Random Thoughts…

One of the most damaging things the games industry does is create a sense of endless FOMO. It’s not even something that’s done with intentionality at this point anymore; there are simply so many monkeys at so many typewriters that we’re getting a new tranche of Shakespeare multiple months out of the year.

The part that is very much intentional is that all of these things cost money, and for the last 30 or so years, that was never even a passing concern for me; I first got copies of games when I started my PSX2.com site back in 1997, and then was lucky enough to end up on a list where everything that was released digitally (give or take).

My cup runneth over. But, like, for reals, y’all:

Now there’s a powerful distinction between just having literally everything barfed into your digital library every week and seeking out or having publishers offer you games for review; there’s a kind of natural curation that filters out the fact that that list you see above? It’s almost 99% shit. I’d venture my library is probably one of the most potent examples of what’s wrong with game development right now: it’s overwhelmingly AI slop, clones of more popular games or asset flip dogshit – or literally genAI thumbnails of asset flip clones of other games. And there are DOZENS of them released WEEKLY.

The Slop is Real

If you’re not really aware of just how bad it’s gotten, I cannot impress upon you enough that those big-budget AAA games everyone loves to bicker about destroying the industry (they are, but that’s a different rant) are noooooothing next to the glut of absolute shit that is clogging the publishing systems of literally every platform where games are available.

If any game manages to rise to the measure of success that is getting featured on some random streamer’s account, it will be instantly cloned and barfed out into the ether on every available platform for which Unity or Unreal let you compile. It happens in nanoseconds.

Often this is damaging just to that small-time indie developer that saw some measure of success on one platform but obviously wasn’t trying to push their carefully-made game on everything all at once – for instance, something like The Exit 8, which got so popular there’s a goddamn movie about it, but that had clones on that very same PlayStation Store I screenshotted with the overflowing library up there for months with the same name “Exit 8” (no “The”).

Take, too, the later PlayStation release of the original Backrooms game that sorta kicked off the leap from Reddit creepypasta to full-blown worldbuilding thanks to youngin’ Kane Parsons’ YouTube videos. The number of zero-effort Backrooms games with incomprehensible SEO-friendly names being released on the PlayStation Store were (and still are) offensive as hell.

Obviously this is not the first medium to have to deal with shitty copycats, but it at least took some effort before and now we’re dealing with absolute insane vibe-coded ports and decomplications and cash grabs on a whole new level. It’s really, really bad how quickly this stuff has been made possible by literally anyone with a Claude account and some social media. We’re not entirely there yet, but what was already a 9000+ game shit deluge in those codes I used to get with everything released that week is about to become a tidal wave.

So… Should I Play ‘Em?

All of this creates an interesting position for my current situation: I didn’t pay for ANY of this slop factory games. I don’t command an audience that can give a shitty clone developer any extra boost, and I am curious about how detestibly bad or even unplayable these games are.

But here’s the other thing: in those 10,700+ games I own, there’s a lot of really good stuff – stuff I’ve finally been getting to now that I no longer feel (or can afford to feel) that same constant urge to play the next hot thing – and certainly not to give my take on it, though I think I might get into doing that for games that really grab me. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for dogshit clones and asset flips unless I somehow monetize the torture, and then we’re back to the issue of giving these assholes attention for biting someone’s else’s hard work, and I hate that idea.

But this also brings up my original point: back when I was reviewing stuff, I didn’t have a choice; the game was thrust upon me and needed to get played through and scored sight-unseen (or at least never sampled in its released version). I didn’t know what I was going to play next because the fire hose never turned off – and that was back in the early 2010s, which is literally exponentially less than the number of games released every week now.

The Power of a Pleasant Surprise

Perhaps it was a consequence of having to weather so many bad games before we got to this AI-assisted hellscape that we’re all in now, but that firehose was rarely an entirely unpleasant experience. Every once in a while, something would come along that just… worked. It might not have the giant budget or the past pedigree or even the full package of something that you spent months or years previewing and knew about, but something made it stand out enough to be a beautiful counter to all the schlock you were made to power through.

