Various video game stuff not deserving its own thread

[RangerBoo]

I am almost starting to feel bad for Bethesda fans. I don't think I have ever seen a studio be so mismanaged as Bethesda in my life. What is both funny and shocking to me is how the mismanagement happened before the Microsoft acquisition. Meaning that Todd Howard is a more egoistical **** up than Neil Cuckmann and Randy Bitchford.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I am almost starting to feel bad for Bethesda fans. I don't think I have ever seen a studio be so mismanaged as Bethesda in my life. What is both funny and shocking to me is how the mismanagement happened before the Microsoft acquisition. Meaning that Todd Howard is a more egoistical **** up than Neil Cuckmann and Randy Bitchford.

Blizzard, Arena Net, Carbine, Square, SEGA, etc, (and countless now dead studios) have had their share of outrageous mismanagement over the decades too. The main common denominators I have seen are that 1. they got a hit and then grew too fast going on a hiring spree and lost control/cohesiveness, 2. they grew too fast and their system for mentoring/cultivating new talent and assigning them into positions of power broke down, and 3. a lot of these game devs were poor businessmen who made really bad decisions and wound up having to be replaced by people who actually understand business to save the company. The common gamer narrative is to blame the business people but when you dive into it, it's these people who were holding things together and they often show up onto the scene after it has deteriorated and a lot of the talent are already leaving, so the business people are often mistaken as the cause instead of a symptom of a problem that was happening many years before.

[rusty_shackleford]

I suspect some of it, especially with non-USA western gamedevs, is just how hard it is to fire someone. Once you scale up during a "crunch" period to push a game out, there's no going back down.

[Maledict]

Remember Black Desert the MMO?

Apparently the makers are releasing a game for 70 euros now. Mad.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Remember Black Desert the MMO?

Apparently the makers are releasing a game for 70 euros now. Mad.

As a RPG that people have been looking forward to for years. Why would you be mad about it?

[Maledict]

Remember Black Desert the MMO?

Apparently the makers are releasing a game for 70 euros now. Mad.

As a RPG that people have been looking forward to for years. Why would you be mad about it?

I've played the MMO and I thought it was shite. Can you hype up the game for me? I can't wrap me noggin around paying 80 quid for a game, yet alone one from makers of an MMO.

[Tangerine]

1. they got a hit and then grew too fast going on a hiring spree and lost control/cohesiveness, 2. they grew too fast and their system for mentoring/cultivating new talent and assigning them into positions of power broke down,

Not sure what the optimal team size is, but for core development it's somewhere under 50. Anything beyond that and you get these two problems.

[Decline]

I am almost starting to feel bad for Bethesda fans. I don't think I have ever seen a studio be so mismanaged as Bethesda in my life. What is both funny and shocking to me is how the mismanagement happened before the Microsoft acquisition. Meaning that Todd Howard is a more egoistical **** up than Neil Cuckmann and Randy Bitchford.

Blizzard, Arena Net, Carbine, Square, SEGA, etc, (and countless now dead studios) have had their share of outrageous mismanagement over the decades too. The main common denominators I have seen are that 1. they got a hit and then grew too fast going on a hiring spree and lost control/cohesiveness, 2. they grew too fast and their system for mentoring/cultivating new talent and assigning them into positions of power broke down, and 3. a lot of these game devs were poor businessmen who made really bad decisions and wound up having to be replaced by people who actually understand business to save the company. The common gamer narrative is to blame the business people but when you dive into it, it's these people who were holding things together and they often show up onto the scene after it has deteriorated and a lot of the talent are already leaving, so the business people are often mistaken as the cause instead of a symptom of a problem that was happening many years before.

From my professional experience I can tell you it is exactly like that.

WRT Bethesda, talking purely from the outside here, it is hardly the worst company, but like many old companies it is full of boomers and *******. I don't envy Todd. Even if he has the will for major restructure, with the The People's Company Of Microsoft calling the shots he can forget about that.

[sheet]

How many studios do companies like Microsoft or EA actually ruin vs. how many do they pick up that are already in the midst of sharp decline?

[Decline]

How many studios do companies like Microsoft or EA actually ruin vs. how many do they pick up that are already in the midst of sharp decline?

It would be a very bad decision to pick up declining companies. That being said, market numbers lag behind internal rot by about ten years. So it is absolutely wise to sell the company when you notice the beginnings of rot, usually after around ~20 years on the market.

