2/28/2023 0 Comments Steam players plaaying ravenfield![]() I want to be caught up in the potential for the future. The real kicker here is that it's almost impossible not to do it. They touch our collective desire in such a perfect way from just the right angle, and we invest our desires into it. As I said, video games run on hope, and certain games cause that hope to pool together. It's the feeling that drives forum speculation about beloved franchises, and it's what makes us excited about a game when all we have is some piece of vague and gestural art. That's also the same feeling that has people screaming at the top of their lungs at video game press events. It feels like an open future where anything could happen has stumbled into our collective gaming laps. Ravenfield makes you feel like every statement you have ever uttered that started with "wouldn't it be great if in Battlefield you could…" will be fulfilled. It seems like it can be the supporting base for so many ideas that fans of first-person shooters have had over the years. Ravenfield has the feeling of those early days of Minecraft about it. We got a dragon, some vague plot, and animal husbandry. Or would it be mechanical: better farming, snow that actually reappeared, and more mechanical complexity for red stone that didn't require a degree in computer engineering? While some of those things appeared, and others were created by mods, the actual future of Minecraft that actualized was so much more dull than even the most idle conversation I had had about the game. ![]() Would we get new kinds of world generation with deep dungeons and giant Moria-style caverns? It was selling tons of copies, new game-changing mods were being released every day, and every conversation about the game was about what it was going to be when it was finally finished. I can remember the very early days of Minecraft. Whether it is the promise of the holodeck in the still-unproven and bleak-looking VR market or the full, immersive, "the game changes with every decision you make" notion of complete player agency, video games are always gesturing at some kind of experience that just happens to be right over the horizon. The idea that one day the games we have will become the games we want is what drives the entire industry. A short piece about the game in PC Gamer from last summer was able to summon up that it's " a complete hoot" as an evaluation. There's honestly not much there, and that's incredibly apparent in the discourse around the game. Blue team and red team fight it out for map locations, each with fairly robust AI that shoot waves of appropriately colored blood out of their opponents, and you just try to help out whichever team you've allied yourself with. ![]() This is a Battlefield experience for you, alone, to play. Crucially, Ravenfield is not a multiplayer game (or at least it isn't out of the box). Those levels have tanks, helicopters, planes and a variety of other vehicles that spawn for your play experience. It has large, sweeping levels populated by as many AI companions and enemies that your computer can handle. On face, Ravenfield is an independently created Battlefield game. It is a game, and it is a wish for a future game. Its success, and the excitement around it, relies completely around its players wanting it to be more than it is. Ravenfield, a game that has recently rocketed up the Steam charts (following about a year of development on itch.io), is fundamentally a distillation of all the different forms of hope that appear around games, and because of that it might be the most video game of video games. ![]()
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