Yeah I’m definitely a bit skeptical of cyberpunk with how exploitative and bad the witcher 3 could get. Like the “Get Junior” quest may be one of the worst quests I’ve encountered.
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yeah uh, not too sure how CDPR’s gonna handle the themes of Cyberpunk 2077 when their own labor ideology is as bad as this
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Next PAX Rumble, steel cage match, LA Rob vs. The Woke Gamer. One for the centuries.
Really love what I’m hearing about Anthem though. Movement/mobility and verticality in 3D spaces is my jam.
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I don’t have a lot of faith in CDPR’s wokeness but they’re a lot better off working with Mike Pondsmith than Andrzej Sapkowski.
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My understanding is that Andrzej Sapkowski wanted more POC in those games but was kept out of having any input on them due to have sold all rights to CD Projekt Red so it sounds to me like it is all on them and I’m not sure sure how much just Mike Pondsmith can really do against that
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Is there a source you heard this from? I’d actually be interested to get his perspective but every interview I’ve found with Sapkowski seems to emphasize how he was offered a lot of money so they could make a game adapted from his books, he had no interest in putting in any input because he doesn’t like or care about games at all, and now he’s upset that everyone who shows up to his book signings is a young person. Not exactly insightful
It seems to have been in response to the netflix show but I’m finding it hard to google. His name throws off google search it seems but I am looking
Here we go: https://twitter.com/LHissrich/status/994977654750167040
It’s not a direct quote though and I feel like I’ve seen that as well
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I totally get why a lot of people here are left anxious about Bioware/their next game, but I don’t know, I’ve been a fan of the studio since the original KOTOR and I vividly remember the “Mass Effect 2 will prove EA killed Bioware” takes, so I just don’t align with the Anthem skepticism personally.
A lot went down after Mass Effect 2, though - It’s never the first game after an EA acquisition that kills a studio. But there’s a reason Anthem is being touted as BioWare’s last life preserver, considering they couldn’t even find an internal justification for Andromeda DLC.
Most of the talent who made the company what it was are long gone, which is why I’m confused by the “we want DA4” sentiment: you want a Dragon Age without David Gaider or Mike Laidlaw? For what?
Cool, thanks for digging this up! Would’ve been a tough find.
I’m hopeful Cyberpunk is more inclusive, and thank god no one can even try and use some sort of tired, misguided excuse about “historical accuracy” to justify why it’s white as fuck. From the descriptions I’m hearing of the brief demo alone it sounds like they’ve made meaningful progress. And as @dogsarecool noted it’s nice they’re working with someone who actually seems to care not only about the medium but about getting at the core of the genre instead of just incorporating the aesthetic bits. Heartening to hear the dev representative during the demo straight up mentioned Reagan and Thatcher era when Austin and Patrick asked him about the game’s politics
Ubisoft is out here making games about American civil wars and government conspiracies and torn American flags set in the US capital and being like “lol what politics” when someone asks about it, it’s exhausting
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I actually got into a bit of a tiff with someone about this a couple night ago about Fallout 76, where I expressed my disappointment in BethSoft kind of turning Fallout from “fuck America” into “rebuild America so it’s good like it was in the 1950s” by not-so-subtlely hiding behind “it’s all just for fun guys ¯_(ツ)_/¯” . Not that those old games are writing masterclasses or anything but I always felt like they understood and were relatively clear in their politics.
76 just feels like a funtime drop nukes on people simulator and it feels so… bad. Fallout was a series that wanted you to understand that the bomb was fucking bad and a mistake. Now its a game that wants you to drop them on strangers so you can steal their shit. Like yo that has some implications Mr. Howard.
The only other game I can think of where you can accrue nukes in a similar fashion is MGS V, and lets be clear, fuck a lot of that game. But at least it mechanically communicated that nukes were an irrelevant resource drain and actively rewarded disarmament.
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I wouldn’t get my hopes too high CD Projekt just came out as anti union
The tweet I saw that summed that up is now behind a locked twitter account for reasons I likely don’t have to explain
(also if someone reads French let me know if I have been misinformed I do not and have to go off info I believe but can no longer find)
EDIT: I should also note that as far as I know this is one higher up at the company for what that’s worth
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I do wonder about the news cycle. With the “just came out as” and I’ve seen it elsewhere given the type of description that marks it as some stunning reveal. We are often told that something has “come to light” even when much of the time it’s part of some widely known larger picture, something never hidden.
Like, the company famous for almost collapsing their team via crunch culture and underpaying their workers (especially with that basically only being partially resolved relatively recently with pay increases throughout the studio to avoid another huge talent exodus) thinks that unions aren’t for professionals (eg game devs). Let me go and find my fanciest shocked face. Every single press person who saw CP77 in the last week, if they paid any attention to the industry they cover, already knew this.
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All this Anthem talk has me very excited.
All this Cyberpunk 2077 has got me very excited. When will they release the footage online?
A couple of weeks ago I went to Blade Runner Secret Cinema in London, it was great - they recreated the streets of LA and played a kind of interactive theatre througout to which we were all characters. Cyberpunk 2077 sounds just like it.
