May 19, 2016

Reliving the slow-mo shootouts of Max Payne 2

PC Gamer

Whatever happened to bullet time? I think the death knell of the early noughties most overused shooter idea was rung in slow-mo when Matrix Revolutions came out in late 2003. All the style established by the first Matrix film suddenly seemed a bit pass , a lesson no doubt learned by hundreds of virgins wearing long leather jackets to nu-metal gigs. Max Payne was the first game to popularise slow-mo, but Max Payne 2 was commercially disappointing enough to put the series on hold for nine years. Bullet time gradually faded as the go-to idea for every third-person shooter.

When Max Payne 3 arrived years later it was unfamiliar, and shaped by the more popular conventions of the genre established in the meantime, particularly cover-based shooting. Bullet time and cover shooting are both solutions to the same problem: how do you create a sort of realworld logic to third-person shooting? Both are about making you feel more involved in the fight, not just strafing uncomfortably from behind a wall. Cover shooting s been around for so long now that we re never getting rid of it. Bullet time had a much shorter lifespan. Playing Max Payne 2 again, or even the recent Superhot, I feel it s a bit of a shame that it faded away so quickly. I say it s better than sitting in cover for five minutes while slowly clearing all the enemies out. You feel like a superhero. What s heroic about sitting behind a wall and blind firing?

Bullet time wasn t just a gimmick when it was used properly, and Remedy was the master of it. Max Payne 2 s use of it is so elegant it turns every room into a puzzle. It s about learning the positioning of enemies and figuring out the perfect way to use your weapons and the quantity of slow-mo you ve got left in the tank. In the back of your mind you re anticipating where the next medicine cabinet will be, so you don t blow all your painkillers after one scrappy firefight. This was a time before recharging health, after all. The need for strategy and precision ensure that Max Payne 2 is still an empowering, exciting shooter today.

Max Payne 2 shows its age in other areas, like the entertaining overuse of Havok physics. Platforms collapse to form convenient new routes around the levels, bad guys fall into neatly stacked piles of barrels like something out of Garth Marenghi s Darkplace, and stuff in the environment pings around the place whenever a barrel explodes. I don t think this spoils the game like Half-Life 2 s use of physics puzzles, it just tells you everything about the mid-noughties timeframe it hails from. It s fun to mess around with, and part of the reason (along with easily loadable custom campaigns) Max Payne 2 ended up with such a healthy modding community.

This sequel didn t add a great deal to the core bullet time system established in the first game but there s a lot more style layered on top in terms of sound design, ludicrously flashy reload animations and weapon feel. Diving into a room and surveying it in slow-mo, popping bullets at enemies in all corners, before quickly snapping to a backwards dive as I clear out the remaining perps... it still feels fantastic. Max might be the most miserable man in the Americas but damn, he sure doesn t move around like a man with nothing to lose. Nothing s really aged about the way Max Payne 2 plays, because no one makes games like this anymore.

The other half of the enduring appeal for me is Max s fictional universe. Payne lives in a heightened, ludicrous world of neo-noir, of betrayals and secret organisations, always running a gauntlet of personal tragedies. As in the original game, the story is presented through comic book panels, though there are fleeting instances of proper cutscenes, too. The dialogue is so overwrought, but I love it, and there s never any doubt that Remedy is aware of how over-the-top it all is. Hell, even quitting the game presents you with the line The night seemed to stretch out into eternity, with your two options being I was afraid to go on (quit to desktop) and But I refused to give in. I had to continue (continue). It s B-movie, but they completely own it. There s an unrelenting commitment to being daft and serious at the same time.

While the game offers nothing as visually memorable as the line-ofblood nightmare sequence in the original, there s more confidence in the cinematic presentation of the world. One segment lets you walk peacefully around the police station where Max works. I stopped to watch an episode of Lords and Ladies, one of the in-game TV shows, with two other cops in the rec room. When it was over and the ads came on, the cops started a conversation about nothing in particular.

One entire level, later revisited, is set inside an abandoned amusement park based on Address Unknown, a Twin Peaks-inspired fictional 90s TV show. It s a wonderfully specific choice for an environment, where your only frame of reference comes from watching the show on the various TVs found in the game. I love stuff like that. I can t see any triple-A developer but Remedy coming up with that framework for an important level of a game.

