Elder Scrolls and Changing Things Up in RPGs 

Both Morrowind and Oblivion are my favorites of the Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim truly modernized the mechanics of the franchise to where you could actually do things and shape a character even if you’re new to action RPGs or RPGs in general.  

Prior to and beyond Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, RPG mechanics such as skill trees, allocation of points, building towards skills, and understanding your character’s stats had been simplified over time to accommodate new players while keeping genre veterans engaged. Of course, you’ll have some complaints of the game being dumbed down early on but this was one of those cases where I welcomed it. 

Some games simply play as if they’re from a different time in gaming. Morrowind is a prime example of this. As player (and for developers themselves), I feel that you want that big leap in gameplay between games. Especially if they’re released years apart. Sure, you have players that don’t mind a game playing almost identically to the previous installment, just look at sports titles in general, but you to feel like “Hey, maybe this new entry is worth picking up”.  

A new experience is great but I’ve always enjoyed a new take or new ways to navigate and interact with a new story in a familiar setting.  

Oblivion 

This brings us to Cyrodiil, the setting for Oblivion. A very different locale compared to the mostly grim setting of the Morrowind province. While I spent most of my time either in the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood but I’ll dabble in the Magic Guild and Arcane University. I might get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. 

Actually, in every playthrough, I get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. They’re hard to avoid. Occasionally, I’ll get into vampirism. Oblivion is my first introduction to vampirism in Elder Scrolls and it’s pretty basic. You get the dark gift and that’s pretty much it. Sunlight wreaks havoc on your health but you get bonus and spells which are fun to use. 

While it can be a hindrance to your adventuring, moving at night or when night is getting ready to fall is an immersive way to include vampire gameplay in a game with a day-night cycle. The sun is treated as one of your character’s greatest foes. Or rather, it’s your most unbeatable foe. 

The problem I have with the mechanic (which is solved in a Skyrim expansion) is that there’s little much of an overarching storyline that comes with being a vampire. There are adventures that part of larger storylines involving a few vampires but nothing that centers the vampires. This could simply be down to vampire hunting efforts in Cyrodiil being especially effective and the existing vampires mostly having their sh*t together to where they can exist among the living. 

Skyrim 

That isn’t to say that vampire hunting is a lost art in the northern province of Skyrim. Vampires seem more plentiful but that’s aided by stronger hardware, better writing to explain why they are so many still around, and a larger world to explore. Vampires in Skyrim exist similar to their kin in Cyrodill. 

They dwell in caves, abandoned forts…anywhere not frequented by the living outside of adventurers. At their sides are usually their thralls, living henchmen who are pretty much equal to any bandit or ne’er-do-well you might encounter in the world. What Skyrim does differently with vampire mechanics is focus more on of vampirism is a virus that can be contracted by the living. 

From there you have mechanics that are easier to utilize such as feeding (thanks to improved stealth in Skyrim) and the sun not being as much of a foe. It weakens your character but it doesn’t attempt to actively kill your character off.  

I was mixed on this when I first played as a vampire in TES V but I remembered how violent the sun could be in TES IV and figured “I can actually do adventures during the day, at least.” It was that simple, folks. Quality of life from the sun. Being weakened during the daytime presented its own challenges but they were manageable. 

It made being a vampire and interesting path to explore. Yes, it could get boring quickly but that’s where the Dawnguard expansion comes in. Dawnguard presented a storyline centered on becoming a vampire and joining an ancient clan of the night stalkers or joining the Dawnguard, an order of vampire hunters. Each had their advantages and you could join the Dawnguard as a vampire. 

Now, you couldn’t stay a vampire the whole time in the DG but you could use some cool silver weapons and they had my favorite faction armor in Skyrim. Meanwhile, you could join the vampires and wield vampire lord powers. 

But that’s a lot of talk about bloodsuckers, what about the murder mutts? You can be a werewolf in Skyrim but I always found being a werewolf boring after a while. I mean, it’s fun initially and it ties into The Companions storyline and career line but I just found playing as a vampire more enjoyable and beneficial when playing as a thief or assassin. 

Did you enjoy playing as a vampire or werewolf in TES? Did you enjoy Dawnguard? Let us know in the comments.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Let me rewind a little.

If you came up on dubbed kung fu flicks during Saturday broadcasts, you know the kind. A wronged student retreats to a mountain temple, suffers through a brutal training montage, then comes back down to settle accounts. Those movies left you chasing a certain sensation ever since. Call it the exchange. Two bodies reading each other, trading strikes, the shot holding steady while limbs do things limbs should not. The medium has flirted with that rhythm for ages and mostly whiffed. This one does not. It connects flush to the jaw.

You play as Soul, an elite assassin framed for murdering his master. He has only 66 days to live, a tidy excuse for the story to keep you sprinting toward one duel after another. The studio calls the whole aesthetic “Kung-Fu Punk,” a label that earns its keep. Picture wuxia elegance smashed into gothic grime, silk stained with blood, incense mingling with rust. The world resembles a fever dream somebody had after watching too much Shaw Brothers in a leaking basement. I mean that as high praise.

Here is where the magic actually lives, though. Underneath the gorgeous dressing sits a fighting engine obsessed with flow instead of attrition. There’s no gauge nagging you to back off and catch your breath. What you manage instead is Sha-Chi. You spend it on your nastiest techniques. Absorbing hits drains it too, so offense and defense drink from the same cup. Hang back and play timid? It runs dry on you. Get in there and commit. The meter keeps topping itself off.

Reading your opponent is the whole game. Big attacks arrive in two flavors. A blue flash means a Brutal strike, something you can stand up to, steel on steel, before flipping their momentum into a riposte that leaves them cracked wide open. Red is a nastier story. That flash marks a Killer strike, no parrying it, and it drops you cold if you got greedy. Your out is Ghoststep, a precision maneuver that rewards perfectly timed dodges and parries by slipping you behind your opponent, a backstab window yawning open like somebody forgot to lock up. Blue, you stand your ground. Red, you vanish and reappear somewhere meaner. Telling them apart under pressure is the entire conversation, and the moment it becomes second nature is a genuine rush.

Now add the arsenal, because this is where the whole production tips over into pure action cinema. You haul around four armaments at once, two main weapons and two secondary tools dubbed Phantom Edges. Swapping between them is not a menu chore or an occasional flourish. It is the beating heart of every bout. Switching weapons helps restore Sha-Chi, though a short cooldown means you cannot rotate carelessly. One stretch of a combo pours out of the Soft Snake Sword, built around parry rhythm, the next erupts from the Outlaw Warblade, a brutish slab of iron that eats your own health on heavy swings and hands it back when you land clean hits. The White Serpent and Crimson Viper pair even lets you send a blade sailing across the arena and catch it on the return. More than 30 main weapons and 25 Phantom Edges, each bringing its own moveset, techniques, and special attacks. You are not picking a weapon so much as choreographing a style.

