Month: June 2016

Some thoughts about Brexit

As many of you know, I blog about the British constitution over at A Venerable Puzzle, so the United Kingdom is a subject that’s close to my heart. I was surprised by the result of yesterday’s vote. Despite the shifts in the polls, I assumed that the uncertainty surrounding Brexit would ultimately encourage people to vote to remain within the European Union. But as I watch the reaction to Britain’s decision, I find myself growing frustrated by the superficiality of it all. According to the Twitterverse, anyone who voted to leave is a xenophobic relic. Donald Trump has been thrown into the mix, too, and there has been lots of hand-wringing about what this means for the presidential election in November.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as a historian, it’s that the decisions we make are rarely straightforward, and events are shaped by a multitude of factors. Therefore, the narrative that the vote to leave was simply motivated by distaste for foreigners strikes me as too simplistic. It glosses over the fact that there are other reasons to leave the EU, including legitimate concerns over national sovereignty and a lack of European accountability. But instead of recognizing the fact that people might have genuine issues with the EU, it’s easier to dismiss their views as the product of ignorance and hate.

A lot of the American commentariat also seems unaware of the fact that yesterday’s vote was hardly a bolt from the blue. Britain has been ambivalent toward the EU for a long time, and successive Governments have rejected key aspects of the European project, including the Euro, the Schengen Area, and the commitment to ever-closer union. In other words, Britain’s estrangement from the EU predates the rise of Trump and the migrant crisis.

As is so often the case, people seem to assume that there was a Right Answer and a Wrong Answer in the Brexit vote. I see it as a choice between two paths. Both have hazards, but both have opportunities as well. Britain is neither doomed nor saved by yesterday’s vote, and it will be some time before we can accurately gauge its impact. Nevertheless, I hope that the chaos of the present will soon give way to better things.

The state of Torment: Tides of Numenera

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

As you know, I’ve been participating in the beta for Torment: Tides of Numenera. InXile recently released a huge patch that substantially alters the game, so I decided to jump back into the Ninth World and see the changes for myself.

The biggest change is probably that the beginning of the game has been completely retooled. The game still begins in media res with the Last Castoff plummeting to earth, and he/she still ends up within their own mind after being knocked unconscious by the fall (trust me, it makes sense in context!). But the beginning plays much differently.

There used to be a fairly involved Crisis where you had to run around to different tanks while avoiding mooks sent by the game’s Big Bad. Within each tank was a creature, and you were treated to a flashback from its life. Your choices influenced how the flashback would play out, and these decisions had an impact on the LC’s development. This Crisis presented an interesting challenge. Brute force wasn’t an option. The LC had to focus on the flashbacks, and the Specter (a ghostly companion who served as a guide) could only push the mooks away. It was a nice way to show players that TTON favors creativity over combat, though it may well have  grated after multiple playthroughs.

Now, the introductory Crisis is much simpler. You still have to fend off an attack by the Sorrow, but the tactical element seems to have vanished. Now, you just whack some memory specters that are being devoured by the Big Bad. The patch notes say whether this Crisis is a placeholder, but it definitely feels like one.The Big Bad looks cool, but the whole thing feels perfunctory. There doesn’t seem to be any challenge to it. Mooks spawn periodically while you’re destroying the specters, but they simply fly off without attacking.

I can see why the designers felt that the old Crisis needed improvement. There was arguably too much style and not enough substance in the early game. I loved learning about the creatures in the tanks, but I’m also the sort of person who reads every single lore book in a game. If you’re not a lore freak like me, the original introduction might have felt unbearably slow. Unfortunately, the new Crisis goes too far in the opposite direction. There’s a lot more action, and it feels more like an ARPG than an RPG.

I also think that the way the Tides are handled is unsatisfactory. The game has never really done a good job of explaining what they are or why you should care about them, and the latest patch has made them even more nebulous. You periodically see pop-up messages telling you that your alignment with this or that Tide has increased, but it feels divorced from your in-game choices (you can see numerical values for each Tide in the character screen, but the numbers don’t have enough context to be useful). In the old version, your initial Tidal alignment was determined by the choices you made during the flashbacks. The process was opaque, but it felt more meaningful than the present system. At the moment, the whole thing feels random.

The biggest problem that I’ve seen so far is combat. Despite the patch, it’s horrifically glitchy. In many cases, I couldn’t even start a fight because my first character wouldn’t respond to my orders and I couldn’t end the turn. I’ve also experienced issues with the game hanging during an enemy’s turn. There was a point where I couldn’t finish exploring an area because I came under attack whenever I loaded a game and then had to quit the game mid-battle due to bugs (I was only able to break the cycle by engineering the LC’s death!). It’s certainly caused me to make liberal use of the feedback button!

Thankfully, the game is still a ways from release (inXile recently said that the release window has been postponed until early 2017 due to localization issues), so there should be plenty of time to iron out these kinks. Despite my complaints, I’m still pleased with the game overall. The writing is absolutely top-notch, and the developers have done a fantastic job of interpreting Numenera’s innovative mechanics. I’m sure that, come release day, these problems will be nothing more than bad memories.