It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. I am probably at my most disposed as I have ever been in life to basically do whatever the hell it is I want to do. I am also disposed to consider that there are not that many decades of life left, in all likelihood, and so many of the turns I take now, I may be doing so for the last time. So minded, I am in the process of one of my last, big, hardware-reviewer-lifestyle, recapitalizations. I recently picked up the iPhone 13. My Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G arrives tomorrow (fingers crossed). The iPhone 13 was at no cost due to Verizon’s current trade-in deal on my iPhone XR; the Fold got a significant amount knocked off due to trading in my Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G. What will be up to bat soon is my gaming PCs. A time which should be filled with wondrous joy. And yet I have agonized over this step most of all. 

I’ve seen recent puff-pieces from some bloggers; about PC hardware and upgrades. Posts about how even an RTX 3080 laptop couldn’t make them fall in love with PC gaming. A click-baity headline meant to make die-hard gear-heads incited and froth at the mouth. That individual’s dislike of PC gaming had nothing whatsoever to do with hardware or graphics and even a rack full of 2U chassis with dedicated GPUs wouldn’t have made a difference. Another about how a poster just now figured out that the most sensible way to procure a current-gen GPU in this age of chip scarcity was to buy a pre-built PC. Eye roll. I figured that out last holiday season. I’ve been triaging and running various Monte Carlo simulations about the upcoming PC upgrades for months.

I’ve built over a hundred systems in 20+ years of building PCs, so there’s little else for me to explore. No; it’s something else I cannot quite put my finger on. And I’ve been trying to nail that down, because there was a time that juggling a ton of variables and coming up with an optimal upgrade package would put a smile on my face before I even went to order parts.

I don’t truly need to upgrade CPUs, in all honesty. I have typically skipped a generation, and I’m on Zen2 Ryzen CPUs right now. I could wait until whatever comes after Zen3. I skipped the 2000-series Ryzen procs; even though the latest procs are Zen3, I’d still be ok waiting. When I was on 800-series nVidia GPUs, I skipped the 900s and next upgraded in the 10XX-series GTX GPUs. I have RTX 2070s and AMD RX 5700XT’s now. I know the 3000’s are much improved in the ray-tracing department. But still….I could wait.

It’s replacement will just be another low-profile cube case. Nothing that unique. I will also admit a bit of FOMO over the Xbox (I have the Series S but want a Series X), and feel like I’d rather have that over a PC upgrade, given that I have plenty of performance overhead in my various configs.

So maybe it is that I have not found the best optimization fit between needing to upgrade cases, moboards, and power supplies, and not necessarily needing to upgrade CPUS and GPUs….all of which are in different machines and I don’t want to have to swap a ton of parts around if I’m buying at least a partially built box. Maybe I would feel better starting completely over with an entirely new build, rather than trying to cut this fine line in between my existing builds and an upgrade that makes sense.

All of this has been going through my head and I have churned the variables in an infinite number of calculations and logic equations. At the end of the day, I am going to upgrade. And maybe it doesn’t even matter exactly how or what. The wonder and the love affair that I have always had with hardware is that I embarked on those journeys out of nothing more than curiosity and exploration. It wasn’t because I had to, and I did not always limit myself out of necessity, but often just for the budgetary challenge of solutioning within a given set of constraints. Upgrade? Yes. Why? Just because it’s time to go on another adventure.

I wish it were that simple. The rest of my life has been easy to explain away in such colloquialisms. Pockets of it have been. And even my primary life motif. Relationships. No woman can wake up in this apartment after sunrise. Fear of commitment has been a staple. And while I am a materialistic SOB, nothing that I own has any real emotional attachment to it. I can drop a car or a bike or a house and feel not one ounce of remorse. They were all things earned. They can be earned again. And if not? I can’t take any of it with me anyway. It’s no wonder that I am a digital guy when it comes to games. Versus physical. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Experiences. Now that’s a thing. People make much ado about the differences between spending money on durable goods versus experiences. I have not one ounce of hesitation in telling you that I would much quicker drop a few G’s on a spec’d out PC that I am going to play games on for 2 or more years than a vacation to some place that is likely a pain in my keeshter to get to and that I won’t be able to wait until I get back from. But what about the games themselves? How do we establish value over those experiences in a discussion about  entirely non-durable, almost ephemeral, goods? This is the struggle with self that I have been going through for the past two years.

