“Core to the extraction shooter experience is the tension that you are at the mercy of every other players’ will, much like their mercy is at yours. The permanence of your items creates the stakes of the prisoner’s dilemma you’re subjected to, the genre being built on the organic and impossible-to-predict nature of those interactions. You are not forced to fight each other, but whoever wins is rewarded with the spoils of the one who loses”
“That trust “check” that I was talking about is what’s happening here, right. You are put into a situation where the both of you can walk away unscathed, where no one gets hurt, but now you’re given an incentive to “win”. This is obviously not how two people meeting in the real world think, I’m not dumb I realise that, but a critical part of how we interact with the world is being gamified. Conceptually, that’s really fascinating and I understand why the genre is being explored by many as a result! What happens when, in a controlled environment, you subject people to a pressure cooker. We’re humans! The result will never be the same twice and that’s interesting!”
“In ARC, that weakness is exacerbated by powerful and plentiful PvE enemies, the PvP element is an added danger certainly but they’re far from the primary threat. It’s what makes organic co-operation so powerful! There is a non-zero chance that you encounter another player with no good tools or ability to fight, and vice-versa”
“Marathon’s heroes and kits teach you that the primary mode of interaction with the world is not “exist as a person” but engage. There is no peaceful way to use a shoulder-mounted missile”
“the field in Marathon is pretty level. You, other players, and the UESC are all of equal threat. The game wants this! Everything hits equally hard, everything dies as often”
“Everything is a threat. The world exists in a way for you to perceive everything as something that wants you dead”
“the audience for those games so far have been pretty self-selecting. Marathon feels like a step above that, where the density of its systems and mechanics laid its desires bare to a degree I couldn’t handle anymore. It asks players to be vulnerable in a game where the primary language is aggression and deceit”
“Most people live in a world where there is no resistance to their existence alone, and the aggression I see mirrored here is invisible to them outside of the game. To many, it’s an unknown and interesting thing to experience instead of an exhausting constant”
“these were, to some degree, the same accusations laid against From’s Souls series all the way up to Elden Ring. If you play online, you open yourself up to invasions. You can open the door to other players and have them help you, but the door stays open for an aggressor to come in and fuck all of you up”