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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2066 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 3, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Assume that you are Bioware executive - which will worry you more - that I have Dragon Age Veilguard pirated for 72 hours or that I haven't bother actually running it after I downloaded it?

Context: I adored bioware up until the launch of Mass Effect 2 (I disliked the party and character driven aspect compared to the knowledge quest of the first part), though that ME3 was too full of fanservice and had too shitty ending and haven't been seriously invested in them.

Also it is not about the wokeness, just that woke in the last 2-3 years pattern matches way too accurate to cringe and mediocrity.

I adored bioware up until the launch of Mass Effect 2 (I disliked the party and character driven aspect compared to the knowledge quest of the first part), though that ME3 was too full of fanservice and had too shitty ending and haven't been seriously invested in them.

Presumably you also are familiar with Shamus Young's analysis/Let's Plays on this subject?

You mean the attempt to use every pejorative in the dictionary over the ~40ish articles to show how much he hates it? I loved ME2 and it is most replayed game from ME series for me. Gameplay was vastly improved compared to ME1.

You mean the attempt to use every pejorative in the dictionary over the ~40ish articles to show how much he hates it?

No, he means the attempt to show how much the writing changed in a way which made the second game (and especially the third) not appeal to people who loved the style of the first. He didn't hate the games, far from it. He loved the first game, and he loved parts of both of the second two (where they kept the tone of the original). He even agrees with you that the gameplay got better in ME2.

Shamus Young’s review of Arkham City broke that game for me unfortunately. Once he’s pointed out all the ways that the story doesn’t really make sense, it’s hard to un-see.

Shamus Young's Mass Effect retrospective is a genuine treasure. He puts his finger on exactly what went wrong with the series, in a way I never was able to do myself. The only real area where I disagreed with him was that I thought the gameplay, as well as the story, took a sharp step back in Mass Effect 2.

Yup. He managed to wrap in word what I felt war wrong brilliantly.

Damn. The guy has died. May he rest in peace.

Also it is not about the wokeness, just that woke in the last 2-3 years pattern matches way too accurate to cringe and mediocrity.

As far as woke and cringe goes, it’s as woke and cringe as BG3 (which is to say very), but if you found that passable it’s not really worse.

Modern Anglo video game writers (whether the Brits, Americans and Irish who write for Larian or the Canadians and Americans who write for BioWare) are essentially incapable of nuance or subtlety or of any good writing.

People make fun of modern literary fiction and prestige writing in general, often for good reason, but literally anyone who has written even a moderately well-reviewed (non-musical) play or lit fic novel or non-superhero movie in the last 10 years could deliver a better script than any modern AAA video game.

Game writers can’t write. That’s because studios hire DnD nerds who have no interest or knowledge of actual literature, have either never read the greats or dismiss them out of hand, and basically don’t understand what makes storytelling good or powerful in any way.

As far as the writing in Veilguard goes, it’s not worse than countless other recent AAA RPGs and games in general (which again, is not to say it’s “good”), but has provoked a big reaction online because Bioware has been ‘woke’ for 15 years now, had been the subject of long lasting hardcore RPG fan hatred dating back to Dragon Age Origins being calls ‘dumbed down’ and ‘consolized’ by Codex grognards back in 2008, the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, and other things long predating Gamergate.

Modern American writers of this kind of fiction appear unable to conceive of a world that does not have the same social dynamics as 21st century urban California.

There's also the shit pacing. Look, I understand that BG3 is an early access, multi-year-spanning project, but hot damn does the story have such an awkward and spasmodic flow to it. Act 1 is good, act 2 starts off barren and then builds up into this bizarre crescendo that (vibes-wise) could pass as the end of the game, and then spits you out into act 3 which is completely anticlimactic because it feels like you were just at Mordor but now you're back at Tom Bombadil's.

I hold the opinion that they should have figured out a way to swap 2 and 3.

Yup, pretty much. Would have felt better undeniably.

