GreatWyrmGab

it's because having "freedom" and "lots of choice" are great for marketing and getting people hyped, but with ballooning development costs from giant open worlds and a slavish devotion to realistic 3D graphics, actually implementing a lot of choices that have rippling effects and each require fully voiced dialogue is easier said than done. so they posture at giving you options, only to railroad you. and while this has always been done and is often an accepted reality of game development, it's becoming less and less subtle, because hiding that railroading is itself something that takes skill and time.

Back in the 90's, most cutting-edge RPGs had text boxes. Some had voice acting, at least for key moments, but most just had text. Look at Planescape: Torment (1999).

It has a lot of dialogue choices, in part because each dialogue option (and NPC responses) were mostly just text strings that may or may not trigger certain scripts when the dialogue was over. They could include as many as the writer could think of, and if they realized something was off, they could just edit the text.

You didn't need to pay animators and voice actors and maybe motion-capture artists to re-perform every minute variation of a scene, and you didn't need to redo all that work to account for minor changes.

It used to be practical for RPGs to be developed with open-ended dialogue webs and forests of flags. If you can write it, it can go in the game. And when they're written well, that's extremely appealing! Modern WRPG* developers want that kind of appeal! But AAA games "need" loads of bells and whistles to look Modern™, and that gets expensive (especially if you need to change things. So keep it simple, keep it lean, while giving the player the best sense of agency you can fake within this rigid structure.

It's no accident that the best-written RPGs of the last decade have been throwbacks to older styles of RPG. Disco Elysium cut the special effects down to text and voice acting, which gave them the same freedom Planescape: Torment had back in the day.

AAA WRPGs* with a clever script can mitigate the overt lack of player agency imposed by these production limitations. Cyberpunk 2077 is, by all accounts, not particularly clever.

*Western RPG. In this context, it's meant to distinguish video RPGs in the lineage of Might & Magic or Ultima from JRPGs like Dragon Quest. JRPGs have their own parallel history of grappling with the limitations of 80's and 90's technology, and then the burdens of 21st-century budgets, but the genre norms were different, which comes with different expectations and burdens.

that's the worst part. the little shavings of humanity on top of the shit sandwich. the conversation at Clouds, Jackie's ofrenda, the more introspective moments from Johnny. a handful of genuinely compelling sci-fi concepts. little pieces of writing that manage to almost be interesting and make me feel something. proof that human hands touched this product. that there are people who put something personal into it, and cared about it. and the grim knowledge that it was wasted. a pointless offering to an altar of capitalism. these people gave their ideas, their blood and sweat, the best years of their lives, to... this. the game that expects me to suck cop dick. what a fucking tragedy. what a cautionary fucking tale. never make a deal with the devil. it's never fucking worth it.

What I feel like Bethesda hasn’t figured out yet is that the decade-long hiatus between franchise installments or the release of anything at all literally, literally, literally only works if you’re Valve. With Valve you can weigh the wait time against the eventual quality of what they do produce, you don’t have to like the trade off that’s occurring there but there at least is something being traded for, and under a visible auteur logic that the audience is primed to respect at least a little even if it’s annoying as hell in practice. Bethesda, on the other hand

You could easily make the argument that I’m in no position to cast judgement on Bethesda for their glacially slow release of mediocre products given that I have no idea myself on any practical level how to get a video game made. But in fairness it’s not entirely clear that they still do either

Fun fact! This npc is standing there because that tile is on the same tile as the entrance to wayward cave underneath the cycling road. Because of how the bridge tiles and the tiles below them are programmed, if there wasn’t an npc there biking over that tile would count as going into the cave entrance and would warp the player to the cave. Rather than creating a way for bridge tiles over entrance warps to work with it that happening, they did the simpler thing of just putting a stationary npc on the bridge above

redditors are a fascinating type of insane

ignoring the buying it for a dollar thing. i would love to see how badly this would suck if one redditor had exactly two years to remake destiny in unreal or whatever. it would be such a dumpster fire

this is how average gamer complaining about game developers looks like

We gotta abolish early access. My one anti-consumer take. You cannot trust most fans to give feedback that respects the vision. They will tell you the characters are too mean and the protagonist needs more aura and we need a button to pet the dog every single time. Stop listening to them! Please!