It started in December of 2019. No. Let me wind the clock back even further. In January of 2019, after an episode of Enough 2 Keep Going, in the post show discussion while everyone was waiting on the Discord phone call to have me validate that we had captured a good recording and the stream had held integrity….this was when the first die of doubt was cast. It was not really intended as such. It was more a journalistic entreat. After ragging, once again, on Star Citizen, I mentioned that if we were going to continue to throw pot-shots at that property (we had been for some time), then one of us, as a matter of journalistic integrity and credibility, was going to need to go deep undercover and become a member of that community and play that game. Participate with the denizens and find out if they were all gas-lighting themselves, or if there was some Illuminati at the center that held the conspiracy together, kept people believing that a real game was actually eventually coming.

I took the assignment myself. I had already gone undercover once as a member of the streaming community. I figured this could be no less dangerous. My co-hosts were always there to pull me out if I got in too deep. But then they weren’t. I became a hard core member of the SC community. I played the game despite it’s game-stopping bugs. I paid in to an extent that approached my normal annual spend as a variety gamer. I believed in the dream and that was what I held on to. The concept. The ideal. To hope. But that, too, is a tale for another day.

The crux of all of this is that after I took a desk job after coming back as a UC, everyone thought everything was ok. I showed up for the podcasts like usual, it appeared that the usual games were coming back on the menu. But my time on the inside left me bereft of the ability to feel anything when playing any game that did not have a persistent progression model. Any notion that I was shoveling time into a time-monster that was going to end in 40 hours just left me disinterested. I wanted something that gave me a tingle that I’d felt while on the Star Citizen op. That feeling that the time I was putting in was leaving bread crumbs of progression that I would still feel represented itself with tangible evidence a year form now. Or two. 

So. In search of that same high, I went seeking that blow. MMOs. Season passes. Battle passes. Microtransactions. I don’t regret any of it. In that migratory onboarding, I signed on to Dual Universe, Warframe, Fortnite, World of Warships and Tanks. I went back to Destiny 2. I finally invested in EVE OnLine. Before I knew it, subscription gaming had become my all. And I could little be bothered to lift my head up and notice anything else. Many of these titles were things I was aware of as a gaming commentator, but had never dared step my toe in. I had always known that with my addictive personality, that once I went into that pool, it’d be hella-difficult to ever come out. I lapped all of these up, and then when Call of Duty: Black OPS – Cold War dropped last year, I went into an eternal abyss from which there appeared to be no return.

But as is the case with many things, the way out was to go through. As I relaxed and stopped fighting the sub-conscious urge to resist, stopped telling myself that I was doing something wrong, and just let myself enjoy the ecstasy…eventually I came to feel that I had drank my fill and that I was ready to go back. In some ways, that sabbatical may have even allowed me to gain some new freedoms that I had previously not been afforded. I now do not feel as repulsed by the idea of spending time in a JRPG. I am no longer rigid in my thought that time in a puzzle game is a waste. Or that a point-and-click adventure is beneath me. No longer do I equate gaming to something that needs to drive me to the nerve-firing ends of adrenaline and lived at no less than 120mph. There’s more room in my gaming appetite for a slow night here and there and some consideration for slower movements and a sonata every now and then.