[Algol]

I wonder if Todd does cocaine?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Remember Black Desert the MMO?

Apparently the makers are releasing a game for 70 euros now. Mad.

As a RPG that people have been looking forward to for years. Why would you be mad about it?

Can you hype up the game for me?

Not really. It's an open world action RPG with a story if you liked the aesthetics of Black Desert but didn't like that it was a cash shop Korean grinder MMO. It has pole vaulting and freeform climbing on monsters. Downside is that there are no waifus (unless you like your gritty man only games).

[Maledict]

As a RPG that people have been looking forward to for years. Why would you be mad about it?

Can you hype up the game for me?

Not really. It's an open world action RPG with a story if you liked the aesthetics of Black Desert but didn't like that it was a cash shop Korean grinder MMO. It has pole vaulting and freeform climbing on monsters. Downside is that there are no waifus (unless you like your gritty man only games).

I've looked it up and you can't make your own char, you're stuck playing as the ***. No, thanks. Have fun, though.

[Breathe]

Can you hype up the game for me?

Not really. It's an open world action RPG with a story if you liked the aesthetics of Black Desert but didn't like that it was a cash shop Korean grinder MMO. It has pole vaulting and freeform climbing on monsters. Downside is that there are no waifus (unless you like your gritty man only games).

I've looked it up and you can't make your own char, you're stuck playing as the ***. No, thanks. Have fun, though.

What? No classes?

[Oyster Sauce]

Just got thinking about how most people didn't really think in terms of "minutes" until like the 1800s. I'll be keeping an eye out for characters talking about them in historical games going forward.

[WhiteShark]

Just got thinking about how most people didn't really think in terms of "minutes" until like the 1800s. I'll be keeping an eye out for characters talking about them in historical games going forward.

Now at the latest minute of the houre, Grant vs your loues.

Our longest sommers daies must be of xvii houres and fortie three mynuttes longe.

(The OED has even earlier references, but I struggled to make sense of the quotations, so I picked easier ones.)

[Bertram_Tung]

[Oyster Sauce]

Just got thinking about how most people didn't really think in terms of "minutes" until like the 1800s. I'll be keeping an eye out for characters talking about them in historical games going forward.

Now at the latest minute of the houre, Grant vs your loues.

Our longest sommers daies must be of xvii houres and fortie three mynuttes longe.

(The OED has even earlier references, but I struggled to make sense of the quotations, so I picked easier ones.)

most people

[maidenhaver]

Only true for *******. The White Man used to think in seconds, too.

[WhiteShark]

most people

Shakespeare wrote for the people. I'm not convinced. The concept of the minute is ancient, and people have been trying to track time as precisely as they could for millenia.

The Astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio was a complex astronomical clock built between 1348 and 1364 in Padua, Italy, by the doctor and clock-maker Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio.
[...]
Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes,[...]
[...]
Early [spring-driven] clock dials did not indicate minutes and seconds. A clock with a dial indicating minutes was illustrated in a 1475 manuscript by Paulus Almanus, and some 15th-century clocks in Germany indicated minutes and seconds. An early record of a seconds hand on a clock dates back to about 1560 on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection.

[Oyster Sauce]

most people

Shakespeare wrote for the people. I'm not convinced. The concept of the minute is ancient, and people have been trying to track time as precisely as they could for millenia.

The Astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio was a complex astronomical clock built between 1348 and 1364 in Padua, Italy, by the doctor and clock-maker Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio.
[...]
Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes,[...]
[...]
Early [spring-driven] clock dials did not indicate minutes and seconds. A clock with a dial indicating minutes was illustrated in a 1475 manuscript by Paulus Almanus, and some 15th-century clocks in Germany indicated minutes and seconds. An early record of a seconds hand on a clock dates back to about 1560 on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection.

There's no way village folk have anything near a consistent concept of a minute without it continually being reinforced through childhood by things like microwaving pizza pockets, watching 30 minute tv shows, and staring at the clock in class. I just don't believe it!

[Jordy]

Shakespeare wrote for the people. I'm not convinced. The concept of the minute is ancient, and people have been trying to track time as precisely as they could for millenia.

The Astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio was a complex astronomical clock built between 1348 and 1364 in Padua, Italy, by the doctor and clock-maker Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio.
[...]
Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes,[...]
[...]
Early [spring-driven] clock dials did not indicate minutes and seconds. A clock with a dial indicating minutes was illustrated in a 1475 manuscript by Paulus Almanus, and some 15th-century clocks in Germany indicated minutes and seconds. An early record of a seconds hand on a clock dates back to about 1560 on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection.

There's no way village folk have anything near a consistent concept of a minute without it continually being reinforced through childhood by things like microwaving pizza pockets, watching 30 minute tv shows, and staring at the clock in class. I just don't believe it!

"Run to the stream and wash your hands kids. Dinner will be ready in 300 seconds."

[Stack of Turtles]

Shakespeare wrote for the people. I'm not convinced. The concept of the minute is ancient, and people have been trying to track time as precisely as they could for millenia.

The Astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio was a complex astronomical clock built between 1348 and 1364 in Padua, Italy, by the doctor and clock-maker Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio.
[...]
Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes,[...]
[...]
Early [spring-driven] clock dials did not indicate minutes and seconds. A clock with a dial indicating minutes was illustrated in a 1475 manuscript by Paulus Almanus, and some 15th-century clocks in Germany indicated minutes and seconds. An early record of a seconds hand on a clock dates back to about 1560 on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection.

There's no way village folk have anything near a consistent concept of a minute without it continually being reinforced through childhood by things like microwaving pizza pockets, watching 30 minute tv shows, and staring at the clock in class. I just don't believe it!

Reasonably accurate water, sand, and candle clocks have been available since the middle ages; if anything they were MORE important back then since one was expected to pray at specific times of day according to the canonical hours. At first most people only had indirect access to them, though, since churches used them to time the ringing of the bells for prayer, and everyone else depended on the bell. In those times, although the concept of minutes and seconds existed already, I would surmise that they were probably not widely known outside of the narrow world of academics. By the Age of Discovery or so, though, we know that wealthy estates had started to adopt these early clocks for domestic use, so servants would have to know how to use them. I would guess most of these may not have needed minute markings, but, since it was already customary to divide hours into sixty minutes, anyone who was taught to use a clock would presumably have been taught about them and had at least a vague idea how long one was; mechanical clocks with minute dials even existed in the 1300s, although I understand they were probably not very accurate, and of course most people would not own one. By the 1500s you start to see town clocks with reasonably accurate minute hands, so people in towns would know more or less what minute it was, or at least know where to look to find out; I would expect everyone else outside of towns would have to at least know what a minute was, for the sake of commerce, since even villagers would have to go to town once in a while. Whether their internal conception of a minute would have been very clear or accurate is a different question, but they would at least have one.

Now, what you should REALLY look out for is that, before those mechanical clocks in the 1300s, Europeans used a system inherited from Rome where every day was divided into 12 hours from dawn to dusk, so that the length of an hour changed as the proportion of daylight did. Those churches I mentioned earlier had to use various methods to recalibrate their clocks over the year to match the daylight so they could ring the bells at the right times by that system. For centuries, then, a winter hour was shorter than a summer one; quite a lot shorter as you went further north. It seems that the system of canonical hours as used by churches in Scandinavia, for example, had to go through a lot of adjustment to cope with the extreme difference between winter and summer days. I imagine the Papar monks who settled Iceland — did you know that the Irish settled Iceland before the Vikings? It's true! — probably had their own system too, though I doubt there's any evidence of it since the Vikings probably burned down all their churches as they loved to do.

[maidenhaver]

[Oyster Sauce]

going to be an especially gay time for video games if we really do enter the "drink a glass of water and all of your enemies die" phase of military technology

[maidenhaver]

going to be an especially gay time for video games if we really do enter the "drink a glass of water and all of your enemies die" phase of military technology

[Stack of Turtles]

going to be an especially gay time for video games if we really do enter the "drink a glass of water and all of your enemies die" phase of military technology

DON'T SAY ****** IT'S BAD
RESPECT AND LOVE ALL RACES

I didn't even have to watch the video, I know it by heart

[Solaire]

We need to put women in time-out for 10,000 years

[Jordy]

We need to put women in time-out for 10,000 years

Imagine having to work alongside that.

Also, this needs cross posting here: viewtopic.php?p=335146-woman-hating-meg ... man hating

[DecadeRiptide]

We need to put women in time-out for 10,000 years

What the ****