copy-pasta buildings and trees, then head to that marker on the map over there so you can kill that guy. Check it off your list of arbitrary and repetitive things to do; rinse and repeat. There's no discovery there. I wasn't just wandering along the road at my own pace, going wherever I want and doing whatever I feel like before suddenly happening upon a treasure and being rewarded. No, the game had to explicitly point it out to me and throw a dot on the map so I knew exactly where to go.

Developers don't seem to trust players to find things on their own. They feel the need to hand-hold you every step of the way or else you might miss something. But here's the thing: you probably should miss things on your first playthrough. With many of these open world games clocking in at 60+ hours of content, it's not as if you were cheated out of any of your value even if you end up finishing the game having only experienced half of that. And don't forget that it's not hard to start up another game and begin anew again, or just keep trekking onward on your current save file after you've beaten the main quest line. It's not as if all this missed content suddenly disappears forever just because you didn't do it at the right time, so don't be afraid to let players miss things. That's part of the fun to discover it all.

Going beyond exploration, there's also the issue of the quest objectives themselves feeling like afterthoughts, as if they're just there to pad the game out and give you something to do in order to justify all the wasted space in the world. There isn't as much attention to detail and variety put into them as you might find in a more linear focused game. Open worlds present many technical challenges for developers; much of which I feel are never properly addressed, and now with Horizon Zero Dawn just on the... horizon (OHHH HO-HO +20 WIT), Zelda: Breath of the Wild launching with the Switch next month, and Hideo Kojima just recently confirming that his own latest project (Death Stranding) will be open world as well, it seems unfortunately that the open world trend isn't going away any time soon. Thus, I would like to take a moment to offer up a few ideas that could possibly help fix the common pitfalls of open world games.

1. Get rid of quest hubs.

Part of how we end up with this pile of quest markers all over the map and discouragement of actual exploration is that open world games tend to always have towns and cities that serve as "quest hubs" for players to pick up a bunch of new objectives. Instead of heading out into the world and happening upon various points of interest on their own, players simply scoop up all the neatly-labeled quest markers strewn about the city, and then proceed in a systematic mechanical fashion to check them off in rapid succession. While in one sense this could be construed as a convenience, in another this serves as the primary source of deflating the excitement and mystique of exploring an open world. When you know exactly where to go and what to do, it starts to feel formulaic and perfunctory. There's no surprise to be had, and if there's nothing to discover or explore in this world, then why have it be open at all?

Imagine if towns served mostly as places to restock goods and supplies for yourself, and as you're traveling along in the wilderness, you suddenly stumble upon a band of thieves robbing an innocent merchant. You can choose to hide somewhere nearby and wait for the thieves to carry out their crime so as to avoid an unnecessary conflict, or you can help the thieves in exchange for a cut of the loot, or of course you can play the hero and save the merchant. In a more traditional open world game, this scenario would likely instead play out by going to a quest marker in a nearby town at which point one of the locals expresses concern about their shipment, and they slap a new marker along the road where you'll find the thieves. Not only does this setup take away the sense of discovery from running into it on your own, but because it's all neatly wrapped up in the form of a quest objective, your course of action is already made up for you as well. In order to complete the quest, you need to save the merchant. In the former scenario however, since you were never told this is a quest objective that you must complete and you just stumbled into the crime, it's completely open-ended for how you want to tackle it, if at all. Now this is a fairly rudimentary example, but imagine if the whole world was littered with "events" like this that players just run into on their own through exploration rather than because a generic NPC was standing on the street waiting to tell you a rigid quest objective to follow. Imagine that the player's main motivation for progressing through the game is not driven by constantly rummaging their quest log and overworld map to make sure all the markers are checked off, but rather that they just want to keep exploring further into the wilderness and checking areas that they haven't been to before to discover something new, whether that something is a hidden treasure to be found or a conflict between the world's inhabitants that unfolds in the heat of the moment. By eliminating quest hubs and forcing players to have to explore in order to find things to do, you can ensure that your open world actually feels open.

2. Reduce or remove quest markers.

Keeping in line with the train of thought for quest hubs, devs should be reducing reliance on quest markers as well, but this isn't to say that these games can't have more traditional quests and perhaps even a quest log to keep track of them. In the real world, not every job or task that people pick up is something that you can simply do on-the-spot. Sometimes that means traveling to another location to deal with the issue, and since the task can't be done right away, it would be nice to have it logged somewhere so that you can revisit it later and have a general sense of what you need to do when you're ready to return to it. The key words here though are "general sense", as I still think the game shouldn't just spell out exactly where you need to go. If somebody gives you a quest to deliver a message to another person in a different town for example, don't just slap a marker on the map and make the player go to it. The quest log could just state that you need to go to such-and-such town to deliver the message to so-and-so, but beyond that there's no marker on your map for it, and once you arrive in the town you might need to actually use a little detective skills. Ask around the locals for directions or if they know / might have seen the person you're looking for. Maybe use a special skill like Assassin's Creed's "eagle vision" to find clues, or insert whatever random ability your game decides to invent for the protagonist. There should be some sort of thought put into it that makes the player feel more like they're discovering rather than merely referencing their checklist.

There is a delicate balance to consider here though as of course you don't want to end up on the opposite extreme where quests are too vague to be able to figure out and it feels like they're just wasting your time, as I saw this with Xenoblade Chronicles X wherein a quest would have you acquire a certain item with absolutely no explanation of where to find it, and considering how absolutely massive Xenoblade's world is, you could easily spend an entire evening scavenging the countryside only to come up with nothing. It just became an exercise in googling the location instead of challenging myself to find it on my own, so players should be able to find things within a reasonable time frame with the tools at their disposal and enough due diligence.