And then there s the story itself. Whereas Max Payne was a revenge story about the murder of Max s wife and kids, this is a fraught love story between Max and femme fatale Mona Sax, coupled to a narrative about the Illuminati-like Inner Circle. I couldn t fully work out what was going on with the conspiracy storyline this time, to be honest, but I have a real soft spot for the doomed Max/Mona coupling, and particularly the tense sequence where control flips to Mona and you re tasked with saving Max from swarms of enemies with a sniper rifle on a building site. The assured voice-acting helps it s better than a lot of what was around at the time.

I last completed Max Payne 2 when I was 22, and I worried the romance might make this less naive version of me cringe years later, but not so Remedy knew what game it was making, and the line at the close of the credits, Max Payne s journey through the night will continue is very well-judged.

Max, of course, never gets a happy ending, and the finale is pretty brutal here. I think it s one of the best game endings there is, and even the choice of music got me. The song Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall that plays over the credits is heard throughout the game at different moments. The lyrics contain unsubtle references to the game, much as the same band s music (now billed as The Old Gods of Asgard) would later do in Alan Wake. Mona s last line, too, I turned out to be such a damsel in distress is a final demonstration of Remedy s self-awareness. They know this is a story awash with the conventions of other fiction. Even the villain, Vlad, mocks Max for being so damned miserable all the time.

This self-awareness is what was missing from the third game, for me. It felt like a reboot in a lot of ways, swapping the heightened noir for the feel of a three-star action movie like Man on Fire, though it definitely has its moments. Bullet time aside, there s a real magic to the other touches that made Max Payne and its sequel so special: the mythical, forever nighttime New York backdrop, the feeling of being swallowed into the criminal underworld over the course of the story, and an understanding that irony offers plenty of leeway for purple scriptwriting.

May 18, 2016

Exploring the consequences of last week s shocking League of Legends bans

PC Gamer

Photo credit: Riot Games

There are ten teams in the North American League of Legends Championship Series and six teams in the North American Challenger Series. Then, three of them were banned, barred from re-entering the circuit, and forced to sell their spot in ten days. This was unprecedented, and easily the most controversial ruling in League of Legends competitive history. The League world is still recovering from last week s decision, and the ripples will likely be felt for a long time. Even people who follow League closely are still stunned at what went down and what this means for competitive League.

The tragic tale of Team Impulse

Team Impulse had been hobbling through the spring split with a number of disadvantages among them that their owner had left the country, providing very little help in his wake, and their translator was left to run the team.

This story begins back with the competitive ban of Yu "XiaoWeiXiao" Xian in the summer of 2015. XiaoWeiXiao was the mid laner for Team Impulse, and not only was he a good mid laner, he was a lovable guy who had attracted a fan base thanks to his personality and cheerful looks. TIP had been playing incredibly well, and they were beginning to look like they could be heading to Worlds. Just before playoffs, when the hype machine was at its loudest, fans saw the update: a competitive ruling for XiaoWeiXiao.

It turned out that the mid laner had a profitable side business namely, ELO boosting. Not only this, but he was negotiating the sale of a Riot-unlocked LCS account. He was banned for a year when this was discovered, and TIP were forced to go through the playoffs without their mid laner. TIP did not go to Worlds, and in fact, most of their talent fled following the season.

Austin Gate Yu was arguably the foundation keeping the team moving; while Cloud9 s Hai gets credit for being a mid, jungle, and support, Gate performed a similar task by switching rapidly from mid lane to support and back to cover the holes in Team Impulse s leaky hull. His efforts weren t in vain Team Impulse survived the split, they didn t make last place, and they fought through the relegation tournament and won their spot back.

Problem is, no one was being paid. The owner didn t come back to re-embrace his prodigal son. Instead, he seemed happy to let things continue on as they were... and then Riot got involved. Team Impulse s tale is not a happy one, but it is arguably the simplest story of the three bans.

The Dragon Knights and the Renegades

Photo credit: Riot Games

As playoffs neared, Team Dragon Knights and the Renegades raised eyebrows by engaging in a massive roster swap. The Renegades gave up Flaresz, Alex Ich, and Trance. The Dragon Knights gave Ninja and Seraph back. The two teams had traded massive chunks of their rosters, and while both teams were stronger for it, it seemed tremendously shady. Riot agreed, and investigated.