Choreographing. That word is pulling real weight, and it should, because S-GAME brought in Donnie Yen as a creative consultant, with the martial arts legend also providing facial and motion capture for Mó Yuan. And yeah, the actual Donnie Yen, Ip Man himself. His influence fits a game this committed to making every exchange feel cinematic. The spacing feels deliberate, the weight lands where it should, and a counter snaps shut with the thrift of a guy who has faked lethal violence for a living since before some of us were born. These animations aren’t just eye candy sitting there pretty. They talk to each other the way footage of a real brawl talks, that rhythm of hold, hold, then everything at once that a stunt coordinator carries around in his body without thinking about it. String a couple of exchanges together without fumbling and the thing quits passing for code. It reads like footage.

Bosses are where that footage becomes a whole feature. Forget health sponges you whittle down over ten dull minutes. A Lion Dance Grandmaster, or Huangxing the Kunlun Renegade, comes at you like a rival choreographer checking whether you did the homework. Sloppy play gets punished hard. Patience and a little nerve get you somewhere. I lost to that lion more times than my thumbs appreciated, and it never once made me want to quit. Each beating showed me a beat I’d been whiffing, so the next run felt like a tighter take of the same scene, the one a director keeps reshooting till it clicks. When you finally drop one, the satisfaction is not “I overpowered that.” It is “I performed that.”

On a PS5, Phantom Blade Zero pulls you even deeper in through the DualSense. Haptics thrum differently depending on the iron in your hands, triggers push back with their own resistance, and a precise deflect sends a jolt up your palms that lands somewhere between feedback and applause. The hardware is in on the fantasy.

And look, there is always a risk with titles built around spectacle, which is that the flash swallows the substance. Plenty of pretty brawlers hide hollow mechanics under slow motion and sparks. This production sidesteps that trap. Strip away the heavy metal riffing, the absurd arsenal, and the outrageous set pieces. One even sends you hurtling down a crumbling bridge in a sequence a Hong Kong studio would mortgage its building to afford. Beneath all that spectacle sits a fighting engine that demands patience, spacing, and real practice. None of that beauty is a costume thrown over a hollow frame. You earn it.

That is the thing nobody tells you about those old flicks we loved. The hero was never the strongest man in the room. He was the most disciplined, the most precise, the one who turned savagery into something closer to dance. S-GAME understood that assignment completely. For once, a game hands you the lead role, then dares you to earn it frame by frame. The moment it clicks, you realize the beautiful figure on screen is only moving because you are.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

The term “conduit” is used for any being that can use super powers. Initially, you had Cole and a few others in Empire City who utilized these powers but with the Department of Unified Protection (think S.H.I.E.L.D in Marvel Comics) being formed and getting their hands on important information, their high-powered death squad and director can wield powers as well.

A Lost PlayStation Hero: Cole MacGrath

Listen, I enjoyed electricity conduit Cole’s adventures in Empire City (NYC) and New Marais (NOLA). Being able to determine if he would be a hero, villain or anti-hero of sorts was a fun mechanic that directed impacted your gameplay.

I’d say it influenced the gameplay more than the story itself. Depending on your actions, the story would head in whichever direction but the combat options and benefits open to you by either saving hurt pedestrians and risking your own well-being or snuffing out ops and leaving civilians to their fate was very interesting.

It also helped that the people of these open-world titles varied between support for Cole MacGrath or fear and resentment of this perceived menace. Mind you, this was despite what heroic or nefarious actions you took. Because Cole was such a stock late 2000s-early 2010s action game (gruff, tough, athletic, possibly got parkour skills), the world itself and the people could have the player’s opinions towards these grateful or ungrateful citizens and act out of them.

The World of Infamous

Honestly, it was like playing through a living world versions of the Spider-Man games post-PlayStation. In these Spidey games, the city is rocking with the Web-Slingers and it’s mostly their ops and J.Jonah Jameson who have some animosity towards them.

In Infamous, it was more like you had this new super-powered person doing stuff around your city during a crisis and the news is telling everyone they’re a menace. The city forms individual takes on this new force and it’s routed in respect and hope or fear and desperation.

All of this is on top of gangs taking advantage of the crisis and the military’s super special task force shutting down the city and shutting it off from the rest of the world. For the PlayStation 3 era, this was some primo world-building! Sucker Punch Productions borrowed the morality system from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3, mixed it in with the world around the protagonist as well as the powers system and it worked.

When the Cole’s adventures ended and the PS4 dropped, the story followed Delsin Rowe (who can absorb the powers of conduits) and later Abigail Walker (who utilizes neon). Their story takes place in Seattle. I always found it odd that Seattle was good as a setting but New York and New Orleans in name? Better avoid that piece of business. The aforementioned D.U.P organization makes it’s appearance as the primary antagonist for most of the Infamous: Second Son game on PlayStation 4.

The Best Part of Infamous’ Gameplay

Infamous was very much like other open-world action games from the PS3 era. You got a big city to run around in, plenty of powers (or weapons if you’re playing a Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause), and plenty of enemies to fight. Just go nuts and have a blast, the story isn’t timed or relies on an in-game clock and schedule. It’s not going anywhere.

Because of the decent amount of side quests, you always had something to do if you didn’t want to invest time in the main story’s nonsense. What really helps in getting players to indulge in the side missions is turf.

I love a game with territory conflict. Always have since GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City Stories introduced and built on that mechanic. The Infamous games have maps featuring a few major parts of a city under control of the ops. They’re enemies flood the areas of these territories and to gain control, you have to do side missions or take out checkpoints and holding centers.

Once the territory objective is completed, you’ll notice the enemy presence in that area goes away and it’s safe to navigate. Very simple in execution and I spent most of my time in the Infamous games clearing out territory. Of course, I wish more came from doing so but there’s no currency or equipment to get in the games and no one tries to reclaim turf.

Maybe that will be explored more if Sucker Punch ever returns to the world of Infamous. However, with their Ghosts games being so successful that might be unlikely.

Were you a fan of the Infamous games? If so, share your memories of playing the game or if you think we’ll see another title in the series. Where will it be based?

Let us know in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Vice City is back. The palm trees, the neon, the swampy Florida heat rendered so clean you can almost feel the humidity through your screen. Rockstar built a machine that prints money, and much of the fuel that machine runs on has always come from us. Our sound, our slang, that swagger nobody else can bottle. The way we move, talk, dress, and joke gets scanned, copied, and sold to the world at $79.99 a copy, plus whatever monetization follows down the line.

