Introduction #
Addendums! I’ve written a few of them lately, 2 for the Democracy Article1, 1 for the Terror War series and another is in the works for the Gigging Experience, I’ve been interested in breathing new life into my work by checking in every so often and seeing if there’s catching up to do on the topics, partly inspired by how Ross Scott used to do followup episodes for his Game Dungeon series, and for some time now I’ve had the idea to do a special article for followups that I thought were relevant but not big enough to get their own articles, so here we go.
If it wasn’t obvious already, you should go and read the original articles if you haven’t already before you check out the followups, or if you just don’t remember them that well, I’ll be linking the original articles at the start of each followup section so you can easily do just that.
Never Meet Your Heroes #
Intro #
There’s not much to report on the Arkane and RWS fronts, what’s left of Arkane is working on their new Blade game, not much info on that since it was announced just over a year ago and as for RWS, POSTAL 4 is still in development but the pace of updates has significantly decreased, not counting hotfixes there have been 12 updates since launch, 6 in 2022, 3 in 2023 and 3 again in 2024. Co-op, first announced and showcased back in September 2023, is still not out.
Whether these developments are just a case of technical problems or a sign of things not being so rosy at the studio I couldn’t say, although they did promise in December that a big update with co-op finally included was finally coming that would “make a public release in the new year”, so let’s see how that goes.
The big story is with Starbreeze, I mentioned back in the original article that I was basically “boycotting” the game over the lack of a proper offline mode, and I stuck to that even as the 2 remaining DLC packs released, but I’ve since changed my mind. I reinstalled the game back in November and I’ve been playing it on and off since.
The reason why isn’t because of a newfound confidence in the game, actually the exact opposite. In November several calamities for the game happened at once, planned content updates were delayed (a new heist was delayed back to December, a new upcoming character pack was delayed into the new year), a number of SBZ employees were laid off, but most importantly an internal Starbreeze report came out detailing the state of the company.
The report showed that the company was making huge losses, they were pivoting their efforts towards Project Baxter, their in development Dungeons and Dragons themed game, and PAYDAY 3 would be getting a “significantly lower level of investment” here on out.
The argument behind this was that this was actually just development going back to normal, that the game had gotten a much accelerated level of investment as part of the team’s “Operation Medic Bag” project to fix the game’s major issues and that now Medic Bag was being wrapped up it was back to business as usual, the game would still be supported.
The problem was that this just wasn’t really true, while the bulk of the planned “Medic Bag” improvements had been implemented, the “initial focuses”, new content releases (the planned DLC packs, plus a free LMG weapon and free heist, Diamond District), improvements to progression, matchmaking and overall server stability, the promised Offline Mode was (and still is) unfinished, with “Phase 2” that genuinely wouldn’t require Always Online connectivity still not being implemented.
Pretty much everyone realised that this wasn’t business as usual, but a serious downturn, me included, and my reaction was to stop being stubborn and just play the game, the reason simply being that with the way things were going it didn’t look like it had long left to live, and given that it’s still an Always Online game a death sentence doesn’t just mean a halt to updates, but the game being totally unplayable, if that was on the horizon I wanted to play all the new content and get my money’s worth before the game became a 67 gigabyte brick.
Back to the Game #
The new content was very impressive: I liked the new weapons and found some personal highlights, the high capacity Blyspruta LMG, the slow but punchy RG5, the equally punchy, controlled burst fire S3, the absolute bullet hose that is the ATK-7 for primaries and the full auto Tribune 32 SMG as a sidearm.
The Techie, the special unit previously exclusive to the first DLC Syntax Error, had been rolled out into all maps and was a real pain in the ass in a good way. Her ability is to launch a barrage of drones, both bullet drones and EMP drones that fuck up your HUD and although they’re easily killed it means you can be constantly harassed and risk having your health chipped away over time, forcing you to eventually go out and hunt down her hiding spot to get rid of her once and for all, as specials should she acts as a curveball that forces you to change up your tactics, in my case hunkering down too much, and she was a great adversary.
