His public presentation skills could get better, but I agree and support the essence of the idea. An art piece has an idea, a form, an ethos, and a character has a personality and is driven by specific world visions. To take an art piece, and just sh*t on the original spirit and forms to produce a derivative piece that fits someone else’s vision while also using the familiarity to market it better is just cynical. Corporate media is just too cynical and hypocritical to not do exactly that: twist a art piece again and again to get better market outcomes.
He is right. God of War was created as a violent dynamical hack and slash with a Greek tragedy as background . It is not shallow, revenge stories after tragical events are a common trope. Kratos was a Greek tragic revengeful character that had a purpose and a vision , and he fulfilled his destiny. End of story. Call it pro revenge or whatever, its the spirit of the work.
The absurd was the newer artists not caring at all about fidelity or having the courage to create something new. Want to continue god of war ? Don’t disrespect the original character and spirit and mechanic of the game, build upon it. Maybe a hack and slash about a Japanese kratos battling against shinto gods. Want to create a story with the opposite message, a completely different character and completely different gameplay ? Create a new game, new characters, and be happy.
I already find it hard to swallow when the original artist itself radically shifts the art piece, like what happened with Dragon Ball (compare the first episodes or chapters with Dragon Ball Z, and tell me its the same thing, its not). To see corporations being cynical about art, and being praised for it is even worse.
I can understand him. God of War 2018 and Ragnarok have basically nothing to do anymore with the original games. They could have made a new IP but they had to take the name and characters for brand recognition.
Save you all the read, games won’t be discounted or even sold for that matter. They are just being removed from shelves.
" An internal memo has surfaced online stating that all copies will be reduced to 3 cents and sales will be blocked by the store’s system and then removed from the store. As of right now, it appears this is only for Xbox games, but this move was reported last October and it seems to be coming to fruition. It was noted that Microsoft is funding this move for Walmart in the memo, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s decision and not Walmart’s. "
Ubisoft *** said the quiet part out loud and Microsoft decided just to speed run it. I do love all the one piece memes of a great pirate era beginning though.
It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn't really that high.
This might mean it’s true that the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh won’t have a hard drive. Microsoft wouldn’t want Xbox games to be on store shelves when they’re no longer selling consoles that can play them.
Sounds like the price reduction will be only in Walmart accounting system, so they can justify throwing them all away and write off the lost sales. I doubt they will actually sell all of those games.
Per the article, Microsoft is paying them not to sell any of the physical games and take them off the shelves. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they end up buried in a landfill next to ET.
Tacit Collusion: a type of collusive behavior where firms coordinate their actions without explicitly communicating or reaching an agreement. Instead, firms may signal their intentions through various actions, such as pricing behavior or output levels, in order to coordinate their behavior and achieve higher profits.
If that were the case, companies would go down left right and center. What do you think the gas stations are doing? Landlords? Companies hiring devs? Everything is becoming lockstepped and thats why we are losing.
We need to break up businesses above 999 mil in assets (including other companies) and break up entry barriers for new businesses. Amend the laws to exclude large companies from any securities so it is actually too risky to become this big.
Its not really hard to do but people need to stop working for a day every month to push this. Take to the streets and unionize en masse.
Everyone who is not part of a union is part of the problem at this point.
No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Is this going to be another ET situation where we find hundreds of Xbox games in a random desert 40 years from now because Microsoft wanted to kill physical copies?
I think a lot of the hating on Gamepass is justified, but I’ve just gotta say as a partially blind gamer it has been a godsend for me.
I used to struggle with whether or not to buy a game every single time because in most cases there is no way from descriptions and reviews for me to know how any given game will work with my vision and fine/gross motor impairment.
With gamepass I can try things and if I can’t play it? I move on and try something else.
Kinda sad that we can’t find some middle ground between making games accessible for disabled folks without bankrupting developers and ultimately hurting consumers.
because the creators using it to hide their bad games
How does this work in particular? The hiding bit? Doesn’t it actually draw attention, considering how many people then spam “OMG SO WOKE!11!!angry!!” and so on threads everywhere?
