Architect Address: 2021 In Review

Hello one and all and welcome to a very special 2021 wrapup Architect address, it’s time for me to go over the massive glut of videos I hammered out towards the end of the year as well as discuss the last twelve months in general to organize my thoughts about them and where I want the channel to go in future.

First up is How VideoGames Make the Ultimate Sacrifice - now, this video is entirely the product of Inscryption coming out and me wanting to make a video about it but I think besides that I managed to talk about some quite interesting stuff. Putting the terrible fallout 3 ending in the context of how good sacrifices are supposed to be written, talking about the fable 2 ending controversy and getting an excuse to play Unsighted, which is very very good were all products of talking about Inscryption’s central mechanic and I think it’s very worthwhile.

I think there’s a lot more to be said about how negative intentionality can be used to make games and why there are some unique challenges around making players feel bad whilst also creating an experience they want to play. That’s kind of the problem with almost all of the games I covered and why Bethesda took the cop-out they did - sacrificing stuff feels bad, so it’s not going to gel particularly well with an empowering gameplay experience. Luckily more niche games like LISA are there to pick up the slack, but it’d be nice to see a AAA game do this and really commit, in spite of the inevitable backlash. All in all it was a pretty good video that did fairly well as a result!

Next was why Master Chief can only use two guns. Now, this is an interesting video because the halo framing really only materialised at the veeerry last second of the writing process. I’ve always wanted to do a video about toolsets and the way they work but it’s such an abstract concept that I really struggled to actually write about it in a way that was comprehensible to people who weren’t me. In an act of frustration, I decided to just play a bit of Halo 1 which I’d always meant to get around to, only to discover that it was the missing link between what I wanted to talk about and comprehensibility.

Now the history of Halo as a franchise is super interesting and I cut a bunch of guff about that out because it’s not really relevant but it’s shocking how much of a coincidence the now fairly ubiquitous two-weapon system was. Halo was originally going to be an RTS, then it was going to be a traditional style PC shooter, it even has the staple ten weapons for number keys 1 through 0 and it was a last second microsoft byout that caused them to pull an emergency pivot to a totally different approach. That’s also the reason why the levels are so big and the AI is so good for the time, weird right?

Anyway, the video did middling to eh and I think that’s because people seem to like it when the title of the video is more generic and subject focused, like roguelikes or sacrifice or whatever, rather than being about a specific game. More on that later but it’s an interesting trend I’ve noticed - I really struggled coming up with a title for this video and it shows,  oh boy!

The next video up is the one on roguelikes, which is sort of a spiritual sequel/followup to my short games video from earlier last year. I always felt a little bit bad implying that long games are bad or waste your time because that’s simply not true, I play long games and games without definite endings all the time and it’s exactly their length that makes them so compelling. Also it was nice to address the longstanding roguelike issue with certain meta progression roguelikes ruining the fun of otherwise competent games and pointing out that it’s all rogue legacy’s fault.

Now, the weird thing about this video is that despite how long it is, the turnaround was very very quick indeed - at least compared to my usual output. It’s some reused ideas from a director’s cut as well as a lot of footage from games that I was basically playing anyway. The only real bespoke footage I had to grab / research I had to do was on sea of thieves because it’d been a while since I played that game and it is… exactly as boring as I remember. I was originally going to talk a bit more about it but my longer thoughts came across as a bit mean. It’s a surprisingly niche game in of that there’s literally nothing on an extrinsic level and the game is all about the social hangout and being pirates together intrinsic stuff.

And finally, was the 2021 wrapup video which all in all, I think turned out pretty well. I think this year there were surprisingly few sort of… actiony games I wanted to recommend? There’s quite a few artsy reading or walking around games on the list and that bothers me a little bit - but not enough that I really want to change any of the recommendations. One major absence from this year’s list that I feel like was on a lot of other people’s end of year recommendations was It Takes Two and honestly, I just don’t really get it. Don’t get me wrong it’s gorgeous and incredibly creative but it just feels so incredibly throwaway, none of it ever really means anything or evolves in any way - and the writing is just awful, genuinely the worst written game I played this year and I finished Deathloop.

Anyway, one major rule I’m considering changing is loosening what kinds of games I can recommend at the end of the year - it felt weird to leave off some stuff that was DLC or is essentially finished but is still in early access. Echoes of the eye is the big one but there are a couple of games I really enjoyed that are arbitrarily in early access that I had to leave off, I guess I can just include them later but there’s always the chance I will just forget. Something to think about I suppose.

On the subject of thinking about things, how about my more general thoughts for the year.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s been interesting to see which videos did well. Obviously last year was totally skewed by a single video ostensibly focused on a single game, but this year it seems my best performing stuff, the holy trinity one, crafting systems and roguelikes have been about RPGs and have been more general. In fact, the worst performing vids on the channel this year have been ones where I’ve put a single game front and center, the resident evil 8, before your eyes and psychonauts 2 ones all did fairly badly which I think is interesting. I think I’m definitely going to shoot for more topic-first branding in future because that seems to be what people want even if I’m not actually going to change the content of the videos at all.

I think the most noteworthy statistic though is that I’ve just not made that many videos in comparison to previous years - just 16 in total, which is roughly one and a third a month and two fewer than 2020. I think that they’ve generally been longer and more indepth but that doesn’t really excuse just how long it’s taken to get them out, and that’s contributed to the channel’s slower growth this year. It is however worth mentioning that the patreon has seen incredibly consistent growth this year even if things have been a little slower on the channel side, so thank you ever so much for turning up and sticking around.

I think aiming for two a month like I did way back in the day when I was just starting out it a bit too ambitious because I put waaay less effort into things back then, but equally I do a lot of fucking around and pointless work that never ends up making it into a video so I ought to try and cut down on that and just get to the point where I’m actually writing the script much faster.

The one final thing I was thinking about is the patreon rewards, I’ve juggled them around now and again and I think replacing some boring reviews with the director’s cut was a really positive change back when I did it, and I was thinking about whether to add something else on the higher end? The credits readout is iconic and isn’t going anywhere but I was just thinking that if people want to give me more money, is there anything I could offer that doesn’t get more and more time consuming the way the read out credits does. There’s a reason I capped that thing at fifty, even if I never thought we’d reach it.

Once again, thank you ever so much for your support - hope this bumper length Architect Address was worth it and if you don’t mind I’m going to get to work on the next video… which might be a special one… ooooooOhh!