As for the new heists, they were all solid, not all of them jumped out at me but the game’s remake of the classic Cook Off map from PAYDAY 2, with interesting new meth cooking mechanics and the final DLC job, a Stock Exchange robbery called Fear and Greed, got to be quite addictive.
The new progression system (which swapped challenge based rank ups with a simple per heist XP system) meant I was getting consistent level ups and I really got back into the swing of things, playing heist after heist to level up my weapons and unlock all sorts of new attachments, earning cash to buy into the C-Stacks currency and use it to buy the masks of the week, I really found myself having fun.
And trying the new offline mode meant that I was able to play without the godforsaken input lag, making for a much smoother experience (although one annoying bug where weapons and equipment wouldn’t be available for the first minute or so of starting the heist still sometimes remained), and even in co-op play performance seemed to be much improved.
I remembered that really except for these odd technical problems I had always liked the game, some people had really big issues for it, the old progression system had been a deal breaker, the heists were seen as too repetitive, they didn’t like the emphasis on armour and its new mechanics, but I had never really been one of them.
I always thought that PAYDAY 3 was a great successor to 2, it took the formula further to the point where really, despite having many fun times with 2, I never wanted to take the step back. PAYDAY 2 had a boatload of content and immense replayability, but the stealth mechanics were dogshit, the movement system was very clunky and too many of the dizzying array of heists relied on the same crappy formula of spending a few seconds moving forward then minutes at a time being stalled by slow, unreliable drills, disconnect prone hacks, slow burn thermite charges or some other formula of “sit around with your thumb up your arse” moments, PAYDAY 3 fixed these things and is such a better game for it.
Were there things I didn’t like? Yeah, for sure. Slow burn objectives weren’t entirely gone, reused in the form of “hacking circles” you had to keep standing in on some maps, the decision to restrict heavier weapons like grenade launchers and heavy snipers into limited hero shooter style ultimates that you have to earn, call in and pick up rather than regular weapon slots was very annoying and meant I generally just ignored them, I shared some of the discontent around the old progression system and Always Online was infuriating, but the general gameplay formula was in my eyes a huge step up.
But this made the experience so much more bittersweet, I was having fun in a great game that I knew very much could be on its last legs and never see its full potential in the way its predecessor so thankfully as able to do, I was really reminded that a game I loved was sliding down into the shitter and I really wasn’t happy about it.
Getting knee deep in the shit #
And then in early December things managed to get 10x worse, Starbreeze came out with an absolutely baffling announcement, a quarter of the studio was being moved to work on a PAYDAY expansion for… PUBG. Yes, really, a PAYDAY pack for PUBG.
To say this went down poorly would be an understatement of the century, it was something that absolutely no one had asked for and represented another massive diversion away from PAYDAY 3 at a time when the game was in dire straits, not only because “Medic Bag” was still unfinished but because there was so much more work to do on increasing the amount of content on offer, work that as the team got smaller and smaller and the game less prioritised seemed less and less likely to be done over time.
Although the planned Heist, a remake of the original game’s First World Bank, did release on schedule and turned out to be (despite its garish colour palette) a pretty solid remake, taking inspiration from its PAYDAY 2 recreation and making its own twists, the bad news caused me to pretty much drop the game again and quickly lose my second wind enthusiasm for the game.
Now in January things have somehow managed to get even worse, a report has come out citing several ex-Starbreeze devs claiming that the layoffs were actually worse than Starbreeze stated:
Even more cuts, even to Project Baxter which is what seemed to be the golden goose SBZ’s senior leadership were betting on to revive the company, this essentially accelerated the timeline from a slow decline into imminent death.
From Downhill to Death’s Door #
Just before this the new character pack, the Jacket Character Pack, was announced for a February 3 release and although nothing along these lines has been said officially, one of SBZ’s YouTube partners, Red Archer, speculated this pack was basically a last hail mary by the team to revive the game: A pack featuring a really popular much requested character to try and spark one last gasp of interest.
And his reasoning honestly seems to track, the PAYDAY 3 roadmap currently has nothing listed after this character pack, it does seem like that’s because the PAYDAY 3 team is waiting to see if they’ll have any resources left after this, they’ve disappointed the community so many times with changing plans and rug pulls that I think they’ve decided not to announce anything they aren’t confident they can deliver.
