It’s become a game industry in-joke, but Bethesda games, from the Elder Scrolls series to Starfield, have always heavily leveraged what’s come to be known as environmental storytelling. The classic example is the hordes of skeletons you find in the wasteland in the Fallout games – propped in various poses suggesting the manner of their …
In the Zone: Great Environmental Storytelling in STALKER 2 Read More »
The holiday season is upon us, with December 19 marking the start of the annual Steam Winter Sale. It’s nearly impossible to experience a “gamer slump” this time of year – too many great titles flood our discovery queues. So this week seems like a good time for a quick rundown of the games I’ve …
When I start rambling about weird niche board games, my industry friends politely smile and nod. But I can tell when they’ve started looking for the quickest possible exit to the conversation. “That sounds cool,” they might say, “but not relevant to what WE do.” There’s no way to get them to tune out more …
Climb and Dive: Clever Mechanics in a Niche Boardgame Read More »
How to build great narrative content in games is a topic that’s always at the forefront of my mind. Crafting game narratives has been one focus of my career, and I’ve been around long enough to see several trends in narrative design come and go. The industry has undoubtedly improved at delivering stories over the …
Battle Lessons: The Superior Narrative Stew of Zephon Read More »
Two hours into Dragon Age: The Veilguard I started to get worried. The introduction to the game had been crisp, an action-packed sequence reintroducing Varric, a much-loved dwarven companion from the previous games, and Solas, the antagonist from the twist ending to Dragon Age: Inquisition. The action combat felt immediately good and impactful; the environment …
Comfort Food: Dragon Age Veilguard First Impressions Read More »
My 15-year-old, born in the summer of 2009, barely makes the GenZ cutoff. It’s a source of pride for him. He describes the up-and-coming Gen Alpha kids in the grades behind him as “scary” and “nearly feral.” For my part, I like to constantly remind him how lucky he is to have a couple of …
I remember when I first played SimCity. Will Wright’s masterwork was a breath of fresh air – a playable simulation of real-world urban planning, a topic that sounded like a terrible idea for a game on paper but was incredibly compelling in reality. Like Civilization and other 4X games, SimCity and its descendants weave an …
Ant Farms: Three of the Quirkiest City-Builders Around Read More »
Useless biographical tidbit: I have a law degree. I don’t talk about it much, I don’t use it for anything, and I never passed the bar exam so I’m not an attorney. It was a waste of thousands of dollars, though I did pick up a few techniques on how to really annoy people in …
Past Lessons: Innovations and Flaws in Ara: History Untold Read More »
Like many gamers, I’ve always got a “game of the moment” going – something I’m playing in my off-time, sometimes a board game, and sometimes a video game. Games have been the passion of my professional life and my hobby for as long as I can remember, back to when my mom let me drop …
Ages ago, my industry friends and I had a running joke about young designers who viewed themselves as the “idea guy.” The framing stems from an uninformed view of how games are made – the concept that there’s a lonely genius on a team somewhere, possibly with a fancy title like Creative Director, who comes …
Idea Guy: The Myths and Realities of Game Inception Read More »