General Video Game Thread
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https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1339974516034965504
One of the best quotes of 2020 right here:
One (dev) asked: How could they make a game about exploitative corporations while forcing devs to crunch?
What a fucking baller.
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Define crunch in this context?
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@tnp said in General Video Game Thread:
Define crunch in this context?
Crunch is the practice of expecting laborers to put in excessive, dangerously high number of hours per work week to get a product out at the advertised time.
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I would swap “expecting” with “forcing.”
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Ah, that makes sense. The context implied something like that but I'd never heard the term before.
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@tnp said in General Video Game Thread:
Ah, that makes sense. The context implied something like that but I'd never heard the term before.
It's a pretty big issue in the games industry, but some journalists have been working hard to try to shed light on it. Even though they get shit on by fanboys for doing it.
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@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
Except the police.
As I was recently told, you can't be a socialist and a law enforcement officer, even though I was both until a few months ago. There's actually quite a few socialist organizations, particularly gun clubs, that say you can't be a member if you are in law enforcement. Military is fine, but no police. The police are The Man vs. The People. The military is The Man vs. Some Other The Man, and anyone who fights The Man is good, even if it's The Man.
@rucket said in General Video Game Thread:
It's a pretty big issue in the games industry, but some journalists have been working hard to try to shed light on it. Even though they get shit on by fanboys for doing it.
Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition talks about it a lot and has for about four years now, but they aren't exactly a mainstream games journalist anymore.
EDIT: Whoops. Didn't realize I misgendered, and I knew better. No excuses.
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Not to get too snippy, but... to do... that...
When, exactly, did we collectively decide that "well, it's day one release" was an excuse for a game to be buggy?
Like, I realize we're past the days when cavemen needed to chisel the ones and zeroes immutably onto a kar-chrij to ship out, and the ability to go back and patch a finished game is on balance a good thing. Same with content expansions that don't need the physical media and shipping expenses you'd get with an expansion pack.
But I'm a bit peeved at the fact that this has been taken as license to, generally, treat release day as "super special open full-priced beta testing." Especially when combined with the industry's... focus? emphasis? unsettling fetish? of deluxe ultra preorder things.
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@insomniac7809 I only regret that I have but one upvote to give.
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@insomniac7809 said in General Video Game Thread:
Not to get too snippy, but... to do... that...
When, exactly, did we collectively decide that "well, it's day one release" was an excuse for a game to be buggy?
Like, I realize we're past the days when cavemen needed to chisel the ones and zeroes immutably onto a kar-chrij to ship out, and the ability to go back and patch a finished game is on balance a good thing. Same with content expansions that don't need the physical media and shipping expenses you'd get with an expansion pack.
But I'm a bit peeved at the fact that this has been taken as license to, generally, treat release day as "super special open full-priced beta testing." Especially when combined with the industry's... focus? emphasis? unsettling fetish? of deluxe ultra preorder things.
You're not alone. Honestly some studios should just embrace the Early Access tag and say that the first year of release is for community bug fixing or some shit. Do what Larian did with the last couple Divinity games.
@ominous said in General Video Game Thread:
Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition talks about it a lot and has for about four years now, but he isn't exactly a mainstream games journalist anymore.
Yeah, I'm aware of Jim. He and Jason Schreier tend to be the two biggest voices in games media about this. I know some other publications follow their work, but the two of them have also had to deal with people giving them shit for daring to talk about studios like CDPR in a way that isn't glowingly positive.
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@insomniac7809 said in General Video Game Thread:
When, exactly, did we collectively decide that "well, it's day one release" was an excuse for a game to be buggy?
When we decided self-respect was less important to us than making sure the hype prophecies we tell ourselves about the toys we play with are self-fulfilling. I'm bad with dates but I think it was about eight years ago.
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@rucket Both Subnautica and now Grounded have handled the early access thing very well I think.
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A lot of games have, but they're usually by smaller teams or one person.
Factorio
Darkest Dungeon
Starsector
Workers & Resources: Soviet RepublicThose are just the ones off of the top of my head.
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I think I was able to enjoy Cyberpunk a lot more than my friends because I had no hype going into it. I love the setting lots, but somehow I just didn't follow CP very closely, and that served me pretty well from the looks of things.
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I have been playing Cyberpunk on my oldish (3 years old) but high spec desktop and whilst I have definitely run into bugs? A lot fewer bugs than many other 'Triple A' games.
Performance has been decent and the game looks gorgeous whilst having largely well written and well acted plots in an amazingly rich and interesting world. Some of the very RPG mechanics stuff like levelled equipment and enemies suck and run counter to the immersion but overall I am having a great time.
Also I admit I do not see where anyone is coming from who is talking about lack of positive representation for LGBT individuals? Outside of the rightful indignation over some of the initial marketing. One of the best characters who is integral to the plot is lesbian and there is a side character who I only recently found out is a trans woman. She has a whole set of side missions where you hang out with her and she is pretty awesome.
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I became more sympathetic when I began to understand how exploitive the industry is. About eight years ago, I guess, to confirm GreenFlashlight.
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@ominous For what it's worth, if I was unclear, my issue is in no sense with people who open up early access to start some cash flow and outsource some QA. "People who want a first look can pay to get it, and we get some testing in a less controled environment than our QA department."
Just, when it comes to release day, I'm just of the apparently outdated opinion that the game should be finished, not "finished*". Like, if there's some bugs that slipped past QA and the magic of a series of tubes can fix it after launch, fine. Hell, with modern AAA massive open world procedural whatnot, I'll even grant that sheer probability means there's gonna be some issues that turn up when you have millions of players instead of one overworked QA department. That's different from a release day game where most every reviewer has an opinion on how severe the bugs they ran into were.
And even from the pure profit motive (I'm under no "just world" delusions that good for consumers is always good for the company), I have to think a game company would be better off waiting for the big release day push until they had a working game. Like, talk to someone who pre-ordered ME: Andromeda or No Man's Sky, and then talk to someone who bought it a year after release, and they don't sound like they're talking about the same game. I would think that the good word of mouth would be more valuable than pushing a game out the door that gets held up forever as a case study of "what the fuck went wrong" even after there's a fixed game for everyone to ignore in favor of like three more rounds of hyped-up "ultra spectacular nylon bag edition" "finished*" game releases.
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@insomniac7809 said in General Video Game Thread:
I'm just of the apparently outdated opinion that the game should be finished, not "finished*". Like, if there's some bugs that slipped past QA and the magic of a series of tubes can fix it after launch, fine.
The thing is, no software project on the planet ever is "finished". There's always something else you can add, low-priority bugs that you ignore because the cost/benefit ratio isn't there, and things you just flat-out miss because your team is human and users will always find a way to do things you never imagined, especially at scale.
So at some point the company just has to draw a line in the sand and say "this is what we're going with".
Smart companies, however, will not draw that line while there are still massively impactful known bugs, as seems to be the case that happened with CP2077. That's just treating your customers like crap, and they're rightfully paying for it.
Tangent - I'm irritated now that I put down $20 for a pre-order deposit for a game that will not run on my console. I can't get a refund from CP because I never completed the purchase. I can't get a refund from GameStop without going into the store, which I can't do because covid. Grumble.
