If Ken Levine ever heard the adage that you bury bad news in a busy cycle, he certainly didn’t adhere to it this week. Maybe you didn’t notice, but February isn’t a hotbed month for videogames. The big titles get pushed out the door for the holiday season, and companies ride that wave through January, as new systems get populated with new games. Then, in February, we crunch the numbers, lick our wounds, and wait.

In case you’re counting, the biggest titles of February so far are a graphically upgraded Tomb Raider title, a graphically upgraded Fable title, and a handful of DLC and episodic content. I’ll grant you, the new Thief game (a series with Ken’s influence all over it, by the way) hits shelves on February 25^th, but it’s so close to March that any responsible human being (so I don’t count) won’t have time to dig in until the weekend anyway—which, you guessed it, puts us in March.

Quick aside:

Some might argue that the biggest game of February wasn’t a full release at all, but instead the Beta for Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall. In fact, I’m planning an entire article on that Beta in a few days, so I’ll say only this: The demand for the Titanfall beta was so high that keys were going for 35-40 dollars on eBay.

Which brings us back to the top. Ken Levine, with what is only perfect timing if you’re going for a pratfall, announced the dissolution of Irrational Games, “as [we] know it.” You can read the press release, but the basic premise is simple: Most of the 110-120 staff members at Irrational are out of a job, the reins to the Bioshock franchise are in the hands of 2K Games, and Ken is creatively huddling with about 15-20 hand-picked staffers to do something smaller, and more meaningful.

This is exactly what many critics have been calling for from our luminaries for years. A creative mind who’s willing to step back from the AAA development cycle and deliver something a little less flashy, but a little more substantive. Obviously, we don’t know for sure that Ken’s new adventure is going to turn into success—but neither were we sure about Bioshock: Infinite after years of delays, and that turned out pretty well.

In fact, some of the surprise of this announcement is that Bioshock: Infinite, rightly or not, is carting home award after award from the gaming press. Even people who have quibbles about the game’s narrative, or its ludonarrative dissonance, tend to heap mostly praise on what has turned into, perhaps ironically, a swan song.

I spoke with an industry friend yesterday, and there is some perception of Levine as “Ken the control freak”, unwilling to leave his masterpiece in the hands of others, so he tore it down like one of the characters in his universe (I’m embellishing some). However, in his goodbye letter, he says clearly that Bioshock is going to continue in the hands of 2K Games—so control freak or not, I don’t see him white-knuckling his baby on the way out. In fact, Irrational belongs to 2K Games, and they—not Ken—write the paychecks.

If 2K is keeping the franchise, why in the world would they fire the team most comfortable and familiar with its moving pieces? There’s been an outcry, especially in the hipsterverse of the gaming community, that Ken gets to keep doing what he loves at the expense of a lot of people he cast aside. These are the same people, by the way, that ridicule Ubisoft for releasing an annual Assassin’s Creed game, or moan about HD Remakes. You know, the kinds of games that turn a quicker profit, keep people employed, gamers happy, and the industry afloat?

We can’t have it both ways.

Either we push for an auteur driven medium and recognize that an auteur driven medium naturally recedes in scope, or we push for a place where all 50,000 game industry professionals get to keep building modular corridors to pay their bills. I imagine we can have a little of both—but we have to stop setting up each side as the straw-man in our news cycles.

This industry, ladies and gentlemen, is a madhouse. There are journalists out there acting like social watchdogs, trying to keep the big-bad game developer in check, when those developers probably make less money to build games than many pundits do to critique them.

Bioshock: Infinite was relatively successful, selling around 4 million units, but that doesn’t take into consideration that it hit shelves in 2013—six years after Irrational Game’s last title, the original Bioshock—which sold about 3 million copies. Bioshock was revealed in 2004 and launched in 2007. That means Irrational Games shipped 7 million units during its last 6 or 7 years of development.

Beyond that, they struggled to get Bioshock: Infinite out the door at all. They lost director Tim Gerritsen, eventually replaced him with a mercenary job from Epic’s Rod Fergusson, and then spent a full year after release struggling to push out two pieces of relatively tiny DLC.

Financially, this isn’t a company that could afford to sit around, 120 people strong, and wait for Ken to come up with something to do. I’ll admit that’s disappointing. I’ll admit that I’d rather every person in development keep their jobs, and that more jobs opened up for rookies like me. But, the secret concussion problem of the game dev world is that almost no one is safe.