It was, and I’m not even joking, one of the reasons why I loved my job as a reviewer so much. A diamond in the rough is so much more shiny when you spend 90% of your time in the rough.

For me, it doesn’t even have to be a total package thing (though I’m going to barf out a bunch of words soon about something I think is a total package and is tinged with absolute tragedy because this whole goddamn industry is in the process of shitting itself, but that’s another post). Sometimes a terrible game has amazing music:

The point is that sometimes not knowing what you’re going to get from the barrel of the never-ending shotgun sometimes gives you something pleasant instead of endless buckshot. You don’t have a choice, but it’s more roulette than prison, if that makes any sense.

With ten thousand options, easily three quarters of which are from the last few years when this whole clone/asset flip thing really got bad, there’s still decent in there, but without knowing which is which, the joy of discovering a rare heater in a tank of ice cold shitsicles is going to be next to impossible without brute forcing it.

Devs\Pubs: Let’s Talk

Before I start streaming the Shit List, I’d rather take my chances with something more earnest and well-earned in terms of exposure. If developers or publishers have any inkling of who I am (or was), and want me to review their game, I’m down. I’ll take at least a curated fire hose over diving into the shit pool, but if there are no takers, I guess I can make sure I’m wearing a really secure diving mask/wet suit.

I’ve been playing the absolute shit out of Genki Racing Project’s Tokyo Xtreme Racer revival. Part of the stranglehold it has on my free time right now comes down to the fact that it is a beautiful anachronism, preserved almost exactly as it was when it last appeared on PS2 in this form more than 20 years ago.

Sure, it’s been updated (barely) to at least feel modern in terms of UI resolution and visuals (it supports HDR kinda!), but what’s presented here is, effectively, exactly what anyone who was glued to those highway battles three whole console generations ago remembers it all looking, sounding and – most crucially – playing like.

In every possible sense, it’s like time just never progressed after the series sort of faded into the ether. The gameplay, designed around simply putting enough distance on a rival street racer that you rolled up behind and flashed your high beams at, still boils down to just a pair of life bars at the top of the screen. Go kicky fast okay, deplete their life bar before yours by leading them with enough distance, pocket XP and upgrade your car, repeat.

Addiction with a Side of Ground Effects

It is, just as it was in the heady early days of the post-dotcom-bubble 2000s, a “CarRPG.” You circle Tokyo’s extensive, circuitous highway system, hunting for cars to race, pocket the spoils and use them to upgrade your car. A late-in-life advancement of the series’ popularity (such as it was) added real cars instead of convenient look-alikes, which means you throw the actual Skyline around those corners at stupid speeds to carom off the walls in bumper car fashion.

All of that is still here, doled out in a slightly confusing and charmingly antiquated menu system that offers some fairly decent tuning options, bios of all the 500+ (!!) racers you’re up against, upgrade trees and, of course, tons of customization of your vehicles aero, wraps and decals. I never subscribed to car customization even at the 2Fast and/or 2Furious street racing cultural zenith, but those options are still here, if you want ’em.

The game otherwise plays more or less like it always has. That core loop of heading out to find and flash opponents has a few added wrinkles like sequential races where your life bar – depleted though it may have become – is preserved between races, and you’ll even battle multiple opponents at the same time, but the name of the game here is the same as it’s always been, with a tight little hamster wheel of upgrades, new opponents (after you take out all the other racers in a crew, their boss shows up and flashes you) and more upgrades.

Digression

I should rewind a bit for some backstory. This series holds a special place in my heart not just because of its temporal Goldilocks zone of my lifetime, where I was in my early 20s in the Bay Area and awash in video game writing freelance work, but because it began my life in San Francisco right on the cusp of the millennium.

See, mere months before Y2K hit, I left a rowdy University of Washington house in Seattle where I was running my PS2-focused web site to take a job in gaming PR at a boutique firm in SF. It was short-lived, and the clients were a laundry list of now-defunct video game publishers, but one of them was a scrappy little outfit called Crave that had a racing game getting prepped for the launch of the upcoming Dreamcast.

