Runescape: Dragonwilds developer Jagex seems excited about breaking free from their MMO roots with this new survival crafting entry in the long-running franchise. To quote Creative Director Rick Turek in an interview with GamesBeat:

"After celebrating 25 years of RuneScape this year, this will be a new pillar in the franchise. We won’t just be known for an MMO. We will have a survival game."

Dear reader: I am not a fan of MMOs or the survival crafting genre. Despite multiple attempts to break this mold, I haven’t found an entry on either side of the Venn diagram that has truly changed my mind and served as starting point for truly engaging with either genre. With that in mind, I’m not sure what compelled me to check out Dragonwilds in the first place. Maybe it was the cross-platform announcement? Maybe it was just wanting to see some numbers go up? Who knows!

What I do know is that Dragonwilds really got its hooks into me, and multiple times throughout my play I found myself wondering why it’s not an MMO. I can understand Jagex’s desire to break outside of their comfort zone, but in my experience what I’m really seeing is a group of extremely talented MMO developers take that expertise and apply it to something that foundationally feels like a modernized take on a largely stale genre. 

So what makes an MMO in the first place? What does Dragonwilds do to set itself apart from its namesake and the other billion survival crafting games out there? And why am I connecting with it despite everything? 

Tune in and find out!

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Hey all! This week I joined Jeff Cannata and Christian Spicer for an episode of DLC primarily focused on the layoffs at Xbox. It’s a heavy topic, and one I obviously feel very strongly about if you follow me anywhere or have heard me talk into a microphone at all for the last two months.

It’s a heavy news section, which we balanced out with some much more chill games I’ve been playing, followed by the guys convincing me to give Black Flag Resynced a shot before the year is out.

You can listen to it here.

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I’m not sure why, but every once in a while I have a video I want to make that takes significantly longer than I think it will. I played and finished Saros —Housemarque’s newest AAA bullet-hell roguelike — over the course of around a week, and after taking a ton of notes ended up feeling pretty confident I’d have a video out quickly. But every time I sat down to talk about the game, I ended up having significantly more to say than I thought. A video essay didn’t encapsulate it all, a standard review didn’t encapsulate it all, so here’s my third attempt at a Saros video.

It’s a game I went from deeply conflicted on to being a pretty big fan of. Despite its rock-solid game feel and gorgeous world design, Saros felt like a bit of a narrative step down from Housemarque’s previous work with Returnal throughout the experience. But by the time the credits rolled, the whole thing clicked together and — intentionally or not — positioned itself as a psuedo-sequel or mirror image of Returnal. Saros uses its roguelike elements in ways that highlight the character study at the heart of the game, and settles into being an exploration of toxic masculinity through the lens of a game about dodging big colorful orbs. It works! 

Even still, there’s so much I did not include in this video because the timer I set for myself had gone off. Saros has a lot more going on than I’ve included here — deeply weird and fascinating lore about Carcosa’s dead civilization, an unexplained-through-tutorials weapon rolling system that people spend a lot of time arguing about online, and the ways the narrative links to and plays within the bounds of the Mahabharata story. 

Hopefully people continue to poke at the edges of this game, because I think there’s a lot left open to interpretation and discussion.

Regardless, thank you for indulging my brain dump here.

And also: You can find my whole Saros playthrough on Patreon!

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Vampire Crawlers is a new deckbuilding roguelike game from the creators of Vampire Survivors, which in most universes would be everyone’s most anticipated game of the year. In reality, it seems to be a bit of a niche thing, possibly aided by the game’s bizarre subtitle: “The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors”. 

This “turbo wildcard” self-identification implies a game which allows for a deckbuilder that feels as snappy and hands-off as Vampire Survivors, but the reality of the actual play demands much more the further into the game you get. Yes, you’ll still have broken builds which will have you flying through runs easily, but you need to spend at least some time drafting cards into your deck and deciding play order on a per-hand basis — which already sets the game apart from its predecessor and the genre description tacked onto the end of its title.

Despite all of this: I think the game is exceptional.

When it launches on mobile, I will be doomed. 

You should check it out.

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Pragmata is a new game from Capcom about a man and his adoptive space daughter as they fight robots on the moon. It is equal parts Resident Evil, Dead Space, The Legend of Zelda, NieR Automata, and Death Stranding — and somehow also manages to be none of them.

I absolutely loved it, and it’s exactly the kind of game I am excited to be talking about ten years from now.

“Man… Pragmata was so good, dude.”

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It would look a lot like this nine minute video where YouTuber HabitatForge scooped some mud and gross-ass water into a jar and checked in two weeks later to see what was going on in there.

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AJ Fillari trying to help me write the intro to this post:

Podcasts are like blogs that you can listen to.

We’re at PAX East this weekend in Boston, which is pound for pound my favorite convention I’ve ever been to. I’ll have more coverage of the show on the channel and elsewhere later, but for this week’s episode I decided to answer some of your questions about Square Enix’s great 2025, Epic Games’ latest round of needless layoffs, and some advice for people wanting to get into games writing.

Thanks for sending in questions! 

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I was a Destiny freak. I started playing during the press preview alpha in the Summer of 2014 and subsequently put in close to 2000 hours across both games. Bungie’s best-in-class gunplay and a strong focus on worldbuilding and visual identity lured me in, but the aspect that kept me playing was the game’s distillation of the MMO as a concept into something less obtuse. I finally had the experience I’d wanted from games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, but on a console and through a form of play I’d already known well via the first person shooter. 

This was my hope for Marathon. The extraction shooter as a subgenre hadn’t quite clicked with me in the same way the MMO hadn’t when I was younger. And just like back then, I understand the appeal — the tension and release of finding and then battling to maintain your gear is one that feels inherently like it would be my shit. Removing the focus from becoming a kill-death ratio decimal-point-goblin staring at end-of-match scorecards is always a plus in my eyes, and shifting that focus towards the items you scrounge up on a run to run basis is a genuinely positive move with regards to how I am generally already interacting with competitive shooters. 

My hope for Marathon is that Bungie would be able to jump into the genre and shift the focus even further, extend the definition of what an extraction shooter could be and find a cleaner on-ramp for curious players like myself.

By packaging it all up in their table-stakes “best gunplay around” and the most incredible visual identity I’ve seen in a video game in years, I think they’ve nailed it.

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I'm absolutely in love with Pokémon Pokopia, enough so that it has me wondering if it could have been a cultural moment — Animal Crossing-adjacent, even — had it released later in the Switch 2's lifecycle. 

New Horizons launched in March of 2020 to a possible audience of 55 million Nintendo Switch users and went on to sell 12 million units in its first month. This snowballed into becoming the best selling Animal Crossing game, transforming the franchise into a true system-seller.

Pokopia is being released as a Switch 2 exclusive in a market where 17 million consoles have been sold thus far, meaning the chances of it being an “event” like Animal Crossing are small. Word of mouth is strong, reviews are glowing, but the high price of the Switch 2 and the small addressable audience is holding it back from reaching its true potential in some ways.

Anyway, I’m gonna go make my friend Drifloon a better house.

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