I have not closed my accounts. I am totes ready to slap on the FPS gloves and sit in front of one of my 240Hz displays with the GPU on fire. But I am also not displeased for that world to no longer occupy my  frontal lobe, with all of my planning constricted around the metric of what my revisit time is on a particular game and account and platform. I’m less cognitively loaded by having to plan and project out my gaming plan and schedule weeks into the future. I can afford an interrupt here and there to go and dip into something I’ve been wanting to check out on Game Pass or to hit one of my Pro Games on Stadia, which is the freedom I should have allowed myself to feel before. This allows me to do things  like check out a Final Fantasy game, which I thought I would never do. Or play some DLC….yet another thing that I did not let come across my windshield before my subscription addiction. It’s a good time, with eyes perhaps a bit wider open. Let’s see how long this tune is held before I need another beat drop and some change-up in the syncopation. Despite my seeming joy at this change, I thoroughly loved my time in MMOs and subscription games and games-as-a-service. And I enjoy my time now. A lot of this essay is a bit of was joking and satire. It all goes to the proof of the philosophy of play what you want and bollocks all to any who tell you to think , speak, and play different than you are. But also don’t follow the crowd. Your gaming self will figure itself out if you let loose the reigns for it to meander and seek out what it ascribes to. Don’t force it and it will all work itself out in time. Maybe four or five times in a very long life as a gamer in different ways. Having lived that experience and now into yet another decade of the life, I’m here to tell you….that’s ok , too.

There is such a thing as too much exposure. As the gaming industry has struggled in recent years, amidst the ever-changing landscape of E3, with when it is “too soon” to reveal a game and its associated trailer, consumers have also had to come to grip with how they feel about the whole thing and how it impacts their buying habits. Square Enix fans seem to be never be nonplussed about the inevitable announcement of a delay of a Final Fantasy title. Other fans voice much Sturm & Drang about game delays, but then complain about games releasing with bugs. I can’t comment about how everyone else feels and the choices they make. I do know that too much marketing, too many demos and trailers, cause people to talk about a thing. At a certain point I get tired of constantly hearing about a thing. I’ll just wait until it’s out, but then I’m at a point where I start to feel bothered by a title as being over-hyped or just too exposed.

Being someone who tracks the news cycle of games and the gaming industry, and the greater consumer tech industry and its products, I go through this multiple times a year. I am soooooo happy when the new iPhone and Samsung Galaxy’s release so that people can SHUT UP about them. In those fields, the marketing drum-beat from Apple and Samsung are bearable, but the endless consumer speculation and puff-pieces that get written about what they might be are maddening. In the games space, we get this exposure from fans over-hyping a game. I am so weary of the blog posts and twitter posts that declare a game a potential game of the year contender before the game is even out….in MARCH. Truth be told, I do not really have a lot of tolerance for the GoTY posts even after a game is released. There are a large number of games to be released in the holiday season, and while they may not be something on an individual’s radar, I see little reason to start GoTY conversations until the last major release of the year is out.

Barring a major gaff in release, like being riddled with game-stopping bugs or things that destroy game saves, there are titles that come along that I am down with regardless of how marketing potentially screws the pooch. Often it has to do with faith in the developer, creative director, or the team’s vision. Sometimes that is something that the team or a public figure has done or said to gain my trust and undying faith; something real and tangible. Oft times it is something that I have entirely made up in my own mind. It cannot be attributed to anything that the team has done; they have not earned it by any particular act. Something in my brain just clicks and assumes a commitment posture to a game. I think this is a factor that gaming enthusiasts refuse to admit and believe. They become anchored to their fandom in a manner not unlike inexplicable religious fervor and fault others for not having an equally ascribed faith.

But the truth is, you cannot “will” a good game into existence. You can’t make it good by just talking about it at volume before and after release. There are so many cases of in recent gaming and tech trends that fandom tries to make a thing. 3D Televisions, VR, and dozens of games. Stating that gamers who dislike a title have something wrong with their tastes, that their perceptions are “broken”, or that you simply don’t get why they are “complaining” (or really just being critical) about an element of a game, doesn’t make the game’s goodness valid. In general, you cannot prove validity of a thing by invalidating the opinions of others. That’s just gate-keeping. And it does not “make” a game good and encourage others to buy it.

