Stray was excellent
It’s kind of funny. The studio wanted to spin off to be independent. So everybody resigning, is effectively doing the same thing. It’s not like there’s big heavy machinery they have to move. The studio is the people.
If they start their own company, they have successfully totally spun off
You have to be in the same region to setup a steam family with someone.
AAAA : on the rails open world where you can only do a few pre-approved actions.
Emergent gameplay is for Indies
I don’t think anybody actually hated the game, it just was very mid, and for the space it was competing in it wasn’t compelling. But it wasn’t obviously bad
So if you’re a consultant looking at one aspect of the game, it’s hard to make the prediction the entire market would reject it.
It’s really down to the game directors, and the leadership, and the executives. They didn’t have a product that was sufficiently unique to make a name for itself, and they should have known that
if it isn’t meant for me, that’s totally fine.
That also means it’s not my fault when the thing that isn’t meant for me doesn’t get a audience, right? Right?
Ditto
k8s cluster + nix flakes
Not releasing your new game on the largest game market in the world is a bold choice as well.
you lost me, building game engines is the major competitive shift.
I appreciate your frustration, but systems run by humans run at human speeds.
Public forums always have issues with trolls.
Matrix really is the kind and fluffy version of IRC.
The best solution is to spend time in spaces where you know the people, or the culture, already.
Black myth wukong uses unreal engine 5. There is no tech war here.
That’s like watching a military day parade where china shows us tanks but with a new paint job.
There’s like four or five opportunities to do a guitar hero style music element. So it’s not strictly a lie, but it’s not major element either
she got political in a place where making waves isnt ideal.
Taking a media break is a good idea
How did they pay for the game?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1827912191275909237.html
More data on this twitter thread. I’m not happy using twitter as a source, but there is a puzzle here, how can this company keep releasing extremely niche games, how do they stay in business?
But… the math doesn’t add up, 15 employees over 5 years at 100k USD per employee : 7.5M (probably more, since they had 309 people mentioned in the credits)… so where does the rest of the money come from?
The theory is that RedThreadGames exists to turn grants into games, and they don’t care if they make money from the games.
Final thoughts after finishing
ahh, i do see the developers are inviting some of the drama themselves.
What’s really funny about this, in the universe they paint, is incredibly welcoming to all people. The governments pretty much leave everybody alone. Do whatever you want (but not drug selling). So this comment from one of the NPCs in game just doesn’t make sense in its own context. The only group discriminated against are the mutants…
They never really conclusively discuss what the message event was, they hint it was from the JFK research center but that’s speculative.
The proto language appears to have complete powers over reality
The main focus of most of the end game narrative is about using powers to bend perceptions of reality.
I think the overall theme was the way to fight propaganda is with propaganda. I think that’s not the best messaging. Not even talking about dealing with people in a Socratic method, or meeting them in the middle. There was some speaking of empathy at the end, but not towards those who disagree with you. Just empathy with your friends.
The big McGuffin they talk about, but don’t actually do anything with, is giving the main character enough power that they can brainwash everyone on the planet to agree with them. I really think that’s a bad message, it’s not a resolution of the core problem. I want to point out the irony again, because it’s really important, the literal solution to all of their problems that they’re trying to do through the whole game is literally a woke mind virus…
The two major warring factions we talk about, the Puritans, and the Republic aren’t really flushed out. We don’t see why they’re evil. Yes they tried to leverage anomalies, or even separate anomalies from the general population. But other than that we don’t see the day-to-day life being such a horrible evil. They could have spent more story time flushing out why it’s such a bad thing instead of assuming we would believe it’s a bad thing. Quite frankly the Republic seemed very nice through all their interactions with the people
I think it’s a reasonable story game, I still think it’s worth about 5 to $10. I enjoyed the time I spend on it. I gave me time to think. I do wish they would have explored the sci-fi elements more towards the end.
I think the developers knew they were targeting extremely niche part of the market, and having played the game I can see they were signaling very strongly to that niche part of the market. In theory the point of video game development, is to make money.
Who is this game made for? Most people aren’t like me, and are going to play a game just to see if the controversy is warranted. So it’s probably people like me who account for the 50 people currently playing online.
I personally don’t think there’s anything tremendously wrong with this game, but the developers aren’t dumb, they knew what they were getting into, so why put themselves in this position? Is this just art? Like functionally I think this is a great game for your resume. But they (15 people) spent 5 years on it. That’s a long time for an art project
There are 309 people in the credits.
So the main character female is in a on-again off-again situationship with the albino gender ambiguous person. The main character has a fling just before the start of the graphic novel, and gets pregnant. The pregnancy is a big slow reveal throughout the whole novel, but the hint out it very hard from the start.
At the end of the story, the main character and the albino have a reveal your emotions moment in the diner, and the main character reveals she’s pregnant via the fling, and the albino just accepts it, no discussion.
That is a huge missed opportunity for drama, that would be a great narrative space to explore these different characters and how they navigate the complications of relationships. And expectations. And communications. But the fact that it just slides by with barely a comment, it’s a wasted opportunity. I’ve watched eight season telenovelas about this single issue. For it to be glossed over in one sentence is just absolute waste of a script and set up
The stakes they do have set up, depending on how much you’ve invested into the albino gift-giving throughout the story, the albino might stay with the main character forever and raise the kid, or the albino leaves and goes to Hong Kong as soon as the game ends. But it has nothing to do with the fling or the child, it’s all about gift-giving.
Sure, agreed. If people are disappointed that’s fine, everyone is entitled to their perspective and opinion, hell I’m not even recommending people by the game right now, I think it’s worth it at $5 or $10.
The whole point of this post is I do see value in the game as it exists, maybe not as what people want it to be
It’s a telltale game. There are action sequences but it’s like deliver us the Moon, any visual novel. Or stray,
The overarching narrative is on rails, with interactive gameplay at points, you can play an arcade game, you can play a side scroller in one flashback, there’s a punch them up shooter that’s kind of okay on the controls, there’s a couple decisions where it seems like you have choice but everything branches out then comes back at various breakpoints.
Don’t get me wrong I like it, but it is a walking simulator
Just spitballing, losing the first lady would give the president an enormous amount of political support, and a mandate. They would be in a position to prevent such a thing from happening again, it would be an emergency akin to the burning of the Reichstag. If JFK was sufficiently angry, and paranoid from that event, they might use that type of emergency to put emergency powers into place and become some sort of emergency dictator in the moment, but the emergency never ends…
It would require a massive change in personality for JFK, but we don’t know how they would have handled losing their wife. It makes for interesting parallel fiction writing,
Just finished the mall scene, I love the fact that the teleconferencing failed and the back and forth with the proxy. That was that was good situational comedy.
Somebody’s been on a lot of zoom calls
I was screaming at the programmer, wanting to use a network computer to look at the super secret thing. This guy supposed to be a hacker and a programmer and he’s willing to do something so dumb. And then of course it blows up on them. And of course you have to do the dumb thing, there’s no way to avoid it. Kind of a forced beat, but that’s the nature of illustrated novels, I just wish they didn’t ask me to hit the button to make them do the thing I know is going to be really dumb
I understand why people can be upset with new entries to existing properties that don’t fit into the existing property. Where things feel like their wrenched and forced.
Dustbourne is a totally new property, it all fits together, the fact that some people are a little bit weird is just part of the story. It’s very cyberpunk in the desert on a road trip.
Quite frankly, people hating on it is probably good for it, it brings more attention to extremely small and niche project. The absolute worst thing people involved in ideological wars could do is not talk about an entertainment property, silence is death in the entertainment landscape.
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