I never realized how massive the cultural gap between me and most of 'nerd culture' was until I saw how widely praised BG3's writing was among people who seemed trustworthy and tried the game for myself. There was nothing truly terrible, but if that's the peak of AAA wRPG writing then even the upper echelons of Chinese webnovels or Japanese RPGmaker hentai games are probably a closer point of comparison than modern litfic. (I'm not really joking, play Demons Roots)

I realise I'm pretty late on this, and apologies, but I'm curious how you'd compare it to older WRPGs, from the 90s or early 2000s?

I wouldn't call Demons Roots a hentai game, it's more of a regular RPGM game with two very unappealing small hentai games awkwardly bolted onto it to entice horny gamers to check it out.

Game writers can’t write. That’s because studios hire DnD nerds who have no interest or knowledge of actual literature, have either never read the greats or dismiss them out of hand, and basically don’t understand what makes storytelling good or powerful in any way.

But isn't this the opposite of what happened? Writing started going downhill the moment they stopped hiring nerds for writing positions and started hiring creative writing and English graduates with "geeky" popular culture interests.

To me it seems like there is an issue of people being hired who don't have interests outside of videogames/anime/etc, which makes the writing and it's influences very incestous. The influences aren't history or literary greats but previous videogames and TV shows, which makes everything extremely shallow and derivative.

I think that’s not clear at all. Firstly, the great majority of “classic” games before professional writers were also terribly, awfully written, even if they were terribly, awfully written in a slightly different way to games today. Secondly many of the great games were written by people who were nerds, sure, but had an amateur interest at least in good storytelling and / or screenwriting.

One of the problems in games (especially at Bioware and Sony Santa Monica) is that they had a big pipeline of writers promoted from QA, or games journalism, or level design, or other teams in the business to game writing, and were only then revealed to be bad writers. They don’t have a screenwriting background where you cover basic stuff that’s relevant to writing halfway decent dialogue.

I feel like a big part of the problem with modern games is that they just try too hard to be novels or movies. I miss the old minimalist approach that was more about establishing a tone and the outline of a plot, and letting you fill in the rest with your imagination, than about spelling out every freaking detail.

I realize that this was largely due to technical limitations, but some people just need enforced discipline.

Firstly, the great majority of “classic” games before professional writers were also terribly, awfully written...

I don't agree with your thesis that games have always been poorly written. Obviously individual works vary, but on the whole story driven games like RPGs used to be written pretty well.

For every Planescape Torment there were literally a thousand 90s games with terrible writing, including many RPGs, come on.

How many RPGs were even published in the 90s? Particularly if you're excluding Japanese games where the localization decisions would play a huge role in perception of writing quality.

No, I don't agree that was the case.

Most point and click adventures had decent and enjoyable stories (since they were carried or buried by them), RPGs were hit or miss because they had a tendency to rely on D&D clichés, but unless you're referring to some B-list stuff, this seems flatly wrong.

I'm in the same boat. And the second thing, not playing it, is connected to the first part. If it were a great game, from a studio that hadn't shat its pants repeatedly over the last decade or more, you'd want to play this new game, and you'd be willing to pay to play it too. In that case they could pay up for Denuvo and profit a lot from millions of sales. There's always a market for a great RPG.

Assume that you are Bioware executive - which will worry you more - that I have Dragon Age Veilguard pirated for 72 hours or that I haven't bother actually running it after I downloaded it?

Presumably, the executive is more worried about you not giving them money than not playing a game they probably don't even care about.

Squeezing maximum revenue out of minimum productivity is the name of their game. The pursuit of "efficiency" started in an intelligent place--"if 39 drops of solder is sufficient for these cans, then 40 is a waste"--but not everyone is smart enough to grasp the difference between cutting fat, and cutting flesh. It's often a lot more complicated than "how many drops of solder," and "being a trusted brand for the foreseeable future" is what (long) shareholders want--not what MBAs are trained to deliver. The modal executive doesn't care if the company goes out of business, the modal executive cares about KPIs. If the company goes out of business, "I made the numbers go up" is how the executive gets a new job.

Boeing, Intel, etc. are in trouble because they became pay pigs for MBAs instead of contenting themselves with keeping up their status as the best actual producers of important goods in their respective industries. Video game companies are much the same.