I have been gaming since the Genesis days, and I say all this as somebody who will absolutely be in line for GTA VI. That is the trap, honestly. I love these worlds. I poured hundreds of hours into San Andreas riding around Grove Street, feeling seen in ways few titles bothered to attempt back then. So this is not a boycott sermon. This is a grown conversation about depth, and whether the studio treats our people as human beings instead of cultural scenery.

Think about what fuels one of these maps. The radio stations are the soul of many entries, and those dials lean hard on hip hop, funk, and R&B that we created. Someday a writer will do the math on how much franchise appeal rides on the shoulders of Black artists who look like me. Fashion follows the same road. The durags, the chains, the fits pulled straight off the block get modeled onto characters who too often exist just to shoot at or run from. Neighborhoods sculpted after where we actually live become playgrounds for chaos, then the credits roll and nobody seems curious enough about the folks who breathe there daily.

Humor is where it gets slippery. Rockstar writing has always leaned on satire, and satire cuts both ways. When the joke punches up at power, at cops and billionaires, at the rot festering under the American dream, it sings. Aim that same jab at a caricature of somebody from the hood talking loud and acting a fool, though, and the whole thing curdles. That line between commentary and minstrelsy runs thinner than people want to admit, and past titles have stumbled over it more than once.

Here is my worry laid bare. A culture can be everywhere in a product without receiving equal care in the writing. Rockstar has given us important leads before. Carl Johnson carried San Andreas, and Franklin Clinton stood alongside Michael and Trevor as one of the three protagonists in GTA V. Franklin later became a family man and the owner of a legitimate business in GTA Online. Those characters mattered, and pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. They also proved the studio knows how to place a Black man at the center when it chooses to.

Lucia gives me another sliver of hope, I will admit that much. She and Jason Duval are now confirmed as the two central characters, a criminal couple forced to depend on each other after a score goes wrong. That relationship changes the formula and gives Rockstar room to tell a more intimate story than another tale about one man climbing through the criminal world. Representation on the marquee matters. Still, a face on the box art does not guarantee a soul in the script. I have been burned before by companies waving a diverse cast like a flag while the writing underneath stayed shallow as a puddle.

What would real depth even look like? Rockstar has already introduced several promising Black characters. Boobie Ike turned his years in the streets into an empire spanning real estate, a strip club, and a recording studio. Dre’Quan Priest wants to become a music mogul, while Bae-Luxe and Roxy of Real Dimez are chasing another hit record. Those ambitions are a start. Now let their bonds with the neighborhood feel lived in, not looted. Let the dialogue sound like folks I grew up among, penned by writers who know those communities instead of people approximating them from a distance. Show us ambition beyond the next crime, family obligations that matter, private fears, old wounds, and dreams that survive past a mission. This company renders skin pores and rain puddles with obsessive care. Applying that same obsession to inner lives would change everything.

The money angle deserves a hard stare too. GTA VI could generate billions over its lifetime, and Take-Two expects the launch to help produce record company performance during its fiscal year. Much of the title’s appeal rides on music, language, fashion, and aesthetics shaped inside Black communities. Nobody outside the individual contracts can honestly say what every musician, actor, or performer receives, so reducing those arrangements to a check and a handshake would be unfair. The larger question concerns where the greatest rewards eventually settle. Corporate owners and shareholders stand to collect enormous wealth, while the neighborhoods supplying so much of the cultural texture rarely receive anything comparable. That is an old American story that predates any console.

I keep circling back to a comparison from my Blerd bookshelf. The best anime, the kind that stays with you for years, rarely treats every side character as furniture. A seemingly minor villager in a strong series may have a name, a desire, or some wound carried beneath the surface. That craft is available to anyone willing to invest in it, and Rockstar can absolutely afford the writing hours. The real question is whether the studio considers all these characters worth that care, or whether some of them remain flavor used to season a world built for somebody else to dominate.

Do not misread me as some grump who hates fun. I will cop the Ultimate Edition. I plan to get lost in that reborn Vice City for a month straight, arguing with my boys online about the best station and the fastest ride. My critique lives right alongside my love, because that is what caring about a medium demands. You hold the thing you enjoy to a standard precisely because you know it can reach higher.

Which puts that standard squarely on you, since you are the one holding the controller. Do you believe Rockstar gives Black characters the same range and interior depth it gives the worlds built around them? Will Boobie, Dre’Quan, and Real Dimez develop into people we remember, or will their style and music carry more weight than their stories? Is that too much to ask of a crime sandbox built for mayhem? Sit with that honestly, because your answer decides how much you shrug off once the reviews start rolling in.

So consider this an open letter to a developer I respect and side eye in equal measure. You gave us CJ and Franklin, which means you already know Black characters can carry the drama instead of decorating its edges. You have also borrowed our shine for decades and gotten rich from grooves we helped invent. The least you owe in return is a cast of people who breathe, ache, and want something, who get to be more than target practice with a nice playlist behind them. Give us humanity instead of props. Manage that and every dollar is earned honestly. Keep phoning it in, though, and all the technical polish money can buy will not cover the hollow spot underneath the surface.

We have been watching the whole time. What feels different now is that plenty of us stopped whispering the critique and started saying it at full volume.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Which magazine escapes me and I don’t think it’s particularly important but I will say my main gaming mag in middle school was GameFan. However, I’m leaning towards it being the guide from Electronic Gaming Monthly. Everyone read different gaming mags at the time.

Stories in Fighting Games at the Time

Prior to discovering Tekken, I was mostly a Street Fighter Alpha-Night Warriors guy. Capcom’s artwork by the time these two games came out intrigued me. It was the same style from X-Men: Children of the Atom. One thing that didn’t wow me at the time was the story and background stories for the characters.

Mind you, it’s the 90s and these games were ported to console where you had time to enjoy it without much interference. Playing the arcade version where you’re sinking coins in and trying to conserve continues, story was barely secondary. Also, the story after beating a final boss wouldn’t even be that rewarding.

Also, you often picked up these games without much context as to why all these fighters were gathered for a tournament. The little context you got was guaranteed to be lost after time dedicated to beating Shadaloo. Hell, even in arcade best ‘em ups, you pretty much just advanced through levels slamming the Mad Gear Gang who didn’t get much fleshing out story-wise until later Street Fighter games.

So, again, not very important. Then Tekken game along.

Tekken: Bringing Long-Running Storytelling to Fighting Games

While Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Mortal Kombat released before Tekken and had somewhat defined stories, Tekken was closer to Mortal Kombat in that they were actively building something to told over the years. You could say that SNK was doing this as well but their stories were simply told in the 90s, I feel. Actually, Mortal Kombat was like that to a degree but there was a reason for new characters to be added and they were given a sliver of story to get you adequately invested.