To the credit of that PR firm’s leadership, we were encouraged to play and know our games deeply, which meant I had justifiable reason to really dig into this racer well before it actually hit stores, and I can still remember sweating like crazy in that back room without AC (the whole office sat on top of a copy shop, too, so churning printing machines were constantly slowly baking us from below), desperate to just beat one more rival before I had to head back to my desk to do actual work.

It’s a deeply indelible image for me of my first few months in San Francisco, and represented a massive shift from the old days of reviewing games to now pitching them to people. Amid literally dozens of other shipping games and a sea of peripherals we were hawking, this one game stood out as not just an easy sell, but one that was incredibly addictive.

Earnest Evocation

One of the reasons why I think I’m so enamored of this TXR reboot is just that it’s presented without any attempt to mine nostalgia; the game is playable nostalgia in that it really hasn’t changed since it was last on a PlayStation system, but none of the current cynical cash-ins or too-obvious winking we-remember-this-too nods are present here. This is a game made by people that loved the series as much as I did, bringing it back for what feels like an audience of one.

Don’t get me wrong; the visuals here are updated, but only inasmuch as they now resemble how your mind’s eye remembers the prior games looking. “Workmanlike” is the most flattering way to describe a bunch of nighttime freeways and cheesy Temu Wangan Trance that gels with a solid framerate and controls that do genuinely let you feel some of the upgrades. Even the differences in weight distribution of, say, a mid-engine car vs. a FF or rear-wheel one are palpable in a way I don’t remember the older games having.

The modernization extends to the game’s AI which was, generously, rather simple back in the day. Now, they’re more aggressive, can actually use things like PIT maneuvers and blocking, will happily ride walls like you can to avoid braking and generally just feel like they have some actual personality. Some racers are wily, some are psychos, some are timid and avoidant and it’s arguably the area where the game feels like it got the most attention – which is precisely how it should be. This is a series that had dialed in its gameplay loop from the start, and it really didn’t need to futz with the core.

By modernizing things on a shoestring budget (this began life as an Early Access PC release, and the news that it was actually getting a PS5 port after being relegated to JP-only PC and mobile releases was met with the happiest of happy dances in ol’ Bishop Manor, I tell you whut), there was no room for anything but the original skeleton of what made this series great.

There’s no pomp, no flash, but what’s here feels tight and honed and refined and thawed straight from the start of the 21st century – there’s a racer named BARGAIN.COM for Chrissakes. If there’s some kind of butchering analogy here, it’s probably a really great piece of meat that’s been perhaps over-trimmed and presented with zero pretension, but that first bite tells you everything you need to know about how good it’s going to be, and well after you’re full, you’re still dipping back in for more bites.

With all that’s happening in the world right now, it feels like a genuine miracle that something this untouched by all that has taken place in the two decades since the last game in this series that I played, and while I’m no longer that dropout transplant from Seattle sweating on a beanbag chair in the back of a jungle-painted back room while my boss yells for me to get back to work, I can still feel like one as I careen around a digitized approximation Tokyo’s freeway system at 2AM.

I haven’t talked much about addiction in ANY of the stuff I’ve written over the last 20+ years of talking about games – at least not beyond the idea that something is or isn’t – but the older I get, the more I get that it’s a function of how we operate in life. We spend endless time talking about how horrid it is, and for things that are detrimental, they are, but for trades, or hobbies, or just things that harm no one other than the obsessor (shut up, I know it’s not a real word, just imagine there’s an applied obsessed), where do model train builders or photographers or watch makers sit?

It’s a moot point; we know too much of A Thing is bad, but addiction can produce theorems that become laws as easily as they can drive a person to ruin just seeking a fix. Our brains crave this shit, and they’re made to pump out all the right chemicals to make us feel like we have to have it.

Which is, perhaps, why Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t feel – at least not innately – like an obsession, though I’ve probably spent entire days’ worth of raw time gnawing into it like a buffalo wing. I can’t get it out of my head; I just keep mentally nibbling at teases of stray thoughts in a way that a game hasn’t done before. The world itself hasn’t been Tetrisized, I’m not imagining jacking every cars, I’m just… always thinking about GT.

