I gravitate toward support roles in virtually every game we play. Outside of a couple odd instances I could go into, I usually just want to help somebody else do whatever they want to do. In the first Minecraft server we ever had, the "job" I invented for myself was to harvest just enough wood to make signs and use those signs to name landforms. In my role as a natural loremaster, I took this incredibly seriously and did not make jokes on the signs. The only time I really made something substantial in one of these was the Krahulik Valheim server was a fancypants bar the children were too young to enter, substantially limiting its utility. My newest role is Effervescent, Erotic Cyber Jester, making keen observations and returning an engorged whimsy to the frontier - a whimsy that's been gone for far too long. Is that welcome? No! No, it turns out. Garb essentially had the talk with me that exists in the second panel. It was surprising, but weirdly tender - obviously, I knuckled under. Even though I have a lot more to say about dicks.

True to my word, I went into Highguard with the intention of getting kicked around for a while until I got my feet under me, and it ended up being about half and half - they'd added 5v5 almost instantaneously, and I spent most of my time in there. A day or so later, I found myself wanting to play it again - I joined a game that shut down about thirty seconds in because there was no enemy team, and then I joined a second game that only had nine players and continued to only have nine players, I assume, forever. I'd done both of these games back to back and by then I was literally too sad to fucking hang around.

I saw an article on Eurogamer yesterday that was like "Are We Being Too Hard On Live Service Games?" and it's like, we can be as hard as we want to on whatever we want to. Before this, the big conversation was that Live Service itself was dead, and I feel like ARC Raiders - live service plus a price tag - put that shit to bed. What's over is dumb, bad, mercenary games. Highguard isn't dumb, bad, or mercenary - but it didn't help.

The intention, clearly, had been to run it back - Apex again, for the second time. Shadowdrop. Except they didn't shadowdrop it! It was affixed to the end of Geoff Keighley's game-a-palooza, absent any opportunity to define the type of game - or games - it ended up being. I like all the inspirations and felt like I got the gist, but it seems like for most people it was incoherent or easily slottable into some preexisting ideological schema that would allow them to preemptively discard it. Calling it the new Concord was a strong indication of this. I consider that a pathology. I can't be too mad, I guess; I have one too, just in the opposite direction.

I mean, if Fortnite can fail, and then become Fortnite, it may be that causality simply doesn't work the way we think it does. There is a subset of this game that is good and does work; games can still connect with people. If you can play them, which I couldn't. It wasn't even possible to perform what I consider due diligence. It's out of the top one hundred played games on Steam and I'm not sure how it comes back.

(CW)TB out.