We poke our heads up and lament firings at companies like 38 Studios, or LucasArts—but we tend to ignore the brutality of most of the industry. We forcefeed readers cynical narratives when a company with great intentions and ideas, like DoubleFine, slip a deadline, or try to get creative with revenue streams.

There is a segment of our community that seems to revel in the Schadenfreude of a failed Kickstarter project. The joy of writing or reading a snarky review has somehow replaced the solidarity of enjoying something together. Ken Levine has  never produced a flop.  Even when he was still at Looking Glass he was making great games.

Still, the voices rolled out during the long development cycle to tell us that Bioshock: Infinite was sure to fail. Wrong again. But, it doesn’t change the underlying issues of the industry. It’s hard to keep a  120 person machine rolling. It’s harder when you don’t have a giant project full of set pieces for those people to put together. When you add the no-win pressure of impatient fans and critics, there’s little incentive at all to open your arms to that grind over and over again.

This industry chews people up. Spits them out. There are no unions to protect all the people who got fired this week. That’s the problem. Not that one guy wanted to step away and make games on his own terms again. Not that we have people with the clout to make AAA titles who are willing to, instead, take a shot at true artistry. The problem is an industry that perpetuates the NEED for cold-blooded severance.

It’s got to be a pretty slow news cycle to take the story of Ken Levine taking a small team off into the proverbial woods to make great content, and twist it into a tale of a man so beset with hubris that he fired 100 people to get his way. If he’d walked away from EA this industry would call him a hero. If he’d announced a new Bioshock title too quickly, we’d have called him lazy, and out of ideas. Then we’d have questioned whether we need another Bioshock game so soon after the last one.

There’s plenty of hubris in our industry. I’m just not sure we ought to pin it all on Ken Levine—even if his timing is terrible.

That said, I will not be joining the people of GamerFitNation in their Online Shooters Ceasefire event. In fact, though shooters are not my primary genre of choice, I might actually do a 24-hour live stream on my PS4, as a sort of reverse-protest in the name of logic.

The idea behind the even, which I’ve taken directly from the event’s facebook page , reads as follows:

“On December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School experienced a tragic act of gun violence, which took the lives of 26 people. In support of the families of the victims and in remembrance of all victims of gun violence, GamerfitNation asks online shooter gamers to step away from their digital firearms and cease fire from Saturday, December 21st, 2013 at 12AM to Sunday morning at 12AM.”

It’s such a condescending idea. “Hey, gamers who had nothing to do with this terrible shooting, step away from a thing that brings you joy, and which does not cause you to be insane or cruel, and make a complicit link between what you do for fun, and the brutal execution of children.”

GamerFitNation is aware of these types of detractions. Antwand Pearman, one of the event’s organizers, told Polygon: “I’m not worried or concerned. I feel like we should just do something because it’s right, not because it’s politically-correct.” He also claims that it’s just about, “gamers coming together to do something positive.”

Image from GamerFitNation

I disagree. In fact, I think it’s a dangerous way to congratulate people for doing nothing. And that’s literally what they’re doing. They aren’t encouraging gamers to take action, they’re simply asking them to, for one day, take an inactive role in fake violence—you know—for the victims.

I used to get together with my grad school buddies, drink too much, and complain about, as we put it, “all this Facebook bullshit!” One of our biggest complaints came in the form of the cryptic breast cancer campaigns, and any other similar fake activism. We, despite our years of training, went with a simple pun: Slacktivism. The opportunity to allow thousands of people feel great about themselves because they posted a shit status update, while never actually leaving their desk.

Masturbate with one hand, update your newsfeed and twitter with the other, feel two kinds of self-satisfied. Pretty good deal. Unless you actually are a victim. Unless you suffer from cancer. Unless your goal is some sort of actual progress or goodness.

We’re trading sentimentality for action. We assume that people who lost their kids are going to be more moved by the temporary cessation of a virtual combat, than they would be in stricter gun control laws. It’s a lot like posting about the hungry instead of feeding them.

Yes, I’m a gamer, so I’m also insulted by the constant reinforcement, even within our own ranks, that we owe an apology for the actions of psychopaths. I just got finished playing an Assassin’s Creed game that took place during the age of pirates and slavery. We don’t need media to raise the human capacity for abomination. Long before XBox Live, we humans had already perfected the art of homicide.