There’s a lot of this done after a game’s release, but it also comes before launch. As early, in fact, as the showing of that first trailer at E3. And therefore, the cycle of show-tell-react is a very real dynamic surrounding games. Stuff happens in development cycles, and despite a team’s best hopes to reveal their game with a chance that it only has to be shown at E3 twice before release (3 times at E3 is the point where I start to slide off my interest), development will sometimes take longer. I do not know if there is a ton to be gained by trying to “control the message” with fans. Fans are going to do whatever they do. If the reactions are too negative, I think devs can but lean on that hope that something they have done or said or that “magic” makes their title resilient to any shade. Ghostwire: Tokyo was shown at E3 in 2019, and has been a title of discussion at three E3’s now that the release data has been pushed back to 2022. Whether it was the charm of Ikumi Nakamura (who has since left the studio), the support that I have for AA games that are something other than a thing from one of the industry’s marquis studios, a desire to see more games that are similar to what Arkane Studios does…who knows. Despite this title lingering a bit longer in development hover before starting its approach run than I would have preferred, I still have very high hopes for this title. Let’s hope that blind faith pays off. After the E3 2021 trailer, things seem a bit hazier. But I’m still rooting for it.

Look. Peanut butter goes with jelly. I am not sure Luke Skywalker would have been that interesting if not for the presence of a Han Solo. Scotch goes with a cigar. And despite our world having a long-running tradition of seeking out and making great pairings, not all game development feels compelled to work within similar concepts. There are ideas that come along and poise either a pop-culture IP (a comic book property, movie, table-top wargame, or pen-and-paper RPG) or a previously established gaming franchise alongside a genre that is a sharply different or non-intuitive fit. Strange Pairings are what I call these things.

There are many examples of this, of course. There was the attempt to map the Warhammer games, historically rendered in some form of tactical genre, including RTS’ and turn-based strategy games, to a first-person model in Space Hulk: Deathwing. That game is not held in nearly as high regard as the series of RTS’ by Relic Entertainment. Nor is its kindred spirit, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Of course, Starcraft also went down the FPS path, breaking mold from its RTS roots, with project Ares. A title that was eventually killed off by Blizzard because they couldn’t quite get it right. Equally questionable is when a pop-culture IP that would seem to lend itself to a particular genre is slated to be wrangled into a genre that, at best, seems like it would be an ill-fitting suit. No game in recent memory has made such a prominent example of when this notion is poorly executed as the XBox 360 version of Shadowrun.

Even when the game is executed well, I have my own problems associating certain properties with mismatched genres, and I suspect other gamers do, too. Star Trek is a property that lends itself to thoughts of starship combat. While we joke at great length about Red Shirts, and love the idea of Away Teams, the Elite Force series of games were problematic business ventures, despite being notionally good games. They failed to hit as commercial successes, the first game selling around 65k units when Activision had projected upwards of 700k. And while I was playing them, despite being a life-long Star Trek fan, I just did not associate my experience in those games with the Star Trek IP. I had always envisioned myself in a Star Fleet uniform on the bridge, at a given station, if not in the Captain’s or Exec’s chair.

The Masquerade is a bit of a niche pop-culture interest. I cannot say that it is followed by great multitudes within the geek community. I cannot imagine anyone popping into the F2P model and extracting any understanding of the lore outside of “Agggh! Vampires!” Maybe the faith comes in the wrapping in the F2P, micro-transactiony business model. But I certainly have greater projections and expectations of success of Arkane Studios’ Redfall, which offers a similar setting and window dressing, but decouples itself from any association with a previously existing IP. As in all games, I have the highest hopes for Bloodhunt. And perhaps I’ll be made to eat crow. Maybe its exactly because no one knows about the Masquerade that it will be fine as a game taken up by unexposed masses. For now, I am pretty convinced that not every IP will squeeze natively into any genre, when the concept causes me to look at it as an unnatural creative mixture. But then, vampires are inherently unnatural, and so maybe it just might work.

