Enthusiastic Amateur

In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium there is only war. And so ever it has been, well, since 3rd Edition at least. One war unending, unbroken by the years both in the game and without. It has been a war of big characters and grand ideals, one never questioned and always pushing forward, requiring us to empty our bank balances to field vast swathes of reinforcements and new toys every few years. Rarely do we get to see the other side of this. Oh the fields of Cadian dead are mentioned, where you’re memorialised only as long as you can be remembered. Warhammer 40,000 is not short on tales of death and grim defiance in the face of it. Still it has never seemed as well realised I think as right here, in the Dawn of War III trailer. The monologue is as daft and over the top as ever, but there’s something there, in the way it’s presented. The violence is nothing new. Relic has always understood that Chainswords, under-represented on the tabletop,...

Over time I have become obsessed with loops, the cycles of gameplay that make up the whole, the patterns of input and the output stimulus that make up a games. They’re what grabs us initially and, when well designed, they are what keep us coming back, over and over. There are different kind of loops, smaller loops are moment to moment; the action of cover, shoot, reload, grenade, are all cycles of action to end result. The best are consist, with an obvious and direct correlation between the players skill and the output of success. These build into bigger and more abstract systems, loot and random reward loops. These are the systems that keep us playing. Smaller loops give us the reward of satisfaction, of seeing the end result of our actions and knowing that we made that kill, that we scored that critical, that we secured that point. A loot system galvanized this by turning time invested into repeating these loops into an irregular reward, a cherry on top of our own personal succ...