A freelance consultant’s days are busy but unpredictable. For any given week, I might have work for multiple clients, or I might be tinkering with my own game, or I might be seeking out new contracts for a future quarter. Most likely it’s a mix of all three.
Consulting doesn’t have anywhere near the security of a full-time job. The lack of fully predictable income can be stressful at times. But freelance life is enjoyable and rewarding; helping other folks get their passion projects across the finish line is a great feeling.
Between Christmas and the New Year, though, I make sure to clear my calendar to spend time with my family and mentally reset. My holiday treat is always a trip to Madness, our local board game and hobby store, to take full advantage of their big post-Christmas “three for two” sale.
This year, the big prize from my Madness trip was a sprawling game called Voidfalll, a massive heavy box of components, cards, and tracking dials with a science-fiction theme. I lugged it home, unboxed it, and spent a blissful couple of hours punching out cardboard.
Voidfall, by Mindclash Games, had done very well on Kickstarter, but somehow I’d missed it when it first launched. I picked it up on impulse (after my usual quick scan of player ratings on BoardGameGeek, just to make sure I wasn’t buying a stinker that would sit unplayed on my shelf).
The game turned out to be denser than expected – charts, cards, dials, and a lot of deterministic math. After punching out all the cardboard bits, I puzzled over the multiple rulebooks for a full day before I finished setting it up, then promptly lost the tutorial scenario twice in a row.
This ended even worse than the first attempt.
But even in defeat, Voidfall was just what I needed – a dense brain-burner of a game, a table full of colorful pieces I could fully immerse myself in. Playing Voidfall was the perfect way to clear the mental decks after the chaos of the last twelve months.
Both 2022 and 2023 were challenging years, with deaths and illnesses plaguing my close family. My own health has also suffered from nagging issues typical of a middle-aged member of Gen-X – nothing remotely fatal, but annoying reminders of mortality.
I’ve watched countless friends lose their jobs and lost a job of my own when BonusXP shut down mid-year. I’ve seen the game industry struggle with all the old demons – diversity, crunch, poor management, and career security.
Yet there have been brilliant moments as well – fantastic and fresh games in so many genres, incredible successes both financial and critical, and innovative ideas everywhere you look.
Game of the Year – and a Cautionary Tale
If I were to list the year’s successes, I’d have to start with Baldur’s Gate 3 – my Game of the Year, without a doubt. I’m not alone in loving Larian’s masterwork. It’s the consensus choice of critics and fans alike, surprising a lot of folks after a lengthy and at times rocky early access run.
I’ve written at length about why I love Baldur’s Gate 3 and what designers can learn from it. I was particularly well-primed to enjoy it as a long-time fan of both the series and the genre in general.
But it’s been great to see how many other gamers have embraced the title, and how passionate the player community has become about the story and characters.
Despite being a game that’s primarily an old-school single-player experience (though it has a brilliant cooperative mode), Baldur’s Gate 3 has the kind of “long tail” that would warm the heart of the most cynical advocates of live-service games with overly aggressive monetization.
But as the new year dawns, a word of warning for the Larian team: the expectations for their next game will be impossibly high.
Recent reactions to Bethesda’s Starfield serve as a cautionary tale. Starfield is, in my subjective opinion, a solid 7/10 – maybe even an 8/10. It’s not as good as Skyrim, or even Fallout 4; the Bethesda model doesn’t map quite as well to a sprawling space setting as it did to a fantasy world or a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
As we close out the year, Starfield is currently getting review-bombed on Steam, with a 28% “Mostly Negative” rating in its recent reviews. Anyone with a lick of sense who has played the game knows that isn’t a fair rating.
The collective narrative that develops about the quality of a game – whether positive or negative – is seldom 100% about the game itself. Starfield’s latest reviews aren’t really about how boring its companions are, or how dull its planets can be between the points of interest, or how tacked-on the space combat feels.
Oh, SOME reviews are about those things, to be sure. But others are about how the game’s aging engine makes it hard to mod; others are about Bethesda’s ham-handed approach in responding to criticism; others still are simply annoyed that the game is an Xbox exclusive and unavailable on the PlayStation.
It’s our modern poisonous internet mob mentality at work, trolls “piling on” and over-amplifying otherwise legitimate criticisms.
And yes – in a year with so many fantastic games, the quality of Bethesda’s competition plays a role in the audience’s collective perception. When Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrates how reactive and creative an RPG can be, Starfield simply doesn’t measure up.
be in Baldur’s Gate 3? SUPER evil.
Still, it’s not adding to the discourse when the internet so aggressively piles on creators who make missteps. Next time around, Larian could be the studio that stumbles, while Bethesda could easily find its footing again and release a brilliant Elder Scrolls 6.
Or – and this is my hope – maybe both studios release great games for us to play. Gamers are the ones who win in that scenario, even if neither studio reaches the critical and commercial heights of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Skyrim again.
Mountains to Climb
2023 was exhausting. All through November and December, I couldn’t open up LinkedIn without seeing another company shutting down, or an old colleague suddenly out of work.
So over the last six months, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog writing about the industry’s problems. And there are plenty of other pressing issues I didn’t have the bandwidth to dig into properly.
As a privileged Gen-X guy, I’m not the proper person to write about the game industry’s rampant problems with sexism and lack of diversity in positions of power – though I want to do all I can to support the right voices in those discussions.
I didn’t write about the messy disaster that was the Game Awards this year, a show geared more toward advertising and celebrity cameos than properly honoring developer accomplishments.
What I’d like to spend more time writing about in 2024 is the positive stuff – celebrations of great games like Baldur’s Gate 3, more articles on the nuts and bolts of production and game design, more analysis of the successes rather than rehashing epic failures.
As I took my annual brain break over the holidays, it struck me that making games is a lot like navigating my first clumsy solo attempts at learning Voidfall. (Bear with my tortured metaphor for a minute.)
Before you begin, you’re faced with a ton of moving parts – a plethora of options spread out in front of you. You’re not sure how – or even if – your plan’s going to come together. You don’t know whether you won until you’re totaling up the points (game sales!) at the end.
There are more failures than successes. There’s a lot of heartbreak.
Yet it’s not only challenging – it’s enormously fun. Despite the problems, getting to the finish line feels great. And the journey is always surprising and educational.
ended in disaster… trying to beat a more
complex scenario is clearly the answer!
So here we all are in the first week of January – a battered industry full of talented game developers facing a brand new year.
Dust yourself off from earlier setbacks. Set up the board, sort all the components, and shuffle the myriad of cards into fresh decks.
Take the lessons learned last time around and start fresh. It’s what gamers always do.
The Scree Games blog is posted regularly on Tuesdays with a repost on Medium on Wednesdays. Happy New Year!