Video Game Deep Cuts: Shine On, Shadowkeep Moon
Video Game Deep Cuts: Shine On, Shadowkeep Moon
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from video game industry 'watcher' Simon Carless (GDC, Gamasutra co-runner, No More Robots advisor), rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.
This week's highlights include a chat with Yoshiro Kimura about iconic game Moon, the latest from Destiny 2's Shadowkeep expansion, the history of EverQuest on PC and Mortal Kombat on consoles, and lots, lots more.
Also happening this week - No More Robots, the indie publisher I advise, announced Yes, Your Grace, a 'Reigns meets Game Of Thrones' kingdom simulator with some lovely pixel art developed by Brave At Night - here's Eurogamer's coverage of it. Excited about this one!
Until next time...
- Simon, curator.]
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Why Online Game Launches Are Often A Mess (Stephen Totilo / Kotaku - ARTICLE)
"Just after 4 pm ET on Tuesday, Destiny 2 players began to see a warning message. A red line stretched across the bottom of their screens, and the text below it stated: “Attention: contacting Destiny 2 servers.” Minutes later, huge numbers of players got booted from the massively-multiplayer online sci-fi shooter."
TGS Encounters - Yoshiro Kimura Interview, moon phases (Archipel / YouTube - VIDEO)
"Taking a turn in the indies hall of Tokyo Game Show, we found Yoshiro Kimura, who told us the tale of moon - a poetic antithesis of the RPG genre, soon to be launched on Switch, more than 20 years after its original release and for the first time in English."
Gamers paved the road for a streaming future. Twitch wants to add more lanes. (Gene Park / Washington Post - ARTICLE)
"Last week at Twitchcon, the now-annual conference put on by live-streaming giant Twitch that welcomes about 25,000 attendees a day, brands from outside the gaming ecosystem demonstrated how they’re bringing clout, and coin, to the platform. And while gaming continues to form the core audience for both content producers and streamers, Twitch is now eyeing expansion into other areas, particularly those that intersect with their core users."
Nintendo Switch: A Discoverability Followup (Simon Carless / Game Discoverability Weekly - ARTICLE)
"So, my recent piece on discoverability for Nintendo Switch, which was based on slightly less personal experience than my Steam posts, got some decent feedback from a few active Switch developers. In general, it appears that the analysis was on the money. Overall, we’re transitioning from an opportunity-rich Switch game sales environment to a much more crowded sales channel."
Better Together: Stories of EverQuest (David L Craddock / Shacknews - ARTICLE)
"More than any game before it, EverQuest channeled the spirit of D&D to create a powerful, community-driven game. Dying and losing your corpse, the vessel that held all the loot you’d fought so long and hard to claim, was a situation that only the most stalwart could remedy alone. Gigantic, polygonal dragons were too fearsome for a solo adventurer to defeat."
My First 24 Hours With 'Destiny 2: Shadowkeep' Largely Involved Not Playing (Ricardo Contreras / VICE - ARTICLE)
"For as much as the downtime frustrated me, the opening mission of Shadowkeep was appropriately bombastic, and tapped into the feeling of being a part of a larger community experiencing something new for the first time. Despite a rocky start, I’m so glad to finally be on the moon. [SIMON'S NOTE: here's another perspective on returning to Destiny 2 from EGM.]
Making Mortal Monday (Chris Chapman / Retro Histories / YouTube - VIDEO)
"Adapted from the book Arcade Perfect by David Craddock... Additional quotes from How Mortal Kombat Defined The Console War Between Sega And Nintendo by Damien McFerran."
Apex Legends' New Map Is Beautiful, But It Has a Big Pacing Problem (Caty McCarthy / USGamer - ARTICLE)
"The first time I dropped into Apex Legends when Season 3 kicked off earlier this week, I was taken aback by how beautiful the new map is. It's far more colorful than Kings Canyon, the map that's kept us busy for most of 2019. In the center of it is a city even, with its own running train and a giant icicle burrowed into the earth."
Inside Pioneer: May the Best Silicon Valley Hustler Win (Paris Martineau / Wired - ARTICLE)
"Since then, tens of thousands of people from around the globe have entered Pioneer’s eponymous tournament—a convoluted, semi-anonymous online competition that uses software and game mechanics like points, quests, and leaderboards to quantify participants’ real-world productivity and incentivize behaviors Gross and his team believe are key to success."
