Blog Title

On 'Developing'

2026-01-25T00:00:00Z

"Developing" is a really lame word for making a game. Maybe cheapened by use (understandable), or by its association with less artsy software. Large productions, as with film-making, have evolved titles for various siloed work, but there's still a practicality and popularity of game developing as an individual practice for which the term feels lacking.

Hobbyists like to use cute shorthands like "devving".

"solo devving".

𝓈𝑜𝓁𝑜-𝒹𝑒𝓋𝓋𝒾𝓃𝑔.

ick. lol.

I was guilty of this when I was younger....

"Game design" is even more lame and doesn't capture the work.

But there's not really a better word that isn't pretentious - I'm not trying to separate myself from peers.

In an old blog, I framed solo game development as hardcore weaving - a kind of meticulous balancing act where you're designing a large piece (such as a tapestry), making your own threads, lining up machinery, complecting them together and constantly re-evaluating. You can imagine this as metaphor for designing and implementing a game idea, and I stand by it. But 'dreaming and feverishly weaving' describes a lot of art...

I simply don't think I'm "developing" when I'm making a little wooden bridge or arranging ivy on walls, animating a character, picking fonts, doing sound, adjusting color gradients, or doodling castles and angry women in my canson multi-media sketchbooks that I keep switching between 7x10 and 9x12 sizing for because I'm not sure if I like the room or the limitations per-page more. Game work IS largely 'development', for the software, but mixing in the rest transforms it into some other craft/art/work that feels apart from drawing or animating or whatever by itself.

"Writing" in the professional sphere has seen change into "narrative design" which I think is understood to be intertwined with game design, exerting directorial and/or feedback-looping influence on the project as a whole. There's an interesting thread there until you follow it to the end and find... "game design".

The process has a lot of flittering attention, hands moving from one thing to the other. Make an animation, write some new code to get it in, adjust some color gradients, move on to something else...

Only more metaphors come to mind. "Stop-motion animating", "film-making", "model-building". Maybe "Game-building". lol. Game-making. 🤨

Work words don't reinvent themselves though, really. "Game Developer" has already been canonized in the fashion that English describes things, with a kind of proletarian and straightforward stamp that I sort of respect.

And a game is software. This has been keeping me up at night recently. We can make tools to have their creation be accessible; we can inlay them with art and sound and ineffable magic, but to play them in 25 years, work - difficult software work (development) - must be done to be compatible with newer hardware and operating systems. Games are high-level and arcane creations that probably won't last well across centuries and especially not across major disruptions - across conquest or pestilence, war, famine, and death. You can never just pick one up like a half-rotten book; a computer (and thus the games inside of it) doesn't even need to be destroyed to be inoperable, it just needs to lose power, lose operational knowledge, lose access to parts and maintenance.

So the fanciful alternatives one could imagine lose something. That sense of fate, that curse of the computer - that even a layman on a laptop is a humble developer of sorts, supported by a dense web of recent history and continual maintenance.

And I guess that's the in and out of it.

Blog Reboot

2025-07-22T00:00:00Z

It's possible you read my previous stuff on my firstname lastname dot com. It was expensive and wordpressy, so I shut it down.

At time of writing I have all the old pages backed up, and I've ported a few to this place. I don't know if I'll port anything else.

I do hate my old writing. In weird ways, like I don't with my old art.

I don't want to be like that anymore: too academic and masked, like I'm writing to an audience I expect to eventually build.

I wanna yell into the void. have punctuation be optional, and have nobody ever read this.

i want to get mad...

post black bile.

and then reel it in...

and the only ones reading this will want to know what I am.

Backloggd (a terrible place) has been a nice outlet for short reviews, so I'll probably be putting that in a link row on the home page.

will I write eco-reviews again? probably not. I don't really like reviewing anymore, or videogames, or keeping up with a series for arbitrary reasons.

not liking videogames... that's something I could definitely vent about, and sketch up a lot of form-related talking-shop thoughts along the way.

I'd like to write from a developer's perspective more. Stephen Gillmurphy is an inspiration (also here): an accomplished developer that has a lot of writing about games- not too common! and if you are thinking this sounds like a unicorn, get this: his games are good!!

he's way smarter (and funnier) than most people (especially me) to boot.

I am not quite as young as I was, but I haven't finished a game in like 7 years. (pushing down the dark thoughts now).

It sucks, but... the years have been productive. I have more brewing in here now than that frustrated dreamer in 2020. I've developed artistic skills and preferences and wisdom on letting go and a cogent realization of precious time and how to be workmanlike sometimes and get the scene done and I've endured so much pain and frustration and dead ends and cycles and cycles of self-acceptance and self-doubt and remaking and rewriting until I shriveled up in a little ball all burned up and gasping for air and agonizing for it to be over but it's never over and I just had to stop worrying and I just can't stop going I guess so I did and a lot of those thoughts are going away (perhaps they never will) and I'm just doing boring old work now (and it's pretty good!) and that's pretty much Nirvana as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know. some fucking neurotic weirdo like me out there needs to hear what I've learned. I wish it was there for me, back then, that you could make Friends on the internet that can actually help each other out, but maybe this is the next best thing.

and I'm onto some really interesting things: colors, design language, writing. I just can't make myself talk about it until I feel like I've earned it by putting a bow on and walking away.

I realized on cohost I don't like posting at all... so I don't.

I never post about what i'm doing. and it's great. I put my nose to the grindstone and work, unless I don't feel like it.

nobody likes my images - because I do not post any. I do not worry about followers - as I have none. the game is not going to sell any copies or make any money and it doesn't need to.

I don't have to post "I just put the finishing touches on this character and this scene is looking great! (gif)."

"Here is [title], my [popular art]-inspired [genre]-game where you talk to a seriously depressed woman after an uncomfortably long hike. Wishlist now!!!"

"What is you favorite blue art?"

I don't have to post several times a week beg for fucking Wishlists like a worm or cut any tiktoks or think about any fucking Player when I'm making my game and anyone who finds it and gives a hoot can keep it to themselves deep down in their heart and send it into the world again when they die or if they tell other people it'll be ones who will actually like it.

true creative freedom. true light at the end of the tunnel.

lots of thoughts on this game... I write them down in my journals. it is really the worst possible thing to try making: a sad, structureless thing that came from a dark time. impossible to write and still wriggles under my keyboard and changes shape as I do art passes on finished scenes. when I'm feeling thin I really hate it.

just a lot of boring work left. enough work to be bored with it: to sigh when I think about it while doing dishes and grind my teeth at night and look for help everywhere else but the editor. (it's more zen than it sounds like, I promise).

still, I beat the drum most weekends. If I worked on it as much as I ran away from it, it would be done by now, but it's coming... perhaps in the winter.

