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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (12/16/2022)

Added 2022-12-17 00:25:47 +0000 UTC

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter where we cover the most interesting things happening in the world of video games. Well, usually. This week’s a little light as we wind down the year and many of the biggest stories are simply continuances of last week’s late-hitters. Still, a few interesting things did happen, including a story that I feel like got surprisingly little discussion or attention, so let’s just start with that one.

Amazon Games Publishing Next Tomb Raider Title

Just yesterday, Amazon Games and Crystal Dynamics announced an agreement that the Bezos-owned game initiative would “support and publish” the next major Tomb Raider title. The game itself was actually announced roughly eight months ago during an Unreal Engine presentation and not by Square Enix — which maybe should have been a major sign that the Japanese publisher was looking to unburden itself of its western branch sooner rather than later. Square Enix sold Crystal Dynamics and Eidos to Embracer group for a surprisingly low sum of $300 million dollars, relative chump change in the high-pricetag world of game studio acquisitions.

Embracer, which publishes games under the THQ Nordic and Plaion labels, all but outright said they would keep these major projects rolling under their stewardship. Fair enough, they should have the money to do so. Which makes it all the more curious that Amazon Games, a publisher that definitely has not really hit it out of the park with their gaming focus, has picked up the oars on this one.

Embracer is not exactly a stranger to AAA publishing, but it would be decidedly generous to say they’re experienced at doing it successfully. The most recent mainstream release was the reboot of Saints Row, a game they have admitted did not meet expectations. Perhaps this is the other shoe to drop, where Embracer is also admitting they may not have the wherewithal to guide and publish a brand new Tomb Raider game all the way to the finish line. I am not positive Amazon has the experience but they sure have the money.

I mentioned that Embracer “should” have the money to do all this, but it’s not clear if they actually do. Their acquisition spree — buying up everything from PS2-era classic licenses to The Lord of the Rings — gives the impression that they’re an aggressively wealthy company that has money to burn. The reality is that a lot of those acquisitions have been paid for by loans and Embracer has accrued quite a bit of debt in grabbing all these studios and IPs up over the last few years. This also explains their risk-averse business strategy of primarily concentrating on remasters, remakes, and the very rare new game like Saints Row or Biomutant that often does not work out.

Ultimately there’s not a hero or villain in this story, but it is interesting to see just how fragile the Embracer Empire seems to actually be. There’s no way they would have agreed to this unless they absolutely had to.

Forspoken Demo Out on PS5

This past week, Square Enix put out a playable demo for Forspoken, their first big current-gen title from their Japanese studios. Well, it is from FFXV developer Luminous Productions, but a big part of their marketing has been the western writers at the forefront of creating the world and the characters. This demo is the first place everyone gets to see that put into action and, well, it’s kind of messy.

From a technical perspective, I’m not sure if this demo is particularly impressive. I think the HDR might be just straight up broken, because every time you step outside it feels like this.

There’s ray-tracing and performance modes. Ray-tracing looks nice but feels bad in combat. Performance feels fine but then dips fairly frequently and then also has some fairly rotten texture quality. The Digital Foundry report confirms some pretty hefty drops when fighting. This is a demo, it’s not necessarily indicative of the final game that comes out in a few weeks, but it definitely did not impress from a technical standpoint.

The actual gameplay kind of has me fence-sitting, too. There’s more to the combat than the demo tutorializes, but they give you a simultaneously boring and overwhelming spell kit at the beginning that just feels like an immediate turn-off. For the rock spells, tapping the trigger releases a bullet-like attack and holding it produces a larger rock formation.

Which means if you’re just trying to shoot at some jumpy enemies, you have to keep repeatedly individually pulling the trigger which is like having to pull an assault rifle for every shot. In playing the full game, I am definitely moving those actions to the L1 and R1 buttons instead if I can’t just completely change that behavior wholesale.

Then that leaves the writing, which is…kind of dire. The protagonist Frey and her magic bangle talk a lot, with almost nothing of value to say, though buried in the accessibility options is a slider for reducing the frequency of their “Well that just happened” style of dialogue. But on the other hand, the inclusion of that slider essentially admits that none of that dialogue actually matters and acknowledges that there’s a good chance you’re going to find it annoying.

I understand that having good dialogue that’s paced well is an art and not a science but starting it at “Looney Tunes” and putting the onus on the player to figure out where it belongs feels like a weird dereliction of design even if it is overall better to modify it than not.

All that said, I did come away from that demo thinking this game could be fun once I get a chance to really learn it and tweak it, but this demo didn’t really do it many favors. I’m curious how reviews are going to end up, because this is an anticipated title that might end up with higher expectations than it can meet.

Game of the Year

Either next week or the week after, depending on available time, I’ll be writing a full Game of the Year list in lieu of a standard newsletter. I’ll be going out of town for the holidays and should be lugging a laptop around, but hopefully no one minds too much if the schedule’s in flux for a little bit.

We’ll also do some other awards like biggest disappointment, biggest news story, etc. along the way, too. It’s the end of the year, let’s talk some shit.