Before the Renegades even made it to the LCS, they were run by caster Christopher MonteCristo Mykkles and Chris Doombang Badawi. Badawi was accused and convicted in the court of Riot for tampering with player rosters, and banned from owning an LCS team for a year. He seemingly stepped back, and all was well... until the new competitive rulings dropped.

Riot claims that there were several complaints levied towards the Renegades throughout the season, and maintained throughout that they needed to keep much of the context of those claims secret to protect the vulnerable. In addition, Riot presented the smoking gun that the Dragon Knights and the Renegades were both being actively run in part by Badawi, and that their relationship as teams were inappropriate. Down came the banhammer once for the Renegades, once for Team Dragon Knights. Ten days to sell.

So what does this mean?

It s impossible to sum up the total ramifications of these decisions in this column a book would likely be a better way to explore exactly what happened and its effects on the League of Legends ecosystem. However, there are a few obvious points that we need to consider:

One, the fact that more than one team is out, combined with the ten day window for sales, means that we re about to see new organizations in the LCS. This is the best shot to enter competitive League in a long time, and such a chance may never happen again. The question is: are the teams that are going to take REN and TIP s spot folks who have been watching the scene for a long time, plotting and biding their time... or are we going to see impulse purchases by investors who don t know how to run a League team? The last thing that the League competitive scene needs is more fairweather investors who are only invested in their team as long as they re making money.

Two, fifteen League players are suddenly free agents. Where are they going to end up? Players like Alex Ich had a long period of strife in their career before they ended up with their current team. Now they re tossed back into the free agent pool to find a new home. Some players, like Seraph, had only just started to show their real potential. Will recruiters notice that, or are their runs coming to an end?

Finally, will teams continue to trust Riot when they ve demonstrated that they re willing to take such extreme measures? Many large team owners spoke out against Badawi during the first competitive ruling last year... but for the players, it must be alarming to see many of their colleagues out of a job in a flash. That being said, Riot is the company in charge and ultimately players may decide that as long as their job is safe (well, as safe as it can be in esports), things will be okay.

Three teams gone, and ten days to take their spot... The next few days of League are going to be an intense time in this game s history. Many questions remain about the ruling and its process, but the game will march forward without waiting for answers.

May 18, 2016

How viable is the World Esports Association?

Dota 2

Photo credit: ESL/Helena Kristiansson

Friday s announcement of the World Esports Association, WESA, could ve gone smoother. A leaked logo earlier in the week prompted widespread speculation, and even in the immediate aftermath of the official announcement it was tough to find a clear explanation of what this new sports federation would actually do. In part this is the fault of WESA itself. I was at the launch in London, and my experience was of a number of good ideas struggling to make themselves heard above the furore.

There are a bunch of different ways to say we want to create a more stable and professional conversation around esports , after all, and we ve started FIFA is only one of them although it just happens to be the one that makes people think about corruption and bad governance. It feels like they ve been fighting fires from minute one as a consequence of mishandling a few key points.

On the other hand, the way the conversation around WESA has developed demonstrates, with bittersweet irony, why something like WESA is necessary. The esports community likes to hold court in Reddit and on Twitter. YouTube and the press are used as soundboards that start public fights elsewhere on social media. And I m not just talking about fans: the last few days have seen senior industry figures including members of WESA get drawn into a mess of he-said-she-said. This is an industry used to conducting its affairs through DMs and private Skype channels, where transparency (i.e, a leaked chat log) is usually a consequence of a fight getting out of hand.

WESA s most appealing stated aim is its desire to structure and professionalise exactly this kind of conversation; to provide a way for esports orgs to talk to one another in a way that avoids exactly this kind of unhappy fallout. I don t think that s a crazy idea, in and of itself.

What, how, why

Here s a broad outline: WESA is a committee featuring eight large esports organisations (Fnatic, NiP, Na Vi, Virtus.pro, G2, EnVyUs, FaZe and mousesports) and one tournament organiser (ESL). Representatives for these organisations are joined by a representative from a player council. WESA is distinct from other sports federations in that it gives players direct representation independent of their teams.

Motions brought to the committee will require a 75% majority vote to pass, and any policies brought into being by WESA will only be applicable to WESA members and WESA-sanctioned leagues. WESA members will be able to play in non-WESA leagues, and non-members will be able to play in leagues that WESA oversees.