Mini-cology Reviews: Northern Journey, Zelda, and Read Dead 2

2023-07-18T00:00:00Z

In which I briefly review a few games I can’t finish full blogs for.

Northern Journey

There is a game, a sort of quirky anomaly: an expressive 3d world steeped in local folklore, displaying an astounding subtle variety of plants and fauna across a every imaginable elevation in Norway. One with sophisticated outdoor level design that centers naturalistic landscapes tied sporadically together with ropes and bridges and ruins as a result of humanity’s attempts to live with it. One that… plays like a fantasy quake where you sling rocks at spiders for most of the runtime. This game is Northern Journey.

The eponymous Journey has a sublime logic to it: follow the water. From the sea, the player treks upwards through stumbling falls, midland bogs, and time-frozen mountaintop, delving increasingly abyssal lows to break up the pacing and finish it off. Its scope and understanding of water is uncanny, as if each level was framed around what the water was doing to begin with.

Percolated within are many insects. Is there a more perfect enemy in an FPS than insects? They have not only the variety and horde-like quantity required for the genre, but this portrait of their antagonism perfectly frames an ecological conflict as old as time, that of mammal against bug blown up to epic proportions. They are as natural an enemy as can be, perfectly acceptable to swat, and provide a honest resistance to the game’s environments that feels true to life’s experiences of trying to cross a bog or avoid ticks in the forest.

You can tell that Northern Journey‘s developer owes a lot of respect and care to the environment they live in (you would have to dearly love spiders to invent so many to torment the player with), and that the world lives alive in their mind and their culture. They have translated it so beautifully to a video game, and I could not recommend it more as one of the many finest I’ve ever played.

Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom

I don’t know what the Zelda games have in them to invoke such pathos from fans, to suggest there is more than there is in every entry. Is it just childhood fondness? The “Legend” in the title? The sales numbers and fathomless fandoms? Perhaps the most frustrating and relevant sentiment echoed endlessly across social media is their comparison to Ghibli movies, that they are in the same echelon of storytelling or environmentalism as Hayao Miyazaki’s works.

I understand that gamers often pin their dreams of prestiege to popular smokescreens, but Nintendo is no worthy comparison: the Switch Zeldas cannot convince me of any ecological depth (and we’ll leave the storytelling well alone). Seemingly no natural feature exists beyond the symbolic, a vague idea of Nature, each hill and canyon cursed to lie unrelated to neighboring elements. It is a given, of course, that the mountains and valleys are placed at random with no geological theme. Rivers start and end in clean stagnant lakes, never suggesting any feedback loop with the landscape, never spilling out to the surrounding sea, never giving rise to flora taking advantage of their networks of moisture. Forests can be found on the tops of hills of grass while dodging empty lakesides. It feels nonsensical to navigate with none of the rules of the natural world, frustrating on an instinctual and intellectual level.

For the specific sense of place in Ghibli’s Totoro or Kiki’s, where Japan and Sweden are painted respectfully, Zelda still insists on gesturing at a generic medieval-land with only its older incarnations as a reference: a land of green grass, brown mountains, and forests dominated by cute round apple trees.

If it sounds like a child’s painting, then am I taking it too seriously? This is the series with the Water and the Lava levels on different corners of the map. I was expressing my frustration with the world to my partner and they said “Isn’t this from the people who made Mario?” Point taken. The world is “toyetic”, if artfully wrought. A conifer is a conifer and it means we’re somewhere cold. The colors are pretty nice I suppose.

So I diminished my expectations and re-entered. What is this game? It didn’t look right on my TV, stretched blurry and fitful across the screen like butter scraped over too much bread and whatnot. A TV is for movies and TV shows, where you spend a few hours paying attention. For Zelda, this feels wrong. This is a game where you wander a few minutes and find a bite-sized activity to do, bread-crumbed until the credits roll. The world is shaped around this, and I could feel my very perspective conflict with the game’s architecture, straining to squeeze my relaxed horse-riding into a loop of 20-minute activities. Play me in handheld mode, it whispers. Just a bit every day, a shrine or a cave. Let the crying princess guide you, isn’t she nice?

A real landscapes whispers to me when I walk it, giving as much to me as the attention I give it, teaching me something or just giving me space. Zelda just takes and takes and comforts and shines, but the illusion is too easily broken.

Red Dead Redemption 2

I was one day researching the Greater Prairie Chicken, as I often do, hoping to finally see one for myself. Usually active in breeding displays from March to April in a specific region of the Great Plains, I had missed this year’s easiest opportunity and wondered just where exactly they could be found otherwise. To my surprise, many Red Dead fans were asking the same question.

If there’s a Greater Prairie Chicken in your game, I’m going to buy it. This policy has been pushed to its limits (on the very first game) with Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that opens with nothing dramatic happening for 10 hours to test if you have the patience- the maturity- to sip it like a fine wine. For this patience? A reward of subtle notes to grace the palette: shooting 5 wolves with a shotgun on top of a mountain for story reasons, rescuing a man from an attacking cougar twice in the same spot in the same hour, and a loony- tunes-esque amount of tumbling and grunting whenever Arthur tries to walk a 45 degree slope. Subtle flavors are an acquired taste, of course.

In all seriousness, the game commits reasonably well to a visual naturalism even as I loathe the sluggishness of its kineticism. The awkwardly small game world shimmers with surprising gravitas under the sophisticated atmospheric effects. The plants are generally where they should be, full of surprises and variation, but there’s something about the grasses (of which there are delightfully many) that are just the right shade of green to sell a regular mundanity, set up to be shattered into genuine splendor by catching a sunset in the right spot. All the subtleties and unexpected contrasts of realism are pulled off.

Why is the “Dakota River” like 30 feet wide? Why did they rename every real life location to some ridiculous equivalent? Why is the game so dreadfully slow about eye-rolling tropes and pointless skirmishes? If you ask me, it’s just a stupid Rockstar game that can’t really sell something worthy of real landscapes, of fine-grained symbols, for one reason or another. But any game where I can see a bison, optionally hunt a bit of waterfowl, and identify a lot of plants on my (bad) knowledge of western flora is a rare wonder. At least worth poking away at.