Tekken came at a time when arcade cabinets and home consoles allowed developers to do more as far as mechanics, animations, graphics and yes, story. What I liked about this period is that characters who didn’t seem the most appealing initially were more fleshed out to the point that they got some play.

I mean, my favorite fighter in Tekken is Paul Phoenix. The PlayStation period Tekken games gave just enough to pique your interest in different fights with cutscenes at the end fighters’ journeys and some good write-ups in the manual and guide but with Tekken 4 in 2001, we got a lot more. Not only that, Namco only added more and more lore with each main entry.

You see, I’ve never been a fan of sliding timelines where retcons play a heavy role or slow-moving timelines where characters age but we have little to no idea where we are in the series’ timeline. I can tolerate a reboot but what I love is a story told in chronological order through the years.

The Mishima and Friends

While Tekken has a variety of characters and a large cast over 30 years, it has a timeline of events, characters age, kids are had, and they have lives outside of fighting in this tournament or dealing with the Mishima family. Of course, it’s the Mishima family drama that anchors the series’ story and it works!

The fighters either have some relation to another character but they’re all binded by involved in the different Iron Fist Tournaments. It’s the epic of fighting games told through multiple generations of Mishima in a “sins of the father” sense. By today’s writing standards, it might be simple on paper but how Namco Bandai executed it over the decades keeps me picking up a new Tekken title and enjoying the story from different character perspectives.

That’s always a strong series writer skill: having characters with their own noticed and enjoyable stories who happen to be involved in the major ongoings either directly or because of some related event. It’s what makes these characters worth keeping around and not a throwaway character.

Mind you, I’m familiar with the old takes that it’s a messy storyline. A few friends of mine even asked when does it end since the game came out when we were all finishing elementary school. Personally, I like this degree of messiness in action or fighting games because there is usually lore and development to accompany it.

Let us know your favorite fighting game storylines and if you’re a fan of Tekken’s story in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

You remember how it went down. Twitter, or whatever we call it now, lit up overnight. Screenshots of cuddly critters holding assault rifles. Somebody captioned it “Pokémon with guns” and that was that. The phrase spread faster than the actual gameplay ever could. In less than six days, the Steam version had sold more than eight million copies. Palworld’s online infrastructure struggled beneath the traffic. Everybody and their cousin had an opinion, and most of those opinions came from folks who never once touched the launcher.

I get why the label stuck. It’s catchy. Does the marketing job in three words, no trailer required. Nintendo built a multibillion dollar empire on pocket monsters, and here comes this scrappy studio out of Japan flipping the formula on its head, tossing your fluffy little buddies into a factory line or handing them a shotgun. The joke writes itself. Shock value sells, and Pocketpair rode that wave straight to the bank.

But here’s my issue, and I’ve been sitting with this since I put a couple hundred hours into it. That nickname stopped being a doorway a long time ago. Now it’s a wall.

See, the folks who dismissed this title as a cheap knockoff never stuck around long enough to figure out what they were playing. Underneath the memes and the viral chaos sits a design that has almost nothing to do with catching creatures in tall grass. What you’ve got is a survival sim with real teeth. You spawn on an island with nothing. No inventory, no shelter, no plan. Cold nights that’ll drain your health bar. Hunger meters. Resources you have to swing a pickaxe at. The early hours feel closer to Valheim or Rust than anything Game Freak ever shipped.

And that’s before you even get to the base building.

This is where it all clicked for me. Your Pals, those creatures everybody keeps reducing to a punchline, they aren’t just fighters or trophies. They work. Assign one to a mining node and it chips away at ore while you sleep. Put another on a ranch and it produces eggs. One’s watering crops. Another’s smelting ingots at the furnace. You’re basically running a little sweatshop of adorable monsters, and I mean that with love, and the automation hooks into your brain the same way Factorio does. Suddenly you’re up at 2 a.m. optimizing a conveyor of labor, muttering about efficiency, wondering why your electric type keeps slacking off near the generator.

Nobody warned me about that part. The label sure didn’t.

Let me talk about the crafting for a second, since it runs deeper than most give it credit for. Tech trees stretch out in every direction. You unlock stations, weapons, saddles, gear, structures. Everything feeds back into the grind loop. Want a better weapon? You need refined metal, and refined metal means a furnace, fuel, and a Pal with a fire skill standing there doing the labor. It’s interconnected in a way that respects your time and your intelligence, and that philosophy has zero to do with a franchise about gym badges.

Once your base hums along on its own, the itch to leave it kicks in, and the map gives that itch somewhere to go. It earns the wandering, too. Towering bosses guard the corners of it, hulking Alphas that hit like trucks and force you to actually build a loadout instead of button mashing. You glide off cliffs on a flying mount. Caves hide the rare materials worth the climb down. And the breeding pen quietly turns into an obsession, letting you pair partners to pass traits down the line until you’ve engineered a worker who mines twice as quick or a bruiser tuned for one nasty raid. That’s genetics, basically. In a game people wrote off as a shallow gag.

Then multiplayer enters the chat.

Roll with friends and this whole thing transforms. Dedicated servers let you and your crew build a shared settlement, split up the responsibilities, and raid tough enemies together. One homie handles combat, another manages the supply chain, somebody’s off exploring dungeons for loot. It becomes a cooperative sandbox where your collective base grows into a stronghold none of you could pull off solo. Some servers run dozens of players at once. That’s not a creature collector. It’s an ecosystem.

So why does the “Pokémon with guns” thing still dominate every conversation?

First impressions calcify. We do this as a culture. Slap a shorthand on something so we can file it away and keep scrolling, and once that label goes viral it becomes the truth whether it’s accurate or not. Half the discourse around this title never moved past the launch week jokes. People argued about whether some designs borrowed too heavily from Pokémon, whether Nintendo would sue, and whether any of it was even ethical, and they kept arguing about the wrapper while ignoring the gift inside.

And look, the Nintendo lawsuit is real. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company accused Pocketpair of infringing gameplay patents, and Pocketpair has acknowledged that the case led it to alter certain summoning and gliding mechanics. I am not here to pretend the visual similarities are imaginary, either. Some of those Pals do look suspiciously familiar. Fair criticism. But the patent case and the arguments about creature designs are separate conversations from what the finished product actually is when you sit down and play it for a week straight.

Here’s the frustrating part for me as a person who loves this hobby. When you reduce a piece of work to its most viral comparison, you rob it of the chance to be judged on its own terms. Imagine if we only ever talked about Hades as “that roguelike.” Or called Elden Ring “Dark Souls but bigger” and left it at that. We’d be flattening years of intentional craft into a bumper sticker. The nickname did its job, got butts in seats, moved units, and now it lingers like a smell that won’t leave the room.