One of those "how it's made" online accounts that just goes straight for the point. How was that movie made? "It was shot with a camera and then edited." How was that painting made? "Someone painted it." How was that game made? "By a wizard."

* several wizards. No auteur worship here.

I'm just. So enamored with this tidbit from @ofthedevil's Design Talk post on Morgan. It's so so funny to me that we got more Bully Morgan moments because they realized mid-process how fun she is to bully sfgjkjgdss

cuz i mean like. look at her.

they're SO fuckin real for that

It does feel a bit sad that the aftermath of Nier Automata for Yoko Taro's creative path seems to have been "Okay, here's what you can do next, as the Nier automata guy, is mobile games and also this card based RPG that's probably pretty cheap to put out, and also we'll have a company do the now safe bet of a first nier game improved version".

Given the news about how he's been trying to get projects started and failing, it feels like automata didn't change much for a person who always managed to have people employ him to make games, and that the main change has been the improved value of the Nier IP and expansions of mobile gaming have made avoiding giving him a full sized game while still getting value from him possible. It might be said that his "My games might have done poorly and yet you will give me full game projects to do" power has, if anything, just declined.

Insane how much better the patched Hades 2 ending is. Incredibly frustrating that they changed it over a month after what was supposed to be the full 1.0 release. They fixed basically every issue I had with the original ending. If they had just gotten it right the first time...

That's the thing, I waited! After the game entered early access I only played it for a little when it was first announced, and then I waited over a year and never touched the early access version again, so I could play the full release mostly blind at launch! The full release was supposed to be the final, complete version of the game, that's what early access is for! That's how it was for Hades 1, too. So I waited for the full release. And yet, somehow, despite waiting, I still didn't get the "real" "true" ending, until a month after launch. How does this happen?

In game development, there is no real 1.0. It's just the place where you stop development.

Except that in the modern era of digital game distribution and casual patches, you can absolutely keep developing after 1.0, and there are a lot of good reasons why a professional studio probably should.

So the "definitive release" is made up and the version numbers don't matter.

frankly between Dwarf Fortress, Terraria and now Silksong, the kind of dev I want to be is "loves their game so very much they can't fucking stop adding content to it". no crunch. just letting it grow and grow because you know your own limits and have enough funding to keep going at your own pace. just because you can. i think that's beautiful

Real. Unbeatable had its first trailer in 2018 and is coming out this year, that's eight years. Disco Elysium took five years for its fully voice acted "final cut" release. Pizza tower took five years. Psychonauts 2 took six years and had to be saved by a Microsoft buyout. Of the Devil posted its first devlog in 2022 and only got chapter 1 out this year. Deltarune chapter 1 came out in 2018 and it only got the 4th of its seven chapters this year. The development time on Silksong is, frankly, exceedingly average.

Heck, if you compare it to indie metroidvanias specifically, rather than indie games in general, seven years is on the low end. In terms of indie metroidvanias of vaguely comparable scope, we've got Phoenotopia: Awakening (also seven years), Ghost Song and Owlboy (both nine years), Iconoclasts (either eight or eleven years, depending on whether you count the cancelled Ivory Springs prototype), Rune Fencer Illyia (still cooking at the time of this posting at six years and counting), and whatever the fuck Hearth Forth, Alicia is doing (don't ask).

I think a lot of folks' expectations are skewed here by the fact that the first Hollow Knight game's development cycle was freakishly quick (and suffered for it; between reports of unsustainable crunch time and the frankly disgraceful state of the game engine at launch, it probably could have stood to spend a couple more years in the oven, too!).

As has been stated multiple times on this blog, team members are assigned where their skills are needed.

