About the image, and this is all personal notes: What a solid summary of Chinese game development. If you told me 20 years ago that China would be producing anything that we could call AAA, I wouldn't have believed you. I'm sure a lot of you will still deny it, but more from a standpoint of raging, furious hatred over the gacha model and sold virtual goods in general.
We all know and have forever heard the Western propaganda: Chinese nationals cannot create, only copy, their talent and skill for copying has been perfected into an art. All your beloved consoles are likely banned in the state. Curfews for the children. Every company being mandated to have a representative or department/board that reports directly to the CCP. All that stuff.
And in those early days, there's World of Warcraft, becoming as big in China as Starcraft is to Korea, if a to us strange and unusual censored form where undead and skeletons have to be cleaned up and made presentable to Chinese sensibilities. And here we are in the present, Blizzard cast aside like an old toy after bending the knee for so many years, not needed anymore.
Even 10 years ago I was still believing all this. Then this international, intercultural Chinese renaissance started springing up when I wasn't paying attention.
When I believed the hype that Kancolle was one day going to be the Touhou Killer, I missed the boat on Azur Lane. When Girls Frontline released, I missed the starting gun, never heard of it until the collab with VA-11 HALL-A.
So when Arknights started pre-release advertising on Twitter, I started getting interested, not knowing all of these titles were Chinese, not knowing the only thing authentically Japanese were the voice actors, not knowing the company was birthed from a split of Girls Frontline devs disagreeing with the direction the game was taking at the time, not knowing the game was even tower defense (if IMHO more like a blend of "real time strategy RPG" mechanics that just happen to mostly distill down to "things are moving toward your blue boxes, don't let them do that").
Now here we are with Mihoyo as king of the hill, boasting the first of a new generation of F2P Breath of the Wild-likes. We have that Wukong game. And it's only going to keep progressing.
And no, not once have I brought up or blamed anything on "woke"
Just make a better product. Because right now, the great and powerful capitalist West is getting out-capitalized by skilled, motivated developers of the East, whether or not the watchful eye of the CCP and the money of giant megacorps like Tencent have anything to do with it.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/arknights/comments/1g57w3a/hypergryph_x_university_of_southern_california/
Was going to be two topics but better to consolidate the discussions into one
The event, paraphrased: Prominent Chinese dev comes to USC, event is attended almost entirely by only Chinese students and the presenters only spoke to them in Chinese. Only the provided slides and merch were English, which I think I've seen before and may be leftovers from game shows they've been recently attending.
The jobs they are recruiting for will be in Shanghai. Not sure if this entails relocation or remote work from a Western US office.
Another poster further down says what would be today will be another recruitment at New York University.
Personal note: Hypergryph has in the past placed a strong importance on education, with there usually being an annual song produced and Arknights marketing and well wishes for students on finals week and graduation. They seem like a bunch of great guys that have been doing well for themselves in the past five years. I hope they get some skilled workers and great insights while recruiting here in the US.
This is my experience with the TV app. It started pairing one unskippable with a skippable, but it's not exact science. Sometimes they're both unskippable, sometimes the first can be skipped. After so long it finally gives you the 5-7 second unskippables alone or in pairs. It's a pretty minor inconvenience, really.
This whole thread is pretty much what I expected concerning Nugirls.
People mutiny against the lead developers with the creative vision behind the project and, rather than being content to push new content for the mobile game if that's what they really want to do, decide to also take what was already long since done and finalized as of 2nd Encore and start making more updates to it.
It's the most bizarre thing I've seen happen in indie gaming yet.
So my takeaway from all this thus far is the this is yet another court case where the outcome conveniently works out for both sides.
The right wing gets its usual "nope, doesn't count, Teflon Don wins again, innocent as the day he was born"
Everyone else gets the deliberately worded headline that he had to pay $5 million in damages for SOMETHING, therefore he MUST be in the wrong, even if it was determined by a jury with likely very little evidence about an incident they are to believe happened over thirty years ago.
This wasn't a political hit, this was a political reload.
For example, watching the news, one point they seemed to dwell on was the alleged photo of the accuser. The story goes that Trump kept insisting that it was a picture of Marla, never mind the claim that he did not know or recognize Carroll in the first place. Remember this for later. I absolutely see the whole uniparty media bringing this up in campaign ads as an attack on Trump's mental acuity, poor guy's such a mess he thinks a woman he sexually abused was his own ex-wife! UNFIT FOR OFFICE, UNFIT FOR AMERICA!
So we'll have that, on top of the smarmy Billy Bush "locker room talks" clip that got dredged back up to be weaponized against him again, on top of the OTHER trial we still have to get to with Stormy Daniels (I already almost forgot about that), on top of two impeachments, on top of questioning election integrity now being thoughtcrime with offenders becoming unpersoned as Election Deniers, and we're still in the first half of the year. If this battle got any more uphill it would be a vertical wall. Maybe it already is, I dunno.