I think there’s a bigger current running under all this, a truth about how we let virality define worth. A title blows up for one reason, and that reason becomes the ceiling instead of the floor. The creators built a full survival, crafting, automation, and multiplayer beast, poured real systems into it, and the internet handed them a meme in exchange. Moved a ton of copies off it, sure. Can’t knock the bag. But the identity got hijacked by the gag.

What would it take to see it clearly? Time has already started doing the work. Palworld officially reached Version 1.0 in July 2026, expanding its world with new regions, additional Pals, a fresh threat, and the long-awaited World Tree. Pocketpair announced that the game had surpassed 40 million players before the full launch. Every major addition pushes it further from the original joke and deeper into its own lane. Eventually the gap between reputation and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Maybe this one’s already earned it and we’re just slow to catch up.

Because when I fire it up now, the gun angle isn’t even in my head. My focus lands on the base layout. Which Pal to breed next for better stats. Whether my defenses can hold against the next raid. How to squeeze more output from my production chain before the sun comes up. That’s the real game. It was always there under the noise.

The comparison opened the door. I won’t deny it. Millions of us walked through the moment somebody made a clever joke about beloved monsters carrying firearms, and curiosity did the rest. Respect where it’s due. But a door isn’t a house. You can’t keep standing in the entryway describing the knob while a whole mansion waits behind it.

Palworld deserves better than the sentence that made it famous. It grew up. Maybe it’s time the conversation did too.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Look, I’m not about to sit here and pretend Santa Monica Studio didn’t cook. That Norse run is gorgeous, well acted, thoughtfully written, and it moved a whole lot of grown men to tears in their living rooms. My problem isn’t quality. Whole issue here is what got traded away while everybody was busy applauding.

Back in 2005, when that Greek nightmare first dropped on PlayStation 2, we weren’t playing as a hero. We were playing as a problem. A walking catastrophe with the ashes of his murdered family cursed onto his skin and zero interest in your feelings about it. Ares tricked him into slaughtering his own family, and instead of processing that trauma in healthy increments, dude went to war with heaven itself. No therapy arc. Zero slow burn toward wisdom. Just a man who decided the entire pantheon would answer for what happened to him, and then made good on it.

That version scared people. Genuinely scared them. You’d watch him rip a soldier’s head off and feel something uncomfortable crawl up your spine, because the game never once asked you to admire him for it. Athena would show up talking about balance and destiny, and our boy would basically tell her to save the speech. Every conversation felt like negotiating with a live grenade. Nobody in Olympus knew what he’d do next, and honestly? Neither did we.

Then came Norse mythology, and suddenly the Ghost of Sparta became a dad with communication issues.

Here’s where my Blerd brothers and sisters start typing angrily, so let me be clear about the argument. Character growth in gaming is good. Absolutely necessary, even. We’ve spent decades watching muscle bound protagonists grunt through campaigns with nothing resembling an inner life, so seeing a franchise mature its lead into something complicated deserves credit. What bothers me is the specific direction that maturity took, and what the studio decided maturity had to look like.

Restraint became the entire personality.

Think about how often that Norse duology asks the old man to hold back. He teaches Atreus to control his temper. Apologies get handed out for his methods. Shame about his history sits visible on him across two full games while he tries to outrun the reputation he earned honestly. Modern God of War treats his former self like an addiction he’s managing, one careful breath at a time, and structurally the games reward him for keeping that beast in a cage.

Cool message. Terrible loss for a series built entirely on unleashing that beast.

Compare the pacing sometime. Greek era combat threw you into arenas stacked with enemies and let the chains fly in wide, reckless arcs. Chaos everywhere. You’d juggle three minotaurs while a hydra head swung overhead, and the whole thing felt barely survivable, like the fiction itself was fraying at the seams. Norse combat, for all its weight and craft, is deliberate. Measured. You’re managing stagger meters and cooldowns, checking your gear score, thinking about builds. Excellent design work, no argument from me. Different sensation entirely.

One system simulated a rampage. Another simulates a professional at work.

The bosses tell that same story. Remember the colossal set pieces from the trilogy? Cronos crawling across the desert with a temple strapped to his back. The Colossus of Rhodes towering over an entire city while you scrambled across its arm. Scale that made you feel like a bug that learned to bite back. Many of the Norse era’s most important encounters lean toward intimate duels against humanoid opponents of roughly comparable size, and while the Valkyrie fights are genuinely superb tests of skill, they don’t produce that specific vertigo the older games manufactured almost casually.

Something else disappeared too, and this part nobody wants to discuss at the cookout: the ugliness.

Original God of War let its protagonist be genuinely, unforgivably rotten. He’d shove innocent people into traps to solve puzzles. Allies got abandoned mid sentence. That infamous cage sequence where a man begs for his life and you use him anyway? Santa Monica put that in on purpose, because nobody was supposed to root for this guy. Watching a person hollowed out by grief become something monstrous, then sitting with how that felt in your hands, was the whole exercise.

Modern entries sand every rough edge into something palatable. Our guy still kills, obviously, but the fiction constantly reassures us he’s got reasons. Enemies attack first. Threats are established. Moral positioning gets handled before blood spills, so nobody watching a stream has to feel weird about enjoying it. Safe. Marketable. A protagonist you can put on a Father’s Day post without irony.

Unpredictability was the franchise’s actual signature, and it went out the door with the Blades of Chaos aesthetic.

Let me push this further, since I’m already in trouble. Ragnarök spends a shocking amount of its runtime having characters talk him out of things. Freya wants revenge, he counsels patience. Charging ahead is what Atreus keeps pushing for, and caution is the answer he gets. Mimir cracks jokes about how much the old man has changed. The narrative architecture of that game positions our Spartan as the voice of reason inside a cast of hotheads, which is genuinely funny when you consider he once murdered his way through Greece after years of divine manipulation, betrayal, and revenge.

Wisdom looks good on him. Danger looked better.

There’s a version of this story where growth and menace coexist, and occasionally the Norse games flirt with it. That moment in 2018 when he unleashes his rage after Atreus collapses during the confrontation with Modi, or the raw brutality of the Baldur fight, or those brief flashes where his temper slips loose and everyone nearby remembers who they’re standing next to. Those beats are electric precisely because they violate the game’s own rules about him. Santa Monica clearly knows what they’re sitting on. They just ration it like it’s rare.

Rationing was the wrong call.

