Chronicling the inability of gamedevs to make video games

[rusty_shackleford]

The position of the article is that no other AAA game was started Fall 2019 or later and came out before Jedi 2.

Dead Space remake started development late 2020.

[Fargus]

Let's pray for a new crash.

I pray for a spaceship full of greasy kike corporate types and their affirmative action pets crashing straight into moon at full speed leaving beautiful crater as a memento. And i hope they take their masters with them too.

[Segata]

Silky smooth 17 fps

[rusty_shackleford]

this one trick completely eludes modern gamedevs

[KnightoftheWind]

It won't be a crash, but a transition away from these shitty AAA devs and publishers. The old ones will fall and new ones will rise, and it will be the indies and AA games that will get the spotlight. These big games are not sustainable, there's a reason why all the top headlines are all for remakes of pre-existing titles. Dead Space and Resident Evil 4. Imitations of games that people already know and love.

We will see less of a reliance of graphics to sell games, and more on actual gameplay and creativity. The PS5 and Series X represent a plateau in graphical progression. Many people are even happy to stick with their old consoles, and why shouldn't they?. Games look good enough and there is nothing worth buying on the new consoles that warrant their purchase. PC gaming?, forget about it. New hardware is still crazy expensive, and no titles are worth taking a loan out for them. We will see more people opting for APUs rather than large, power-hungry gaming rigs.

[rusty_shackleford]

AAA has been dead for years, and AA soulless trash is even worse than AAA ever was.

[Segata]

[maidenhaver]

Gaming's another expression of decadence, so its slide to mediocrity isn't a bug its a feature.

[KnightoftheWind]

Gaming's another expression of decadence, so its slide to mediocrity isn't a bug its a feature.

It didn't have to be this way though. Games, unlike film, was not a construct of immigrant jews designed to promote degeneracy. It was a medium with endless potential, where bedroom programmers could make their own games and express their creativity. For many years gaming was a "safe space" for traditional ideas. It wasn't until it got popular that undesirables started infiltrating the industry.

[Segata]

[rusty_shackleford]

[maidenhaver]

I want to genocide reddit.

[Klerik]

Pedo's in technology are pretty much the same phenomenon as pedos being in the church and rapists, other predators and manipulators of WEAK FLESH THAT WILL BURN IN HOLY HELLFIRE.

*uses inhaler and eats chicken tendies*

[rusty_shackleford]

Reading old usenet posts is interesting because it reminds you how delaying a game used to be a serious decision because technology(and, often following from that, grafx) was outdated in 6 months. Delaying a game for 2-3 years was a death sentence, a spiral of trying to play catchup.

It's hard to explain to younger people just how fast technology was moving at the time.

[wndrbr]

Obsidian and George Ziets are both unable to make a game.

[wndrbr]

The new Bioshock is in development hell.

Despite a complete change in development leadership, the Bioshock series is still haunted by the curse of problematic development. No game details will be described here, and this is likely to be my final report on the next Bioshock.

In the summer of 2022 the project was rebooted for the fourth time. The constant changes in development teams and concepts do not bode well for the future of the series. The setting is probably staying the same but the game is currently being drastically rewritten

The work structure is highly disorganized. Unfortunately, development has been affected by complications such as the pandemic and Quebec's Bill 96. There is a very high staff turnover, with numerous contract workers whose tasks are then redone by less qualified specialists.

The studio has a significant number of employees without any visible experience, which is highly unusual considering the requirements of 3 to 7 years of experience for most positions

The narrative team has faced the biggest challenges, as they have been "unable to write a script worthy of a renowned franchise" over these years. This became a key factor of the reboot.

I guess, this is the full pipeline
- Certain Affinity - somewhere until 2017 - original parkside
- Pre-established Cloud Chamber - 2017 to 2019 - twin cities
- Established Cloud Chamber - 2019 to summer 2022 - antarctic city
- The newest reboot - summer 2022 to current day

After almost a year since this reboot everything seemingly started to getting back on track. Cloud Chamber trademark was reapplicated this March. Yesterday's T2 investor call indicates that they are still planning to ship it in fiscal 2025. The amount of job listings is at ATL.

But this does not change the fact that the next Bioshock game is in a circle of limbos. If it won't be announced this summer, it’s most likely facing a total clusterfuck and has zero chances being released at FY2025 as initially planned.

Poor management, uncertainty about financial success, and questionable staff decisions are the reasons why the development of this game is going so difficult and taking so long. Lack of any significant updates or announcements only creates more confusion about the game's future.