Speaking recently to a group of friends, I intimated that I typically don’t get excited about games pre-release. My co-hosts on E2KG have too often heard me say “Developer, finish your game, and then I’ll take a look at your wares.” I am not too often inclined to be bothered with a beta, early release, developer preview, or any of the innumerous labels this recent age of digital publishing has yielded for “game that is not yet finished”. I imagine that it must be like a polar night in Alaska for a developer to endure the long period from trade-show announcement or press release through making a live demo of some sort available, possibly skirting through the aforementioned playable beta phases to actual release. An eternity during which their creative work is under the scrutiny of a microscope that measures it against the yardstick of “final product”. It may be that as a software engineer, I choose not to be anywhere near the hype-train out of compassion and empathy.

But the other reason is because that same slice of my psyche cannot be bothered. After several decades of gaming, I’ve come to perceive that the most gilded lily in pre-release can still arrive a mangled lump of clay. For the most part, I formulate my thoughts on a game after it has released, and after I’ve heard some initial word of mouth about it, and then make a decision to play it or not. I wish I had time to play all the games. But I don’t. I’ve spent my time as a game reviewer, and am still an early adopter when it comes to hardware. When it comes to games, I generally feel that, at $60 a pop, I do not need to be the first person in the pool. I still pump plenty of cash into the gaming industry on a yearly basis despite my snap-back tactical demeanor about releases.

Being an Avenger makes total sense to me in a limited, 40-hour-ish campaign with a relatively definitive beginning, middle, and end (DLC and expansion packs notwithstanding). But the notion of being an Avenger inside a game-as-a-service? I never saw the thru-line in that. I’d rather be my own Guardian, or Tenno, or ship or spaceship captain, writing my own history against a blank, or minimally filled in, canvas. Not overlaying it on top of 80+ years of already written comic book history.In similar vein, I’m not entirely sure what the messaging around Marvel’s Midnight Suns is supposed to be. Admittedly, I never read the original comic. But I’m familiar with a bit of its history. Then game features a cast that is not in-line with the comic. And while I am not a fanatical “stick to the book” kind of gamer, it feels like a missed opportunity to not take the opportunity to bring Daimon Hellstrom and Morbius into the light of day. While I applaud the addition of Magik, given her integration into the X-Men storyline, I do not understand the addition of MCU heavy-hitters Captain’s America and Marvel, Iron Man, and alt-MCU flag-bearer Wolverine. These seem gratuitous fan platitudes that maneuver the title into the corner where I look at it as just a skinning of X-Com. This was much the same effect that Galactic Battlegrounds, a game developed by LucasArts (may the studio rest in peace), built on the Age of Empires / Age of Empires 2 “Genie” engine licensed from Ensemble Studios (may that studio also rest in peace) had for me back in the day; I was never convinced it was much more than an AoE2 palette-swap. It feels like there is marketing around this Midnight Suns and concerns of profitability that have crept their way into the game design and are smothering the messaging like Wuthrich butter.

Yes, there are a few proclivities I have that keep me outside the ring observing the chaos inside when a game is in its pre-release. And generally I wait until something lands and I have some time to see what others are saying about the game. Still, I have to decide amongst a myriad of games that are out at any one time what I may want to buy. And when a game with clear messaging is up against one that has buried the lede, I am more apt to choose the one whose messaging has been clear, and whose design I think appears to be in-sync with that messaging. The past is riddled with the corpses of games that were messaged differently than they played, or whose messages showed a clear invasion across the creative boundary by the marketing team and IP owners. My hopes that things turn out better for Midnight Suns. I’ll be waiting at the back of the club to see if anyone else hits this particular dance floor and comes away raving about the DJ.