There is no tldr, I just wanted to vent about a few things I noticed yesterday. This is why I normally keep my political thoughts to myself.
I'm down with this solely because the provided example goes for the one joke just about every tabletop group has ever made: What do you get when you have the child of a halfling and a gnome (bonus points would have been awarded if the example called it a Half-Halfling or Quarterling)
Aren’t we already past this? Article has today’s date but cites tweets from January.
We have progressed beyond “haha the dumb AI can’t even do hands right” and “well if it’s doing hands right then it must be art theft!” to “oh no it’s actually learning and isn’t stealing art, we can’t keep up with it, we need to stop all advancement for at least six months so we can plan out how next to overreact” in the span of just a few months.
Despite the decision being made and in-app purchases being shut down, Crunchy almost defiantly chooses to stick to the schedule and intends to run its last character on April 17th. Today they even announced that Tamaki can now be ascended to 6-star, for what good that is now worth.
Also, they still ran a 24-hour event yesterday, Landosol Wars: Return of the Colossus. They're essentially running a "business as usual" approach up until the day of the shutdown itself.
As for Uma Musume, that's still speculation based on a slide at the Google for Games developer summit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/11rorl1/potential_global_uma_musume_confirmed/
I don't exactly see anything outright denying it, plus this has the whole "developers were supposed to see this, not consumers" angle, so I'm going to rule an English release as plausible.
If we go by March 29-30 of LAST year, sources had said Cygames were pursuing a global release, but "global" was believed to mean China-Taiwan-Korea, not so much the western world. Could be related to THIS year's March 30 decision to kill Crunchyroll's license, might not.
Don't let JP Priconne relaunching Grand Masters for the week distract you from the fact that global Priconne (under license by Crunchyroll) chose this time to announce its end of service at the end of the month and immediate removal from app stores.
If you try to search for it, the first title that pops up will now instead be KonoSuba: Fantastic Days by Nexon. Appropriately enough, some Priconne refugees are heading to Blue Archive, the next closest game of its style... Also published by Nexon.
What this means for Cygames right now, I don't know, considering a recent Google presentation let it slip that Uma Musume may finally be on the way. As such, it understandably looks a lot like the closure of Priconne is the failure of Crunchyroll as the publisher.
Making a few demons put on some pants is one thing. Getting to the aesthetics specific to P5, it appears that they also had to ditch the fluorescent brightly colored blood effects.
Check out Arai's awakening. Nevermind that they pretty much copied the circumstances of Ann's awakening (the character herself is straight up Ann and Ryuji mashed into one but with Chie's face because of course); when it gets to the actual Persona summoning, she grips her mask for all of two seconds before it just pops off. No struggle, can't do the blood. Just yoinks it off her face.
MC doesn't even have an unmasking, he reveals the Persona, THEN manifests the mask/Gurren Lagann sunglasses and puts it on (but still does a twirl and removes it in battle when casting magic). There could be an intentional reason for this, but my expectations aren't that high yet.
Yeah, the other angle to all this has been “well the graduation was decided on/by the day the Harry Potter game came out + she was going through personal/family things during hiatus so it couldn’t POSSIBLY have been because of the drama!”
WELL IT SURE DIDN’T HELP
I guess we're back to 3 and maybe Oceans/Tides. Not that being easy or short (in both real time and game days) is a problem in and of itself.
I'm still on the first arc of 4 as of the last time I played it because I wasn't expecting the difficulty to ramp up the way it does. I can speed through Amber and Dylas on a fresh file, but after Dolce the monsters really start to bulk up and I find myself needing to take things at a slower pace than I was anticipating. It's quite interesting, really.
I'm still the same way with Frontier, I think the last time I was playing it I only just finally progressed to somewhere around Iris Noire... And then I think I stopped because this was the playthrough where I didn't stuff Blanc full of tomato juice beforehand and wanted to go back/delay it just to see what happens if you do. I'm very weird like that.
Which makes a little bit of sense to why it would make the mainstream news everywhere. It certainly gets attention in that "look how much people are paying for a First Edition original series Charizard!" sort of way.
I absolutely know mom looked at me and had that thought at the dinner table and wanted to say "YOU have a copy of Mario 64, you could be rich!" without any understanding of the conditions that would need to align for anyone to so much as think of valuing it that high at auction.
So it definitely strikes as understandably odd to a culture that has seen beta carts and trade show demos get passed around for sums less than that, along with a thousand other titles that could be sought after by collectors but wouldn't make the news and reach the ears of normies in the same way Mario does.
Still loving the hell out of Metaphor, if also facing the reality that having a full time job means I don’t exactly have the spare time for 80-100 hour RPGs (that also lock away at least one thing behind lategame NG+ on top of that) anymore. What I could have knocked out in a week or two has become… How many months has it been now? Two? And I’m only just now roughly around the halfway mark.