squirrel

squirrel, 5 months ago

Piranha Bytes is/was owned by Embracer, that should say everything about its chances of survival.

squirrel, 6 months ago

If you are up for written reviews: Buried Treasure does a very good job of digging up stuff that hardly ever gets any attention elsewhere.

squirrel, 6 months ago

That’s Mattel. And one of the reasons why Hasbro looks so bad in comparison.

squirrel, 6 months ago

That’s one part of the reason: Google seriously angered the judge by deleting possible evidence (Google got in similar trouble in the anti-trust trial in regards to their search engine). Additionally there were emails that showed that Google was very worried about Epic and that they bribed phone manufacturers to not install pre-install a Fortnite launcher (or other app stores) on their phones.

So there was a clear paper trail that showed how Google execs used their control over Android and the Google app store in order to undermine Epic’s efforts to circumvent having to pay Google for being included in the app store. That’s the main difference in regards to the trial against Apple where the evidence was not that clear-cut.

squirrel, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

They are totally right, it’s a shame that PC Gamer did not name a single woman.

One nitpick though: Two of the women named in the article, Rieko Kodama and Amy Hennig, did not create games for PC. Both were employed by console makers. Jen Zee being acknowledged is certainly deserved, but a there are many, many trailblazing women in PC gaming which should be highlighted: Roberta Williams (co-founder of Sierra Online), Brenda Romero (Wizardry series), Jade Raymond (Assassin’s Creed producer) or Danielle Bunten Berry (M.U.L.E.), just to name a few.

Particularly the omission of Roberta Williams who has not only co-founded one of early gaming’s most successful game dev studios and publishers, but also designed the long-running King’s Quest series which transformed and defined the adventure game genre, is inexcusable. It does not get more influential in gaming than that.

squirrel, 7 months ago

Fair point. Though the article points towards Uncharted and her work on Legacy of Kain is not as well-known IMO.

squirrel, 7 months ago

Maryland authorities are looking for a man, aged 53, goes by the name of “Todd” who went missing this afternoon.

squirrel, 7 months ago

Nobody could see this coming.*

*except for all the people who knew that execs like Ritticiello saddling a company with tons of debt would result in a financial mess that would undo even the most financially stable business.

squirrel, 7 months ago

They are banking on nostalgia, because nostalgia is all they have left. After so many people have left I don’t even know what to expect from a new ME or DA game.

squirrel, 7 months ago

Avi Arad’s track record is a very mixed bag IMO. His films include the “Spider-Verse” films on one hand, on the other there is stuff like “Morbius” and the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”.

There is no doubt that Arad knows how to get the budget and bring the people together, but it certainly isn’t always working out as intended.

squirrel, 7 months ago

Depends, really. Producers do decide who will work on a movie in the first place. Producers’s biggest influence is during pre- and post-production. It’s true that producers stay out of the way during the actual production phase, but producers often take back control during the final cut (unless directors get the explicit right to do it that themselves) and other steps in post-production.

squirrel, 8 months ago

Despite all that’s happened, at least one source told the outlet they don’t think Unity’s moves were made out of complete malice. “They need to do something to make more money. Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there.”

And that’s why every dev (who can) should run as far away from Unity as possible, because Unity will try to screw them some other way.

squirrel, 8 months ago

The answer is as simple as it is horrible: It’s because for every burned-out, overworked and underpaid game dev, there are two starry-eyed kids who want to realize their dream and create games - and the C-suite knows this.They will replace any veteran dev with someone right out of college as soon as it is convenient

Mind, I am not blaming young people who want to create games. They lack the experience to know they are getting exploited. It’s all the cynicism of managers who know no loyalty and only want profits.

And if anyone wonders why every new game somehow manages to be a buggy mess that needs fixing, you have the answer right there too: Because the devs who fixed it the last time got fired and replaced with rookies.

squirrel, 8 months ago

If there is one upside to the Microsoft/ActiBlizz merger, then it is that this parasite will finally get out of the gaming industry. Kotick has shown again and again that he barely knows what his studios actually did. He infamously stalled the development of games with his incompetence, burdening devs with needless extra work.

So that guy now thinks he knows what the future of gaming is going to look like? Get f***ed, Kotick!

squirrel, 9 months ago

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity’s Marc Whitten and Whitten’s responses are very, very telling:

“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.

squirrel, 9 months ago

Thank you. I try to make an effort, but it is really hard to type. Humans should make smaller keyboards.

squirrel, 9 months ago

A beak or feet work too, but I get your point. Invertebrates obviously have a hard time with typing.

squirrel, 9 months ago

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Considering that DA veteran David Gaider left ages ago, I do not have much hope left for the next DA game. BioWare may have hung on a little bit longer than other EA studios, but it looks like the notorious mismanagement by EA will get it too.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Well, there is the MetaCritic user score too. It currently sits at 1.4, so it should surprise nobody.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Tolkienesque fantasy has become the carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy ages ago…
And it becomes even more apparent when people consider that Tolkienesque fantasy tropes aren’t even about “medieval Europe”, they are about a particular English pseudo-medieval world. Fantasy doesn’t do much exploring even beyond the English-speaking world.

Southern Europe (Italy, France, Spain,…) aren’t even featured much. The landscape may allude to it, but then the same Northern European castles sit on the top of hills, occupied by the same kind of lords that you’d find in other parts of the game map.
And other parts of the medieval world do not fare much better: Everything around the Mediterranean is reduced to stereotypes or entirely replaced by some fantasy race. Every place outside of Europe/the Mediterranean fares even worse.
It has no depth, no knowledge of particular local traditions, it is not rooted in any stories, only recalls the same tired tropes that Tolkien established.

Even inside Europe and around the Mediterranean, the medieval world was very diverse. Every region had its own traditions, stories, clothing, customs and its own mythologies with their own particular kinds of monsters and creatures.
But you’d not know through most fantasy stories which - no matter the landscape they take place in - it always boils down to a band of adventurers walking into an inn, drinking a beer and paying it with gold coins, before they go off to kill some orcs in the name of some duke. Very little thought is spend on considering if it even makes sense that a place that is akin to - let’s say - Southern France had any of these things.

When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he based most of it on ancient Germanic stories like “Beowulf”, that there are uncountable other folktales and stories from all over the ancient world which could be chosen as the basis of a fantasy setting instead.

squirrel, 11 months ago

Whatever the platform it will have a battle pass, five “premium currencies”, an item shop “only for cosmetics pinky swear lol” and in order to unlock upgrades players will have to drink a verification can.

squirrel, 11 months ago

The “Gollum” devs, Daedelic, have been around a long time. They were mostly known for classic 2D adventure games, the best known among them were probably the “Deponia” series.

They wanted to go big with “Gollum” and failed even more spectacularly than most people realize: They already ran out of money in 2021 and had to sell themselves to a bigger company who brought in additional funds in order to finish the game. And even the money Daedelic got through that deal was limited, so they had to push out the game no matter what.

squirrel, 11 months ago

My answer to that question is always “King of Dragon Pass”, a narrative/management game that is unlike anything else out there. It got a spiritual successor with “Six Ages”.

squirrel, 11 months ago

Have fun! It’s a weird little game, but I am always happy when it finds some new players.