"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.
In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic
Good old Trainwiz. Pretty sure the mad bastard used to frequent 4chan’s Elder Scrolls modding threads, so I’m kind of impressed at the restraint of his response.
“I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine,” Trainwiz wrote on the Nexus Mods page for Really Useful Cliffracers. “I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.”
They fought to change the name since the beginning because they knew it would be impossible to deliver a real sequel and while this name might get initial sales it would cause blowback killing the game almost immediately…
Which is exactly what happened.
Like, they’d have loved to make Masquerade 2, but they weren’t given the time or funds to make it.
The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.
Chinese Room is clearly a bad fit for Bloodlines. They have zero experience with RPG games.
They make good walking-sim style gaming experiences with strong atmosphere and world-building, but they've never made any RPGs. Bloodlines was a living world full of dynamism (remember the Voerman twins missions?).
Their gameplay also tends to be subpar. The original Bloodlines had some flaws with gameplay (combat), but you still had a lot of different gameplay options and approaches.
Why shouldn't people have expectations for a strong roleplaying experience and player freedom for a Bloodlines game?
They absolutely are, in terms of gameplay. Ozzy Mandus and The Crank Hog Machine sacrificed most of the gameplay Frictional’s Amnesia became known for. There are no light mechanics. Barely any physics puzzles. The pigmen are braindead, which removes the challenge and the tension. Even if it’s a better story and atmosphere than The Dark Descent, it’s a lesser game. Even Still Wakes The Deep only goes as far as “throw the object to make the thing look away” when you’re not just responding to non-diegetic prompts.
You can make the argument that walking simulators have a place in the gaming landscape, and you’d be right, but by their nature, they are the exact opposite of what Bloodlines 1 was and what Bloodlines 2 should have been. Why Paradox decided it was a good idea to entrust with it a studio that has only made things that it never should have been is a fucking mystery to me.
Those two studios for the game because it was Hardsuit’s idea to make the game in the first place and TCR barely kept Paradox from canceling the have after they kicked Hardsuit out of the project.
I think it basically went like this (simplified):
Hardsuit: “Hey Paradox, we wanna make Bloodlines 2. We have everything worked out, we have the best possible writers involved, and it’s a real passion project; here’s our pitch.”
Paradox: “Wow, that pitch convinced us completely! You get all the green lights in the world!”
Hardsuit: “Now keep in mind we’ve never done a project on this scale before so we’ll need plenty of time—”
Paradox: “We set you on an extremely aggressive schedule. Surely that’ll motivate you into delivering perfection!”
Hardsuit: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we need.”
Paradox: “But it’s the exact non-opposite of what you get. Now chop chop, we already gave the release date to the press.”
Hardsuit: “We’re not getting the game done in that timeframe.”
Paradox: “No problem; we’ll delay a little bit. Surely nobody will mind.”
Hardsuit: “It’ll take more than ‘a little bit’. We told you that—”
Paradox: “Okay, sure, whatever, the game’s canceled now. Don’t call us back.”
TCR: “Hey, can we try to salvage this? We really wanna see this made. But we’d like to throw away all of the writing, characters, and gameplay. Everything except the setting, really.”
Paradox: “Okay, sounds reasonable. But make it snappy.”
TCR: “We’d also like to change the name because what we can deliver won’t really be a proper sequel to—”
Paradox: “Bloodlines 2 it is. Good discussion. Glad we talked about this.”
TCR: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we asked for.”
Paradox: “Can’t hear you; too busy launching the sequel to one of the most beloved cult classics in the action RPG genre.”
Customers: “Well, this is a pretty bad sequel. Decent game but they really shouldn’t have called it Bloodlines 2. We’re disappointed.”
Paradox: “The only logical course of action is to swear to never release a non-strategy game ever again because nobody appreciates our art.”
With the second paragraph I agree, it’s a bad fit for a sequel and this is consensus (probably, I didn’t enjoy Bloodlines much), even TCR thinks so. But is this a scale? Is Bloodlines 1 a lesser game with subpar gameplay because it’s systems weren’t as complex as other CRPGs? “Game” is just the term we stuck with, it doesn’t mean that the fidelity of the gameplay, the mechanics and dynamics is paramount. If I value narrative, and it is, has become, a narrative medium, I very well might think that A Machine For Pigs did a better job.
I enjoy walking sims (Soma is one of my favourite games of all time) in general and TCR's releases as well.
That doesn't mean one can't recognize that TCR tends to struggle even with relatively simple gameplay and that a game like Bloodlines requires strong gameplay design/implementation skills.
While I loved the atmosphere of Still Wakes the Deep, there were many situations where weak gameplay undermined the ambiance and immersion.
I hope I was able to at least share my own reasoning (even if you don't agree). And I think we can both agree that TCR does not have any experience in RPG games.
