This happened to one of my favorite game studios recently. Starbreeze/Overkill makes the Payday series, along with a lot of shitty pop culture IP games (The Walking Dead, a Raid WWII game, I'm forgetting any others).
Turns out between Payday 2 and Payday 3, they fired most of the original staff, hired out all the art to third party companies (including some that used AI generation, which got Steam pissed at them), hired out the AI for enemies, and used a lot of upsampled voice work from the second game for the third. The game's community is pissed.
And then you realize that this is the new hotness, the new "it" thing. The developers of Kerbal Space Program did it, the devs of Alan Wake are doing it, the devs of Cities Skylines are doing it.
I remember when getting into Payday 2 that the general design of the game would have been perfect for a Stargate reskin.
Multiple orders/factions of Jaffa to account for harder mobs: normal Apophis Jaffa, Sokar Jaffa, Kul Warriors as Dozers.
Archeology digs as an alternative time sink to hacking/drilling, and even then retrieving some Ancient, Asgardian, or whatever piece of tech would still work perfectly.
Multiple weapons, including the possibility of energy weapons and ranged weapons with melee attacks since a Jaffa staff weapon is still a staff.
And then nothing actually happened with Payday 2. It just kept releasing the bare minimum in terms of DLC but charging a premium. Guns, mods, clothes, sometimes even a mission! 😮
So much time and money grabbing I'm kind of glad now a franchise reskin didn't happen because it would have been a dancing skin suit at best.
Still, it could be used as a working concept for such a thing in the future.
I'm not sure whether I should be experiencing grim satisfaction or vitriolic hatred that the 'sequel' to KSP is an absolute clusterfuck that every fan of KSP is calling out.
By this point, I may just have to settle for 'both'.
KSP2 could have been a great game. Take the first one and the most popular mods, code it from the beginning so it didn't stutter like Lieden, boom, instant classic. Instead they made all of the same errors as the first one, with none of the programmers to back up their claims.
Notable Clients include Microsoft(Xbox), Electronic Arts, Valve, Take 2 Interactive(2k & Rockstar), Ubisoft, Square Enix, Warner Bros, & Hasbro(Wizards of the Coast).
Make no mistake, the companies using these services IS terrorist financing!
The one that stands out to me from this list is Valve. Gabe is woke? Thought he was a hardcore libertarian. Nothing they released recently speak to me as pandering to leftist either but then again I haven't really touched their games in years.
Any idea what they could have done with Valve specifically?
Dude it’s a company of nerds who live in Washington state outside of Seattle
I very much doubt anyone there is actively “based”. Gabe just isn’t a moron and doesn’t want to sacrifice his company on the altar of The Weekly Whims of the Woke
I'm so glad I was able to binge read that until it went completely off the rails so I hardly invested any time at all in the clusterfuck of drama and insanity it turned into.
I remember reading that comic a while back. Occasionally I'll get bored and wander on by the places that do fan-edits that satirize the whole thing.
The part that always made me wonder about QC, though... was the author so fucking oblivious about the red-pills he inserted into the story? Was he so far gone it just never occurred to him some of the stuff put into the story? Granted, this was early QC, and it's only gotten alot worse, but still.
Seems Valve contracted the founder for at least some of Dota: Underworld's writing, some mobile-first game. I'll be much more concerned with who writes their next mainline single-player.
Casual single-issue libertarians... Proper libertarians have read a book on economics and care more about owning grenade launchers and controlled borders(more than just the federal boundaries) than the unconditional approval of meth fueled furry fucking.
The fundamental contention that Libertarians have is eliminating the power of the state. We understand that personal freedom is limited by social and moral obligations. Furthermore wokists are all about the state controlling what you can say and think.
3D modeling was outsourced to foreign sweat shops on par with fiver. We had 3 artists on staff who's job it was to fix all the fuckups the foreign artists were doing. The foreign artists never hit target polycounts and always turned in work that was full of flaws like unwelded verts or being set up in the wrong scaling / wrong world orientation. Those artists spent most of their time creating entirely new low poly models and then baking the details of the high poly down onto that model to make it compliant with our metrics.