My honest read? The industry shifted, and the franchise shifted to survive. Prestige narrative became the currency around 2013, and studios chasing critical respect learned quickly that emotional interiority scores better than spectacle. Every major series started giving us complicated fathers, quiet campfire conversations, and protagonists working through something. God of War played that game brilliantly and won. Awards, hearts, an entire new audience who never touched the PS2 originals.

Winning cost the series its weirdness though, and weirdness is worth something.

Nothing on the market right now feels like Greek era God of War felt. Doom gets close on pure aggression, but Doom Slayer is a power fantasy without the psychological rot underneath. Devil May Cry has style and flash minus the genuine cruelty. That specific cocktail of mythological grandeur, personal damage, and complete moral bankruptcy hasn’t been replicated, mostly because the studio that perfected it walked away from the recipe.

We got a better character and a smaller experience.

Ask yourself honestly what stays with you longest. Some of y’all will say the boat conversations, the way Mimir’s stories filled the silences, the ending of Ragnarök and everything it implied about legacy. Beautiful answers, all valid. Others will admit that what lodged permanently in their memory was Zeus getting beaten so thoroughly the screen went red, or the sheer audacity of a mortal dismantling an entire religion out of spite.

Both versions matter. Only one of them was singular.

So as Santa Monica Studio prepares God of War Laufey and continues working on a remake of the original Greek trilogy, I’m hoping somebody remembers that his rage was never merely a character flaw to be corrected. Rage was the thesis. Everything interesting about him grew out of that soil, including the fatherhood arc everybody loves. Strip it entirely and you’ve got a well written dad simulator wearing a legendary name.

Give me the old man who learned something. Keep the part that made gods nervous.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

That opening still lives rent free in my skull. Alex Mason, tied down, sweating, disoriented. Somebody keeps asking him about broadcast codes. He doesn’t know. He genuinely doesn’t know, and neither do you, and that not knowing is the whole point. Most shooters hand you a rifle and a reason. This one handed you a headache and dared you to trust anything you saw.

Here’s the thing folks slept on. Most of the story is being reconstructed through an interrogation. You aren’t playing missions so much as digging through a man’s cracked recollection while somebody with a rougher voice than yours pushes him to remember faster. Nearly every level is a memory, and memories, as anybody who has argued with a family member about who said what at Thanksgiving knows, are slippery little liars. Treyarch understood that. They built the whole experience on the idea that the narrator’s head was not a reliable place to stand.

Then came Viktor Reznov. My guy. Gravel voice, scarred up, dropping wisdom like a Soviet uncle who has seen too much snow and too much blood. He rides shotgun through Mason’s flashbacks, guiding him, naming enemies, telling him who has to die. Dragovich. Kravchenko. Steiner. The list becomes a prayer Mason repeats until it’s tattooed on his soul. You believe Reznov. Why wouldn’t you? He saved this man. He fought beside him. He feels realer than half the actual living characters.

And that’s the knife.

Because Reznov was dead. Had been for a long stretch of the timeline you were living through. The man riding along in Mason’s head giving orders was a ghost, a piece of psychological wiring somebody planted and somebody else never fully removed. The Soviets ran a conditioning program on Mason, tried to turn him into a sleeper, a weapon that walks around looking normal until the right sequence gets whispered and the trigger finger does what it was told. Reznov, the real one, got hold of that same programming and hijacked it. He couldn’t kill his enemies himself, so he rewired a captured American to do it for him, hiding his own vendetta inside the conditioning like a message tucked in a bottle.

Sit with how wild that is for a mainstream military franchise. The protagonist you steered through most of the campaign was a puppet, and the hand up his back belonged to a hallucination that was itself a smuggled revenge plot. You weren’t the hero saving the day. You were a loaded gun somebody else was aiming, and you spent hours thanking the phantom holding you.

Now let’s talk about the broadcast, the transmission, the endless recitation of figures that haunted the loading screens and the wall of a certain hidden room. Those weren’t set dressing. The broadcasts carried coded instructions meant to activate sleeper agents and order them to release Nova 6 across the country. Hudson and Weaver already had recordings of those transmissions. What they needed was Mason, because the Soviets had planted the ability to translate the sequences inside his conditioned mind. The whole tense back and forth, the flashing red room, the way that recitation gnawed at you, all of it was a man’s brain being pried open like a stubborn oyster while he fought to remember what the codes meant and where the numbers station was located.

I remember finishing it the first time and just sitting there. Controller down. Screen dim. Feeling like I’d been running through somebody else’s nightmare and only realized at the exit that the dreamer was me the whole time. Games rarely earn that. Movies barely earn that. The Manchurian Candidate did it. Memento did it. Get Out did it in its own way with the sunken place, that horror of your body still moving while your will gets shoved into a basement you can’t climb out of. Treyarch snuck that same dread into a product mostly known for teabagging and killstreaks, and somehow it worked.

What made it stick was the craft underneath the twist. The hallucinations weren’t a cheap rug pull tacked on at the finale. The clues were breathing in the margins the entire time if you were paying attention. Reznov appears where he shouldn’t. Timelines don’t quite line up. Characters react to Mason like he’s carrying something they can see and he can’t. On a second run the whole thing reorganizes itself in front of you, which is the mark of a story built with actual intention rather than shock for its own sake. Not every player caught it live. Plenty of us needed a forum thread and a homie explaining it before the pieces snapped together. That’s fine. Good mysteries reward the rewatch.

Here’s my honest gripe, and it’s less a gripe about that entry than a lament for everything after. Call of Duty returned to this well, especially with Black Ops Cold War, but it never recreated this exact feeling. The sequels chased spectacle. Bigger set pieces, more helicopters spinning out of the sky, more slow motion breaching. Fun, loud, absolutely. But loud isn’t the same as haunting. Later stories tried the “gotcha” structure, tried unreliable narration, tried to twist your understanding of who you were controlling, and a couple got close. None of them left me questioning my own perception the way that 2010 release did. None of them made the act of remembering itself feel dangerous.

Part of that is the franchise growing into a machine expected to satisfy an enormous global audience every year. You can’t build a slow, paranoid character study when the quarterly report demands a rollercoaster. I understand the business of it. Doesn’t stop me from missing the version of this series that trusted players to feel confused, to feel manipulated, to sit in discomfort instead of getting spoon fed a clean victory. That entry treated the audience like grown folks who could handle their own footing being pulled out.

There’s also something quietly heavy about who Mason turned out to be. A regular soldier turned into a vessel, his identity carved up and rewritten by governments on both sides treating him like equipment. As a Black man who grew up on stories about how power loves to reach inside people and turn them into tools they never agreed to become, that theme landed with extra weight for me. The horror wasn’t the gunfire. The horror was the erasure. Somebody reaching into your mind and deciding what you’d believe, who you’d hate, what you’d do with your own hands while telling yourself the choice was yours.

