Rundown (11/03-11/10) Natalie’s Not With It!

So, those who have followed my work for any amount of time would have inevitably picked up on clues that I am, to an extent, quite privy to certain concepts such as TG, body swapping, possession, and to a lesser extent whatever narratively flexible and interesting concepts that have been hued by the billowing fetish community. But lately I feel that whatever part of me that would obsess over these things has been steadily and slowly fading away.

Such as how, to use a pair of examples, my mind did not immediately go into TF fantasy territory with the reveal of the Super Crown in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and instead centered around how this raises questions in the Mario lore. Or how when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate revealed World of Light and the Spirits mechanic, I did not immediately veer towards the idea of possession or possession influencing bodily traits, which is arguably the best kind of possession. I mean, heck, Nintendo did that with their own Bowsette. Then there’s stuff like Mario possessing people with Cappy, which was a pretty obvious idea, and I pretty quickly thought of the gerudo Link concept after crossdressing popped up in Breath of the Wild— Okay, seriously, why is all of this stuff popping up in Nintendo’s major releases? Is this all because of one kinky producer or something? Because if so, they are a saint, and I appreciate their work.

Earlier this year, following the release of the finalized and semi-complete version of Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix announced that director Hajime Tabata would be heading a new studio by the name of Luminous Productions. Shortly after this, a second season of DLC episodes were announced for Final Fantasy XV, with the intention of releasing throughout late 2018 and early 2019. Well, 6 months out from those announcements, and evidently things did not go as planned. As three of the four announced episodes were cancelled, excluding Episode Ardyn, which is set to release in March 2019. While Hajime Tabata left Luminous Productions and Square Enix as of October 31st, 2018. …What?

Tabata claimed his departure was to allow him to pursue a new project, but it is pretty clear that there is something else going on, seeing as how hours before this announcement, Square Enix reported an extraordinary loss with Luminous Productions of over 30 million dollars. A loss of this size can only mean that something was cancelled or discarded, and while the reasoning for said cancellation is unclear, it nevertheless means that Square Enix is out a lot of money, a new project, a director, and several pieces of DLC. It really makes me curious as to just what the hell is going on inside Square Enix, though I have been asking that question for the better half of a decade at this point. Seriously, just what is wrong with this company?

As part of an unexpected yet nevertheless somewhat sad story, strategy guide publisher Prima Games will be shutting down in early 2019. This is a natural progression of the advancement of technology, namely the internet, in how it altered the way people gather and consume information. With most information that would have traditionally only been found in strategy guides now being freely available on the internet. Though, part of me is a bit sad to see them fading away into nothingness like them, as I was quite keen on strategy guides as a child and would flip through them quite regularly, even if I was not playing the game, or really wanted to. Their layout, design, and reproduction of game content was something I greatly enjoyed, and Prima were typically pretty good. Though, not as good as Nintendo Power, or the short lived Versus Books.

*Sigh* I loved strategy guides. I used to get one with almost every game I scrounge up the money to purchase. Hell, I used to buy two guides for every mainline Pokemon game. I think back before I gave away a lot of them, I had over 60 of the guides, and some of them were for games I barely even played, which is just baffling to think of looking back on it. Though, much like a lot of my early childhood, they are now locked away in my closet, encased in plastic prisons. Oh, and BradyGames merged with Prima Games a while back, so, yeah, strategy guides are dead.

A month ago it became known that Microsoft was in the final stages of acquiring famed RPG developed Obsidian Entertainment, and during the publisher’s mostly uneventful XO18 event, the announcement was formalized. Bringing the Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity developers under the green wings of the Xbox division. Though that’s not the only western CRPG developer that Microsoft acquired, as they also claimed ownership of inXile Entertainment, developers of The Bard’s Tale, Wasteland 2, and Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Now that seemingly all the acquisitions have been made and Microsoft’s first party is finally looking somewhat competitive, I am quite interested in seeing how things will fare as new projects are greenlit, developed, and announced in the coming generation. Also, I really hope that this video from Obsidian does not come nip them in the metaphorical rear if Microsoft ever does choose to shut them down. Because they seem so gosh darn optimistic.

To close off this week, which has been stupidly hectic for me personally, it was announced that the day one patch for Fallout 76 will be a whopping 54GB, surpassing the 45GB size of the actual game. A few years ago I quietly shaked my head in befuddlement at the sight of a game’s cumulative total patches throughout its life surpassing the size of the base game, thinking that the industry really needed to reexamine how they compress or optimize data. I mean at this rate, even 100GB Blu-Rays might not be enough storage for the next generation, which is pretty nuts when you consider how you could probably fit about the every game released on a Nintendo platform from 1983 to 2000 onto a regular 50GB Blu-Ray.

(Header image was drawn by ONATaRT)