Tag: gaming-culture

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on-the-nose. Over the lpast few years, real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticized “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which The New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” Colossal Order says in its blog, and the developer says it “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

When it came time to make Metaphor: ReFantazio, developer Atlus had a guiding principle: make a video game that was a culmination of all the beloved RPGs the company had made before it. “We decided to challenge the fantasy genre,” director Katsura Hashino said this week during an online demo of the game. Atlus has been making games for some 35 years, and it wanted to pull together an all-star team to commemorate the anniversary.

Hashino has been instrumental throughout the Persona series; following Persona 5’s release, he moved away from P-Studio—the team working on Persona games—to start Studio Zero, another internal Atlus group. For Metaphor, Studio Zero brought in Persona character artist Shigenori Soejima and longtime composer Shoji Meguro. They also brought in guest developers Koda Kazuma, concept artist for NieR:Automata, and Ikuto Yamashita, one of the artists behind the beloved anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Metaphor: ReFantazio, scheduled to hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on October 11, will combine many of the social elements of the Persona series with a faster combat system and new fantasy setting.

In Metaphor, a king’s assassination kicks off an election that will allow anyone to be the next sovereign, so long as they get enough backing. That means the protagonist, who is on a mission of his own, will need to form bonds with potential followers, earn monster-slaying bounties, explore dungeons, complete side jobs, and generally rally support.

Like the Persona games, there’s a social element at play, whether it’s building relationships with followers or hanging out with the game’s cast. There’s no fast-travel between destinations; instead, players get around on mobile bases equipped with everything from hang-out rooms to libraries to spots to cook or get your laundry done. It’s reminiscent of Persona’s incredibly satisfying, totally mundane tasks that make the game feel more alive.

Hashino says that Metaphor lets players build their squads using a job system based around powers called archetypes. “By confronting their anxiety, the protagonists acquire these archetypes, a special power,” he noted during Tuesday’s demo. “Their powers manifest in various forms throughout the game.” They may sound similar to Persona games’ eponymous enemies, but they’re more like traditional battle styles. A seeker is a well-rounded fighter, for example, whereas a mage fights with magic. Players can mix and match their parties however they want, including creating squads entirely of the same job.

Atlus is currently enjoying a renaissance thanks to the breakout popularity of games like Persona 5 in 2016 and Persona 3 Reload, released in March. Reload, a remake of a PS2 title, became the fastest-selling game in Atlus’ history within its first week. Metaphor retains much of the series’ eye-catching style and slick combat. It’s a massive game, Hashino says, one that “questions the power of fantasy, a power we all possess.”

Burnt rubber and gunfire are not the most pleasing of smells, but for action games, they might be the most common. At least, that’s true for GameScent, a new device that aims to make gaming more immersive by adding smell to the equation.

GameScent, which dropped late last month to a bit of fanfare and some snickering, uses an adapter and an app on your phone to capture audio while you play. It then feeds those audio cues into the company’s “innovative AI,” which then triggers certain smells.

It’s a hexagonal device, compatible with most consoles, PCs, and virtual reality setups, built to hold six different aromas at a time. At launch, those smells are called Gunfire, Explosion, Forest, Storm, Racing Cars, and Clean Air—perhaps the most important, as it’s intended to neutralize whatever odors may linger.

“We feel like we are adding the missing link, if you will, to gaming, which is the use of olfaction,” says GameScent president Casey Bunce. Future scents the company intends to release include Ocean, Sports Arena, and—perhaps troublingly—Blood.

Bunce says that the device’s launch scents—which I’d argue are not the most aromatically pleasing lineup—were largely decided based on requests from gamers. They wanted smells to go along with action or horror games, thus all the explosions and gore.

Those smells can be strong. During a demo of GameScent at this week’s Game Developers Conference, the device, paired up with Far Cry 6, dutifully pumped out the smell of carnage and burning rubber. It’s set to a two-minute timer, meaning it won’t create a complete haze over your room every time you get into a gunfight—but it’s still better to place the unit far from your gaming perch, rather than sit near it. While its tamer options like Forest are nice in a Febreze sort of way, anyone sensitive to smell, like myself, might get a headache after a few whiffs of car stink.

GameScent’s creators say they hope to release an additional 30 to 40 scents in the coming year, making it easier for players to customize what they’d like their experience to smell like.

The company’s products are largely made of essential oils, which you can easily pick up at the store. When I asked what’s to stop me from dumping in, for example, my own lavender oils, a rep for GameScent told me, “Honestly, it would probably work. Look, you might end up clogging the thing, and then you just take it out and flush it out with water.” To keep essential oil enthusiasts from using their own smells, the company plans to work with its community through an “insider’s club,” which will take feedback into account.

That being said, GameScent doesn’t plan to supply every user’s demand. “We get a lot of like—you know, X-rated requests,” Bunce says. “Very strange requests.”