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I messed with Wayfinder a bit in its original MMO form, and I have now messed with it a bit more in its new incarnation as a co-op action RPG. One of my fixations is imagining all the games that could be made with a specific set of assets; I often fantasize about that sort of thing when I'm about done with a game, just trying to think of all the possible creatures it could become or could have been. I've been in the soup of gamedev alongside different designers enough to know that there are points where the game's state - in the sense of material states - is a liquid. Seeing what the same mechanics and the same gameplay arc mean in the absence of a monetization scheme that (functionally) constitutes a genre unto itself is fascinating and I don't know that there are that many precedents for what's happened here. It's gonna be a heavy fucking lift - but I can't look away.

Famously, I don't own a Playstation - at least not a working one. My PS4 Pro is so angry at me that it won't turn on. My Xbox One X is also goof troop.  So I don't really have a dog in any kind of State of Play fight, except to say that as this website's resident PC stalwart it doesn't look like I'm gonna need a Playstation.

Wayfinder is a game from Airship Syndicate that came out last year in early access. You could purchase a “Founders Pack” to get into the beta but the game was designed to be Free to Play when it eventually released for real. It’s been a rough ride for Wayfinder but some massive changes to the game have made it a much better experience in my opinion. Let me break it down for you.

Gabriel, as his posts on the site reveal, has retreated into the games of youth - and now, having consumed them, has found himself bereft. I'm sorta in the same place; I've installed three comfort games over the last week. Last night I installed Paladins, which I unironically think is more fun than Overwatch. And I mean good, old Overwatch. Recent reviews are mixed, but I don't know why; in service games, communities use reviews to "communicate" with developers but I don't know precisely what they're "communicating" about because I only installed it yesterday.