We had many people who were SJWs who got into games as a fall back when things like their fine arts degree didn't get them a job the way they were hoping. No doubt their foot in the door was some kind of nepotism.
Don't know how recently you left the industry, but you have any idea as to why female characters look so much worse compared to the supposed models they use for face scans and such? Mary Jane in the latest game looks worse than the model she is based off of, and yet oddly has an eerily similar facial structure as one of the writers for the game.
Yup. Laziness. The work saving tools have left the new generation of game industry workers without knowledge of problems or how to fix them. But also male feminists.
One of my favorite stories was that we had a dommy mommy style character. Had high heels and a fuck-me waddle. We onboarded this bald headed goonie beard man and within the first 5 days, he was complaining it was sexist. By the by, the art director was a woman. That character was her idea. She ordered the concept and approved all the concept art.
The pick-me male feminists are advocating the ugly stick to win points in the office.
Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.
Theory of mind issue; you're thinking if you can do it then they can do it. Consider yourself a unicorn.
Linux has ALWAYS been an option. Every time windows is looking to impose a really shitty change, people threaten to go to linux. Do they though? Or they threaten to change cloud services... but they usually stay on azure.
You could have a manual transmission offer 30% better gas millage. People would still stick to automatic because they just don't have the mental bandwidth to learn manual after a lifetime of automatic.
Not justifying it, just saying, humans preserve brainpower whenever possible.
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.
Look at pictures of the female staffs of Western studios and compare it to pictures of female staffs of Asian studios. Completely night and day. Little to no danger hair colors, fat girls or trannies.
Game companies keep saying games are getting more and more expensive to make.. but games look like shit, runs like shit and isn't even fun to play. More expensive, but more shit is being outsourced to some low shit tier studio or some cheap studios in phillines or india.
Games aren’t getting “more expensive to make” they’re getting more expensive to do a yearly mill of the same copy paste and keep customers interested for 70-100 bucks a pop. If they hired competent workers who actually enjoy video games they wouldn’t be having the worst competency crises in the industry’s history.
Sweet Baby Inc. is an inclusion-focused narrative and consultation company.
My Sides.
We believe that representation is key to connecting players and audiences,and we offer a few ways to help your team and project gain the perspective needed to make it happen. We’re part of an inclusive and knowledgeable community of diverse consultants, able to cover a wide range of cultural and sensitivity topics. Our approach leads with the creation of joy in marginalized players, and seeks to be additive rather than strictly corrective.
We do: Cultural Consultation, Sensitivity And Inclusivity Reading, Risk and Opportunities Assessment, and more.
There was an Alan Wake developer video where they legit say "a woman that is a person of color as a protagonist is very rare in gaming"... they legit said that.. even though every other Western game has a black female protagonist.
Shit, they got to Alan Wake? Doesn't surprise me but this is the first I've heard of it and I was actually looking forward to the sequel, keeping myself in the dark (lul) to better enjoy the experience. Why can't we have nice things?
Welcome to third party companies. It's like this all over. Dynasty Warriors is made in Vietnam. Disney and Universal have the same third party companies. NDAs are insane when you realize the guy who signed it also signed one to not reveal what he is designing for the competitor. Companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Namco swap employees all the time.
I find it funny the perpertrator in question is from Canada. Why of course it's Canada, a country made up of woke faggots mostly. I always didn't like that country in particular for some reason but this seems like one of the reasons along with other things.
Lol, Goodbye Volcano High is one of the listed games under their portfolio. The hilarious story is that it got upstaged by a parody game made by 4chan.
Even when they brag about their "stellar" work, it seems off, like a statement meant to be as neutral as possible. (Paraphrasing) Look guys y'all, this man person we helped make for AC:Valhalla, check out his fade. A diverse warrior named Vagn.
And the only response is from a studio they partnered with... quite the engagement.
This happened to one of my favorite game studios recently. Starbreeze/Overkill makes the Payday series, along with a lot of shitty pop culture IP games (The Walking Dead, a Raid WWII game, I'm forgetting any others).
Turns out between Payday 2 and Payday 3, they fired most of the original staff, hired out all the art to third party companies (including some that used AI generation, which got Steam pissed at them), hired out the AI for enemies, and used a lot of upsampled voice work from the second game for the third. The game's community is pissed.