That’s the buried genius of it. Underneath the Cold War coat of paint, the real war was for a single man’s grip on reality. Every shootout was really a question. Is this true? Did this happen? Is the voice guiding me a friend or a splinter left behind by people who wanted me broken and useful? A shooter asking those questions in the middle of its own gunplay was rare then and feels damn near extinct now.

So yeah, I’ll say it plain. Later entries gave us prettier explosions and slicker menus and a multiplayer suite that ate years of our lives. What they never gave us again was that specific vertigo, that feeling of the floor of your own mind giving way beneath you. For all its rough edges, that 2010 title reached into the player’s head and left fingerprints. Everything since has been content to just entertain the hands. Give me the one that came for my perception. Give me the ghost, the chair, the recited code, the terrifying possibility that the hero was the crime scene the whole time.

That’s the one that stuck. That’s the one I still think about at two in the morning. And that’s the one nobody has managed to top.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Rewind to May 2025. id came out swinging with a philosophy rather than just a product. Eternal had turned you into a fighter jet, so this one would turn you into a tank. Stand and fight. Plant your feet. Parry the green stuff, bash the little ones, let a shield do the talking. Hugo Martin recited that line in every interview like scripture, and on paper the swerve earned respect. Nobody wants a studio running the same play until the wheels come off.

Here’s what happened in a lot of living rooms, mine included. That tank got boring. Not immediately, mind you. Clanking across a gothic battlefield with a buzzsaw frisbee strapped to your arm felt like nothing else on the market for a good long while. Then arenas began blurring into one another. Then you noticed your movement had been trimmed down to walking, walking slightly faster, and occasionally shoulder checking a fool into a wall. Dodging? Gone. Verticality? Mostly decorative. You were pinned to a horizontal plane, running a very well produced version of the same encounter on loop, and that flow state which made 2020’s outing feel like drumming never quite arrived.

Plenty of folks loved it exactly as built. Genuinely. An audience exists that found Eternal exhausting, that resented being told to swap weapons like a barista taking orders, and for them a slower rhythm came as relief. I respect the position. I’m just not sitting in that pew, and judging by a year of forum arguments, neither are a whole lot of you.

So along comes this frozen purgatory story, and inside the opening level id does something almost cheeky. They break the shield. Betrayal, defeat, the big man dragged down into Hell’s core with his armor in pieces, and the centerpiece of an entire design philosophy gets snatched away from him. Call it a plot beat if you want. I’d call it a confession. Somebody in that building stared at their own signature mechanic and asked who the Slayer becomes without it.

What he becomes is the Chain Spear, and I need you to understand this thing is not a gimmick weapon. It stabs at range. It pierces defenses. It yanks you toward demons and lets you swing or orbit around them, which means the fight is suddenly happening in the air, above you, behind you, and in places the original campaign rarely asked you to use. Reviewers keep reaching for the same comparison because it’s the accurate one. It’s Eternal’s meathook energy welded onto medieval bones. The grapple is back. The dash is back. The pressure is back.

And pressure is the word I want to sit with, because the base campaign’s real sin wasn’t slowness. Slow can be terrifying. Slow can be Resident Evil. The sin was comfort. Once you learned the parry timing, most encounters stopped asking you anything. You were never truly cornered, never scrambling, never doing that thing where you’re at fourteen health, out of ammo, and improvising your way out of a coffin. The expansion puts that back on the menu with intent. New demons show up with actual job descriptions. Archviles summon reinforcements and teleport around like they’ve been holding a grudge since Doom II, which they have. Warlocks buff everything nearby while drowning the arena in fog. Cosmic Elementals harass you from above so planting and swiveling stops being an option. Triage becomes mandatory. Prioritizing becomes mandatory. Moving becomes mandatory.

Difficulty scales up too, and there’s a substantial endgame structure waiting after the credits with Master Arenas, newly opened paths, extra puzzles, additional challenges, and an ultimate boss encounter. Classic DOOM layouts return as rebuilt flashbacks, recreated with modern materials and effects while you’re rocking a shotgun that sounds like 1993. Ten to twelve hours of content, more if you’re the type who has to find every last collectible before you can sleep. Early reviews have been highly positive, although the critic pool remains small, with the difficulty curve and the backtracking heavy endgame structure showing up as the main sticking points rather than the combat itself.

Now the harder question, the one I actually want to argue about.

Should an expansion get credit for correcting the flagship’s biggest weakness?

My honest answer is yes, but with a receipt attached, and the receipt matters.

Give credit, because the alternative is a world where studios never course correct in public. Think about what id had to do here. They spent a year and a full marketing campaign telling everybody that the deliberate, grounded, shield forward approach was the point, the vision, the future. Walking that back in the sequel would have been easy and quiet. Walking it back in paid content nearly fourteen months later, in front of the same people who bought the original argument, takes a certain amount of nerve. Most companies would have doubled down and called the audience wrong. Instead they wrote a story where the Slayer loses the very thing that defined him and has to rebuild into something faster and hungrier. Good marketing doesn’t get you there. Listening does.

Now the receipt. Anybody who bought at launch paid full freight for an incomplete idea, and here comes a request for another twenty dollars to get the version that sings. Nobody in a press release wants to do that math out loud. If the mobility and the aggression are what make the combat sing, and if the developers now agree that they do, then the seventy dollar product was missing something essential and the fix has a price tag on it. You can call that iteration. You can also call it a toll booth.

A version of this argument goes too far, though, and I don’t want to slide into it. Truth is, the new material only lands this hard because of the foundation holding it up. Your spear thrills you partly by contrast. Freedom registers because the weight is still fresh in your hands. Parrying, shield bashing, that heavy footed pulse, all of it remains, load bearing as ever, and swapping back to the saw is one button away. One reviewer over at Gamereactor even argued that the expansion can sometimes feel better with the repaired Shield Saw, despite the extra options offered by the Chain Spear. That suggests the original design was never broken. Just unfinished. Nobody repudiated anything here. They wrote a second draft.

Here’s where it turns grim. Microsoft’s Xbox restructuring hit id Software immediately before this thing shipped. Initial reports said roughly half the studio had been dismissed, while a Texas WARN notice later identified 136 id Software positions, including 96 at the Richardson office and another 40 remote workers who reported to that location. The same notice included 22 additional cuts at Bethesda Game Studios in Austin, with 146 of the 158 affected workers represented by the Communications Workers of America. Best work these folks have done in years, delivered while colleagues packed up desks.

