I took a good look at Skyrim’s Creation Club content after getting the latest release on Steam. I will, in an extremely polite manner, just say that it was underwhelming. I could accept paid mods if it was passion projects of people making DLC-sized content, such as Beyond Reach or Enderal. But that’s obviously not what this is all about. It’s just about further privatizing and exploiting whatever spaces of free community efforts do exist in an increasingly commodified world.
However, even when the project had been given the go ahead, Klindžić said the team was “set up to fail from the start”, due to not having been allowed a pre-production period. “Whenever we raised concerns about this and expressed we needed more writers if the deadlines were to be met, we were accused of not wanting to do our jobs,” Klindžić said.
“Pretty much from the moment the writing team’s pitch was approved in August of 2022, the other teams started production,” Tuulik added. "We didn’t even really know what the story or the characters were gonna be, when art teams were already making first character and environment concepts. I’m sure you can see how this is a big problem, when you’re making a narrative-led game.
“Essentially, the writing team had to work double-time from day one to supply other disciplines with work, whilst trying to write the first dialogues and sketch out the rest of the game at the same time. The writing team consisted of myself and Dora at the time.” Another developer added: “I don’t know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control.”
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and call the headline bullshit. It should also be noted that Disco Elysium had 8 writers, on top of Kurvitz, and Kurvitz himself still argued that he went through crunch. Current ZA/UM’s management is a disaster and nothing good is going to come from it unless a brick falls upon their heads, and they magically learn that making good games requires a lot of work, or if you’re a capitalist, a lot of investment.
Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.
Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.
I mean. The diminishing returns on larger teams in software development is an absolutely proven idea. But according to what I’m reading, the game is made by one person, which is probably not the ideal size for a game of these characteristics that becomes a hit. Still, expanding a 1-person team is going to be a slow process no matter what, especially for a project like this and right after a successful launch.
Ok, that’s fair. The article might be omitting context with that quote.
“Like, where do you draw the line between what’s true and what’s not true?” he said. "What we tend to do is, the most truthful thing is what people saw on the screen, right? That’s the most truth. And then things that are written officially along with the games are kinda second truth. And then, other things that are written or done outside of that—spin-off things, or somebody answering on the internet—those things are kinda third place.
…Huh, what??? I can understand him wanting New Vegas to have lower priority in terms of canon in comparison to games made by Bethesda, but why the hell would he want a TV show’s canonicity to be above the actual source material, and the one that they themselves made on top of that???
“Make this character’s ass and thighs thicker,”
No love for thin bodies SMH
Tyranny is great because those motivations are not just strange situation where doing evil is, for some reason, such a not bad thing to do, but rather your position in the story is almost always constrained by fucked up social systems that rely on violence to sustain themselves - and they will destroy you if you want to triumph above them (unless you somehow find the good route).
That’s because that’s not Geralt at all. Geralt is a sour, cynical old man, but he always has, up to some point, tried to maintain a moral compass, even when the vast majority of the world hated him just for being a mutant. The most brilliant part of the books is their set up for interesting moral dilemmas and how different charactes engage with them.
Has he even suggested that the tips were to go directly to the game devs? I had assumed he meant tipping the company. Call me cynical or something idk.
Low hanging fruit isn’t so spicy, you know?
Nintendo has a shit attitude towards consumers, but their internal structure allows for a lot of designers to have plenty of freedom to experiment, reiterate and try new things, and ultimately make a lot of fun mechanics. A concern of mine is that, when the historical big names of the company (Miyamoto, Aonuma, Sakurai; Iwata is no longer there) begin retiring, the internal balance of power will shift in a different direction, and the one saving grace of theirs will begin to slowly fade away.
Generally agreed there. It takes a lot of commitment from a company to keep a franchise’s lore consistent through decades, and it’s rare for them to decide it’s worth it.
I mean, the fact that Pikachu, clearly not wanting to have Ash for trainer during the first episode, and yet still being expected to obey and tag along, is still very iffy, coming directly from the view that pets are property and must do as we say because we own them, rather than pets requiring human caretakers because we live in a world that doesn’t leave much room for them to live independently.
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.
When you receive a request for a feature that you know would be good, but for whatever reason you can’t implement it (perhaps there are other things you need to pay more attention to, or perhaps there’s an idiot manager establishing dumb priorities), giving the response you received is one of the least anger-inducing ones. It’s likely they’ve been repeatedly asked to make the process less painful, but whoever is in charge of managing devs doesn’t care.
I understand the Pokemon fanboys who lash out against Game Freak after years and years of dissapointments. I understand the Pokemon fanboys with tempered attitudes who enjoy the new products when they get a little bit better and sigh when they don’t meet expectations. And I understand the Pokemon fanboys who will always continue playing Pokemon games, even when they have SwSh levels of quality, because fuck, it’s Pokemon.
The ones I absolutely do not understand are those who seem to think TPC needs them to go out and just straight out fabricate lies about a game that apparently competes against the franchise they like. If they like a monster-taming franchise, shouldn’t they be glad the genre is getting more popular, even through different avenues? What’s the point in lying for the sake of a corporation that doesn’t care about you?
What’s even worse, is that after taking a look at the new, incipient Palworld communities there’s also a loud minority that turns their apparent enjoyment of the game into disproportionate vitriol to spout against Pokemon. It’s a shame, because both Pokemon and Palworld benefit from having large communities to discuss them with, but I’m absolutely not in the mood to sort between people worth listening to and emotionally dysregulated children.
Palworld developer Pocketpair has insisted Palworld is more akin to survival crafting games such as Ark Survival Evolved and Valheim than Pokemon, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to hit out at the game.
And even if Palworld was a monster-taming-battling game, so what? There’s Digimon, Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories, Medabots, and so on and so on, and many have existed for decades. No company can own the IP to a genre. Ultimately, the people claiming that Nintendo/Game Freak will do this or that are a tiny minority, but journalists and youtubers thirsty for clicks are giving them a megaphone.
People comparing Piplup and the penguin pal and I’m like: they’re PENGUINS. They’re small PENGUINS, how the hell do you want them to not to look like each other!?
Those working conditions aren’t even good for companies seeking long-term growth. If you want to produce 5 years long projects that are high quality enough to storm the market, you need people who stays healthy and doesn’t get burnt, which requires consistent long-term humane conditions, or else you’re destroying whatever talent you had in your hands and will end up with a mediocre product.
Capitalism already has enough problems on a vacuum, but its current dominant version of prioritizing profits in the next quarter over literally anything else is disastrous.