(Author's note: I did eventually go back to RDR2 and find the prairie chickens. I was disappointed to find them just in the starting area, and no tin the plains. The bison are nice. The plains are smaller than my hometown.)

Ecology Review: Elden Ring

2022-08-26T00:00:00Z

Coming off my Halo: Infinite review (where I applied a serious eco-critical lens^[1] to a big game because I thought it would be funny), I’ve now done the same for Elden Ring, which has proven more difficult to talk about cohesively. Its merits go a lot further in regards to complex symbolism and literary ambition (even in world construction and micro-biomes), but it fails to enliven its ecology in similar ways that most videogames fall prey to.

So what is it saying about the natural world? Can its failures be pinned on the RPG genre? Are there any dense forests that take more than a minute to walk through? Let’s find out together.

Ecological Conflict

In an interview with Edge magazine (##367), director Miyazaki is asked about the Erdtree and then says the most enticing stuff I’ve ever read from him (paraphrased lightly):

“The tree is something that burns an image into your mind, but it also stands out as something that represents those rules and an order of the world we talked about earlier. What can represent these rules and order but also not be absolute?

That was the question that ran through my mind when I created this image. The tree is something that’s alive, something that grew, it’s something that will eventually wither and die.”

This is a dramatic hint to the core of the game, come a year before it was even released. He goes on a bit more to describe the tree (excitedly!) as representative, the perfect metaphor for ebb and flow of powers that eventually become replaced. This story is one that Fromsoft indulges in across their works, and this promise of an age and its tree is delivered on most strongly of what the game can give you.

But beyond the Erdtree as a uniting visual metaphor, Elden Ring is vibrant with the vitality of succession, where all forms of power are married with symbols of organic growth, clambering over the past and recycling it into the future. Cast in a light where the lands between are a well of abstract nutrition – of mystic energies, of faithful servants, of land and waters – figures representing flowers, tree roots, lions, dragons, and the uniquely human vie for success, breaking down the land for consumption with rot and claw and steel. The capture and recapture of energy is ecology in abstract, and Elden Ring dwells on the human drama of these forces – natural process excessively warped by powerful figures, here cast into the mythological clash of deities and the grim humanity that writhes under these imposed systems.

This theme is elevated by the narrative thread detailing the most powerful beings in the game’s setting: the Outer Gods. Where humans and the deific among them warp the processes of succession for their fleeting goals, they merely follow pressures of existing forces at work on the Lands Between, older and more abstract than human lives.

Despite the name, they strike me less as “Gods” and more as dense ideas, each a cluster of symbols and metaphors that are difficult to collectively label. “God” does happen to be a noun reserved for the one who allies with a force to change the world, Queen Marika, while the Outer Gods’ nature, by contrast, invokes unconscious competition and unknowability – both like and unlike competing organisms or colliding fundamental forces in accordance to their literary purpose. They represent anything from cathartic rejection, faint hope, comic cynicism, and obviously more than enough wry allegory to real manipulative systems, religious or otherwise.

Just as gravity cannot be seen but by the tumbling of rocks and rivers, the Outer Gods are never seen directly, but work through beings in emergent patterns. The Lord of Blood and the Elden Beast are envoys, the Fire Giant a host, each blessed with the charge of enacting their power and not commanding it, as if all the trees and mushrooms of our world would be driven to grow by the whispering of distant celestial bodies, by collective pain or an emergent didact. In the language of alchemy (a fascination of the game larger than I can fit here), the “Gods” are often tied with fire, the transforming force of alchemy – black flame, frenzied flame, old flames and cold flames – natural successive forces stymied out of the world by the clinical Queen Marika. Even rot spreads in brilliant orange bursts of Aeonian scarlet bloom, and by this metaphor alone does the cold light of the moon offer a tempting alternative; a fireless path beyond the fertile land, saved from total darkness by the guidance of a luminous body^[2].

But where much more can be said of the forces interwoven into the fabric of the game^[3], we can circle back to the fundamental premise spoken to by Miyazaki. Elden Ring is fascinated, centrally so, in depicting the Lands Between and its inhabitants as a space of succession, where orders past and postulated are symbolized by organic beings – dragons and trees and humans and demigods – but which all come to an end by the hands of a successor. This age is concluded by our fated tarnished to an order particular: something rational, defiled, chaotic, novel, or quietly hopeful. Gone are the figurative binaries of the perpetuated system against desperate unknowability – the anxious dichotomy of Souls games past – Elden Ring knows that orders cannot be extended forever, that climax forests will eventually be replaced by encroaching deserts or groaning glaciers, and indulges fruitfully, if broadly, instead with the flavors of diverse futures ending in blank pages.

I’ve been fixated since release trying to understand a main theme of the game, like it was missing a central thread as in Sekiro. While obvious systemic issues are drawn up early on, the details burrow and twist into nowhere, confusing the meanings and asking questions to which no answer is given wholly or dramatically. Yet for all the puzzling dead ends, the game towers less as a story than a sculpture, something to be turned and studied, for light to dapple and illuminate a different detail at a different time. Stepping back, all the knotted shapes and sinuous curves of characters and places and monsters and prose build and snap together to invoke a mythical place beset by perpetual change. What better way is there to build this theme of successive orders than to simply catch the player inside one and let them try to see it? To blaze a trail through wriggling drama and see what becomes of the aptly named Lands Between, an unwitting participant in ecology with exaggerated agency.

Guided by Grace ((RPG Tropes))

Coming back down to earth, Elden Ring is also a playable game, which means the majority of moment-to-moment interpretation requires a different lens for analysis than literary theming. The problem is, however, that the DNA of previous Souls games and their developers have warped the shape of the game before it was even conceived. To keep myself from talking about the RPG genre as a whole (a label gesturing to a legacy of inherited tropes from tabletop games and genre fantasy) I’m just going to focus on the how these imported mechanics cast relations with the (digital) natural world.

While leaving to others a more thorough analysis of videogame conventions and their problems, I think comical objectivity may be of use to get a basic ecological angle. Consider these points as if we’ve never seen a game before: Elden Ring has chosen to let the player inhabit a singular body from an immersive perspective. It has little interest in presenting a realistically-proportioned region, but a reasonable facsimile with encounters and monsters as primary inhabitants. The procedural premise is a human combating their way through fields and castles and grabbing everything up. We’re already arriving at some pretty spicy stuff, right?