WESA itself will not run events or leagues at all, but given the connection to ESL it s not surprising that the CS:GO Pro League is the first to be sanctioned by WESA. Areas of consideration suggested to me on Friday range from anti-doping to anti-gambling, broadcast rights, scheduling and legal dispute resolution.

To that latter end, WESA will also operate an arbitration court designed specifically for esports. They boast that this will be able to operate via video chat, return a verdict within 48 hours, and allow disputes to be resolved independent of the complex web of national jurisdictions that esports has traditionally struggled to navigate.

The association will fund itself with membership fees (the board would not specify how much this is) and by taking a revenue share of the leagues that it sanctions. This share is split evenly between all member organisations.

Almost all of it has precedent within conventional sport (WESA s first league commissioner, Pietro Fringuelli, was previously a legal advisor to the German Bundesliga) and the failings of similar organisations, like FIFA, does not necessarily mean that this also will fail. Associations and unions are not de facto corrupt, and all governance is imperfect to a degree. If esports is to become more structured, that has to start somewhere. There is no perfect external authority to be consulted for an industry this new, with this many unique considerations. To that end, I understand why WESA has formed in the way that it has.

Photo credit: ESL/Helena Kristiansson

Cause for concern

The controversy surrounding WESA, then, comes from a few different places: concern about who is involved in WESA and how much power they ll have; the motivations that drive its members; the failure of previous initiatives like this; a general distrust of centralised governance. I put these concerns to James Kennigit Lampkin, VP of Pro Gaming for ESL.

You look back at an organisation like G7 Lampkin says. These teams came together and said we re going to work together, we re going to unionise against organisers and leagues . Then other people tried it. And it always failed. Why did it always fail? Because every single time a new game comes out, that relationship set resets. Those team owners are incentivised to be ultra-competitive in the space, get the best players they can, go after each other shady stuff happens. When you say to team owners, hey just go work together , consistently over the last decade it didn t work.

Creating a stable structure that can produce guidelines that would survive the death of any given game was one of WESA s founding ideas. That was the thought behind the structure Lampkin says. Instead of having teams operate by themselves and organisers operate by themselves, maybe we could actually create something sustainable that doesn't get destroyed the second a new game comes out.

This sentiment is echoed by Fnatic s Patrik cArn S ttermon, who was captain of the Fnatic CS:GO team for six years. You cannot really expect, in esports, that a title we play today will be around in a hundred years. But nevertheless we feel like a game can have longer longevity than it has today. In order to stimulate such, we need to get organised. We need to set standards. We need to ensure that the professional circuit that we are very much part of is well-defined, predictable, that sponsors can understand the scheduling and so on. This has not been the case in CSGO in particular.

People think we re just coming in and making a power grab and trying to control the entire space. That is by no means the ambition we have here at all.
Patrik S ttermon

A lot of what WESA seeks to do (arbitration being the exception) already happens unofficially in some form or another. Esports orgs talk to one another in order to agree on schedules, players talk to each other about how they are treated, and how they d like to be treated, and so on. At its most benign, WESA seeks to make these processes more transparent and consistent.

Teams, and players, have come together in very unofficial ways Lampkin says. We deal with a player union in Dota and a player union in CS:GO. But the significance of those unions is fairly small the Dota union, for example, exploded because of a Twitter fight between two players. An entire union destroyed because of a Twitter fight between two players. If we're talking about how to make this work, it has to be official.

[WESA] will govern and form regulation, but it will form regulation on itself, really Lampkin says. It's a collective partnership that brings stakeholders to the table.

Both S ttermon and Lampkin acknowledge that skepticism is a likely response to any initiative like this. There will be questions asked S ttermon says. The community will be like, is this good for us? There have been projects that appear to be similar from the get go people have an inherent caution when it comes to uniting stakeholders, particularly when there are some dominant forces. People think we re just coming in and making a power grab and trying to control the entire space. That is by no means the ambition we have here at all.

Photo credit: ESL/Helena Kristiansson

The ESL-ephant in the room

Given WESA s stated aim to professionalise communication in the industry, the question of who has been invited to participate in that process is a primary concern. There are a lot of high-profile teams already involved, but many that aren t. Most notably absent, however, are the other tournament organisers: MLG, DreamHack, FACEIT, and so on. As far as WESA s launch incarnation is concerned, ESL speaks for that entire aspect of the industry. This is clearly questionable, and the hardest thing about WESA to accept on trust.

