Fatigued Souls (Part 1)

In videogames especially, that depends. It’s perfectly possible for that to be the case or for a videogame to have no single director per se.

AAA videogames are looser, larger and more resistant to micromanagement than a movie, so the analogy implied by the word “director” doesn’t fit that well, I think. I wonder if the role is actually closer to the TV word “showrunner”.

Auteur theory is dumb, point blank.

I think leaders are important, but auteur theory is just intellectual fellatio.

Also, directors are frequently shiny celebrity names in video games (as are musicians, artists, etc.). So how important they are/how much they had their hands in the pie is always pretty questionable anyway.

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In my experience we can broadly divide it into 2 categories:

  • Momentary focus – the director looks at a cutscene or reviews a level and calls out specific bits to heighten or inflect the mood. They usually don’t dictate but push.
  • Strategic shifts – large resource allocation decisions come down to the director. Is it worth building this system? Should this be cut?

Everything is moving fast enough that the director can’t be hands-on with much; if, for example, the director was deeply involved with Bloodborne over its roughly 3-year development and then later, also, on Dark Souls 3 over its roughly 2.5-year development, starting later, they would find many pieces moving too fast for them to change, and would have less scope to throw out work.

The cliche is that culture eats strategy for lunch. So I’d say the real job is to inspire the team with a vision and vaguely influence everyone into better attitudes and methods for collaborating on creative work, so that the entire team’s potential is fully utilized.

A director’s influence is also seen through his team. They can’t be hands-on with everything but it’s not unusual that they choose the people who will be, art director, lead programmer and so on, and in that way steer the project through trusted right hand men.

For example, the lead character artist and at least two lead map artists on Bloodborne are advisors on Dark Souls 3, the BB lead programmer is part of the DS3 programming team (and those people were already involved in DS1, whereas more of the leads for DS2 come from other franchises)… The whole advisor thing is precisely so the DS3 team may still be taken towards the right direction even though those people were busy with Bloodborne.

But this power over staffing seems more potent for movie directors than for game directors, so I wouldn’t be inclined to emphasize it. Game studios (except indies!) don’t generally operate with a “flash team” development model of ideally suited collaborators coming together for a single project. This strongly constrains their staffing decisions: they need to promote the best of a few internal candidates or hire. And when they made a choice, these are done as permanent career decisions for the future of the studio as much as project-specific best talent for a particular concept.

The DkS1 staff advising DkS3 seems to have been important to the outcome, but it’s more about organizational communication structure and cultural transfer. Making someone “advisor” is not a staffing decision per se, it’s just putting them in the same room as the real staff and make sure that their views are heard and understood.

where is the captain toad treasure tracker of souls

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That doesn’t change anything though. If the advisors’ real role is cultural transfer (and that’s entirely your assumption) then choosing them from Miyazaki’s historical Soulsborne posse still asserts his direction through them. At the very least within the scope of the “b-team” debate it is observable that the DS3 team was seeded with Miyazaki’s people in a way the DS2 team wasn’t, contrary to the earlier assumption that Miyazaki was the only staff member coming from Bloodborne.

As for the power needed to exert that kind of staffing influence, given he was on the verge of becoming From’s head honcho it’d be nothing surprising even if it weren’t the normal process.

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i still havent finished dark souls 1

:dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre::dansemacabre:

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get the remaster, beat it with me!! That goes for all of you!!

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Ahh yes the ole kindling the fire. The ole praising one’s self. The ole candleheading. The ole wish I could remember more dark souls stuff that is vaguely like masturbation.

I left the obvious one on the table and it can stay there because we are all adults okay!

On what platform tho

sublime bone dust?

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Well, ps4 for me…

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Stick it in. By it I mean your head into this wax pool.

It was only like my third time through the area that I figured out what it did.

Regarding Dark Souls 2, nobody ever mentions the random gender-swapping coffin guarded by really tough ogres on a silent, dark beach in the tutorial area. I loved that bit. Those messy, evocative, totally unnecessary and half-completed bursts of poetry are my favorite parts of those games.

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yooooooooo

plus iirc if you are wearing armor, you would only notice something is different because of the voice grunts?

Yeah you’d suddenly be Peter Serafinowicz

is this a metaphor for gatekeeping, i wonder

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