That humans made a game like this can’t wholly be taken for granted. The basic perspective is bounding and solid, commendable even; we aren’t playing as trees, crabs, or inseparably entangled networks of forest, but a member of our own species, where we can can run and roam around like the animals we are. We’d like to explore a whole region with this exciting perspective, but that isn’t possible to make, so shrinking it down is reasonable enough. Sprinkle this space with semi-historical visual shorthands and some resonant symbolic groundwork and you’ve got yourself a story.

No, the more problematic premise worth talking about is accumulation and combat. They’re probably the most essential RPG tropes – possibly unquestioned at the outset of this game’s development – and where I, for example, can temper or control their importance when I run a game at the table with my friends, Elden Ring has a lot to lean on from recent history and code repositories that make the form harder to break out of.

So, accumulation first. The desire for collecting stuff is to some degree a basic quirk for humans, cheekily catered to by all sorts of activities, and in Elden Ring, a player collects overwhelmingly numerous trinkets and currencies, plucked from merchants and castles and other enemies over the course of their journey. The variety of collectible things is an understandable device; both a concession to diverse player interests and an avenue for artifacts laden with prose and disparate storytelling. The system, though, bothers me, as the structure of economy doesn’t at all lend itself to the feeling of mythic fantasy, encouraging bizarre and exploitative behaviors from players as they seek to prepare themselves for opposition. Plants become quickly reduced to items, players plow through herds of sheep for crafting materials, and the structure of inventory commodifies all that can be gathered, sapping weight and importance from the character and the world.

Importing RPG economy wholesale generates myriad contradictions. Why can’t hunting animals provide dozens of bones instead of one or two? (They’ll be killing until they get 20 bones anyway.) Why does the game have a storage box when you can comfortably carry anything you desire? What do runes feel like and should I be taking them seriously? Is the cool factor of a hundred weapons worth it when constantly acquiring them erases their importance?

Despite its dignity, Elden Ring‘s nougat-y videogame core seems too easy to be healthy, conjuring silent questions around the unfortunate feeling that the human aspects of encumbrance, rarity, and mystic energy bear no visceral representations beyond mere number – the icons in a ubiquitous list. I think existentially I have to write in sympathy for wanting to make games about getting stuff, but beyond satisfying this basic instinct, all the swords and sorceries your character can hold combine to weaken sublimity instead of strengthening it, occasionally encouraging exploitation.

By comparison, every imported trope about fighting things is mutated with an odd deftness (I dare say). With the exceptions of “farming” crafting supplies or runes for empowerment, violence for accumulation’s sake is addressed with criticality or systemic judgement in-text, leaving the remainder of combat reading… almost primal.

Now to get this concept across, imagine your average Elden Ring encounter. You’ll wander on your horse into a territory where a beast or a soldier dwells and then it snaps at you. You’ll either fight back or run away, but ultimately progress onto somewhere else where most beings react the same way. From a bear in the woods to a sorceress in her academy, the animal nature of “contest against other being and get a benefit” lives at the core loop, at really the core of every game with violence in it, the difference to reality being that you murder your opponents with a giant sword and get a couple runes for your trouble. This fantasy violence feels like only an elevated version of universal animal behavior – something natural enough for an animal to create. From lizards tackling each other to kangaroo fights, territorial combat is rarely lethal in the animal kingdom and a defining dramatic aspect of organic existence, and this “lethality” is largely softened by nearly all foes and the player respawning all the time. Elden Ring‘s mythological death systems enunciate this, with the debatable immortality of every living thing framing even combat to the death with a star-conquering demigod as no more than a grand butting of horns.

So while most of the combat can be read in this lens, the task of checking its ‘eco-vibe’ or general meaning is a challenge of dissecting power dynamics, notably where there are humans involved. I think Elden Ring does this fantastically, as broad narrative threads are devoted to conquered demihumans and dignified beings of all sorts of shape.

Conquest is a central fascination of Elden Ring – but do not mistake this fascination with love. Tarnished motivations flit between it and subjective justice, depending entirely on the player’s temptation and interpretations of the game’s hammy invitations for lordship bought by “warrior blood”. Even as the Tarnished enters the stage, history is built from ancient orders and species fought to near-extinction by the victorious Golden Order, and from the Giants to the Misbegotten or the much- characterized Omen, the game holds the most sympathy for otherized creatures beset by the prejudice of human supremacy, charged furthermore with a Catholic-coded religion to make excuses for itself in a way that hews close to existing ideology. While the sympathy is mostly reserved for animals with humani traits, they make for dramatic story-telling figures to represent non-human forces larger than themselves, and I think the game paints wisely in displaying the cruelty and stagnation of orders bought with blood.

And when it comes to non-human characters, I’ll bring up the word that matters most in these eco-reviews: dignity. Though I would like to see plenty more games experiment with non- player entities having agency over their destinies, the majority of tree spirits and giant lobsters and beast-men and bats in Elden Ring‘s many corners simply attend to their own business without asking for permission or offering reward. They roam and live for themselves. They sprout up wherever seems most likely. And when they aren’t detailed, heroic figures with narrative import, they still exist as part of the cultural and ecological fabric of the world that Fromsoft thought obvious to include, and I find that really praise-worthy.

So at the end of the day, the specific shape of a Fromsoft game is something I’d like to see changed. Their dungeon- crawling mode feels like a limiting format for everything they’re interested in, and the imperial pleasures of collection that make it popular seem almost like an afterthought to what they’re really trying to convey.

But in a world with games full of cops and soldiers and settlers and supermen? Fromsoft has a bright enough soul to avoid getting lost in their weakest imported tropes. I even have faith they might break their own mold someday.

Attention to Detail

Finally, I’d like to talk about the everything else in a somewhat unorganized section. I previously mentioned that the world is a shrunk-down version of a single region; so while initially it feels massive, tumbling further that you could imagine into the hundred hour mark of a first experience, it eventually feels disappointingly small on successive plays^[5]. Once the mind has wrapped around it, you might start to question whether the shrinking down was really worth it, and this unfortunately leads to similar problems and missed opportunities as are present in most other open-world games – although there is plenty to praise as well.

Regrettably, most of the criticisms levied at the lack of naturalism in Halo: Infinite can be levied here to some degree – although each are tempered somewhat by finesse. The forests are disappointingly small and sparse, if deliciously dense and dark when available. Cliffs are ubiquitous and uninformed by geological processes, if shapely and clever for dividing well-designed gameplay regions. The lack of moving water or deeper lakes sticks out as a sore spot when aquatic plants so beautifully buffet their edges and shallow interiors^[6]. In some ways, it’s actually worse than the other game, and I’m shocked that rivers are relegated only to under-ground ant- tunnels (as beautiful as they are).