What we said was, if we're going to build this structure in WESA, then you're inherently required to balance ESL's power in that system ESL s Lampkin says. Because otherwise, as fans say, it looks like ESL's just going to try to dominate everything. That is specifically why we built it with players and teams with so much power. Certainly ESL as an organiser love our own events, but when you bring all these other people in who counterbalance that view, you get a system that allows for us to have a proper communication structure with other organisers and with non-member teams.

The structure of WESA, Lampkin argues, prevents ESL from operating with the kind of impunity that concerned fans have suggested. Even so, there are understandable concerns about how ESL might influence the association s priorities, or take advantage of these new clearer lines of communication. To that end, Lampkin asks that people wait and see.

What it comes down to is the actions of the association he says. If all the WESA teams pull out of ELEAGUE tomorrow, then you can quickly go and say 'hey, yeah, this was a terrible idea.' The point is that if, theoretically, ESL runs into the WESA board room and says 'we're shutting down everything!' The players say 'no, we're boycotting you' and the team owners walk out of the room and the entire organisation crumbles immediately. Because it requires consensus! That's the entire point of the system.

Even so, the question but why isn t anyone else directly involved should be asked. Lampkin s answer surprised me. ESL was in negotiations with other organisers he says. Not all other organisers, but we were in negotiations. Hey, is there a way for us to align our interests.' And after months of this process, hmm-ing and ha-ing, we came to the realisation that, no, it fails. As leagues, we are too competitive with each other across the esports ecosystem.

Lampkin didn t offer a specific explanation for why these discussions failed, so in that sense this remains another aspect of this difficult subject that the community is being asked to take on trust. We tried, but we re the only people who want to make this happen is the message here. And it s easy to be cynical about that message.

This is an open playing field. There is nothing stopping any organiser from building systems, fighting doping, fighting corruption, fighting against match-fixing.
James Lampkin

When I spoke to Fnatic s Patrik S ttermon, however, he independently verified Lampkin s sentiment. We set out, as teams, to talk to tournament organisers a few years ago he says. Through that process, eventually we learned that what we can accomplish with ESL is superior to the other discussions we had. This doesn t mean that those guys are cancelled out or not in consideration going forward. In fact, we hope to set a great standard and maybe stimulate other regions to set up something similar. Maybe we can work together.

There's always, I see it in esports press, I see it from fans, and I see it from our competitors, this implication that we're bulldozing or crushing Lampkin says. What we're saying is, no. What we're doing is we're working. This is an open playing field. There is nothing stopping any organiser from building systems, fighting doping, fighting corruption, fighting against match-fixing. Anybody can go and do that, it's just the case that ESL has been a bit ahead of the pack on a lot of this stuff. Look at the esports integrity initiative we had, AnyKey, WESA these are initiatives that we put forward with others to create a better structure within esports. Because literally we cannot do it by ourselves.

This, at least, is something that can be independently assessed. ESL have repeatedly expressed an interest in professionalising esports no other tournament organiser has been as public about anti-doping, for example, or diversity. This does not mean that their involvement in WESA is altruistic, but it does lend credence to Lampkin s notion that ESL happens to be the organisation with the most drive when it comes to these issues. This might sound unfair, particularly if you re working for one of ESL s rivals: in which case the onus is on those organisations to prove that they re just as engaged.

Put it this way: if WESA is successful in creating a system of governance that makes CS:GO players richer, safer and happier, and attaches that primarily to ESL events, then ESL will definitely benefit and that is worth being circumspect about. However: players will also be richer, safer and happier. That should make it harder for tournament organisers of all kinds, including ESL, to offer players anything less than the good deal that they ve become accustomed to. This is a best-case scenario, perhaps, but it illustrates why a pragmatic approach, even one that seems compromised, has the potential to exert a positive influence over the esports industry as a whole.

This product is very close to my heart S ttermon says. Esports has been vastly changing, but some stuff hasn t changed in pace with the rest of the industry. Like player representation, benefits, broadcasting rights stuff you normally see in conventional sports that have been around for a long time.

