It’s what it actually looks like when the Y2K dreams of MMO designers come true and merge the real world with games. Not a sealed proscribed fantasy, but no walls between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ culture.
It’s not pure collage like the internet, it’s all still processed under their house art style, but that makes it more hallucinatory – it’s a mind that sees a particular way processing everything a 12-year-old is interested in
The cultural cachet of Fortnite is such an absolute disaster
dude you wrote that two minutes after a post about how much you like World of Warcraft
Yeah, it’s less of a disgusting money trap than Fortnite. How sick is that
I briefly worked at a AA game studio 13 years ago and, like, one memory I keep going back to.
So, it helps to establish some context. The main game the studio was actually working on was… I shit you not… Bee Movie Game. That’s why I remembered it in the Seinfeld thread. Because my entire work social circle was heads down on Bee Movie Game. Thank the gods, I was in a small legacy part of the studio and was personally spared from working on Bee Movie Game. I never mentioned it before out of excessive concern for my pseudonymity but hell if it matters now. I was thinking last week I should talk about it, as it’s hilarious.
The studio leads believed in positivity and glass half full. They had two ways to spin Bee Movie Game. The first one is that we would bring kids joy and it was a really high quality product, in its own way. The second one is that this is like a hazing and if we are really successful at this, we’ll get to work on games we’re really excited about. Like, HQ is suggesting we might actually make Spiderman. (This actually happened, 2 more unexciting licenses later, long after I left.)
Now finally to my point. They also dangled an idea they were even more hyped about: an inhouse MMO concept. Remember this was 2006. The title would be something like “World of Beasts” but it wasn’t that, I can’t remember now but it was more epic. They showed a concept art of a colossal wolfman surrounded by floating islands (inverted mountains), a cloudy sky with godrays and tons of tiny humanoids to put the wolfman in scale. The studio CEO explained that you would start as a human-sized wolfman at level 1, and you’d get bigger with every level until at max level you towered over the other players. And raids would have big colossus leaders surrounded by a varying height raid party.
I was absolutely blown away by how childish their visionary masterpiece was. And there was no way to mock it with other employees to blow off steam because everyone had to pretend to be excited.
Two years later I went off to Silicon Valley and decided never to rejoin the game industry unless I could be absolutely sure I wouldn’t be going back into such a culture. The opportunity never arose yet.
has Silicon Valley work proved sufficiently more mature?
Oh yeah night and day. In my next job, for starters, the honest willingness to be negative about obviously shitty things I noticed in my very first week. I felt at home then and immediately gained confidence I would never feel sickened in the same way I described in the above post again
ah, enveloped within the cocoon of cynical engineer-led culture
I like the embittered scrappiness of old ex-AAA professional indies a lot more than the vague-eyed comfort of AAA, where people aren’t scraping to make it into a higher rung, but mutely comfortable
absolutely love that the bee movie game feedback that Wikipedia has chosen to single out for its “critical reception” blurb mentions that even a relatively old child was confused by the controls
Their idea rules hard.
they pioneered the lvl 1 thug -> lvl 20 crook world we’re living in now
The gambit slots are a huge deal, though there are just 3 per character iirc. If you feel that two jobs are unbalanced I think you can still just assign one job to each or just don’t fill in the 2nd license board. (oh wait that wasn’t new) The job reset will just refund your license points so you can start over without anything lost but sitting through the animations to fill the board all over again can be tedious. Switch/xbone FF12’s new game+ also carried over your inventory and money which is great for beyond hope completionist weirdos like me
RTX voice is good enough to remove clicky keyboard switch noises from your mic audio completely and you can install it on GTX cards by deleting three rows from a config file.
The amazing part is you can run it on audio output which is a godsend for misophonia.
I’m gonna start wearing I 
CUDA t shirts
can’t decide if this is a bug or a feature
Do you have a classy ALPS/Matias keyboard? We’re talking the blues.
I have a Happy Hacking Keyboard but I was thinking more in terms of “maybe I want to hear your clicky switches and now I won’t get to hear them”
Ah! Always optional, of course. I love the sounds but folks typically do not. And I am a hypocrite who finds all kinds of sounds unbearably grating.