And then you realize that this is the new hotness, the new "it" thing. The developers of Kerbal Space Program did it, the devs of Alan Wake are doing it, the devs of Cities Skylines are doing it.
Kind of glad PD3 took so fucking long to come out I lost all interest in playing PD2. The long list of overpriced DLC didn't help matters.
I remember when getting into Payday 2 that the general design of the game would have been perfect for a Stargate reskin.
Multiple orders/factions of Jaffa to account for harder mobs: normal Apophis Jaffa, Sokar Jaffa, Kul Warriors as Dozers.
Archeology digs as an alternative time sink to hacking/drilling, and even then retrieving some Ancient, Asgardian, or whatever piece of tech would still work perfectly.
Multiple weapons, including the possibility of energy weapons and ranged weapons with melee attacks since a Jaffa staff weapon is still a staff.
And then nothing actually happened with Payday 2. It just kept releasing the bare minimum in terms of DLC but charging a premium. Guns, mods, clothes, sometimes even a mission! 😮
So much time and money grabbing I'm kind of glad now a franchise reskin didn't happen because it would have been a dancing skin suit at best.
Still, it could be used as a working concept for such a thing in the future.
my kingdom for a good stargate game while all the actors are still alive.
I'm not sure whether I should be experiencing grim satisfaction or vitriolic hatred that the 'sequel' to KSP is an absolute clusterfuck that every fan of KSP is calling out.
By this point, I may just have to settle for 'both'.
KSP2 could have been a great game. Take the first one and the most popular mods, code it from the beginning so it didn't stutter like Lieden, boom, instant classic. Instead they made all of the same errors as the first one, with none of the programmers to back up their claims.
Ironically.. this is the same generation of asshats that brought you "move fast and break things!"
Notable Clients include Microsoft(Xbox), Electronic Arts, Valve, Take 2 Interactive(2k & Rockstar), Ubisoft, Square Enix, Warner Bros, & Hasbro(Wizards of the Coast).
Make no mistake, the companies using these services IS terrorist financing!
The one that stands out to me from this list is Valve. Gabe is woke? Thought he was a hardcore libertarian. Nothing they released recently speak to me as pandering to leftist either but then again I haven't really touched their games in years.
Any idea what they could have done with Valve specifically?
Dude it’s a company of nerds who live in Washington state outside of Seattle
I very much doubt anyone there is actively “based”. Gabe just isn’t a moron and doesn’t want to sacrifice his company on the altar of The Weekly Whims of the Woke
Gabe Newell personally donated to the DNC & the Patreon of the author of questionable content, he likely authorized it.
If you have a lot of money, and you're smart, you give to both sides. Fewer enemies.
tbf if you're only concerned about California, you only have to pay off Democrats.
I'm so glad I was able to binge read that until it went completely off the rails so I hardly invested any time at all in the clusterfuck of drama and insanity it turned into.
I remember reading that comic a while back. Occasionally I'll get bored and wander on by the places that do fan-edits that satirize the whole thing.
The part that always made me wonder about QC, though... was the author so fucking oblivious about the red-pills he inserted into the story? Was he so far gone it just never occurred to him some of the stuff put into the story? Granted, this was early QC, and it's only gotten alot worse, but still.
Seems Valve contracted the founder for at least some of Dota: Underworld's writing, some mobile-first game. I'll be much more concerned with who writes their next mainline single-player.
Libertarians are woke moron. Unlimited personal freedom is about as woke as you can get
Casual single-issue libertarians... Proper libertarians have read a book on economics and care more about owning grenade launchers and controlled borders(more than just the federal boundaries) than the unconditional approval of meth fueled furry fucking.
The fundamental contention that Libertarians have is eliminating the power of the state. We understand that personal freedom is limited by social and moral obligations. Furthermore wokists are all about the state controlling what you can say and think.
Speaking as an ex game industry worker.
3D modeling was outsourced to foreign sweat shops on par with fiver. We had 3 artists on staff who's job it was to fix all the fuckups the foreign artists were doing. The foreign artists never hit target polycounts and always turned in work that was full of flaws like unwelded verts or being set up in the wrong scaling / wrong world orientation. Those artists spent most of their time creating entirely new low poly models and then baking the details of the high poly down onto that model to make it compliant with our metrics.
