The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games.
Quality reference. Also, in reverse, companies such as Larian prove that trust works.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the buggiest messes I’ve ever played. In that, it gives me warm fuzzy memories of the originals, which were similarly buggy monstrosities.
Despite the bugginess, the deep involvement of Larian with the community at every step of the games development and release proves that trust can get you nothing but accolades, even when your game is a buggy mess for six months post-release.
I’m okay with the post-release bugginess because I can trust that Larian actually cares about resolving those things.
The rising costs of developing blockbuster games has also raised the stakes. “When you’re talking about a budget that’s $100mn plus, even for a big company, if you miss with two or three of those then commercially you’re on the ropes,” Harding-Rolls said.
Oh boo hoo, is the only type of game you can think of to release is a"blockbuster" type game?
Because last I checked, small titles regularly do quite well, like Hi-Fi Rush did so well compared to the fucking bomb that is Starfield. Same company, small game vs. big game. Small game did well, big game tanked.
I have yet to see anyone ask “But is it actually fun?” about, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.
Maybe part of the reason why is because games like Hogwarts Legacy don’t respect player agency and spend their time forcing you to play the game the way the developers wanted, while Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to experiment and try to break guardrails.
Hogwarts Legacy literally won’t let you jump over a fence that your legs are visibly taller than. I only finished that game because I wanted to be able to write correctly about how deeply that game disrespects player choice and is all-in on “you play our game the way we intended, or you don’t play.”
The 21st century has been repeated instances of “the man behind the curtain” getting completely caught in the curtain, yanking it down, causing a small fire, pissing himself a little bit, and then standing up, waving his hands and yelling at the gathering crowd “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” while the fire begins to grow.
The world wouldn’t be so frustrating if it wasn’t so clear that so much of leadership (corporate, especially so) has no fucking clue what they’re doing, certainly no more in depth clue than their own workforce, and they’ve been coasting on things like stock buybacks for the better part of three decades. They continuously fail but they use their absolutely massive wealth to constantly shield themselves from liability, or any responsibility really, from their near-constant fuck-ups that piss off consumers, poison the environment, and harm workers.
Anyway, much like with their constant fucking-with-the-consumer on Windows 11, they’re just barrelling down the “fuck the people who invested in our hardware ecosystem” path because “fuck consumers, amirite?” They mostly cater to other businesses now, which is part of why it’s a lot easier/cheaper to get a Windows license than it used to be (although that’s been changing). This is the same with so many businesses now, they mostly just serve… other businesses, that’s where the real money is… because they’ve bled the US consumer dry and so they’re prioritizing corporate clients, who have deep coffers.
It’s much like what’s going on at Warner Bros, where shitcanning a movie and deleting it entirely is more “cost-effective” to a movie studio than releasing it. They don’t give one flying fuck how much it pisses of consumers or the people who made it, all they’re worried about is the numbers in WB’s and their own bank accounts. They couldn’t give less of a fuck about what’s in consumers bank accounts or the laborers and artists who made the films bank accounts.
They’ve fully insulated themselves, the aristocracy never left. They just use the power of money to control and influence the power of the State instead of being a King themselves. They’re simply dictators of their own little feifdoms.
And everyone else just realizes how bad this means things are going for the gaming industry as a whole.
This isn’t good news for anyone who likes actually owning their games instead of just having a license, if they own a console.
That ship sailed in PC gaming forever ago, which is honestly fine considering storefronts like GOG exist, but it’s still going to be a gut-punch to people who have invested financially heavily in the Xbox ecosystem.
It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.
They are, but five of them? It seems like they’re ready and willing to kill current goodwill in respect to their games by stepping on the gas instead of realizing why people suddenly liked the games again.
When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.
A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.
Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.
And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.
…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.
I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you’re actually trying to learn something from what you’re looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you’re willing to learn from them, that’s great, but here’s the thing.
Not everybody is taking away the same things.
What you take away from it isn’t what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there’s a lot of people who are.
My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.
However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren’t learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.
And that’s where I begin to worry, because while like, I’m in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, like… It’s hard to feel real “glee” at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go “awwww” inside, but I tell myself “I can’t get caught up in that if it’s an evil playthrough.” And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.
But the reality also is that a lot of people don’t care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.
while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.
You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn’t inspire confidence that you see that.