After the layoff revelations Archer actually quit the program entirely, saying in an announcement video that while he had a totally positive experience with all of the developers he worked and talked with, he was convinced that the company executives were pretty much running the company and PAYDAY into the ground with their incomprehensible out of touch decision making, and that the Starbreeze he’d signed on with back in 2019 wasn’t the Starbreeze he knew in 2025.
It reminded me a lot of my own personal experience with working and interacting with Running with Scissors and the POSTAL series, although in my case things were a lot more messy and less graceful, and I did have a bad experience with certain figures at the company personally, I recognised that dynamic of trying to reconcile your fanboyism and admiration for a studio and your frustration with their growing number of mishaps and lack of willingness to listen to criticism.
In my case when I look back at things I do think maybe they never actually were good, and what happened wasn’t a downhill trend but their poor traits becoming more and more visible, in other words I think maybe the cracks were always there, but you can say the same about Starbreeze as well, how many more scandals did they go through over the years and not learn? Or at least the people at the top didn’t, that or they didn’t care enough.
This sight was basically what convinced me to push this article forward, I had been planning to work on it after my (still upcoming) Gigging Experience addendum as a little bonus to wrap up all of the 2024 topics, but with change seeming to be more imminently in the air a pivot of my own seems right.
In some ways I think Archer must have had it harder because for me, although unlearning my fanboy attitude took time, it was made easier by the fact that POSTAL 4 was just a bad game, every time I played it, either back when I was a tester or as a fan trying to give it a second, third, fourth, fifth, however many times chance, I always came out with the same impression, the game just isn’t fun and trying to force myself to enjoy it isn’t going to work, that made it easy enough to realise that things were different and repeating the lesson helped me realise there’s not going to be a moment where things 180 and suddenly it’s all fun and back on track again.
With PAYDAY 3, the game actually is really fun, so it’s harder to reconcile the shambolic studio management with the genuinely excellent project that studio has put together, which is why it’s taken so many more rounds of scandal to find the breaking point.
Part of all this comes down to the series of terrible decisions made surrounding the game, the absolutely awful decision to implement the Always Online central server system and double down on it, the sluggishness in pivoting away from it, downsizing the team and pivoting large parts of it away to uncertain new projects like Baxter and the PUBG expansion while the existing project is still nowhere near finished, these all made the state of development considerably worse and massively undermined community confidence, this is all Starbreeze’s fault.
But the other part of it is really no one’s fault, which is the unwillingness of the bulk of the community to come back in the first place, the game has simply never recovered from its botched launch, at release it had 77,000 players, since the launch slump the highest it’s managed to get is just over 5000 in late November 2023, except for occasional spikes during major updates or DLC drops it averages around 1000 to a few hundred players, nothing Starbreeze has done since release has even come close to recovering the lost playerbase.
Of course that can partly be blamed on the mistakes in development, but a lot of it I think is just players not being willing to give the game a second chance, unfortunately it has never gotten its No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk style moment and it seems that it never will.
The lack of that moment coming has further disincentivised Starbreeze leadership from giving the game badly needed investment and has pushed them towards these desperate cuts and pivots. It’s an endless cycle of decay, the game does poorly, the leadership comes up with another stupid gambit to try and save things, that goes down poorly, each stage of the cycle destroys the already highly unlikely prospects of a recovery.
And that’s a real shame because, like I said, I really love this game, I think it does deserve that revival and I do think despite its faults if a lot of those people who dropped off in the first days of release actually gave it another shot they would find themselves having fun, but it seems its not to be.
Will this Jacket Pack really turn that around? I don’t think so, it has already gotten flak for packing the game’s first melee weapon behind a paywall and for the fact that the new gun it offers isn’t actually new, it’s just a new variant of an existing gun. The first point doesn’t bother me that much, the second more so, but neither of these are deal breakers for me.