Part of the infatuation with the game is, of course, the return to the old CaRPG roots, offering a “single-player” path (if you can call it that) through the livery that unlike older games, forces you to try (and gain) new cars for your stable. It’s a gorgeous, pure, earnest expression of car porn. It’s cars’ Behind the Green Door.

But because it’s above all earnest, the love is infectious. All of the tech that dazzled as we moved between generations and this simple presentation of mechanical horses got fancier are all still here; legit, some of the Scapes – the game’s overwrought Photo Mode – are indistinguishable from actual. They convince utterly, especially at a glance, but even when you try to peek around the edges. They are sumptuously glossy and sun-glinted and just… they’re celebratory of the work that goes into all of these machines stretching back to culmination.

So, again, car porn. Fine. Yay. It’s good and right and nobody can complain about objectifying an actual object, but the deeper you slip into these cars, you feel their personalities, their faults, their infurations and docility at taking the exact same corner you’ve taken a hundred times, but this one is new because it’s in a different shiny new mechano-carapace. The subtlety is the point.

I think that’s partly because the race to just go photo-real finally took a back seat for a bit. GT7 straddles generations of hardware, so we’re not (and probably not in this generation) going to see fully globally-illuminated, ray-traced courses teeming with infinite pebble detail. Instead, the choices are about minutia, or at least how they’re delivered to the player.

A racing wheel is, of course, and will always be the ultimate way to experience these games, but the sense of understanding of the road and the way your tires are screaming to snatch that last stitch of asphalt because friction gives way to momentum with a DualSense is sublime. A lot of very, very good games have used this controller in fun new ways, but they feel like party tricks next to driving a GT7 car.

“Rumble” is cool and fun and Hideo Kojima’s Rumble Guy/Girl basically justifies it with every game they make. This is a different kind of feedback and the difference matters. This is rubbery tugs accelerating out of a corner and bump strips in time with your speed happening only on one side of the controller while separate knocks from an overtaker getting a bit too familiar with how your paint tastes at the same time. It’s sensory in a way that controllers couldn’t do before, and it’s lost with a wheel, in part, because it’s bifurcated in a way a single instrument couldn’t before.

I still don’t have a wheel. I keep seeing co-workers set up their fancy new ones, but I’ve neither the room nor the budget to spring for the kind of setup that would truly justify the cost, and I pray their experiences on dirt are as good as mine.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because I can hear their “holy shit” moments in my mind as they experience how a new car hugs a corner or out-accelerates an opponent, or how spending a bunch of cash in the story to take a schlump ride from stock to impossibly peppery feels.

I know, because I’ve said them myself – multiple times – over the course of what will likely be a years-long journey with this game. It’s frankly a little stupid how much I’ve fallen back in love with just buying random shit to upgrade a car. Most of said upgrades are delicately explained, if you ask, in plain talk, though things necessarily dip into gearhead talk at a certain point. The sensation of spending hard-earned winnings on a few potent updates (all spelled out with a continuation of the PP system in previous games that both indicates how supe your hooptie is AND what races it’s allowed into) and watching your little pep-mobile overtake the other cars is every bit as potent as it was 25 years ago.

I’ve barely dabbled with the online bit; I doubt I will, nor did I with the last game’s over-emphasis on it (for obvious reasons; it all paved the way for this game), save for races with work friends at lunch. Thankfully, with a fun new tour-cum-celebration of cars across the years, I don’t really have to. I’ve finished the “single-player” part of GT7, but as the ending credits remind, it’s a Grand Tour; it’s not meant to end, just to extend until there’s no more road, and as a permanent install on my PS5, it’ll be just that as new cars and tracks are added.