So this then begs the question, why are people decrying games as “woke” trying so hard to push their political agenda into gaming discussions? After all, as per point 1 + point 3, the game was already criticized/panned anyways, then someone came in and tries to push the critique onto a political level instead of a game one.
Citation: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, I can even put Stardew Valley in this list, though not as vocal as others. I didn’t see anyone bash these games as being woke, or maybe they are a minority if there are.
You have spend zero time in game forums talking about Baldur’s Gate 3 if you think it wasn’t criticized for being woke. The best game of the year by every metric, and conservatives got batshit insane about a slider for gender that contained “non-binary” as an option. The first year or so every second steam discussion was about that topic.
Which goes to show that it being heavily criticized for being woke has nothing to do with quality. It’s not a “symptom” of a bad game, like you wrote earlier.
If Dragon age flops it will do so because it’s a bad game, not because it’s woke - the people who actually give games bad ratings for that are thankfully always a very small minority, no matter what a conservative bubble, right wing influencers, or some random internet shit storm might suggest to you. Your original comment simply missed the point.
Based on that, then, do you think that the folk complaining about wokeness are always the vocal minority and the reason you see it far more in unpopular games is that there’s not a higher ratio of positive reviews to hide the assholes?
Aye, it has become another dogwhistle of the weirdo alt right crowd. It’s kinda helpful because whenever you see someone use it unironically, you can just safely block/ban them at no loss of conversation.
Woke is not a symptom. What people usually complain about with “woke” is more choices for the player to personalize their experience. Body type 1 or 2 instead of male female? Woke. Different skincolors? Woke. Woman in charge? Woke.
(I’m so sorry for writing so much. Skip to the last paragraph if you have to. There’s a tension in me because I fall on both sides a bit.)
It’s an indicator of developer focus and intent. Sometimes.
If people’s introduction to trans characters wasn’t “hi, I’m trans” then maybe they wouldn’t have these stereotypes, but we are where we are. Pretending that it’s just extra options is ignoring that the people that push this sort of thing also seem to think we also want to read their shitty writing and shitty characters.
Their dumblelore/voldemort slash fiction bullshit was trash 15 years ago and they haven’t improved because their focus is social issues, not good writing. That’s the real issue - paper thin characters that are just vehicles for social commentary. Subversion isn’t annoying your audience from the start, it’s developing deep characters with all the flaws of humanity that also happen to have atypical identities.
My favorite book series are The Culture novels and Discworld. They both have trans characters that aren’t there just to push narrative. They were well written characters that fit the world and also trans. In the culture it’s not even remarkable - they’ve solved everything biological so it’s just kind of there. Discworld is more by-the-horns, but he still manages to be sneaky with the subversion and it works every fucking time.
On the flip side, Hugo award winner A Deepness in the Sky has a character that uses gender neutral pronouns which is whatever. Not a big deal, but it was the first time I saw it in a book. What was the book? Torture/rape fantasy set in space. It’s one of two books I couldn’t finish. The other is Atlas Shrugged. Coming from someone that’s read a lot of more classic science fiction and considered a Hugo a seal of approval, that was a very harsh realization.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with extra options or making ugly characters (though I don’t get that - there’s a sweet spot between fan service and trash can) but I don’t consider them a useful feature if the game is shit. If they focus on the game and add ‘woke’ shit to a good game with well written characters it’ll go down like honey. If the devs see the game as a vehicle to disseminate their social ideas, they’re in love with themselves and not the game and people will see that. It can, and has, been done well.
Simplicity to access the content is important, but I’d argue just as important is they’ve tried to make the games simple and appealing to everyone, and they end up not really appealing to anyone. Make an interesting game for the people that want it. Don’t make a game no one wants.
It genuinely feels like the notion of a pure triple AAA RPG is slowly being torn down by publishers chasing the wide audience of action game fans who will ultimately not care that much for the end product.
Yep. Just look at Bioware. BG3 would have been theirs if they didn’t go the action game route. In the past they made BG and SWTOR, but then they made DA: Origins (not an action game, but moving that direction) and then Mass Effect. At that point they never went back from that direction. They’ve been successful most of the time, but I feel it can only last so long, because it isn’t really made for anyone anymore. I think we can see that now.
