Sundays are for sleeping off your fourth 10-hour flight in two weeks, assuming you in fact can sleep, and have not exacerbated your physical disintegration by staying up late on Saturday putting together a list of interesting games and not-games writing. Why not do it earlier, you ask? Daft question. You were busy with those flights.
Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese and Alex Donaldson discuss their respective Dragon Age: The Veilguard reviews, one year on. Admittedly this might be one that speaks more to fellow press sneak fucks than our readers, touching on the profession’s classic anxiety on whether past criticisms were either overly harsh or unduly forgiving, but it’s still a thoughtful bit of sausage factory insight.
For a year, on and off, I’ve been thinking about Dragon Age: The Veilguard. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about my Dragon Age: The Veilguard review – the five-star review I wrote for Eurogamer. It plagues me. Because to be blunt, I’m not happy with how it sits. I don’t think The Veilguard is a five-star game and definitely don’t think it’s BioWare’s best game. To have suggested such a thing has haunted me for 12 months, particularly as new information about Veilguard’s troubled development has arisen and we’ve learned how a Mass Effect team commandeered the project in order to rescue it, overriding the Dragon Age team at its core.
For GI.biz – and I promise I’ll link someone who isn’t an extended RPS colleague later – Rob Fahey considers why even the endlessly monied Amazon failed to make a sustainable break into games.
Scale, finances, and tech dominance simply aren’t enough to make it in what is, essentially, a creative industry that sometimes cosplays as a tech sector on weekends. Google wasn’t willing to make the long-term commitment required to build a business in this sector, while Amazon seemingly lacked the coherent vision and high-level support required to leverage its actual competitive advantages on behalf of its gaming ambitions.
At Rolling Stone, Will Borgar looks for the lost meaning of F.E.A.R. ghost girl Alma.
Alma’s positioned as F.E.A.R.’s monster. She’s on the cover; but the real monsters are Armacham, her father, and capitalism. It’s hard to blame Alma. She is what they made her. The real horror occurred long before F.E.A.R.’s opening moments; it just doesn’t stare from the shadows. It’s out in the open, doing business in broad daylight, demanding respect. It’s easier to make a monster out of the ghost of a little girl than the systems and people who killed her.
Good bit of original reporting here by The Esports Advocate’s James Fudge, on why the International Olympic Committee split from sportswashing gold medallists Saudi Arabia on their previously agreed Olympic Esports Games plan.
Sources tell TEA that friction between the new IOC President, Kirsty Coventry (she was sworn in in June), and individuals within Saudi Arabia in charge of steering the Esports Olympic Games arose because they couldn’t agree on some key points, namely, important issues with the IOC charter itself. The IOC charter generally requires that games organizers work with a relevant stakeholder/federations, but as esports only has the International Esports Federation (IESF) and the Global Esports Federation (GEF), the Saudis were not keen on having them be a part of the process, because both organizations are struggling financially, and had no control over intellectual property from stakeholders.
Here’s Daiz on the decline of Crunchyroll’s previously stellar subtitles and typesetting for its localised anime library. It’s pretty techy in places, but full of damning how-we-got-here history.
There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from that: the Funimation-turned-Crunchyroll executives still do not have any respect for anime as a medium. In addition, they seem to be treating Crunchyroll and its ways of doing things as the ways of “pirates” – which isn’t entirely incorrect, as Crunchyroll’s use of Aegisub and ASS did originate from the ways of pirate fansubbers. But fansubbers deeply care about anime as medium (they wouldn’t be illegally subtitling it for free as a hobby otherwise), which in turn means that the ways fansubbers have developed to subtitle anime are in fact extremely efficient for the job – much better than basically any “industry standards” for subtitling, even.
Music this week is Marco Beltrami’s thumping Le Mans 66/Ford v Ferrari soundtrack. Happy Sunday! Don’t wake me up.