I’ve been quiet for a while around here, and had countless experiences since my last post. Uncharted 4 happened, and reaffirmed my belief that Naughty Dog understands how to milk – on an almost impossibly technical level – the most that a console can do at that current time. Plenty of games may supplant that bar they established, but almost certainly none of them will come from external developers, as is the way of first-party development. But Gears of War 4 also happened, and it seems as apt a comparison as any with The Coalition really flexing what the Unreal Engine 4 can do on (relatively) weaker hardware. Games like Forza Horizon 3 are showing that the hardware isn’t the issue; 1080p games are possible on all hardware, and specs mean nothing if something is coded to work the hardware – especially if the competition is boasting said specs. It’s been wonderful to watch this all play out. Yes, fine, I’m biased and I know that in like-for-like 3rd party comparisons, the Xbox one will fare poorly in resolution or textures (or some combination thereof), but when you have first-party developers knowing the specs inside and out, it makes for a game where “limitations” are pointless. It’s gorgeous, sounds like a ton of fun to play, and I will.

But this is a post about VR, a thing that this dumping ground of my thoughts is supposed to be about. I’ve been quiet. REALLY quiet. A lot of that comes down to just not having the time or impetus to actually post something there, but PlayStation VR was finally released this week, and without question I will be biased my impressions. I’ve seen the hardware evolve at work, I’ve seen the software get better, and most of all, I’ve seen how the UI would finalize. I’m not entirely sure that it’s complete at this point (you don’t actually get Trophy notifications, for instance, which I swear was in there before).

There’s no objectivity here, is what I’m getting at. I cannot possibly distance myself from seeing how the platform, the hardware and the games have matured over the course of the last two or so years when I was quietly snuck into a room to try out the hardware for the first time (as Project Morpheus in the parlance of that era). The actual engineering had clearly been done at that point. Visibly it was no different from what you can try today. The head strap, the whole sliding face mask, it was all there, and the research had been done.

What was different, however, as the hardware progressed, was the software, and the actual UI. For the longest time, there was no real UI. After spending ample time in the Vive and Rift headsets, I imagined a sort of “greeting room” approach that never happened. Nope, you’re using the PS4, you get the PS4 interface. That’s fine, and in truth the Playroom VR and Demo Disc constructs do approximate the vision I had of things, but you don’t get that when you unbox the headset for the first time. Instead, things are kept simple, logical, and for the amount of wires this generation requires, is insanely straightforward. Seriously, if you can’t get PSVR up and running in 15 minutes, then my compatriots have failed.

But it was seeing all these things I’d seen before, at multiple points, slowly growing more and more “right” that got me excited. I’ve NEVER been one to hide my excitement for VR. I’m trying to make stuff for VR – PlayStation included, but that’s way after I tackle the other guys first – and this is the first/last shot at taking it mainstream. It was happening. This low(er)-cost headset was performing like the others did. The end result is this: they nailed it. Seriously, the headset tracking is flawless for me, though I know there have been issues with the poor Giant Bomb guys, and I wish they’d actually get a new unit, but I’m guessing they want to review what was given to them because it could happen to someone who walks into a store to purchase things. I will not shill for PlayStation: if you experience the problems they have, that’s horrible, and you should return that thing to the place you got it, because it’s straight-up BROKEN.

Here’s where I also try to avoid the inevitable insinuations that I’m blinded by my approximation to PS VR (see, I separate them because I’ve been conditioned to; PSVR, if you prefer). Move was a poor idea for a motion controller – not at the time; it was WAY more responsive than the Wii remotes, and there are a slew of technical videos that show this was tech Sony didn’t steal or copycat, it was just a Deep Impact/Armageddon kind of thing – visible light optical tech is not at ALL acceptable if you want real, non-jittery motion control. Colored balls are amazing at positional tracking, which is what PS VR uses, but it’s shit at orientation and depth, and those, even with a normal camera that can’t see at an extremely high resolution. The sensors are fine, and will be tweaked to improve things, but the tech is forward-facing, jittery and imprecise because it’s tech from a generation ago.

The headset has its own problems too: the OLED shmutz is unavoidable at this point; if it’s dark, you’ll see a kind of spotting pattern that literally is only there in the dark areas. The panel and what you get per-eye is lower-res than the other headsets, though in practice this is less of an issue than you’d think due to the fact that all three RGB pixels are crammed into the the same block of the screen that would normally be laid top-to-bottom and kinda broken up on the other two headsets. The so-called “screen door effect” is present, but less than you’d get even on the higher-end headsets. The optics were made to squeeze all them pixels together in a way that would focus (quite literally) the available pixels right into the middle. As you look out with your eyes, you see more blur and chromatic aberration, so things aren’t so clean.