[rusty_shackleford]

The narrative team has faced the biggest challenges, as they have been "unable to write a script worthy of a renowned franchise" over these years. This became a key factor of the reboot.

Perhaps the most hilarious form of masturbation gamedevs engage in is when they pretend the narrative quality of games isn't almost uniformly bottom of the barrel.
And guess what? Nobody cares.
If a bad story sinks your game, it's because it was a shit game, not because it had a bad story. The overall story of a video game is perhaps the single least important aspect of a video game. Sure, it's nice to have well written characters, or well written small, individual narratives.
But the overall story for a game? Pfffft. Witcher 3 is one of the best selling games in the world and it has a single good questline followed by 80 hours of garbage, and it is highly regarded as being a good narrative experience due to that questline + characters, not the completely forgettable story. You guys do actually remember the whole arctic ice thing, right? And you travel to other planets or some shit. Yeah, that happened, you just forgot it. Bet you remember the scene where the witchers get drunk at the castle though.
Don't even get me started on Skyrim. Has anyone here actually played the game for its main quest instead of just running off and doing whatever after you can shout at dragons?

I probably couldn't summarize the plot of most games I've played because they're both forgettable and take backseat to actually playing the game. This is why the writing of individual characters is so important, because interacting with them is part of playing the game.
The games I can remember tend to have the most barebones overall narrative - Fallout waterchip+master. I've beaten pillows of eternity multiple times(yep, deal with it), and I barely remember anything about the main plot. I remember the first town, the first dungeon, and the castle because they were well designed areas with interesting themes. Everything else? pffft, forget it. Cognitive overload.
I also remember rasputin, because well written characters are memorable and what gamedevs should focus their writing efforts on.

Also,

script

Movies have scripts. Games have stories. Yes, there is a difference. There's a reason games written by people who have no background or interest in writing nonlinear stories repeatedly create games referred to as "moviegames".
It is the difference between someone telling a story to an audience and making changes as they go, and an audience watching a movie. A human part of storytelling was lost in writing & movies that was regained with video games, yet gamedevs do everything in their power to reject it.



There is not a single more forgiving consoomer in the world than the video game consoomer. As long as your game runs eventually, doesn't crash constantly, and it's actually a game... you can probably get a good review out of most of them.
Although I'm not sure how long this will hold, it's clear the backlash is becoming more severe to shitty games due to the increasing amount of games that flat out just don't work on release.

[WhiteShark]

Movies have scripts. Games have stories. Yes, there is a difference. There's a reason games written by people who have no background or interest in writing nonlinear stories repeatedly create games referred to as "moviegames".
It is the difference between someone telling a story to an audience and making changes as they go, and an audience watching a movie. A human part of storytelling was lost in writing & movies that was regained with video games, yet gamedevs do everything in their power to reject it.

Every game dev, not just RPG devs, should be required to gamemaster for a while. Either the dev will learn that you can't write a script or he will quit out of frustration due to players 'ruining his story' before he can ever proceed to game development.

[maidenhaver]

RPGHQ should make a game.

[Roguey]

2K had a large team of people qualified to make Bioshock games and they laid most of them off, so they're getting what they deserve.

[KnightoftheWind]

2K had a large team of people qualified to make Bioshock games and they laid most of them off, so they're getting what they deserve.

But wasn't (((Ken Levine))) incompetent and dragged his feet when developing Bioshock Infinite?. Why is there even a need for more games in this series?. It should have ended with BioShock 2.

[Segata]

Why are games getting worse? It's a mystery!

[Cedric]

Rat? Looks more like an elephant to me.

[Roguey]

2K had a large team of people qualified to make Bioshock games and they laid most of them off, so they're getting what they deserve.

But wasn't (((Ken Levine))) incompetent and dragged his feet when developing Bioshock Infinite?. Why is there even a need for more games in this series?. It should have ended with BioShock 2.

It did sell lots of copies, so they downgraded him to a much smaller team so he could spend years and years and years on it while still keeping the budget manageable (assuming he can still sell Infinite-level numbers). For some reason they opted not to allow the people they ended up letting go continue to make Bioshock games without his perfectionist management style (2 showed this was perfectly feasible and even better for it).