The finity and direction of the game is well-supported – even comfortably gamey – but very little promise of a romantic landscape the game is clearly inspired by shines through here, where I could imagine a knight trawling through seemingly endless forests or desert battlegrounds. And ask yourself seriously: wouldn’t you like to play a game where a forest takes more than thirty seconds to ride through?

All the vitality of a landscape in scale is lost as a concession for tightness in a game distinguishable by fluidity. The space is really a tenth of what it could fill in-between dungeons – a landscape unfilled by unique “content” but by the same forbs, animals, and trees decorating a landscape shaped by erosion and rivers – and I’d just kill for this studio to commit to the negative space and a certain kind of trust in the players to pull that idea off.

Yet for the lingering disappointment in the form of the world, the commitment to depth does a lot to make up for it, even expanding my imagination for what could have been possible. Each region invokes a rich palette and playfully straightforward ecological motif, let loose and vivid across a diverse arrangement of lighting conditions and weather patterns (you might discover the rain dampening your fire spells or wetter enemies as vulnerable to lightning, revealing a step-up in their commitment). Every corner has a different strength; the mountaintops and their scale and sparseness, Liurnia’s immensity and fantastic weather, or the Weeping Peninsula’s forest-cover and flattened beaches. I could write a blog just about the Haligtree! – but suffice it to say this mecca for the dispossessed marries its tender intentions with the strongest relationship between architecture and wildlife.

And on the whole, the wildlife is beyond compare. Plants and fungi decorate Elden Ring‘s every field, from varying grasses to shrubs to veritable hills of fruiting toxic mushrooms. The animals – I can barely express my delight at the animals on display: goats, bats, wolves, and fox-squirrels? Lobsters and crabs and giants and hounds? Eagles perched across every high cliff? I have a personal endless appetite for pushing those boundaries – feeding behaviors or mating or chilling or playing would be lovely to see in the animals throughout the world – but they run away well enough, and their given breadth and quality more than meets the bar. It’s stimulating, magical even, what a game can impress so filled to the brim with life, where every color of tree is a riff on some species and every magical herb has a lovingly rendered portrait.

If anything, my greatest criticism of Elden Ring‘s world pertains to that other beast, the humans, whose influence seems inescapable, but oddly contained.

If you regarded humans in Elden Ring through only what you see in the game, they would seem oddly un-animal and divorced from the world. Yes, the castles of Elden Ring are significant landmarks, and the trade routes or mercenary camps connecting them permeate the world with human presence, but the barriers between these unnaturally lonely cities are sharp, with very few villages and a startling lack of agriculture to blend the pinnacles of human density with the wilder un- populated regions. All this gives the impression that they live locked up in their cities, venturing out only to conquer or when driven as outcasts.

It’s not beyond me that this may be read thematically – as the older orders are described quite clearly to have reverence for the blending of animal forms and more intimate relations with the lands and the stars – but the end result feels like negligence, or at least a lack of interest in population topology, which casts an unfortunate nature/culture distinction on a mythology where these concepts are otherwise blended quite literally. With naught but some roaming sheep to suggest a relationship between humans and the land, the true sense of the population of the Lands Between is vague and obscured, suggested only through the sparingly few shacks and city homes that we can actually see. This would be an unrewarding kingdom for demigods to clash over (unless they really enjoyed the scenery and nothing else), and that really is a pity.

Still, the humans you might meet are excellent figures representing much more than themselves, to their benefit. Gatekeeper Gostoc (who opens the gate at Stormveil Castle) is a welcome peasant representative, whom I continually let steal my runes as recompense for his stomping display after defeating Godrick, espousing his disgust for the dead petty tyrant. Ranni, a demigod who I suspect misunderstood the lessons she was meant to learn, locks herself up in heady ideals away from the rest of the world and its people and life – a fitting behavior for one who will readily abandon it for the stars.

And then there’s Millicent, a favorite of mine, whose journey to either bloom and perpetuate the scarlet rot or die with dignity as a human reveals one of the deepest hidden storylines that From has ever spun – a gripping tale of rampant ecology, continual rebirth, unwanted followers, blue- garbed warriors, and ancient fairies. All centered around Malenia’s scarlet rot and her tragic blessing that has encompassed swathes of the world, Millicent’s role can be read more un-literally than any other sidequest in the game, bringing the best that From has to offer into one wild and beautiful thread.

At the end of the day there’s too many details to list. Too much stuff to account for. The depth of the fog on Divine Towers, the puffy grasses by minor Erdtrees, the roiling Limgrave clouds that look like an animated painting – Siofra River’s eerie chorals, the ant tunnels, where the desert meets the sea, the Altus forest, the mountiantops, the red trees in Farum Azula! These things all deserve their meanings divulged, their efforts praised, and their shortcomings discussed, but I suppose I have to trust the other millions of people who played this game. Suffice it to say the world is gamey, but earnest.

Conclusion

When I started the Eco-Review for Halo: Infinite, it was really meant to be a joke, something cheeky for the moss lovers and geologists. But the more I dove into it, the more I found truly lacking, and this concept consumed me for Elden Ring. There’s a vitality that’s missing from games that attempt to make worlds. People know they want it – they’ll say they don’t feel alive, that they want bigger worlds, but not the dreaded “copy-pasted content”. If only they had words for what that could possibly be!

Elden Ring has this sense of vitality – just a bit! – and it goes a very long way. I love this game- and it’s not (just) that I was excited for it, that it exceeded expectations, and that it has a more plants and animals than you can wade a Tarnished through, but that it kept me thinking for months on end about its succession of civilizations, its seemingly industry-standard shortcomings, and all the care and thought yet put into every symbol, model, texture, and cliff. It doesn’t get lost in the utility of a landscape, but pays attention to what a landscape means and the forces at work within them, perhaps more than what they actually are; so as much as an RPG world and occasionally a painting as it looks, it also breathes, saying more without its item descriptions than I think any game they’ve previously made.

Elden Ring is big, perhaps deserving more depth than my blog post can really give. Maybe I’ve done it justice – just sort of splurging and remixing out my thoughts over half a year – but for as cynical as I can feel about the obligatory attitude other studios have for ecology, I feel this one was well worth the time, and I hope to inspire whoever reads this to take that stuff seriously.