Here’s the hilarious part of it: after focusing for SO LONG on the advantages the other headsets had in specs, I honestly don’t give a shit. Yes, both have a wider field of view (meaning you take in more of the “picture” in your head before you see black), and some can feel crisper at their native resolution, neither is as easy to use, offers the same breadth of options, and stands as much of a chance at actual VR mainstream success. For all the specs that the others have (and again, I’m trying to make a game for them, not PS VR), their screens are as poor in the bad ways, aren’t as good in the good ways, and perform literally identically in terms of actual tech.

PlayStation VR genuinely IS the cheapest way to find true presence – the ephemeral quality that removes you from feeling you’re watching something and instead puts you INSIDE that thing you’re watching. It’s essentially the holy grail of first-gen VR, and PlayStation VR nails it despite apparently lower specs. It also has a TON of content. Dozens of hours, at least, in terms of random demo disc (yep, that’s a thing, and it comes in every system, though in truth it’s apparently just a portal to download demo updates at this point), plus stuff like VR Worlds, which is legit as fuck in delivering that presence. Playroom VR is also incredibly good at serving that sort of Wii Sports-style introduction of the ideas, but it’s handled with aplomb in terms of getting you inside a world. You’re literally missing out on the fun if you don’t try it, because it’s free and because you might actually hate fun.

There are so, SO many games I want to talk about, and I will. I’m going to try to commit myself to actually reviewing shit again, because if I don’t I will go insane, but for now, know that PlayStation VR is not the underpowered, second-rate version of VR that people tried to make it. It’s real. It’s incredible, and if you want to get in on VR, this is the cheapest, most straightforward and EASILY the simplest version of it. I hope it takes off, I don’t care if it doesn’t, but I do want VR to catch on, and I think it’s the best, cheapest way to do that and understand WHY VR is so huge.

Ubisoft gets a lot of crap (often times rightly so) for some of their practices in games. They have, for better or worse, come up with a set of gameplay loops that to many – myself included – find impossible to resist. I don’t have any real-life OCD tendencies, but for whatever reason, the Ubi Formula seems to have been keenly tuned to invoke a sense of OCD in gaming. The set of systems goes a little something like this:

• Barf a ridiculous number of collectibles throughout the various open worlds that they’ve created, then hide most of them until the player is in range, then highlight them on their mini-map
• Blanket the world in a fog, but scatter a handful of towers of some sort around, and once climbed/synched, reveal all nearby collectibles
• In more recent games, gate off upgrades behind a certain number of collectibles – nothing absolutely necessary, but good enough that the player will want to at least attempt to get them

This formula germinated and then was fully fleshed out around the Assassin’s Creed games, but it’s spread to nearly all the other open-world games in the Ubi stable – namely Far Cry and, most amusingly of all, The Crew. I know many poo-poo this whole approach, but for me it creates a compulsion that I can’t seem to shake; lizard brain see shiny, must get shiny, must make number go up.

Though it is without question as small slice of the whole, what I’ve played of The Division’s beta that’s running through this weekend thus far seems eager to buck the ostensible Ubi Formula. There are no towers to climb, no points to sync, though there are at least a handful of different collectible types (downed drones, bits of intel). Even still, what’s here has clearly lifted elements from Destiny’s addiction playbook. A dyed-in-the-wool RPG, there’s XP and levels (with attached gear requirements), tons of pointless loot (to be sold for cash to but new equipment, mods and weapons), and enemies that initially feel a little bullet spongey until those level gains and upgraded equipment make fights far more trivial. This is, to put it plainly, extremely my shit. I’ve always found the role-playing mechanic of leveling up – even grinding if need be to make it happen – and seeing the little stat upticks translate into stomping enemies that were previously an inconvenience. It sets off a tingle in the base of my skull like no other gameplay mechanic, and it’s why RPGs are still my favorite genre.