Publishers are a key ingredient in the recipe for trash games. Buying IP and telling some dev team that is doing it for the paycheck to slap something together is not making a game, it’s parasitism.
I honestly don’t know what Paradox was smoking with this one. They get the license, cool, they hand it off to a studio that…while is known for being a support dev or doing ports they DID manage to get the original Bloodlines writer on board and then it was delay, delay, delay, fire the creative team, more delay, switch studios, start completely over, call it a day, and then claim “yeah we’re not going to make one of these style games again…we’d rather continue to nickle and dime our customers with strategy games.”
Paradox has lately been really good at admitting fault and then mismanaging the next big game outside of their bread and butter grand strategy games. They need to shake up their management because it’s becoming clear they’re giving unrealistic timelines/budgets/demands for these games
ProtonDB reports say that it runs great under Linux, including multiplayer, so I’m not sure if kernel level anti-cheat can really be in use. Maybe it’s just under Windows?
I’m gonna give it a shot, and if it doesn’t work I’ll refund I guess.
Kernel Level Anti-Cheat For Windows Only. Embark specifically publishes a build for Proton Users validated by Codeweavers. We don’t have to worry about it :)
Yep. Honestly if someone still uses Windows but complains about kernel level anti-cheat they’re hypocrites and only have themselves to blame. If you want sovereignty as a PC user you have to put in the minimum effort and not just sit on your ass and wait until big corp is spoon feeding it to you. That day won‘t come.
I believe for Proton users the kernel level anticheat is substituted for a user level anticheat or is deactivated. Only for windows is the kernel level anticheat utilized.
Not all kernel level anti-cheat are the same. Riot’s Vanguard and whatever Battlefield 6 uses requires TPM and SecureBoot and they quite invasive. I believe Vanguard just runs in the background even when you’re not running the game which is awful. Arc Raiders devs made some pragmatic concessions to allows the game to run on Proton and Steam Deck which is pretty good.
And worth pointing out that the Linux version of EAC (which is what Embark games use) runs in user space. It’s literally not kernel level anticheat on Linux.
I can confirm, both this and The Finals (same developers) works great on Linux. No Kernel level AC for us. I even load into games faster than Windows people I’m playing with, and I just realized this is possibly why.
IGN put out a first preview video of Arc Raiders couple months ago and it was borderline hit piece. The quality of the video was unbelievably bad. They made the game look muddy, dated, and choppy. This wasn’t IGN trying to showcase the game on some realistic typical gaming hardware. In reality the game is well optimized and visually really good on moderate level hardware. I hear the game looks fantastic on consoles. Maybe they’ll do a full review now that the game is finally released but I question the journalistic integrity of IGN.
They’ve done this with a few other games. I remember the EU5 review being really choppy and it turned out they were running it on like 6-7 year old hardware. It might just be a cost cutting measure to not buy the latest stuff for all their reviewers but I basically ignore most of what they say now.
tbf a lot of people don’t buy a top notch rig for RTS games, so I think it’s entirely valid to test on a dated PC and point out if this is a weakness - but not record gameplay on it exclusively.
If one reviewer has an insufficient PC, assign it to a different person - at least the gameplay recording.
EU5 is grand strategy, not RTS. Just a small correction. RTS is like Starcraft — ~30m matches and then everything goes away. Grand Strategy is ~100+h of constant progress where nothing resets. They’re both strategy games, but they couldn’t be more different.
Ah. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on Anno games and always considered them part of the range of RTS. Are you sure those terms are incompatible? Seems like a strategy game can be “grand” and “real-time” at the same time.
Anno is more city builder with some RTS elements. Definitely not Grand Strategy —arguably RTS.
I wouldn’t say they’re “incompatible” but they aren’t synonyms. I haven’t seen a grand strategy that is also an RTS, but I could see them co-existing potentially. Total War is close with its battles, except I think creating units and buildings is a requirement for the RTS genre.
Grand Strategy is generally: you control a nation and operate on a map of the world (sometimes limited to a region). You’re continuously progressing your nation, constructing permanent buildings, unlocking permanent technologies, and improving your economy.
Examples: Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Total War.
RTS is: you control an army and win a battle on a relatively small map, where individual people are a relevant scale. You build units during the battle, but very few to no resources come into the battle from anything before, and very little to nothing changes after the battle.
Examples: Command and Conquer, Dune II, Starcraft.
IGN: “Traditional gamer journalism is dying. Please support honest journalists.”
Also IGN: “Good work, 47. Now publish the article and locate an exit.”
Maybe someone else on the IGN payroll will do a proper review because a big reason the review was ass is because the reviewer was also ass. He was literally pressing the “ESC” button at the bottom left with a mouse. IMO the biggest crime of this IGN review is that the reviewer still works at IGN.
ign.com
Aktywne