Until next time, touch grace.

Footnotes

1 What is meaningful ecology: Do plants grow sensically and according to their nature? (if not, why?) Are beings seemingly alive, more than set dressing? Are they neglected? Does the game come across as human-supremacist, exploitative, or unempathetic to non-humans? Is it gross or cynical? Do its meanings feel like an accident?↩

2 More on the outer gods: There’s this great, brief video by Zionstorm that playfully compares all the outer gods to mushrooms, doing a great job divulging some thoughts I had about the ecology of it all.

3 The lunar journey: I think the Ranni ending is exactly as she sells it: something alien and new, a faint hope worth the price of entry. It’s not salvation, but the bargain of a cold witch to voyage the stars and leave behind the world, at best a gentle abandonment of humanity. I prefer the earth, but I can see how many hearts were stolen by this vision.

4 A secret footnote from the RPG section that I deleted the call for: Somewhere out there I saw a reddit post about a user asking how to build their character better after speccing heavily into intelligence, thinking it would open more conversation options with NPCs. This is funny, but also interesting food for thought about how for-granted we take mechanic tropes that could be leveraged for a lot more (or maybe re-named or better elaborated). There are dozens of things you could affect when increasing your ‘Arcane’, but it just makes blood do more damage.

5 Successive plays: The game does not particularly owe offering anything on a successive playthrough. As ever, intimacy of getting to know something takes away the mystique, which the game loves most and stands to lose.

6 Shallow waters: Elden Ring‘s sister-game Sekiro featured an adventurous swimming mechanic, allowing a lake and several contained ponds to be explorable. While the co- development may have impeded its implementation by differing design goals, I speculate the ocean was the biggest hurdle, where swimming out to it may have required odd solutions to keep the character in-bounds, or maybe swimming away would just draw attention to the game’s oddly small boundaries. Maye it’s just hard to make the character look good in the crashing waves, or that they’d sink in their armor, or that… (you get the point)

Ecology Review: Halo Infinite

2021-12-13T00:00:00Z

After many years, a new installation of Halo has come upon the world, drawing in a high level of my curiosity for reasons I do not yet understand. As a game where the multiplayer and the shooter-ing are oft-examined, I and probably many other gamers have been waiting with bated breath for the answer to only one question, all this time, as it impended: how would 343 craft Halo’s classic boreal ecosystems using contemporary quality standards and rendering techniques?

There will not be spoilers of any kind in this review, but I have elected to undertake this assignment extremely seriously and with a fresh set of high standards, resulting in an exhaustive examination of the game’s entire map to ruin both mine and your own enjoyment of its painfully well-rendered environments. Let’s get at it.

Part 1: The Trees

While long-time game ecology enjoyers may have picked up early warning signs for this feature back in the 2020 demo, I came into Infinite with a fresh and ready palate for towering woody plants, the impressions of which are first and foremost when you meet Zeta Halo’s vocabulary of non-human life.

As a fan favorite and much-beloved feature of natural environments, I expected a great deal of care in the placement of forests, but I must say that I came away disappointed! In contrast with the ancient forests native to the watersheds 343 calls home, the distribution of trees in Infinite seems to be largely random, belying either a lack of knowledge or simply commitment for simulating or set-piecing a simulacrum of forest succession.

Forests are the result of generations of microbes and lichens and eventually grasses working in tandem with animals and fungi to thrive, decay, and in so doing, build layers of soil that bury scapes of bare rock under a deep layer of hummus – the rich soils nutritious enough and moist enough to support the myriad beings of a mature ecosystem. This usually happens in waves, bathing landscapes in grasslands that build into forests – wide and deep and dense. Furthermore, the plants in a forest have complex relationships with each other, either via literally supporting each other with fungi-facilitated nutrient exchanges or with the cascading effects of pheromone exchanges and pollen on the wind.

At the very least, tall trees will block sunlight for younger trees (often the offspring of their own fallen pine cones), causing them them to grow slowly until the oldest generation eventually dies: trees in open sunlight tend to get bushy and wide, while those forced to grow slowly and bide their time grow taller as they grow older in order to compete for sunlight. This also creates the conditions necessary for the niches that result in diverse speciation. (Fun fact: in the Sequoia forests of California, tree species that are common elsewhere can be found growing up to 30 meters higher than normal due to competition with neighboring redwoods! This is also one of many reasons why giant tree species don’t reach their legendary heights in foreign habitats.)

The team at 343 seemed to understand that they should throw in a few smaller trees next to the big ones, but if the trees as tall and impressive as Infinite’s grew naturally, they would need a great deal of time and neighboring trees to do so, resulting in something significantly denser – perhaps leaving few patches of open grass at all in the absence of grazing animals (we will get to that later). The ring is, apparently, about 100 thousand years old, which is more than enough time for countless successions of old growth to peak and wane continuously.

As it stands, adult trees are clumped together at arbitrary densities – often thrown in three to five at a time or in randomly denser pockets, usually surrounding the presumably recent installations of Banished infrastructure in dubious fashion. There are indications of landslides or washed-away soil that trees might not find appealing, but they don’t always particularly indicate that a forest once stood there or that a water source exists at the bottom. In more open fields, trees can sometimes be found younger and bushier, but rarely in notable proximity to their parents. I just can’t help but ponder all the veritable swathes of sunlight-kissed soil simply waiting to for a pine cone to grace them.

Overall, the impression isn’t extremely dire; there are plenty of times where the curtains of trees form pleasant silhouettes that frame the set-pieces well. That said – while I would like to see a full realization of trees and their relationships in just about any game I play – it’s the sparseness and largely monocultural speciation that distracts me the most, given the time this ring has been sitting in space undisturbed. There are plenty of techniques for rendering an incredible number of trees, but Infinite just doesn’t seem interested in more than a minimal selection – something especially apparent from any high vantage-point looking down.

There is some unspoken understanding that a thorough simulation of ecological succession isn’t on the menu for a shooter game although Far Cry 5 seems to think so, but I would expect a lot more than this from any AAA game set entirely within a forested eco-region. If the ring is being maintained this way, it would at least be interesting to see sentinels attending to forestry.