10 years on and 20 more to go - Mojang on the present and future of Minecraft (Imogen Beckhelling / Eurogamer - ARTICLE)
"Minecraft has had a hell of a year, and a hell of a decade. But how has it got here? And what do the next 10 years hold? I caught up with lead developer Jens Bergensten and Minecraft Earth executive producer Jesse Merriam ahead of Minecon Live to talk about how Minecraft has stayed so successful - and what it must do to stay on top."
What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games (Razbuten / YouTube - VIDEO)
"About a year ago, my wife asked if she could play a game. Instead of simply saying yes, I decided to run an informal experiment where I had her play a sampling of games to see how, after a lifetime of not playing games, she would do. These are the results."
Mutazione is a game about the importance of tending to gardens and people (Michael Moore / Polygon - ARTICLE)
"Mutazione is an adventure game in the sense that “adventure game” has become a sort of catch-all genre term for games that have lots of narrative with some gameplay elements, like Night in the Woods. The story follows Kai, a high school girl, who sets off to visit her estranged grandfather after receiving a letter that says he might be dying."
The new MS Flight Simulator taught me how to fly an actual plane (Sam Machkovech / Ars Technica - ARTICLE)
"My MSFS kiosk was set up with a pre-loaded virtual flight opportunity: to take off in a Cessna 172 from the Renton Municipal Airport, then simulate flight around the cities, forests, and valleys of the Seattle area. Hours later, I would do the exact same thing... in real life, in a real Cessna 172, as the pilot."
How Warframe Broke The Rules (GameSpot / YouTube - VIDEO)
"As Warframe moves into its seventh year, we dive deep into the secrets - and challenges - behind its ongoing success."
The Split-Screen Man (Josh Harmon / EGM - ARTICLE)
"During an introductory phone call, Mitchell talked at length about his belief that real journalism no longer exists, that reporters everywhere have been unable to do the research necessary to get to the truth. When I told an ally of Mitchell, the YouTuber and esports team owner TriForce Johnson, that I didn’t want to spend too much time relitigating the scandal and instead wanted to focus on a more human angle, he cautioned me against that approach, comparing Mitchell to Superman. [SIMON'S NOTE: this story is deep-dive bananas.]"
The story behind Liberty Island, Deus Ex's most iconic level (Andy Kelly / PC Gamer - ARTICLE)
"Liberty Island, where New York City’s famous Statue of Liberty is perched, is the first level in Deus Ex. It’s a trial by fire, thrusting newly minted anti-terror agent JC Denton into the middle of a terrorist occupation of the island. It’s also the perfect introduction to Deus Ex’s unsurpassed freedom of play, with multiple ways to infiltrate the complex and deal with the terrorists holed up there."
Clockwork Games and Time Loops (Game Maker's Toolkit / YouTube - VIDEO)
"There’s a handful of games where time is taken very seriously. In this video, I look at the design, challenges, and opportunities of what we might call “clockwork games”."
Here's How Subscriptions Will Disrupt the Games Industry (Lloyd Melnick / Deconstructor Of Fun - ARTICLE)
"People in the game industry are continually asking about “a new business model” but they usually want new monetization techniques (ie. gatcha mechanic, piggy bank, etc.). Now, however, there is a real opportunity to disrupt the industry with a new model, subscriptions. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is within mobile F2P games, and I was surprised.]"
How a 14-Year-Old Designer Became Part of Apple's Splashy New Gaming Service (Patrick Klepek / VICE - ARTICLE)
"The service, part of a larger shift towards monthly subscriptions, is a big deal for Apple, so it made sense to double down on attention-grabbing titles. Operator 41, also part of the launch, is hardly that, but is notable for a different reason: Operator 41 was developed by 14-year-old London designer Spruce Campbell."
The Environmental Impact of Physical Games - The Ethics of Buying Games (HeavyEyed / YouTube - VIDEO)
"[This series is called] The Ethics of Buying Games! It's gonna be covering a lot of, uh, loaded topics, but I'm trying to approach them as neutrally as possible because despite their subject matter being less than savory, I do think it's all important stuff to be talking about at the end of the day."
Jam Sesh: How a Popular Online Contest Sparks Design Innovation (Phillip Moyer / EGM - ARTICLE)
"The theme was a single phrase: “Just One.” It was up to the contestants to decide what that meant. The contest has no prize. Winning it doesn’t even come with any large amount of exposure or prestige. The only honor is that its top 20 games will be analyzed in a Game Maker’s Toolkit video."
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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts - we crosspost to Gamasutra later, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]