What is a deal breaker is the state of the game, I already invested a substantial amount of money into this game, I pre-ordered the Gold Edition of the game (or as they new call it, the Year 1 Edition) 3 times, once for me and twice as a gift, then I bought it again (as another gift) a month after launch, and did I get my money’s worth?
In a way, yes, all of the promised DLC content did release in that first year, there were a few delays here and there but it’s close enough for me to say it was pretty much on time.
But ultimately I bought in hoping for an expansive future ahead, and that future is very much not being delivered, a consistent downhill trend in commitment to the game, so it feels like being asked to buy in now is like being asked to invest in a sinking ship, and I have to follow my own lesson, don’t reward downhill performance with more money, so I’m not going to be buying that new pack.
I really hope these dire expectations turn out to have just been over dramatic and that PAYDAY 3 does continue, it would be even better if somehow that second wind does actually come, and if it did I’d be very happy to go back to being a committed customer, but as it stands PAYDAY 3 may truly soon be a dead game.
The Crime Boss Experience #
Update 12 #
Since I released my Crime Boss article the game has had 2 major updates.
Update 12 (released in October) included a number of balancing tweaks, a 3rd slot dedicated to melee (previously you only had primary and secondary and melee had to replace a firearm if equipped) and all characters carrying melee weapons, and 2 major overhauls.
Campaign has new ways to play, originally it was split into 3 options: Roguelite, the regular mode, and the “standalone plotlines” for the 2 DLC heists, Gold Cup and Cagnali’s Order, where you would start the roguelite at the beginning of the heist questline and your main task was to complete it, rather than win the turf war.
Now there are extra plotlines for each of the game’s “Big Heists”, with Dragon Dogs unlocked to start with and the other 3 locked, if you beat the first plotline you unlock the next one and so on.
This was a cool way to give people access to all of the game’s big storylines without them having to wait for RNG to just throw them their preferred plot, however it wasn’t perfect. A major shift In-Game decided to do was to remove the character missions from the main Roguelite campaign, now they only appear in these specific “plotlines”, Chase’s story is in Dragon Dogs, Cracker’s in Money Train, Wiz and Ranger’s in Hidden Vault and Jupiter’s in Import Export.
I understand why this was done to a degree, the character stories were annoying to some as ignoring them could cause their character to leave Baker’s crew or die, as could failing them, effectively forcing you to play them if you wanted them on your team, but to me removing any story elements and random surprises from Baker’s Battle is a step backwards.
The other big new overhaul was a new multiplayer mode, Rockay Rumble. Rockay Rumble is a survival mode, you’re plopped into 1 relatively small map and have to fight off 15 waves of goons, starting with basic melee gangsters then escalating to gun toting gangsters, cops, SWAT officers and Scouts and then Cagnali’s PMC goons, with boss rounds every few waves.
In normal rounds you just have to survive for long enough on a timer and at the end of the wave a big ring will burst out from the centre of the map and wipe out the remaining enemies, in boss rounds all the bosses have to die for the wave to end and the ring to emerge.
But the big quirk of Rockay Rumble is that you don’t get to choose your loadout, you can bring in perks but no weapons or equipment, instead you get these and a variety of other upgrades from the van in the centre of the map, by killing enemies you get money, gold or gem drops that build up a progress bar, once that reaches makes you get a token that lets you use the van.
The van is, like many of the upgrade mechanics in Crime Boss, is a pick 3 system, you’ll get 3 random upgrades you can choose from to beef up your character, including:
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New weapon (+ damage upgrade)
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Speed upgrades (movement speed, reload speed, health regen speed)
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Health upgrade (damage resistance)
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Ammo upgrade (more magazine capacity)
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AI teammates (which respawn at the start of every round)
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New equipment
This adds something really interesting to the mode as you have to decide with each run how to build your character, and they each have their benefits.
New, more powerful weapons help you stay competitive as enemies get strong wave by wave. Reload and regen speed and ammo upgrades can cut down on the time you’re vulnerable. Movement speed can allow you to reposition yourself when getting swarmed, teammates can help distract the horde and they can also gather all the cash they drop in one place, since they stick to the centre o the map, and new equipment can give you random game changers like cluster bombs, mines or sentry guns.