“Focusing on one game at a time” would not do anything to expedite the final touches on Eureka, because the team member who has moved on to writing things like Silk & Dagger and Death Bed has already done his job on Eureka, which is to write it. The main things being done on the Eureka rulebook right now are editing and visual art, which are not headed by the same team member.

More recently, the lead writer has been called back to Eureka to handle a few rules changes, and to review and provide feedback on some of the fan made adventure modules from the game jam. This is why it is taking the Death Bed alpha so long to come out, which is actually really hurting us.

It is actually because of releasing things like the Silk & Dagger alpha that we have been able to consistently stay afloat, and we could really use the sales boost of releasing the Death Bed alpha, but it just isn’t ready yet. This is also what’s forcing us to create small Eureka expansions like The Fanservice Files, The XXX-Files, and 800 Years or Progress. More eyes on Eureka and more sales coming in in general would free that team member up from having to work on as many short-term mini-projects and allow him to finish the Death Bed alpha, make progress on Silk & Dagger, and even make more progress where needed on Eureka.

If you want Eureka to be finished faster, talk about us more and buy our stuff so that we can work more efficiently without having to worry as much about financial stability.

the besties <3

i said pretty much everything i had to say about yukiko's link in an earlier post but re: chie's, i'm really struck by how kind of. nothing it is. this is definitely an unfortunate symptom of p4's social link progression being so disconnected from the plot - you can't have anyone really meaningfully change or radically shift their mode of thinking in case it becomes 'desynced' from how they behave in the main story. and while i think some of the other characters fare better in this regard, chie is kind of just the same at rank 10 as she was at rank 1. i almost wondered if there was going to be a thing of her needing to properly learn not to be so reckless, that if she's going to 'protect everyone' then she needs to protect and care for herself too, but that never really happens. it just feels like wasted potential.

I wonder if this problem could be fixed (or at least abated) by restricting the scope of the game a little.

Like, ideally the game would have slightly different versions of scenes, changing main-story cutscenes depending on how far Chie or whomever is in their social link, or perhaps social link dialogue depending on how far along the main story is.

But writing multiple versions of the cutscene takes more work, more writer-hours, more editing and QA and so forth. And this becomes exponentially worse as more characters and social links are introduced!

Say that Chie has two or three distinct responses to (say) the culture festival beauty pageant. He's present, and needs written responses to each of those responses. But if he's also changing through his character arc, one or all of those responses might need to change depending on his social link progress. And in each of those 4-5 conversations where Yosuke drags Kanji into the conversation, he needs some kind of response, which might depend on his development/social link!

But if there were 3-5 main characters instead of 10-12, and 8-10 social links instead of 23 or 25? If the game was 30-50 hours long instead of 70-100? Well, maybe then it could be practical to write multiple versions of many cutscenes.

But it's a lot easier to market a 100-hour JRPG with ten party members than a 40-hour one with reactive dialogue.

a thing that kind of gets to me about the "game industry is cooked" talk is that a lot of people just... genuinely don't care about the people who make games. like their issue with the industry is primarily from a consumer perspective, stuff like overpricing and microtransactions and, you know, bad games. but when it comes to shit like crunch, harassment, and union busting, a lot of people are willing to either ignore it, accept it, or even encourage it if it makes a better product in their eyes.

like, i know this is just one anecdote, but a few years ago when final fantasy xv was having its shit moment, i was talking with someone about it who was a huge fan of that game. they were absolutely livid with square enix for canceling the later dlc, and i agreed (i'll never forget you episode aranea). but when i brought up the layoffs, that a ton of people lost their jobs due to corporate bullshit, they didn't even respond. the conversation just Ended. and i worry that critiquing game companies exclusively as consumer advocacy... misses a lot of the picture of what's really wrong here

Thr PlayStation 2 had third person action games from Atlantis

That's a common misconception. Many Atlantean developers worked on third-person action games in the sixth console generation, but they worked in non-Atlantean studios (mostly in New England, Portugal, and northern Brazil). A few tried to develop video games in Atlantis, but their computers got waterlogged.