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The newer Fallout games’ issues (well BGS Fallout games at least, New Vegas leans closer to what those old games were going for) is that they’ve almost entirely abandoned the black humor and satire that made the series a joy to experience and have traded it in for a mess of forced zaniness, hollow 1950’s glorification, and self-serious main plots that manage to be consistently pretty awful. It’s unfortunate.
New Vegas tries to tell a story about humanity trying to rebuild using knowledge from the old world to improve quality of life and move forward while dealing with the danger that such knowledge can once again bring destruction and catastrophe on a grand scale. Like the final DLC of the game is almost entirely about letting the player reflect and question their role in bringing about more death and suffering to the world, culminating in a decision regarding Nukes. The new one seems like it’s, uh, less interested in treating it that way.
To bring it back around, I just think devs need to be aware that regardless of their intentions their games, especially in a political climate like our current one, will have meaning and draw parallels to the real world in possibly unexpected ways. Stuff like Cyberpunk, Fallout, and the Division most definitely, and ultimately they can make a decision to cower away from upsetting the “keep your politics out of my games” crowd or actually make something powerful and confident in its themes and messaging. All this to say, everyone could learn a thing or two from Machine Games when it comes to this sort of thing
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Games of this size are made by more than one or two people and since quite a few others besides Gaider and Laidlaw who’ve worked on their various series for years are there I’d still like to see what they come up with before writing them off for eternity, not to mention newer talented people. Hudson, Darrah, Gamble, Karin & Patrick Weekes, Mary Kirby, Sam Maggs, etc. plus working with, for instance, the Sunless Sea guy. I dunno. I like their stuff. I loved every ME trilogy game including 3 - that series is the reason I care about games at all nowadays. I loved Inquisition despite its flaws. I even liked Andromeda, warts and all. I still want to see more new stuff from them. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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And while I believe he left back in March to focus on more of his freelance projects, Drew Karpyshyn was still at the studio as a writer for most of the production of Anthem. So I’m going to keep an open mind as far as story and lore stuff goes, as his record is pretty solid.
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Just saying, the fact that Inquisition and Andromeda need those caveats even among people who liked them - and that we know, thanks to Jason Schreier’s reporting, exactly how much of a mess EA made of the latter game - is reason enough to be skeptical. If Anthem works out, more power to MMO fans; but I don’t think they’re at a place anymore where they can offer DA4 or another Mass Effect or Jade Empire 2 and have those be anything more than cynical cash-grabs with weak writing and a failure to understand why their past games worked.
Just want to say thanks to the Waypoint team for the epic Periscope sessions / podcasts! Especially with Periscope felt like we were getting to hang out with the team in an epic late-night college / grad school conversation.
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Hmmm, this (see academic research as underpaid crunch with associated health issues) cycles back round to some of my thoughts on E3 this year.
“Crunch is bad” is a theme of coverage, by people (increasingly now unionised) who are working 6 (7?) days straight with little sleep and working basically every waking hour. Plus travel days on the ends. People joking about how physically taxing this week is, how exhausting and endless it felt even before “day 1” arrived.
And it’s not an exceptional sprint. When covering games is work, playing games (that are then talked or written about) is work - so is engaging with other coverage (watching a stream or reading other editorials is work). All these big games being consumed near launch, the hours dropped into things (hundreds of hours? thousands for a few exceptional titles over the years?) and that’s somehow not being added up? If you’re averaging over 40 hours a week then something is broken and management are meant to step in to make sure “passion” isn’t creating self-imposed (or imposed by the expectation of having done always more research) crunch.
It’s not like the famously short career lifetime in game development isn’t perfectly mirrored in games criticism and reporting. People are typically burned through in years with few enough staying longer that it becomes a club.
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I think Patrick and Austin betray a tendency in this podcast that a lot of us do when talking about works that excite us, that of being enthusiastic for the big, cool, shiny genre thing that references the shit you loved when you were young.
Nihilism and overt edginess are easy to criticise in a game when the work as a whole doesn’t fill you with joy because it’s catering directly to your inner nerd. Similarly, the brutal realities of labour exploitation are overlooked when it’s in service of making a lauded game like The Witcher 3 yet are scrutinised heavily when a developer like Crytek boasts about crunching for fucking Ryse. The press’ enthusiasm for games that take the medium and the genre is always going to be a mitigating factor, even for conscientious critics like Patrick and Austin.
A great example of this is the way DmC is remembered. DmC is full of overt fat-shaming/fatphobia; aggressively leers at its female characters, casually references sexual assault to characterise its sole relatable female character and then forgets about both it and her, and Ninja Theory’s attempts to convince people that the new Dante wasn’t gay were beyond gross. However, it upset a lot of the people who would go on to become weird anime nazis, and had an a e s t h e t i c that resonated with writers at the time. That game hasn’t gotten its comeuppance in a similar way to The Witcher 2. People who should know better like it, and so they’re probably not going to seek out and amplify the genuine grievances people have with those works.
For all the criticisms of developers and publishers capitalising on worker’s passions, even the best of the gaming press are complicit in this exploitation because they’re just as passionate, which has led to a lot of blind spots for games that appeal to their core sensibilities.
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