Part 2: The Meadows

Between the intermittent clustering of suspiciously towering trees, swathes of low-laying foliage sway in copious, curious beauty. I think it’s apt to call them meadows because the intermittent scatterings of grass are too static and sporadically tree-pocketed to be considered prairies – despite a few nice, sizeable fields – and their relation with the trees or waters seems totally non-existent. However, while the height and profile of the grass is very stock (the kind of Videogame Grass that looks like a lawn grew out), the selection of herbaceous plants is overall quite commendable, rendering a good diversity of flowering things that shift to shorter clovers and ferns in proximity to trees. Mushrooms can even be found near dead logs, and there are several species of alien-looking plants to spice things up.

On the technical side, one particular compliment I can make is that the yellow flowers leave an equivalent yellow splotch on the landscape texture, representing their color at a distance when the mesh fades out. While it isn’t present for every flower, it makes the LOD transition to nothingness of the brightest ones relatively less noticeable. However, there is a general problem where the large rocks burgeoning from the meadows that build into cliffs are simply covered with a green texture and no semblance of grass at all, contrasting roughly with the landscapes they pair with. This is probably due to the landscape material being solely responsible for populating the terrain with flora – something that can’t account for static meshes (evident by grass clipping into rocks) – but there are solutions to this that I wish the studio could have implemented.

Overall, it’s standing in a meadow and breathing in the wind where the game’s natural world can really look its best. While so much open space doesn’t really make sense for the reasons elaborated above, you can elect not to think too hard about where the shrubs are and earn a genuinely nice display.

Part 3: The Topology

When it comes to landscaping, plants on their own can have a significant effect on the make-up and ecology of an environment, but there is an even tighter relationship between the lithosphere and the hydrosphere when it comes to the shape of a place. This is where the artificial origins of the ring become most relevant, and (sometimes), provides an array of imaginable answers to what would normally be quirks in the terrain’s design.

Before we dive in, one feature I quite like is that the day/night cycle plays light off of the other side of the ring, rotating in space. It’s something I always enjoyed watching at night, and the spin of the ring also explains the shortness of cycle, which works in clever harmony to be comfortable with open-world gameplay.

On its own, water is of primary importance to the history of a place, as it is both essentially the base determiner for what kinds of life a landscape can support and the most powerful force of erosion that a can meet it. The lack of ready water at higher elevations (thanks to gravity) requires plant life to either be capable of reaching deep to draw it up or need little to begin with. As it trickles and builds into creeks and streams, tumbling further down into rivers or occasional lakes, shrubs and trees begin to crowd around them, more easily able to survive with pools of water and moist soil ripe for making a home near. This flow carves through soils and wears away rocks, creating hills and valleys – tracing their lowest points.

All of that history in relation to the land is ignored in Halo Infinite. Almost none of the water sources display a significant source of plants nearby them, where open soil is directly available. Furthermore, sources of water are actually quite rare; lakes and oceans decorate the opposing interior of the ring, but even the wider basins in the playable map never pool deeper than a few inches. The results are somewhat disappointing; much of the stagnant water looks more like the flash result of recent rainfall than a permanent feature of the environment, and there are hardly ever any plants to take advantage of the moisture. I have to wonder if weather was a planned feature that had to be cut – something I can’t blame them for when the game had a difficult time getting shipped – as a lot of the water (and mud) could be explained by a dynamic phenomena where they maybe come and go.

The most impressive area I could find was a sort of bog, which showcases a deliciously thick smatterings of aquatic plants and frothy algae, complete with buzzing things and fireflies in the night; surrounded by trees and interesting plants, it made me wonder by who and when it was made, as the care put into it seemed to outmatch the neighboring areas. It is, of course, fed by a 10-foot wide waterfall sourced from a small and isolated bog high above it, ultimately kneecapping the high it delivered.

When it comes to flowing water, there are multiple streams – artfully placed – that have little relation to the heights of the land that they run through. They call to mind, however, how the forerunners might attempt to maintain water cycle; heads poke out from scattered sources on high-up mountainsides, where I would chase them down to the shattered edges and watch them topple into nothingness – into atmosphere? An inclusion of stream-side plants would be appreciated, but the banks are often rocky enough (if somewhat rough-looking) to excuse their absence – which is more than I can say about the ponds.

Overall, the effects can make up for the nonsensical placements – as the sun sets and rises, mist coils up from naked water, presumably feeding the blankets of fog that nestle between the trees and rocks for artful framing. These transitory periods – an actual natural dynamic instead of just a prop – were often the most exciting things to witness in the game, and I have to commend the thought put into this effect.

But the mountains they blanket – oh, the mountains! Never have I taken those things for granted – native as I am to the flatter part of the States – but Halo Infinite struggles to impress me, bashing rock upon giant rock into towering cliffs and peak-like shapes that seem to work best only well into the distance.

With the mountains, most of all, the artificial structure of the ring should be able to explain nonsensical (although artful) shapes, but instead of magnificent towers of metamorphic rock – craggy and naked and raw from the shattering of the ring – the myriad piles of stone feel often dull and difficult to look at, something especially egregious when shoving your face into them as you’re grappling up a cliff.

At their best, the peaks or shelves catch sunlight perfectly in the distance, or stand tall and dark as the light falls behind them, or tumble into shattered stones spilling out onto a valley. Erosion too can sometimes be apparent, with evidence of sedimentation littering various slopes or the messy results of landslides.

Given a hundred thousand years have passed since the ring’s inception (a hilariously long time for the forests, but ultimately very short in geological terms), I can’t have expected much to change in terms of hydro erosion – but with neither a sound geological basis (or pretense of one) for their existence or the succession of lichens and forests from the ecosystem that’s lived here this whole time, there isn’t really much to hold visual interest upon closer inspection. As mentioned above, the unconvincing textures of dirt or grass only contrast with the terrain they build out of.

Giant, lumpy, un-geological cliffs are no stranger to video games (and I have read many a geologist lament this fact from game to game) but Infinite’s plethora of bare rock still disappoints me, and can often be the weakest-looking part of the game. In contrast with the beautiful hexagonal pillars – kissed brilliantly by the sunlight and reflections of the sky – the experience of grappling up stone can be both frustrating and occasionally ugly. At their worst, they highlight the limitations of dynamic lighting (a paradox I hold deep sympathy for), never looking quite dark enough in shadow in a way that lowers the overall contrast. But beyond being difficult to navigate, I would say that at their worst, too many areas can struggle to look like a natural formation at all, invoking a kit- bash dull-grey rock palette in the hands of developers rather than a mythical creation process from eons ago.