One of the first stories in the Old Testament (whether you take it as fact or fiction) was the story of one brother murdering another. Has anyone orchestrated a day where we all agree to put away our violent bibles in memory of the dead? I’ll bet I can draw a more convincing line between the violence of the world and the violence of that particular media.

So, December 21^st, if you want to do something helpful, then do something at all. Don’t settle for a sentimental and condescending inaction. Don’t insert yourself into the narrative that virtual guns owe more apology than the real ones. Instead, let’s get a game together, let’s shoot fake guns, let’s be eloquent and friendly while we do it, and let’s help idiots realign the difference between fact and fiction.

The guys over at Rocksteady set this franchise up to be sex in a deep black cowl. They spent half a decade making guys like me feel like a billionaire ass-kicking vigilante. They’re off working on some secret project, ostensibly next gen, potentially Justice League related—likely to kick the doors down from fifty feet away and make us beg for mercy—or more.

So, for now, the Batman franchise remains rooted in the death throes of the dying console generation, and  strangled at the hands of Warner Bros. Montreal. Yes, I’m being melodramatic—just like the unkempt dialogue, and the way I wanted to throw my computer after my save file corrupted—but man this game went wrong.

Full disclosure: I didn’t finish Arkham Origins before I started this review. I probably got about 20% of the way into the game before I lost my save file—but it’s enough to know that the game was more mess than promising. When I still had a save file I often had to walk away for a few hours, cleanse the nasty taste in my mouth, forget about the clumsy design, the bugs, the dialogue.

But, to the credit of the foundation the game was built upon—I always wanted to come back. Even when I was kicked out of my game without warning because I lost my internet connection for 10 seconds, even when I fell through a place where a texture existed, but BSP/collision did not (and fell forever), and even when I got caught in a fast-travel screen for 10 minutes, gave up, and lost my progress, I’d take a deep breath, pace my apartment, and come back for more.  The same thing that keeps the institutionalized criminal in their cycle of crime and incarceration is what kept me going back for more: the inside was easier to understand than the outside—and on the outside I just dropped 50 bucks on a game that refused to be worth it.

The technical issues aren’t even the worst parts. The game looks better than ever, the game even feels good a lot of the time—it’s not as if they broke the engine into its component parts and then reconstructed it—but the world they built around Batman is loose, lazy and the wrong kind of effortless.

Gamers have grown accustomed to waist-high cover as an automatic cue that combat is about to start, but Origins replaces that with unrealistic open lobbies. It got to the point that if I saw a big empty space, apropos of nothing, I knew the game was about to throw 20 guys at me at once. It’s uninspired stuff too. Where previous iterations of the game let you spend a lot of time feeling like a predator, using the shadows, quietly disabling your opponents, Arkham Origins takes the opposite tact: attrition and lots of it.

The city is devoid of life, the streets are empty of cars, people or any sign that this game is more than an Alpha build that never quite took the next step. With the snow covering the ground and the near lack of personality, it’s too poignant a pun to call this game a whitebox hub that leads to corridor action sequences.

Collision boxes are drawn in mid-air. Sometimes, if you zip-line in the right places, you can watch Batman hit these invisible barriers and scrape along them in mid air. Batman, trooper that he is, still slingshots to his destination.

At another point, the collision around the ice floes near a boat in the harbor was several feet above the textures.

Other times, ledges allow Batman to climb on top from one direction, but not the other, or to grapple from one side, but not the other. It is possible that this is a glitch, but the scarier notion is that it was a deliberate game design choice. Often, these moments where the game refuses to let you grapple up to an obvious ledge correspond with a time when it would give Batman a combat advantage in a room of 16 enemies.

The “real” Batman uses these strategic advantages as his bread and butter—so do quality gamers—but Arkham Origins makes the mistake of demanding that the player eschew all paths but those the designers deemed “critical.” It’s their way, or nothing, and so I pace some more.

I hear the developer is very apologetic about these problems. I hear they’ve already patched the game with ferocity. I hear that these issues are being taken very seriously. But, even if they hammer out the technical issues, it would take a miracle to remedy the condescending way this Batman game presents itself. Batman, world’s greatest detective, held by the hand, dragged through a mundane world, and punished for improvisation.

But hey, at least they found a way to bring the Joker back, right?