The studio has since pushed back on the framing, saying the reductions were spread across teams and that the crew today runs about the size it did during DOOM 2016, which is either reassurance or corporate throat clearing depending on how much faith you have left. Launch also brought some rough edges, including button binding trouble, minor bugs, and progression problems that prompted an early hotfix. None of that proves the corporate turmoil affected development, but the timing made the problems harder to separate from the uncertainty surrounding the studio. It doesn’t change what’s on screen. It changes how what’s on screen sits with you. Craftsmen at the peak of their powers, rewarded with a pink slip.

So where does that leave us.

If you bounced off the medieval detour last year, come back. Seriously. The complaint you had is the exact thing this content addresses, and it addresses it with more imagination than a patch note ever could. If you loved the original as it was, you’re not being punished either, since the toolkit expands rather than replaces.

But hold both thoughts at once. This is a triumph and an admission. It’s a studio proving they can still cook, and proving the first dish came out under seasoned. Praise them for hearing us. Just don’t let anybody tell you we weren’t right the first time.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Yet on the very morning the ship sets sail again, a quieter question keeps surfacing. Is this a genuine celebration of one of the finest pirate epics the medium ever produced, or is it evidence that a struggling giant reached backward because it could no longer trust itself to move forward?

Let me tell you where my head is at, because the answer is not as simple as either side wants it to be.

You already know the backstory if you’ve been paying attention. The French publisher has spent the last two years bleeding. Star Wars Outlaws face planted. XDefiant got taken behind the barn. Whole studios shuttered, thousands of positions disappeared through layoffs, attrition, and restructuring, and a €1.16 billion Tencent investment helped shore up the company’s new Vantage Studios structure. Shadows sold fine, sure, delivering the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in the whole series, but “fine” don’t erase a €1.3 billion operating loss on the books. When a company that big starts leaning on advisors to “extract value for stakeholders,” that’s corporate speak for the wolves are circling. My guy, they were prepping lifeboats.

Now here’s the part that stings if you love this hobby. Their answer to all that pressure was to reach backward.

Think about it. Reportedly, 15 Ubisoft studios contributed to rebuilding a title that already exists, representing a wide slice of the company’s talent and resources. A title people already adore. The safest bet imaginable. Ubisoft looked at their mess and decided the smart play was to hand you the thing you loved when you were younger and hope you’d feel warm enough to open your wallet again. And you know what? It’s working. According to estimates from Alinea Analytics, Resynced’s pre-release Steam sales ran more than five times higher than Shadows did at the comparable point before launch. Nostalgia sells. It always has.

But sit with that for a second, because it says something heavy.

The reason this remake lands so hard is the same reason it worries me. Kenway’s voyage came from an era when this developer knew exactly who it was. Back then the maps felt hand crafted instead of algorithm stretched. The naval combat, those swivel guns and shanties and the whole rhythm of chasing a Man o’ War across a storm, none of that existed to check a box. Somebody dreamed it up because it was cool. There was a confidence baked into that 2013 disc, a swagger, a point of view. That pirate fantasy wasn’t buried under seventeen menus and a battle pass. It just was.

Somewhere along the way the machine got bigger and the vision got smaller. Every open world release started blurring into the same checklist. Climb the tower, clear the icons, grind the loot, repeat until numb. The soul that made those older joints special leaked out slow, one bloated sequel at a time. Which is exactly why going back to Black Flag feels so good and so sad in the same breath. It’s a reminder of a version of this company that felt more alive.

I keep thinking about something a Kotaku reviewer wrote, about basically being two people at once while playing. One dude just floating around the 4K ocean having a ball, and another dude staring at all that gorgeous new animation asking a colder question. What could they have built if they aimed all this money and muscle at something brand new? Man, that split lives in my chest too. Sailing the Jackdaw is pure joy. What guts me is that sailing the Jackdaw was the boldest move a struggling giant felt safe enough to make.

And the new stuff they layered on top honestly slaps. There’s a fresh endgame chapter called A World Without Gold that gives Blackbeard a whole eight mission arc. Stede Bonnet gets a proper epilogue, which, if you watched a certain pirate comedy show, hits different now. New shanties, including a Woodkid version of Leave Her Johnny that I’ve had stuck in my head since the trailer. Crouch anywhere, dive anywhere, hood up or down as you please. Little quality of life fixes that make the old bones move smoother. Real care went into this. Nobody phoned it in.

That’s what makes it complicated. This isn’t a lazy cash grab. It’s a lovingly restored classic. Those two things can be true at once, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Still, I can’t shake the bigger picture. When one of the clearest symbols of your recovery strategy is “remake the last thing everybody agreed we did right,” you’re admitting something out loud whether you mean to or not. You’re saying the well of new ideas has run low. There’s a wager being placed on three brands, a hope that the crowd’s affection for the past will cover for a present you couldn’t quite figure out. That’s not villainy. It’s fear. And fear is a rough thing to watch from a place that once felt fearless.

Here’s the part that keeps me from writing the whole thing off, though.

Plenty of people playing Resynced right now never touched the original. Think about how wild that is. The original landed 13 years ago. There’s a grown adult buying this today who was in elementary school when Edward first raised that flag, while some younger players weren’t even born yet. For them this isn’t a remake at all. It’s simply the newest Assassin’s Creed, the one with pirates, and it’s dope. No baggage, no melancholy, no old head sighing about what used to be. Just a great game they get to meet for the first time.

And there’s something almost beautiful in that. Art gets to live again. A masterpiece that was slowly aging out of relevance gets dusted off and handed to a whole new crowd who’ll fall for it the way we did. If you strip away all my industry hand wringing, that outcome is a genuine gift. Preservation matters. Letting a classic breathe again matters.

So which is it? Celebration or symptom? Honestly, I’ve landed on both, and I think refusing to pick is the only honest answer.

Resynced is a real celebration of something wonderful, executed with skill and affection, and it deserves to be enjoyed by anybody who likes a good yarn about swords and sea legs. It’s also, unmistakably, a flare shot up by a company that lost its nerve and reached for the past because the future felt too expensive to risk. Both readings are correct. The tragedy and the triumph are welded together, and you can’t melt one off without losing the other.

What I want, more than another remaster, is for this publisher to remember why we loved them in the first place. Not the icons. Not the towers. Confidence, plain and simple. A willingness to build a whole pirate simulator inside an assassin franchise just because somebody believed it would be magic. Spirit like that is what Resynced is really selling back to us, and I hope, somewhere in those offices, folks are taking notes on why it resonates instead of just counting the receipts.

Go play it. Enjoy the ocean. Sing the shanties loud. Just don’t let the warm glow fool you into thinking a company can sail forward forever by staring at its own wake.

Because a wake is beautiful. But it’s still behind you.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.