But you can’t get all of them, so each choice has to come at the expense of improving something else, weapon upgrades can also be a very double edged sword, if you get something like a Double Barrel Shotgun without ammo cap upgrades you can be in deep shit, the same kind of thing if you get an LMG when you don’t have reload speed fixes, so you have to choose wisely.
And of course, since the 3 you get to pick from are randomised, what you actually get to pick is a dice roll, you might not even get to follow your preferred upgrade path because the game has something else in mind.
This system means that despite the base of the mode being very basic it has a lot of replay value, seeing what characters you can build and marvelling at the insanity the upgrades can bring, a Double Barrel with 15 shells per reload, a P90 with 170 bullets in the mag, an LMG reloading at the speed of light because you move like a teenager hopped up on 20 cans of Monster Energy, you get the idea.
It’s also fairly mindless outside of working out those upgrade choices, with no objectives, just the dynamic of “kill things and don’t die”, it makes for something you can easily play on autopilot. Given that the mode actually pays out quite well, this really helps with the game’s money grind problems, and because of that even though I still don’t give a fuck about them I bought all the weapon skins, because it’s not like I have anything else to spend my money on. Presumably it also makes a big deal for the XP grind but since I already maxed out my level and I’m not earning any XP I couldn’t tell you.
This was actually a great boon while we were in the final stages of editing MEGA: Ukrainian Divide me and Massi had many calls going over the edit and I often found myself with a lot of downtime when he was doing the more mindless parts of the edit or simply covering areas that didn’t need my input, so I would whack on round after round of Rockay Rumble during that downtime and then in times where I’d need to look things over more I’d go off and play Roguelite where I actually have a pause button.
Rockay Rumble also included a challenge, in the first weeks of release anyone who beat it on Extreme would get a code for a new DLC, Baker’s Bundle, which came out in November including old pre-order bonus content, a white suited Baker skin and 2 weapon skins, of course me and my friend Booyak jumped in.
Update 13 #
December saw the release of the Jupiter Character Pack, containing a steroid induced ultra muscly version of Jupiter, a Grenade Launcher attachment for one of the Shotguns, a red dot variant of Jupiter’s auto pistol, a Knuckle Duster melee weapon, an Adrenaline equipment piece that allows you to regenerate health through kills while it’s active and a new Mule perk that allows you to carry 3 bags without the limitation of being locked to your secondary while the max bags are being carried.
A very nice pack that I quickly bought, very reasonably priced, both of these DLCs being just 3 quid each, absolute heaven compared to PAYDAY prices to say the least.
Later in the release saw another major update, Update 13, with lots of extra weapon variety for Roguelite’s turf war, more rebalancing, AI improvements and a new winter wonderland coat of paint for Rockay Rumble, RR was originally a temporary mode with plans to extend its lifespan if the mode was popular, but here the feature was made permanent.
And lastly, a brand spanking new heist was added exclusively for multiplayer, Operation Cold Strike. Deep in the arctic Baker’s crew is recruited by the CIA to storm an old Nazi base taken over by the Soviet Union and recover a nuclear tipped V3 rocket, with a hidden vault to find for the inquisitive explorers. A large heist with a strong degree of randomisation, including different starting and escape points, and some new features: A mini-boss against a tank and an RPG equipment piece.
An incredibly tough but stand out mission, I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t included as part of the singleplayer, but with how difficult it can be with its huge swarms of enemies, maybe that’s for the best.
So despite a few occasional iffy decisions, Crime Boss is on a real high now, very affordable DLCs, consistent substantial updates, its long term prospects seem to be very good, and lo and behold it has a full roadmap for the entire year: 5 character packs, a bunch of new missions and a big heist expansion for the end of the year even if it’s subject to change I’m very glad to see that there’s at least one heist game that’ll survive and thrive in the future, great job In-Game Studios!
