Shrinking Maps and Pink Mist: A Year-End Respawn

Free-for-All and Kill Confirmed are my favorite game modes in Call of Duty, which is why I created these two comic strips:

The first multiplayer shooters I played were GoldenEye 007 and Quake II on the Nintendo 64. Back then, the default mode was four-player free-for-all. Occasionally, we’d switch it up with team deathmatch or capture the flag, but with only four players, those modes felt stale compared to the chaos of fighting everyone you saw.

My first large-scale multiplayer experience was the original Unreal Tournament on PC. At the time, I lived in the mountains, where we rarely even managed a 56 kbit/s connection, making online play almost impossible. As a result, my earliest experiences were offline, battling against bots. Even so, the sheer number of players and the size of the maps made everything so frenetic—it felt like a drug.

Of course, none of this compares to the online multiplayer experiences available now, but I’m grateful I got to witness the progression from offline to online play. There’s something satisfying about knowing how far it’s all come.

I don’t understand Battle Royale game modes. The pacing feels monotonously slow, and the shrinking battle zone is an uninspired gameplay mechanic borrowed from PUBG and Fortnite to compensate for poor level design. We could digress and get balls deep into some nerdy shit here, but a good summation is that maps that are either too big or too small don't work. Starting with a map that’s too large and shrinking it to a pebble feels like sacrilege to someone who grew up in the golden age of multiplayer.

That said, one game has managed to pull this off in a way I can respect: Hunt: Showdown. Instead of shrinking the entire map, it narrows the investigation area, keeping the rest of the map intact and still engaging. I could go on about this for a while, but suffice it to say, Battle Royale is one of those genres I don’t get—right up there with MOBA and MMORPG titles. People can have those; I’ll stick to my Call of Duty, Titanfall, and Rainbow Six.

On a completely different note, something I can wrap my head around is the recent news on Hasbro.

I really don’t understand why people are upset about Elon Musk potentially taking over Hasbro. Personally, I have two hopes: that he restores Dungeons & Dragons to a more unforgiving, classic edition and that he ends the endless flow of bad Transformers movies.

I can’t speak for others on the D&D side of things—I’ve never played tabletop D&D and probably never will—but I do enjoy video games that follow those rules. Over the years, it feels like every edition has become increasingly simplified and easy, which I’m not a fan of. I miss the brutality of the original Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games, with larger parties and harsher consequences. Back then, if a party member was killed, they stayed dead unless you had a resurrection spell. It felt logical and added tension to every fight. The new rules, where characters just get back up at the end of combat, feel hollow by comparison.

I don’t know what Elon would do with Hasbro, but as an old-school gamer himself, I imagine he might share a vision for games that demand more thought and skill—a return to the days when surviving wasn’t just a given.

On another note, today’s strip will likely be my last one until the new year—unless inspiration strikes and I feel an immediate need to publish. For now, I’ll be focusing on completing pages for Prodigy and working on other art projects and concepts.

When I return, there will be some changes to how I post and publish, but we can talk about that more in the new year. I’ll also be updating some of my older comics from their original horizontal format to make them more readable. That’ll probably wrap up my work for the year.

For premium subscribers, I’ve included the original hand-drawn sketches for this week’s comics below.