Photo credit: Riot Games

Players and teams

If long-term players want these things, and they are not being provided for in the industry as it currently operates, then they will go looking for it. It s worth considering that WESA has been established with a focus on CS:GO that seems to have been the main criteria governing which teams were initially invited and the CS:GO scene is probably the most open to this kind of structure. There s little publisher oversight, a lot of different stakeholders, and little stability.

CS:GO is, I think, the one game where there's an opportunity for team owners to start to manage themselves without excuse the analogy without a parent says Lampkin. [WESA] is not a reporting-upwards relationship, it's a consensus-building organisation.

This is the sense that I get from S ttermon, too: CS:GO both needs better governance and is open to it. He cites League of Legends as an attractive model.

I think there's a lot of learning to take from Riot S ttermon says. How they set up the LCS. The LCS has proven to be a very successful formula for teams, there's a schedule, there's a transfer window, the fans are really hype. That's similar to the sports world, and sports have had a much longer time to figure these things out.

It s easy to see where the appeal of WESA may lie for teams like Fnatic. Reliable prize pools, regulations and schedules are good for business, and they are specifically good at attracting major sponsors that might be put off by esports wild west reputation. If WESA (or an initiative like it) succeeds, then the parties involved stand to benefit tremendously. But and this is a really important but stability and profitability translates directly into a better experience for players and viewers. If you want more events near you, better support for semi-pro teams, more regular games, then all of that stems from a healthier business. I m not saying that WESA can or will achieve this, but it s important to understand the contours of the area between trying to make esports more viable and trying to take over the industry.

Through WESA, however, these organisations many of them a decade or more old have an opportunity to become the official governing heart of the CS:GO scene. They may well prove to be benevolent governors, but they ll still define the environment that players operate within. The growth of the Dota 2 scene makes for a useful contrast, here. The vast prize pools associated with the International, coupled with Valve s preference for working directly with players rather than teams, has created a highly unstable environment. The influence of the traditional esports orgs has been on the wane since 2014, when a number of teams split up and reassembled under new banners. This has been a mixed blessing: more freedom has, on occasion, meant more freedom to get screwed over . But players have largely been in charge of their own destinies.

As prize pools in CS:GO increase, it s not surprising that the old orgs are looking for ways to increase their significance in the eyes of their players before the scene goes the way of Dota. If they re trying to do that by offering the players a better deal as part of a WESA member org than they d get on their own, however, then it s hard to say that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Photo credit: ESL/Helena Kristiansson

Long-term viability

I suspect the discussion around WESA will change dramatically the moment they either (a) screw up or (b) solve a major problem for players. The former would prove the cynicism of the last few days warranted. The latter would suggest that ESL et al deserve more benefit of the doubt than they ve been getting.

Beyond that, the organisation s first challenge is creating meaningful regulations that create more stability and better quality of life for players within the CS:GO scene. That is far easier said than done, and likely the work of months if not years. But if they can do that and that s another big but then the next step is to apply WESA s learnings to other esports. S ttermon is confident that this is possible.

It s inevitable to capture the learnings and apply the learnings across the board, right? He says. Not only in future Counter-Strike leagues but within our organisation across other games. That doesn t mean it has to be a forceful approach it s about getting in the same room, understanding the opportunity and how we can collaborate together. The intention is to very much be open minded, include as many stakeholders as possible, but not forgoing the intention to professionalise the space we want to do this in a sustainable fashion.

The only way WESA works is if it has the buy-in of players and teams.
James Lampkin

Lampkin argues that WESA doesn t need to take over the industry to be effective that it can be just as useful as a positive example independent of other organisations, and that they would be happy for this to be the case. I don t think Riot needs WESA, right? He says. But what we see is a lot of problems that we look to solve are either not the core competency of a lot of game publishers, so the goal for us is, we provide the solution even if we re not engaged with that publisher through WESA if we ve figured out how to solve anti-doping, or we ve figured out how to solve gambling issues, then just copy us! It s an open market.

Despite the talk of the LCS, there s a little of Valve s logic to this stance. WESA will either succeed because its ideas work, Lampkin argues, or fail because they don t and either is good for the industry as a whole. The only way WESA works is if it has the buy-in of players and teams he says. It's the only way it works. I can go and ask nicely for a team to join but if they don't want to join they don't have to join. It's entirely based on the value proposition that we as a group here have created to try to stabilise things and create a better structure.

