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Democrats will continue to give sternly worded remarks all the way up to their appointment with the gallows, so brave!

When They Go Low, We Go Die

Chapter 3

Marjorie smiled with great satisfaction as she looked at the crowd and began to check the rifle in her arms to make sure there was a round in the chamber.

2 men with giant beer guts - who each wore different flavors of Punisher-style skull masks and were covered head to toe in pointlessly elaborate tactical surplus gear as if they were cosplaying their favorite Call of Duty characters - began dragging another elderly man up to the makeshift platform.

The white-haired old man was dressed in a finely tailored dark blue suit with a little American flag lapel pin next to his tie. It looked so similar to the one that so many others in his cohort had adorned for probably the last 20 or so years, but he had been blindfolded by the men before being brought before the stage so he couldn’t see how many others still wore it or who had switched to the golden lion that… “the others…” now wore exclusively.

The octogenarian ghost of a man feebly began to speak (not shout) loudly in protest as if trying to reason with whomever might be in charge, but the 2 pig-like men grinned and said nothing. They began tying his hands behind him against a wooden pole covered with small holes, indentations and spatters of red. As the grinning pigs both stepped away from the geriatric man secured to the pole, the mob just below him roared with wild bloodlust over his inaudible words drowning them out over and over again with : “USA! USA! USA! USA!”

Marjorie laughed and took one hand away from the rifle to quiet the crowd so they could hear the old man’s words :

“Point of order, Mr. Chairman! Point of order! I’m reclaiming my time! I’d like the gentle-lady to put down the firearm she just picked up, Mr. Ch-”

…he was cut off with a loud and sudden BANG as he slumped into a dark puddle of red slowly expanding across the stage floor.

The crowd roared and resumed its repeated chant…

…and another blindfolded well-dressed elderly figure was walked up to the pole.

Oh, right. 🤣 WAIT HE updated it with a longer one!

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Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).

Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.

I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…

Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?

This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.

“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”

The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.

Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.

Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.

Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.

Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.

I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.

Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.

And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…

They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.

And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.

This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”

Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.

I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.

Said this in another thread :

First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.

Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…

So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.

Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.

I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.

This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.

No, the people who deserved it are the ones at the top with garages full of supercars and fleets of private yachts. The Bobby Koticks, the Don Mattricks, etc.

The ones who I guarantee you are NOT suffering or losing their livelihoods.

The tens of thousands of devs who got into making video games because of their deep love of them… devs who have worked countless hours and crunched over the holidays while missing out on sleep, family events and more all just because management won’t plan, can’t stop chasing trends and pivoting the project, and because they fired 10% of the team last quarter to boost the share price by $0.02.

The devs didn’t deserve any of that.

They don’t deserve to lose their jobs right after some game ships and it turns out no one wants to pay $70 plus micro transactions shoved in their faces every other round between matches.

AAA gaming is broken and many of my peers from that industry seem to be in a bad spot now at no fault of their own… but their boss’s boss’s bosses who keep steering the ship into rocks are the ones you should be throwing rotten produce at.

Car seat adjustment, above seat vehicle interior lights, steering wheel adjustment, door handles, door locks, main rear view mirror, climate controls for vents and seats, car starting, and trunk and seat releases should all have controls that can be operated either directly or with physical buttons.

If there is ALSO a screen driven element, that’s fine, but this stuff needs to work without a screen.

This stuff is not being done for the sake of UX. It is for saving money at the expense of consumer safety.

They should make it so you can find chaos emeralds and turn into super or maybe even “hyper” sonic to go double or triple the speed

I would have guessed the “Tar Sands” area being an incredibly massive source of air pollution, but I guess I wasn’t considering wild-fires role in the matter.

Again, it’s a snowball effect.

Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…

They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.

The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.

Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…

Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.

I always go back to one of my favorite CollegeHumor vids literally making fun of that. 🤣

…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.

And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.

Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.

Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.

This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.

All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.

All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.

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