Look, I’m in no great hurry to become typecast as the Grand Theft Auto V guy, but if you’re paying attention, you’ve probably heard that Grand Theft Auto Online “launched” on October 1st. I put launched in quotes because, as is often the case with recent online launches, things started off with a whimper rather than all the bangs that GTA fans have come to expect. The whimpers, meanwhile, came en masse from twitter, facebook and talkback forums (all the places I visit all day instead of being a productive member of society).

I know that it’s frustrating when a game or feature that you’re excited about doesn’t work right out of the gate, and I know that it’s easy to feel cheated when developers launch something that winds up being unfinished. As someone who’s been on both the gamer side (Diablo III, World of Warcraft Expansions) and the developer side (a game I did in college called Deathball), I can tell you that both parties are frustrated. The difference, of course, is that the gamer side is grumpy and the developer side is panicking that they won’t get their project finished.

With Deathball, everything worked perfectly during testing, but we’d forgotten some networking code, so our game didn’t communicate properly peer-to-peer. Luckily we tested this the night before a milestone presentation, panicked, then our programmer spent a few hours repairing the problem. This isn’t an easy task, but it’s certainly simpler for a 5 on 5 game of robot soccer than it is for a game like GTA V, which sports over 15 million potential users.

So, my first bit of advice in situations like these is to be a little more patient. Obvious right?

Consider that if a 200 person development team playtested their game every day for 3 years, non-stop, that would equate to  1.75 million test hours. Now consider that if every single person who owns GTA V tried to sign-in to GTA Online during the first day. They’d need to spend only 15 minutes each to outdo that entire test cycle. Keep in mind, my man-hour estimate is based on a huge team dropping everything, and somehow mythically playing GTA V and GTA Online for 24 hours a day, three years in a row.

Usability just doesn’t get that kind of budget. Humans can’t function that way. Obviously, when the game is flooded with 15 million new minds to concoct insanity, to stress servers, and to throw different internet and system configurations at the game–yes, there will be a day one glitch. The game makers aren’t out to get you, they want their game to be amazing, and anyone who’s played games to this point ought to know better than to get snarky fifteen minutes into a new online experience.

The Other Side of the Coin:

I read a tweet this week from a gaming personality that said: “Can I just say: it is kinda bullshit that some gamers are giving Rockstar a pass on server issues but raked EA over the coals for Sim City.”

First of all, I don’t think GTA V is getting a free pass. I think there’s been a pretty remarkable level of “how dare they” in the winds when it comes to the rocky October 1st launch. But it is worth noting why GTA Online and Rockstar Games ought to get a free-er pass, at least when comparing them to games like Diablo III  or SimCity.

When SimCity‘s online component didn’t work, SimCity didn’t work. You were less sixty dollars, but you couldn’t access any aspect of the game. Likewise, when Diablo III didn’t work, that didn’t just mean you couldn’t play online with your friends, or use the auction house, it meant you couldn’t play the game at all. Anyone there for the first couple of days of the Diablo III launch will remember this image:

Wisely, Blizzard removed the online-only requirements when Diablo III relaunched for consoles, so even if the PSN or XBLN crash, owners can still fire up a game with their friends or spouse at home, and continue earning new loot.

The same is true of GTA V and GTA Online. In fact, the “Online” part of Grand Theft Auto V was sort of a late discussion point. While online doesn’t function, GTA V still does. Many people pre ordered their copies of the game (either literally or emotionally) the moment they knew it existed. The online component for a GTA title has never been what moved that franchise to the top of the heap, so it’s a little irresponsible for anyone, especially a member of the media, to make such erstwhile analogies. We ought to do a BETTER job of offering context, not a more reckless one.

So, here’s the context you ought to take from this: GTA Online is an added feature for GTA V. Whether it works or not, you can still play GTA V‘s robust single player. Finally, and possibly most important, Rockstar warned people that they sold more copies that they’d dreamed of during the launch window. They told us all that the first day of GTA Online would be uneven, that they weren’t sure what kinds of problems they’d run into. They did their best to be transparent and manage gamers’ expectations. By the time you read this, they’ll likely have delivered their first major patch to the online experience.

None of this is to say that GTA Online will be a success, or that it will even be fun. My vote is still way out on that one. But, if or when we wind up hating GTA Online let’s do it because it isn’t very good, or because it costs too much in micro-transactions, or because our friends keep shooting up our hoopties. Let’s not hate it because we’ve misapplied “fair-is-fair.”