Dragon Age’s drop in reputation had nothing to do with launchers, given many if not most players were on console.
“Simplicity” is arguably what killed it, because they had an excellent formula with Origins, and “simplified” it to the point it lost its identity as a true RPG.
Wasn’t it dragon age 2 where the level design got super repetitive though? It felt like they kept reusing the same exact level design in ways that didn’t really make sense.
I’ve heard that, and it’s reasonable however I found the level design in the first one could be a little repetitive as well so I thought some of the criticism was somewhat unwarranted.
Yes, 2 had a lot of re-used locations. Some of them did make sense, as the story was almost entirely set within a single city, so certain locations are bound to pop up multiple times, especially as the game takes place over a decade or so.
But the real reason, 2 was developed and rushed out the door in like a year or something? It was a ridiculously short amount of time to develop a sequel to a game as big as DA:O. Unsurprisingly, this led to a LOT of re used assets and locations.
But though it obviously had failings, I, like some others, would probably put DA2 as the high point for the series telling really character driven stories with the most compelling cast of characters.
Oh yes, I played a mage in both and the difference was startling. In the first part you have immensly powerful spells, that could also backfire hard because the game had friendly fire. At high levels you could wipe everything on the screen, including your party. In the second, friendly fire was gone so you could blast away and suddenly you spun around like a kung-fu master for some reason.
I will agree that the asset reuse in 2 was bad. But I loved the game for putting me in completely different shoes from the norm. The settiing of the character as refugee was unique
Aye, let’s agree to respect each other’s opinion. No matter how wrong yours might be.
(joking of course, I actually like 2 a lot despite how clearly unfinished and rushed it was, although I really really disliked 3 except for the romances and the character interactions)
I always enjoyed the story of 2. Origins and 3 both fall for the same story beats aka “You are the Chosen One. Only you can save the World.”
Origins, you are the last of the Grey Wardens in Felderen. Only you can reunite everyone to stop the Blight.
3, only you can close the rifts, reunite everyone, and stop the Big Bad guy.
In 2n Varic actively mocks that in the beginning. Hawke is portrayed as the Chosen One. When challenged, Varic admits that he made it up. Hawke is a nobody in beginning, only kicks start the mage and templar war because of the people that they associated started everything. Cough Anders Cough Hawke really just stumbles from adventure to adventure because of their companions.
It’s a story about unintended consequences and how small events can lead into big events.
2’s biggest failure was the over use of the same assets. The is cave/house/ruin is the same layout all the other cave/house/ruin. It was fine when it made narrative sense however that it is only for a minority of the time.
It’s always weird to me when people talk about video games as if story is the single most important aspect.
Personally I think 2’s biggest folly was abandoning the deep RPG in favor of overly-simplistic hack and slash. A mistake 3 somewhat attempted to correct, and for that, I’ll take its weaker story because I enjoy playing it much more. And if course 1 blows them both out of the water in terms of RPG gameplay.
Inquisition wasn’t quite as bad, I actually enjoyed it because it made an attempt to walk back some of the “streamlining” from 2, though obviously they both pale in comparison to Origins.
I was kind of hopeful they’d rediscovered their identity somewhat with Inquisition, but 4 looks like that hope was misplaced. They doubled down on abandoning the RPG in favor of the overly simplistic button masher with a smattering of RPG elements that are more or less meaningless.
For me I loved Dragon Age 2 beacuse I came from Mass Effect and the streamlined effect totally felt like an ME game to me. Also loved the idea of setting things in one city it was something different. Totally get why people don’t like it tho.
It’s a very overused and absolutely terrible use of a word.
For two reasons:
It has a predefined meaning, and if you read what the DA creators say, they’re not actually “slamming” it. While they’re pretty openly hostile - and for good reason - that’s a far cry from what someone “slamming” someone else or a quote would be.
It’s inclusion in the headline is for sensationalism, which would not be needed as the “You’re an idiot!”-quote already does that. Or maybe it’s just surprising how desensitivized people on the net are nowadays.
To think it further, consider the whole headline had been slam-ified:
comicbook.com
Najstarsze