The overall effect isn’t terrible, but it is a unique intersection of the game’s technological weaknesses (and production workflows for games in general) playing poorly with the hyper- fidelity of the foliage or metallic structures. The final component of the topology, however, is something I do think is a bold visual design: the ubiquitous hexagonal structures that make up the literal foundation underneath all the stone. For something that drew actual criticism in the 2020 showing, they have made quite the glow-up, showcasing a real committal to giving the landscape a unique and alien identity. I noticed late into the game that geology itself is in relation these pillars somehow, apparent where the crust is cracked at the seams – giving the impression of some abstract tiling that conjures to mind unknown rules for how the ring operates or how it was built.

In the end, the geology and the waters – two inseparable forces that play off one another in planetary formation – are here both visually disappointing and entirely unrelated, which may upset geologists or the rare few people that care about their opinions. If the layout of these features were more naturalistic, 343 may have had more to work with in terms of visual interest, but the literal silhouettes and metallic underpinnings of the terrain are so unique that I think the mistakes were made up for by the effect.

Part 5: The Moving Things

Last – and, unfortunately, certainly least – we have the animal inhabitants of the ring that exclude the excruciatingly attended-to military combatants. I needn’t give an introduction to animals, as the behaviors and emergence of our kin is already obvious to humans, but one could imagine the complexity a game could lean into if it represented their needs and interests.

Of all the things I love and yearn for in games, animals and non-enemy AI are the dearest, so I hoped to see at least some of these things. For a moment – too brief – Infinite gets really close to impressing me: the landscapes are populated with intermittent flocks of birds, bright and colorful, or odd, blue little burrowing gophers. The lack of committal becomes really apparent within several hours, however, collapsing the fantasy more than anything else that this is a world interested in representing an alien environment.

I first met these things with genuine wonder and curiosity – taking my time to observe where I could find them and what they could do, but the mere handful of species becomes quickly repetitive and unnatural even without paying attention to them; each group spawns as a flock, disperses when you get close, and disappears. Needless to say, they do not search for food, interact with each other, sleep, or even persist for more than a minute. The impression can be good from a distance, where birds flock similarly with much less attention being drawn to them, but relegating the opportunity to showcase wildlife to mere ambience in a series reputed for its excellent AI – it feels like a missed opportunity. After caving into the temptation to shoot a gopher some hours in, I found that they merely disappear with a wet particle effect, cementing their intangibility in a way I found actually sad.

Even the Premium creatures – the ones that we want to end the behaviors of – offer different disappointments. The Banished patrols are basic, often mere meters long (and never over distances between outposts or camps), and many of them don’t move at all when you aren’t shooting at them. Grunts will sleep like they did in 2001, and nobody else seems to have any better ideas, so they just stand around. In combat, I can admire their diverse tactics and intelligence on the grounds that I usually would, but there are still limitations in where the scope of this game exceeds the old ones: if you shoot from afar, the smaller species will just stand and shoot back while the bigger ones take cover, sitting in exactly one place until they feel threatened to move a few feet. Rarely if you are on a difficult feature does the AI attempt to flank you or have interesting ways of countering it, and you can tell where the nav-mesh is denser and where it may not exist at all.

The marines? They are solid, but uninteresting, and struggle with the terrain in understandable but fix-able ways. The first ones I found were unable to follow me out of an area I shortly led them to, making a sorry send-off to my initially warm first- impression.

And yes, I liked all of these things at first; I’m sure many people feel the same way. My first reaction when I see creatures in games is genuine and novel, like a human instinct. It’s the curiosity of seeing something intelligent and wondering what it will do, a bandaid to the endless isolation games often drown in, or simply a creature you want to see live when so many are created just to die.

I can sit here and joke about the lack of ecological succession in a military adventure made by computer nerds, but I do feel uniquely disappointed at how AI is shafted time and time again, and here – in Halo Infinite, the big one – after the series has flirted with this concept for so long. The multiplayer bots are keen and human-like, so perhaps I was set up my expectations were too high from the start. Maybe the rest of the ecology would have to be holistic for AI programmers (or the staffers that hire them) to conceptualize non-combat at all.

Conclusion

While the level of fidelity on display in Halo Infinite is stellar, the game suffers from a lack of commitment to ecological principles in a way I would argue meaningfully holds it back.

If you start to imagine a very dense forest – dark and claustrophobic and pocketed with Banished patrols that could be around any corner – you could start to imagine a whole new level of visual and experiential leverage they could get out of the singular biome in the game, something which already showcases an impressive diversity of locales. Larger fields with distant bunkers, sprawling wetlands with alien infrastructure, twisting canyons traced by ancient watersheds and pocketed with anti-aircraft guns – the evidence of time and space baked into a terrain is nothing to take for granted, and would intersect meaningfully with Halo’s existing identity and this new opportunity for a long-range adventure, now split wide open with fast-travel, FOB’s, and air-support on demand. Why not make the terrain a real star? Think a little less hard about combat density and objective locations, just let the principles of natural landscapes guide your level design.

I can’t exactly blame 343, who were already pressed for time and decided to make Big Halo, but the world in Infinite feels like what a team makes with a lack of interest or perspective on what naturalistic landscapes can offer – beholden to a giant level instead of a giant world. That is by no means unusual for video games – I can’t think of a single example that does it well – but the structure of game landscapes is lagging noticeably behind the blistering fidelity of their character models and other assets. As it is, the game is vertical, dense, and consistently interesting, but in a very normal way where zones are smashed together in close proximity to try and keep things constantly interesting. I just want the world to breathe, to have some dignity.

Maybe this would sting less if it weren’t for the 2018 engine trailer, which showcases natural landscapes, rain, deep oceans, and even stampeding space-rhinos and odd-looking deer. It addresses, funnily enough, everything I talked about in this article. The video’s own comments and other forum threads I’ve come across contain posters lamenting what didn’t get in the game, although they usually fixate on the various details instead of the whole – it had the impression of a real place.

While the world in Halo Infinite often looks good from a warthog’s point of view, it fits together in chunky, predictable ways and a small scale common to games of its ilk. I have enjoyed my time in it (and the actual videogame it facilitates), but the closer you peer into it, the emptier it is. Maybe that emptiness isn’t a lack of items to pick up or bad guys to shoot, but a lack of plants and animals that exist in complex, dynamic relationships – that exist in their own right to a degree you should respect and represent.

You don’t need to re-invent the universe to make a Halo level, but maybe we can learn from trying to imagine we can.