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm continually convinced this is a cultural occurrence. France is well known for being very insular in its culture and their gamedevs are not experiencing the same issue.
For example, Ubisoft put out Origins in 2017, Odyssey in 2018 along with two major DLCs that are about 15-20 hours each. They followed that up with the absolutely massive Assassin's Creed Valhalla in 2020, the base game taking ~150 hours to complete with side content. Valhalla then saw three major expansions totaling ~60-80 hours of content, along with numerous small DLCs ranging from 3-5 hours to 10-15 hours each, along with an entire rogue-lite mode with separate content.
Their next game, Mirage, is expected to release this year.

Another example is Solasta. One of the few times I've seen a dev not only deliver everything promised in a kickstarter but do it months ahead of schedule.

[KnightoftheWind]

I'm continually convinced this is a cultural occurrence. France is well known for being very insular in its culture and their gamedevs are not experiencing the same issue.
For example, Ubisoft put out Origins in 2017, Odyssey in 2018 along with two major DLCs that are about 15-20 hours each. They followed that up with the absolutely massive Assassin's Creed Valhalla in 2020, the base game taking ~150 hours to complete with side content. Valhalla then saw three major expansions totaling ~60-80 hours of content, along with numerous small DLCs ranging from 3-5 hours to 10-15 hours each, along with an entire rogue-lite mode with separate content.
Their next game, Mirage, is expected to release this year.

Another example is Solasta. One of the few times I've seen a dev not only deliver everything promised in a kickstarter but do it months ahead of schedule.

I wouldn't say Ubisoft is an outlier. Their games typically have multiple studios working on it in tandem, and each studio has hundreds of employees. So to me it seems like they brute force development of their games, and it doesn't matter if 100 employees are inept niggers as another 200 chinese will pick up their slack.

[rusty_shackleford]

I wouldn't say Ubisoft is an outlier. Their games typically have multiple studios working on it in tandem, and each studio has hundreds of employees. So to me it seems like they brute force development of their games, and it doesn't matter if 100 employees are inept niggers as another 200 chinese will pick up their slack.

It's not like other major studios don't also do this though, yet they don't get Ubisoft's output.
Ubisoft also publishes a ridiculous amount of games between their studios, they don't all work on one game.

[KnightoftheWind]

I wouldn't say Ubisoft is an outlier. Their games typically have multiple studios working on it in tandem, and each studio has hundreds of employees. So to me it seems like they brute force development of their games, and it doesn't matter if 100 employees are inept niggers as another 200 chinese will pick up their slack.

It's not like other major studios don't also do this though, yet they don't get Ubisoft's output.
Ubisoft also publishes a ridiculous amount of games between their studios, they don't all work on one game.

The newest Ass Creed has additional work done by Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Sofia, Ubisoft Barcelona, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Chengdu, Ubisoft Bordeaux, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Philippines, Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Pune, Ubisoft Saguenay, Ubisoft Winnipeg and Sperasoft.

They farm out their games to numerous partner studios like an assembly line.

[rusty_shackleford]

I wouldn't say Ubisoft is an outlier. Their games typically have multiple studios working on it in tandem, and each studio has hundreds of employees. So to me it seems like they brute force development of their games, and it doesn't matter if 100 employees are inept niggers as another 200 chinese will pick up their slack.

It's not like other major studios don't also do this though, yet they don't get Ubisoft's output.
Ubisoft also publishes a ridiculous amount of games between their studios, they don't all work on one game.

The newest Ass Creed has additional work done by Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Sofia, Ubisoft Barcelona, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Chengdu, Ubisoft Bordeaux, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Philippines, Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Pune, Ubisoft Saguenay, Ubisoft Winnipeg and Sperasoft.

They farm out their games to numerous partner studios like an assembly line.

Nearly all of those are just support studios to create art assets that work on every Ubisoft game.
e.g.,


Modern AAA games require an army of artists.

[J1M]

I wouldn't say Ubisoft is an outlier. Their games typically have multiple studios working on it in tandem, and each studio has hundreds of employees. So to me it seems like they brute force development of their games, and it doesn't matter if 100 employees are inept niggers as another 200 chinese will pick up their slack.

It's not like other major studios don't also do this though, yet they don't get Ubisoft's output.
Ubisoft also publishes a ridiculous amount of games between their studios, they don't all work on one game.

Ubisoft learned to invest in automated tools so things like "this torch isn't connected to the wall" and "this area of the map has no torches" aren't something they need to worry about when people are editing a map or doing manual QA.

Unlike EA they don't pay real costs to switch engines for hypothetical benefits. (Mass Effect, Dragon Age)