As the edit on Divide came to its final stages in December and January Crime Boss stuck to being my passtime and I’ve now actually gotten all of the singleplayer Boss Level upgrades as well, all that’s left to do is complete the last character storyline, Ranger…
Yeah I tried, but that ending mission is still too damn punishing, for now he’ll stay rotting in the dirt, the only other thing left to do is get the achievement for escaping Rockay City, which involves maxing out the investigation and then completing the final escape mission where Baker has to hold out for the escape van in an intense wave of escalating cop spawns, I haven’t managed it so far, it’s tedious to do because with all my upgrades to investigation speed it’s actually very time consuming to get caught, and that final mission is incredibly punishing. Oh well, 95% completion is good enough for now.
My playtime has now jumped to a whopping 414 hours (that’s another 120 hours into the mix if you’re shit at mental maths like I am) making the game my number 4 most played on Steam. Given that no.1 is Cookie Clicker, an idle game I just left on for days at a time without actually playing, and no.3 is Postal 3, where the overwhelming majority of my playtime comes from playtesting Catharsis Reborn, not playing the original game, we could actually say it’s more like my number 2 most played game, with PAYDAY 2 being number 1.
Crime Boss needs another 538 hours to reach the top spot, so it might not be taking that height any time soon, but despite me starting to pivot to other games (recently I finished Warhammer Space Marine and Dying Light and started playing Atomic Heart, the Battlefield games and Far Cry Primal) it’s still a staple of my library.
The Yeonmi and North Korea Series #
The Coup #
And now for the most violent segue I’ve ever made in an article so far, games are out and politics are in.
A running side theme in the YoNK series was that South Korea isn’t really the shining democracy it’s sometimes presented as, in the main MEGA episode and its spiritual predecessor, my “Truth of North Korea” script we talked about how the country had been a dictatorship for most of the Cold War, in “Getting on the Naughty List” we talked about our experience with the country’s media censorship in the modern day.
Well, that fact came very clearly to light in late last year, because the world wasn’t going mad enough already South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol decided to plunge his country into chaos by announcing martial law, with the country’s military commander quickly announcing an order banning political activity and strikes and taking control of the media. Yoon proclaimed that this was necessary to safeguard the country from “Communist” and “anti-state” forces related to North Korea.
This is the only article of news I've read where they elaborate more details. Others just said the typical "to protect from North Korea"https://t.co/XybwSV6SGE https://t.co/velAA7kaTm pic.twitter.com/xOkHUWQqaU
— . (@awfulendingss) December 3, 2024
About the current situation in South Korea pic.twitter.com/UYO4CqkY24
— 레일라 🦮 (@enhypenation) December 3, 2024
What had really happened was this, the conservative Yoon was elected in 2022, narrowly beating the candidate from his predecessor’s liberal Democratic Party, but the DP was still the largest party in the country’s parliament, having won a sizeable majority in parliamentary elections 2 years earlier, this meant that Yoon struggled to fulfil his agenda.
And when the next parliamentary elections were held 2 years later things didn’t get any better, while his People Power Party gained a few seats and the DP lost several, the DP formed a political alliance called the Democratic Alliance, which gained a total of 176 seats, just 4 less than the DP had gotten on their own in 2020.
This shattered Yoon’s hopes of gaining control of the agenda, and by the end of the year he had had enough, martial law was essentially an attempt to get rid of the obstructionist parliament. Before his bizarre comment about supposed North Korean backed forces, he listed off a range of complaints about the parliament, they had impeached his officials, passed through their own budget and blocked his own fiscal policies, which he called “budgetary tyranny” and “legislative dictatorship”, which was paralysing the country, this was what he framed as the “anti state” conspiracy, he promised to “eradicate” these anti-state forces.
All of the country’s political parties, including Yoon’s own People Power Party, denounced the martial law as unconstitutional and wrong, in the capital Seoul tanks raced through the streets, soldiers began patrolling, a surreal scene not seen since the eras of South Korean military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Under South Korean law a martial law declaration can be overturned by parliament, so police forces were sent to the parliamentary building and blocked the entrance, later joined by special forces units, MPs arrived anyway and managed to worked their way in, with the parliament’s speaker running round the back of the building and climbing over the walls to avoid the guards, moving into parliament as staff tried to block the soldiers from getting into the building.
