Patreon Letter - 26th May, 2018

Hi everyone,

Jackson here! It has been an extremely busy week, I'm in the final stretches of moving house preparations, I've edited four podcasts, I've barely slept, I've recorded another podcast today, and still I am here to bring you the regular patreon letter. Such is the commitment I have. I am so very tired, but press on we must.

Football is arguably the greatest competitive game ever designed. It is almost perfect. If not for the fact that if you were to tell me you 'love football, mate,' I would begin a thorough investigation into the details of your life as to whether you were a) a white supremacist or b) a men's right's activist, I would declare it The Beautiful Game.

To play football, you need is four jumpers and a ball. If you are creative, you do not need the jumpers at all. Any appropriately sized marking will do. Football has rules beyond "don't touch the ball with your hands," but they are irrelevant. If you look upon a group of people kicking a ball at each other, you would not need to examine their application of the offside rule to say they are playing football.

Everything in Football is intrinsically meaningful. Outside of the score, there is no way to understand which team is "winning" or "losing" other than to play the game itself. A completed pass does not give you +1 to your pass meter, it moves the ball into a more advantageous position. Nobody playing or watching needs to be told that what this means, for we already know. Football is a game about silent, constant communication. It is seeing the ball, seeing the other players on the pitch, and positioning yourself accordingly. That is why when someone is playing FIFA, they are not playing football, but when someone is playing Rocket League, we can easily argue that they are. FIFA is a video game adaptation of televised football, Rocket League simply is football in another form.

You've probably guessed where I'm going with this, but I played Destiny 2 yesterday. 

It came in the Humble Monthly, so I gave it a go. Destiny 2 is not a good game. It feels incredible in its moment to moment, it looks and sounds fantastic, Bungie is still a studio which somehow imbues these massive, lumbering video-game-like creations with a sense of genuine earnestness. Somebody really, really cares about this beautifully stupid lore. If only they were given any real power over the game. Instead, the hilarious parade of proper nouns is replaced with a bad quip-heavy story that will (and in fact, did) please no one.

Absolutely nothing in Destiny 2 is intrinsically meaningful. It takes this base full of potential and covers it in numbers, an endless loot grind that completely misses the point of what made the RPGs its pulling from good in the first place. These numbers are everywhere, and they intrude on every moment, and they overwrite any sense of meaning the game may have had. They replace the good game (where I shoot monsters with my gun) with a bad one (where I make my Light number go up). 

This is not a novel critique of Destiny 2, in fact it's what everyone has been saying about Destiny since the first game came out in 2014. Somehow the problems have only gotten worse with the sequel. However what is novel is that within The Farm, Destiny 2's hub area, there are two goals and a ball, and that's all you need.

When I walked up to the football pitch there was already another character kicking the ball, trying to nudge it into one of the goals. I positioned myself opposite them, and tried to stop them. And just like that, we were playing football.

We played for a while, I made a strong attack but accidentally misjudged my speed and the ball sailed over the bar. When the game was tied, I blocked the ball right after they kicked it, and it ended up going over the fence. The player characters cannot survive over the fence for more than five seconds. I rushed over the fence and got the ball back in the nick of time. I cannot stress how incredible this moment was, and if anyone at Bungie knew that this was what they were doing. Destiny 2's recreation of backyard football is so spot on that it even has the fucking fence.

Nothing else in Destiny 2 feels even remotely like this. It is utterly singluar in its sense of actual play, that putting it in the middle of a game such as this feels like a cruel joke. In the first level, you come across a camp with corpses of Guardians who have died without their Light. You think "wow, fuck it must be dangerous." Then Nolan North says "These Guardians died without their light. It will be dangerous." Then a tooltip comes up and tells you that if you die in this area you will not respawn.

There is no fence.

-Jackson