We had many people who were SJWs who got into games as a fall back when things like their fine arts degree didn't get them a job the way they were hoping. No doubt their foot in the door was some kind of nepotism.
Don't know how recently you left the industry, but you have any idea as to why female characters look so much worse compared to the supposed models they use for face scans and such? Mary Jane in the latest game looks worse than the model she is based off of, and yet oddly has an eerily similar facial structure as one of the writers for the game.
Yup. Laziness. The work saving tools have left the new generation of game industry workers without knowledge of problems or how to fix them. But also male feminists.
One of my favorite stories was that we had a dommy mommy style character. Had high heels and a fuck-me waddle. We onboarded this bald headed goonie beard man and within the first 5 days, he was complaining it was sexist. By the by, the art director was a woman. That character was her idea. She ordered the concept and approved all the concept art.
The pick-me male feminists are advocating the ugly stick to win points in the office.
This is an important truth. Women would not get their way if it weren't for the "sneaky fucker," "men without chests" types aiding them.
Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.
Theory of mind issue; you're thinking if you can do it then they can do it. Consider yourself a unicorn.
Linux has ALWAYS been an option. Every time windows is looking to impose a really shitty change, people threaten to go to linux. Do they though? Or they threaten to change cloud services... but they usually stay on azure.
You could have a manual transmission offer 30% better gas millage. People would still stick to automatic because they just don't have the mental bandwidth to learn manual after a lifetime of automatic.
Not justifying it, just saying, humans preserve brainpower whenever possible.
I do some hobby 3d rendering in blender. How does that tool compare to the professional ones?
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.
Look at pictures of the female staffs of Western studios and compare it to pictures of female staffs of Asian studios. Completely night and day. Little to no danger hair colors, fat girls or trannies.
Game companies keep saying games are getting more and more expensive to make.. but games look like shit, runs like shit and isn't even fun to play. More expensive, but more shit is being outsourced to some low shit tier studio or some cheap studios in phillines or india.
Games aren’t getting “more expensive to make” they’re getting more expensive to do a yearly mill of the same copy paste and keep customers interested for 70-100 bucks a pop. If they hired competent workers who actually enjoy video games they wouldn’t be having the worst competency crises in the industry’s history.
It cant be cheap feeding all those hambeasts.
Gaurantee its like twitter where the studio can fire half its employees and itll make a superior product and more efficiently and cheap.
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There is evidence that the female lead in Alan Wake 2 was originally a white woman, so I think they do more than simply review scripts.
There was an Alan Wake developer video where they legit say "a woman that is a person of color as a protagonist is very rare in gaming"... they legit said that.. even though every other Western game has a black female protagonist.
Shit, they got to Alan Wake? Doesn't surprise me but this is the first I've heard of it and I was actually looking forward to the sequel, keeping myself in the dark (lul) to better enjoy the experience. Why can't we have nice things?
The former, they are pushing forced diversity.
Alan Wake 2, God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2… it’s a who’s who of woke AAA.
Leftist strategy. Create the problem and sell the solution.
Welcome to third party companies. It's like this all over. Dynasty Warriors is made in Vietnam. Disney and Universal have the same third party companies. NDAs are insane when you realize the guy who signed it also signed one to not reveal what he is designing for the competitor. Companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Namco swap employees all the time.
We are seeing the company, they dont.
I find it funny the perpertrator in question is from Canada. Why of course it's Canada, a country made up of woke faggots mostly. I always didn't like that country in particular for some reason but this seems like one of the reasons along with other things.
Lol, Goodbye Volcano High is one of the listed games under their portfolio. The hilarious story is that it got upstaged by a parody game made by 4chan.
Would not have been surprised to see Blizzard on this list because whoever they've got doing their writing now isn't any better.
a target appears
Even when they brag about their "stellar" work, it seems off, like a statement meant to be as neutral as possible. (Paraphrasing) Look
guysy'all, thismanperson we helped make for AC:Valhalla, check out his fade. A diverse warrior named Vagn.And the only response is from a studio they partnered with... quite the engagement.