So The Division ticks those boxes nicely. The matchmaking isn’t nearly as heavy-handed as Bungie’s, but people have rightly drawn comparisons to Destiny with the way The Division handles its version of strikes. Gun down waves of enemies, scoot around a level and take down a boss (or boss mob) and dovetail neatly right back into where you started. You can do all of this by yourself (which I did), but you can just as easily pull up the map (delivered in a slick little augmented reality overhead view of the city) and pick out the yellowy-orange blips of friends scooting around those same levels. Tap a button, join on them, and you can replay missions with seamlessly increased enemy numbers and the chance for different loot drops. It works wonderfully, and the hop-in/hop-out nature of how this is done is absolutely commendable.

All this is well and good. A modern-day take on an RPG with guns is well-trodden ground at this point. Borderlands managed to do it quite well, but The Division really feels right. The gunplay is just wiry enough to feel like you’re not just mindlessly gunning down grunts. The enemy AI can suffer from the occasional brain fart, and enemy types seem divided into Shooty – Sometimes Moving, Shooty – Sniping You With Mysterious Glowly Aura, and Charge You With Melee, and that’s all fine. When you swap bits of cover (handled with the single best point-to-point pathing and targeting interface I’ve seen in a third-person cover-based shooter) without being seen, enemies will keep firing on your old position, allowing you to flank. Opening fire again causes the Shooty – Sometimes Moving guys to adapt to a limited degree, but it seems the melee enemies just sort of stand around. Enemy AI used to be something that was actively chased by developers, reaching something of a zenith with FEAR back on the PC. The better part of the decade, though, hasn’t really seen things grow beyond the Good Enough standards that we have now, and though it would likely cause fights to be far more tedious, this seems like the kind of game where it really could have shined – not as a back-of-the-box feature or anything, just as the natural progression of how a next-gen game in this genre should handle these things. Alas.

Back in my editorial days, I spent plenty of time praising the 50 gajillion Ubisoft teams that cobbled together the multiplayer modes for the Assassin’s Creed games because they managed to wrap that slightly wonky traversal around a completely thrilling game of cat and mouse. By making all of the inhabitants of the multiplayer levels the same as the various characters trying to hunt down and kill each other, there’s a constant tension. Which of those seemingly innocuous AI drones is actually a killer hiding in plain sight? Over the three AC games where multiplayer was present, there wasn’t much in the way of evolution – mostly just tying the XP/levels to unlockables that talked about the Abstergo side of AC lore (the background to the MP mode was that you were an Abstergo trainee learning to become a Templar killer), and after Black Flag, the MP was axed. I can understand the reasoning: the devs just didn’t know where to go with things, but that morsel of constant unease and the rush of sneaking up on someone to off them after calmly tailing them in and out of crowds was so damn thrilling that it didn’t matter. And it was completely unlike any other game out there.

The Division seems to have found that same crack in the familiar multiplayer construct and carved out its own niche by simply playing off human nature. The Dark Zone is the game’s free-for-all PvP area, and the premise is incredibly simple: better loot lives here, but the AI is often far more powerful and numerous, so it behooves players to form loose alliances. Thing is, this is a lawless region, and at any time, a player can “go rogue” and simply gun down all his erstwhile teammates and take their stuff. Doing so paints them as a traitor, making their betrayal a neat little risk/reward setup. Since the Dark Zone is teeming with the virus that took down most of New York in the game, any gear or weapons found here have to be decontaminated by calling in an extraction, which starts a countdown timer for the helicopter to arrive and causes the AI to make a beeline for you. I’m only just getting my feet wet in the DZ, but the systems in place here have that same sense of freshness that AC’s multiplayer did. Whatever culture at Ubi that causes them to share gameplay system and crank out endless sequels does seem to also allow genuinely unique concepts to gestate in all that sameness, and with all their development resources, they can properly flesh out and polish those concepts until they really shine.

I’m not a fan of forced matchmaking, but the “mutual benefits” approach in the Dark Zone and the constant threat of greed overriding any sense of ad-hoc community is incredibly compelling to me. The Division’s beta accomplished exactly what all “beta” releases in this modern age are trying to do: it converted me to a full-blown purchase. Nice work, Massive.