Hey Siri...

Ultimately though if a quest log or markers are to be used at all, they should be utilized conservatively. Players should always find themselves running out of markers before being able to advance to the next major segment of the game, as once the objectives dry up, the only way to advance is to shift focus to exploration, which again is the entire attraction of an open world and should be the goal to encourage after all.

3. Reduce or remove fast travel.

I know this is more of a hard sell, because backtracking can be tedious at times and you just want to get to where you're going, but part of appreciating an open world too is actually being required to traverse it and really take in just how large in scale it is. If you're just teleporting around from point A to point B like you're Mega Man, then once again you have to ask yourself if the open world setting is really necessary. You're just skipping over most of the landscape and not really taking in the scenery. If you don't actually care to traverse it, then why does it need to be there?

We don't often stop to think how little conveniences and streamlines can make larger impacts on our gameplay experience than we realize; impacts that go beyond saving us a few minutes of riding a horse across the road. They change our larger perception of the game as a whole, sometimes in negative ways. This was especially made evident to me over the years with Blizzard's famous MMO, World of Warcraft. As the game streamlined itself over time, they provided more and more ways for players to get around, but as we were repeatedly given more and faster options, the world continually kept feeling smaller even though objectively it was getting bigger with each new expansion. As a result, the sense of scale was lost, and you don't feel like you're part of a big living and breathing world anymore, but a series of isolated zones that you teleport to on-command. More importantly, these changes also make real impacts on player interactions. I belonged to a PVP server, and during the early days of Warcraft it was a fairly common occurrence while traveling with my group to prepare for a dungeon that we would encounter a band of opposing Alliance faction players and engage in small skirmishes or games of cat and mouse. Sometimes these skirmishes would prove to be frustrating, other times they would be satisfying, but in almost all circumstances it helped build a sense of camaraderie with my team, and the dynamic nature of these encounters made the world feel more exciting regardless of outcome. Yet after Blizzard introduced the dungeon finder system that not only automates assembling a group but also teleports you directly into the dungeon, suddenly all of these encounters were taken away, and as more systems were introduced to teleport around the world at will, you were less and less likely to find players wandering along the landscape from both factions, increasing the feeling of emptiness and decreasing the spontaneity of gameplay. These are just some of the ways how simple little changes can have costly rippling effects that should be taken into consideration.

There are ways you can mitigate the feeling of "been there, done that" though when forcing players to have to backtrack through previously-explored land. One such way is introducing more quests and events that weren't previously accessible at an earlier point in these areas, as now that you've progressed further in the game, changes in the story have led to new situations arising. You can also take a page from open world games' older sibling, metroidvanias. Games like Shantae and Metroid are fantastic at actually making you want to go back and re-explore areas because as players acquire new items and abilities throughout the game, these tools can be used to access previously unreachable sections of zones that you've already explored, sometimes providing a way to more quickly traverse back to a certain area you're trying to get to, or other times provide you with even more juicy loot and treasures to be found. By incorporating a similar mindset to modern open world games, you could design old areas to include more routes and shortcuts to your destination that you're trying to backtrack to, but these routes are only accessible once you've obtained a new item that can help you access them.

Fast travel doesn't necessarily need to be eliminated entirely. If the world is large enough that always making the player travel back and forth will inevitably become laborious, you could still allow fast travel with compromises like placing it on a cooldown that you have to wait to expire before you can use again, or make it cost some sort of in-game currency that is just pricey enough to make the player consider whether it's worth the expense. Whatever the case, fast travel is a feature that on its surface seems like a nice convenience, but if overused, it goes against the point of having an open world and makes the size of it lose its impact and significance. It should be used sparingly.

4. Make it linear first, expand it to an open world later.

Possibly the biggest problem of all with open world games is that the quests can often feel very cut-and-paste, as if the developers slapped some NPCs around a certain area without much thought or consideration behind their placement, and then they give you some kind of basic objective as a justification for why you need to interact with these NPCs; that interaction usually consisting of shoot everything that moves. Part of the reason for this is that open worlds obviously require exponentially more development time than smaller and more linear environments, yet the dev times for these games are rarely adjusted enough to account for this so that developers can put the same attention to detail in every area as they normally would with a linear game. To a certain extent this is unavoidable due to the limitations of time and budget, but another reason for this apparently lackluster quest design is that developers often design the open world first without consideration of the quests until later, so what if we reversed this process? Instead of developing the whole world first and populating it with NPCs and things to do later, we strictly design the main quest first and approach it as if you were playing through a more linear game with more thoughtful consideration of NPC and environment layout, how these things will interact with each other, and how we can incorporate exciting setpieces into it. Then with the time left over, we go back through these levels and remove all the invisible walls and conveniently-shaped cliffsides, expanding them out into more open environments and connecting them together. This approach ensures that at the very least if the player only chooses to stick to the main quest line, they'll be guaranteed a very tight and polished experience, and they can do side quests that aren't as engaging at their own pace until they get sick of them.

Of course, there is the possibility that with this approach the devs could spend so much time wrapped up in polishing the main quest and inserting setpieces that they run out of time to actually make the open world, and you end up with something more closely resembling the Tomb Raider reboot than Horizon Zero Dawn, but if that's the case, you know what? Good. Your resources were still well-spent, because Tomb Raider was a blast to play and a damn sexy game anyway, and I'll take that any day over another 50-hour snoozefest of mundane tasks and checklists, which is exactly what you would have gotten if that's all they truly had time for in order to cram that open world in. If you don't have the time to properly flesh out your open world, you probably shouldn't be making one in the first place.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on how open world games could help improve themselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another arbitrary fetch quest to get back to.