🇰🇷 Soldiers in South Korea are blocking the entrance to the parliament. pic.twitter.com/Yc0lnfoOhF
— Update NEWS (@UpdateNews724) December 3, 2024
In the early morning of December 4th (local time) 190 MPs, mostly from the DP but a few from People Power, managed to get in and vote despite the special forces storming the building to try and stop them, with everyone voting in favour of ending martial law. Shortly after the troops gave up and returned to their barracks, even though the military insisted that martial law was still in effect until Yoon cancelled it.
BREAKING: South Korea's parliament votes 190-0 to lift martial law pic.twitter.com/08Sf0HHZ0C
— BNO News (@BNONews) December 3, 2024
The Aftermath #
Realising his coup attempt had failed, Yoon cancelled the order and the country breathed a sigh of relief. The same day the DP led an effort to try and impeach Yoon which failed because the People Party didn’t support it, but the Democrats vowed to keep holding the impeachment votes until they gave in, and on the second vote a few days later the party voted in favour.
Yoon was replaced as President by his Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who was himself impeached a few weeks later after trying to obstruct parliamentary bills that would lead to the investigation of Yoon and his wife over the martial law and a series of corruption charges, he has since been replaced by the Deputy PM Choi Sang-mok.
Yoon himself had been in hiding in his Presidential residence since the bungled coup attempt, protected by the Presidential security service, on January 3rd Police tried to arrest him but were blocked by the security services, a second attempt on January 15th and he’s now in custody for the investigation.
How to look at this is really a glass half empty/glass half full type of thing.
Empty? The coup attempt, and the fact that military and police forces were willing to go along with it, shows that authoritarian tendencies still exist in South Korea, and the fact that it was prevented was essentially down to luck, the MPs had just enough time to overthrow martial law before the military raided the building, had they been just a little slower or the military a little faster, the country would’ve been sent into a much deeper crisis.
This also isn’t the first time something like this has happened in recent memory. In 2013 it emerged that the country’s intelligence agency, the NIS, had been running propaganda campaigns on behalf of the country’s President, Park Geun-hye, which could’ve helped her win the Presidential elections in 2012 when she ran against Democratic candidate Moon Jae-In.
Park was eventually overthrown in 2016 after a series of anti corruption protests nicknamed the Candlelight Revolution, she ended up in jail on corruption charges and her party, Liberty Korea, was disbanded. In 2017 Moon won early elections and became President, with his party leading a crackdown on the NIS, which admitted responsibility for the election meddling.
Liberty Korea later merged with several other parties to become… The People Power Party. Bizarrely though, their candidate, Yoon, was actually the prosecutor for the NIS cases, you’d think he’d have learned his own lesson, but after spending years rooting out this authoritarian tendency, he tried to use it for himself to get out of a political jam.
As for glass half full, well, the coup was stopped and stopped peacefully, even before Yoon cancelled his orders the soldiers sent to storm parliament respected parliaments will and left after martial law had been rejected, just like Park, the President whose schemes he prosecuted, Yoon will likely find himself in prison for a good few years to come.
And despite the PPP’s attempts to obstruct that prosecution they and the whole political spectrum of South Korea spoke out against Yoon’s attempt to drag the country back to a dark political age where force rules and accountability vanishes, large masses of people came out to march too just as in the age of Candlelight, showing that the country isn’t sinking into apathy, complacency kills, so that’s an important factor to note.
They passed this test to their nation, the next question is, how far do they have to go to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again? The spectre of the 70s should be kept where it belongs, in the past.
Conclusion #
So, that’s all the followups that came to mind for my other articles of last year. Website content has been dry lately since I’ve been busy working on bonus content for MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide, a lot of that will be in our paid edition available on Gumroad but some stuff that I think has important journalistic value will be released publicly as well and will of course be linked on the website too, so keep your eyes out for that.
Alongside there’s that Gigging Experience addendum coming up, a lot has been written for that already but it’s still in the works, and there is of course a bunch more planned after that, let’s see how it goes.
My start to 2025 has been a productive one, I hope it’s been fulfilling for you too!
All the best, Elwood.