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December 2025 Retrospective

If you thought 2025 was crazy buckle up because 2026 is gonna dial things to eleven. There is a non-zero chance that the US will be directly involved in multiple armed conflicts and the Federal Reserve interest rates are going back to near 0% in July. Fire up that printer boys!

Dispatch

I have two questions for you. Did you like the type of games that Telltale made, such as the The Walking Dead, before they imploded? Do you enjoy the dark humour of TV shows like The Boys or Invincible? Then don't bother reading any more of this section and go and play Dispatch.

I had no idea that a decent contingent of ex-Telltale developers formed AdHoc Studio with the explicit goal of carrying the torch for narrative games. But after the first two episodes of Dispatch I can confidently say that they have succeeded. If you played The Walking Dead and Dispatch back to back you'd swear they were made by the same developers.

Dispatch is comprised of eight "episodes" that on average take about an hour to beat. The first six episodes were utterly fantastic, particular the bar scene in the fifth which will most likely be something that I recount on my deathbed. I won't go into too much detail but I did not enjoy the final two episodes. Up until that point I felt like I had been directing the story and that my decisions mattered. But without getting into specifics I started to feel that I was being railroaded towards a certain conclusion and now I'm just along for the ride. The ending wasn't bad by any means it just left a sour taste in my mouth because I thought I had more control then I actually did.

I still think that a lot of people will enjoy Dispatch but to anyone reading this who hasn't played it I would make two recommendations. First, disable quick time events because even two decades later they still absolutely suck and do nothing to enhance the story. Second, don't make any decisions. Let them default to whatever the developers wanted and just be witness to a very well written and entertaining story.

ARC Raiders

Last month I wrote:

So far I've put about 30 hours into ARC Raiders and I think I have another 10 before I'll have completed all of the quests and "beaten" the game.

Apparently I am psychic because that is exactly what happened. But after completing all of the quests I lost all motivation to continue playing. The quality of matchmaking continued to deteriorate and you really started to experience the worst of the human condition. Nearly everyone seemed to be running around with the free weapons and ambushing anybody they came across. At this point in the game the only things left to do were search for blueprints which seemed pointless because why would I waste resources crafting things when I can be just as competitive with the free loadouts?

But if ARC Raiders player count on Steam is any indication, I am in the vast minority and gamers love what ARC Raiders has become. I'll be interested to see what happens in the next two months if Embark continues to focus on PvP or if they finally pivot and add PvE-only elements to the game.

Watched Avatar: Fire and Ash

I absolutely loved Avatar: Fire and Ash. James Cameron and his team continue to create the most realistic and mind boggling CG that has ever existed. It always amazes me how I completely forget that 100% of what I am seeing is computer generated and my brain is tricked into thinking that Pandora exists somewhere.

Watched KPop Demon Hunters

I finally watched KPop Demon Hunters I can confirm it is as entertaining as everyone said it was. Also, the Saja Boys did nothing wrong when they are cranking out bangers like this:

Watched Wake Up Dead Man

Wake Up Dead Man is another solid whodunit in the Knives Out franchise. Highly recommended.

Budapest Major

I've been fairly addicted to watching professional Counter-Strike this year but I've been consistently disappointed by the majors. Their structure generates some really fun matches in the qualifying stages but the playoffs aren't usually competitive. The favourites seem to routinely choke and stumble over themselves to give the underdogs victories.

This month the Budapest Major's grand final could have been an email. We watched Faze advance as their opponents continually stepped on rakes until Vitality showed the how a competent Counter-Strike actually plays. Combined with a really broken Viewer Pass that does not encourage you to care about your pickems and I ended up checking out of the major a lot early than I thought.

But I guess the money continues to roll in so I doubt we're gonna see any changes from Valve in 2026.

Pluribus is boring

I watched five episodes of Pluribus and cannot think of a worse way I could have wasted that time. You could have edited everything down to a single 45 minute episode and not missed a beat. There is something about these ludicrously expensive TV shows that shoot all at once that cause writers and directors to spend so much time on long, pointless scenes. I think it was the second episode that opened with like seven minutes of no dialogue where someone travelled from the Middle East to Phoenix, Arizona and the only important aspects were shown in the first and last 15 seconds. I would love to know how much all of that cost because I bet we're talking in the several million.

In my mind one of the biggest indicators of the horrendous writing is that no characters ask any important questions. You are screaming at the screen pleading for the characters to ask the most basic questions that any 10 year old would asked. But instead you are just required to watch one of the biggest pieces of shit in the world continually act the same with absolutely no character growth. The tagline for the show is "The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness" for fucks sake!

This appears to be another Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 situation because Pluribus is somehow getting rave reviews and I could not care less.

Battlefield 6

I'm gonna take a tiny victory lap as Battlefield 6 has managed to sabotage itself even faster than I expected. Every update by EA continued to push Battlefield towards Call of Duty and unsurprisingly it is failing to attract new players while chasing away existing ones. Last month I predicted we would see daily peaks of 100,000 players on Steam by the end of January and we're basically there before the month has even started.

A nearly 60% drop in average daily players is painful for most games, but when you're operating at EA's size you are relying on tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of players to participate in microtransactions. At this rate I'm not sure Battlefield 6 is going to survive past the first quarter. Their second season is supposed to drop in February but who knows how many players are going to be around to spend $25 USD on another Battle Pass.

Review December Goals

January Goals

#MonthlyRetrospective