There is a long, tough journey ahead for WESA. The association has been founded in a culture that was primed to reject it from the start, and it may yet prove that this is justified. Yet I worry that this same culture might prevent WESA, or an organisation like it, from being effective despite best intentions. If every attempt to establish standards is treated like a conspiracy, and every attempt to make esports more profitable treated like a scandal, then the conversation within the industry between teams and showrunners, teams and players, organisations and fans has almost nowhere to go.

It s important to ask tough questions. As the esports industry matures, however, these are questions that need answering too: who is going to offer players a secure career path? Who is going to prevent another crash? Who is going to ensure that the rights of players don t get trampled as the business becomes more profitable? WESA may not prove to have all, or any, of the answers. In that case, the question becomes: who does?

May 18, 2016

Why I love the beautiful isolation of The Long Dark

The Long Dark

Why I love

In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. Today, Andy endures, but ultimately enjoys, the trials of The Long Dark's wasteland.

A geomagnetic storm has rendered all technology useless and plunged the planet into a quiet apocalypse. Suddenly humanity is no longer at the top of the food chain and every day is a fight for survival. This is the harrowing premise of The Long Dark, an atmospheric survival simulator created by Canadian studio Hinterland. Your only goal is to stay alive, but this freezing, merciless landscape doesn t make it easy.

It s a bleak, hopeless game. But there s a strange serenity to be found amid the devastation. There are moments when the weather is calm and you have enough food and water that survival briefly takes a back seat. You re free to enjoy the atmosphere and beauty of your surroundings. You hear the crunch of snow under your feet and the wind blowing through the trees. You see tumbling waterfalls and silent, snow-dusted valleys. You forget about about the apocalypse, at least until a blizzard sets in or you start running out of food.

Hinterland s painterly wilderness is one of the most evocative settings on PC. Every location has its own personality. Whether it s the rugged slopes of Timberwolf Mountain, Pleasant Valley s rolling fields, or the abandoned cabins in Mystery Lake, the places you visit tell a story: of what life there was like before the cataclysm, and what has happened since. The feeling of isolation is powerful, but occasionally you ll see traces of life. Smoke curling from a chimney or freshly-cut firewood stacked on a hearth. Signs that maybe you aren t as alone as you think, which is both eerie and reassuring.

But the only people you see are dead, lying frozen in the snow. A grim reminder of how life hangs in the balance in this frigid wasteland. While exploring a cave, the warm glow of my oil lantern revealed the body of a man sitting hunched by the remains of a fire. It was a sombre scene, reminiscent of British climber David Sharp who died on Mount Everest and was found in a cave in a similar position. For all its beauty, the game also has moments of melancholy like this that bring home just how grave your situation really is.

The Long Dark also has remarkable sound design, which is a big part of why its setting is so transporting. When you re indoors by a crackling fire, listening to a blizzard wailing outside, you can almost feel the warmth of the flames. If your pack is full of firewood it rattles and clunks as you walk. Cross a wooden bridge and you hear it creak under your feet. Hike through a valley and your footfalls subtly echo. It s an incredibly rich, dynamic soundscape, and sparse use of music brings the excellent environmental audio to the fore.

A recent update improved the game s weather effects, giving Hinterland an even broader palette of moods, feelings, and colours to paint its wilderness with. Plump, gently falling snowflakes give a misty morning a sense of calm, then the wind picks up and suddenly you re trudging through a hail of ice. Sometimes the sky will be grey and overcast, then the clouds part to reveal a piercing blue sky. As the sun sets, it casts a pink glow over the forests and valleys, and on a clear night the moon shines like a spotlight surrounded by twinkling stars. The weather and light change constantly.

I love how all the environments are connected, enabling you to travel freely between them. Hiking from Mystery Lake to Timberwolf Mountain involves crossing a treacherous ravine and navigating a maze-like coal mine, and when you reach your destination you feel you ve been on a real journey. But there s no map, so you have to find your own way or, if you want to make things easier, search for maps created by the community s talented cartographers.

The next step is a story mode. I m excited about it, but I wonder if the loneliness of the sandbox will be as alluring when you encounter other survivors. There s something captivating about feeling like the last person alive, which makes this one of the most compelling post-apocalyptic games on PC. But I trust Hinterland. It knows what it s doing.