What structural intervention would you make to reverse the MBA-ization of essential industries?

The pursuit of "efficiency" started in an intelligent place--"if 39 drops of solder is sufficient for these cans, then 40 is a waste"--but not everyone is smart enough to grasp the difference between cutting fat, and cutting flesh.

I don't know about video games, but I think this point is often misunderstood.

Rockefeller didn't start by asking for 39 drops of solder. He asked for 38. When that wasn't enough, he asked for 39.

By the same token, Elon Musk is known to cut all the fat and some of the flesh. Only by cutting live tissue can you be sure that all the fat is truly gone. If you haven't experienced at least some problems due to cutting too many people, then you haven't cut deeply enough.

We've been talking about Musk's management ability, and to prove I'm not sucking his dick I started thinking about the failure modes that will eventually break his personal control of his companies.
His cutting is vulnerable to Yellowstoning, where managers deliberately hurt performance or use cuts as an excuse to avoid responsibility. Right now Musk can personally show up at the office with an audit team to instantly fire a guy he suspects of doing that. But as the org expands and the hierarchies deepen and interlink, internal politics will hurt his ability to excise a bad actor who's spent all his time schmoozing with management.

Worse, his harsh strategies incentivize internal politicking and backchannel dealing among management to mutually reinforce their positions. It's like overusing an anti-parasite drench on a flock: you're accelerating resistance buildup.
(Even worse, the kind of internal politics most effective at subversion through parallel management cadres is the bioleninism of the party that's made him a priority target and allocated massive resources to seizing his companies. I'm expecting some manufactured hysteria along the lines of "Elon Musk Fired LGBT Rocket Scientist Whistleblower For Supporting Environmental Justice Over Rocket Noise Harming Endangered Birds: Harris Administration pledges to arrest him for hate crimes." And if that sounds crazy to anyone, they're nuts for forgetting the exact same scenario played out with Timnet Gebru and google)

I don't know about video games, but I think this point is often misunderstood.

Rockefeller didn't start by asking for 39 drops of solder. He asked for 38. When that wasn't enough, he asked for 39.

Yeah, that's explained right up front in the linked article.

Only by cutting live tissue can you be sure that all the fat is truly gone. If you haven't experienced at least some problems due to cutting too many people, then you haven't cut deeply enough.

That's certainly the MBA way. It is my growing suspicion, however, that if you've successfully cut all the fat, you have deprived your organization of something essential to its lasting and meaningful success--maybe it's a margin of error, maybe it's "play in the joints," I've seen many metaphors and probably none entirely captures the phenomenon, but it seems clear to me that corporate hyper-efficiency is objectionably likely to generate short-term numbers-go-up at long term expense to the organization, its people, and even often the general public.

Yeah, that's explained right up front in the linked article.

You can't expect someone to read an article as table stakes for engaging with your comment. Same for those who link youtube videos.

Surely expecting to read the first paragraph of an article isn’t too much…

This is the motte. Asking someone to read a 10k word article is table stakes, just don't link "video essays"

I can never find it when this discussion comes up, but years ago there was a great video by someone about the importance of corporate culture and how it destroyed Bioware after the EA acquisition. Bioware had a culture of "we want to make video games, and to do that we need to make money". EA has a culture of "we want to make money, and to do that we need to make games". Those two approaches to the video game business are very different, and are going to produce very different results. And, even if you assume the best intentions of all involved, the corporate culture of the parent can't help but influence the subsidiary over time.

And that's what happened to Bioware. Ever since the EA acquisition they have steadily lost that drive to make great games first and foremost. And it shows in their output. Opinions vary, but for me the last game they made which was good was Dragon Age Original in 2008. Ever since then it's been mediocre or bad games coming from a studio that no longer knows how to prioritize quality.

You're thinking of the Pele of complaining about videogames, Bob Case, AKA MrBTongue. Specifically his video "A Tale of Two Companies". He also did a bit of writing for Shamus Young's blog, Twenty-Sided.

Yeah, that's exactly it! Thank you for pointing me towards it again, I had completely failed at finding it myself.

Boeing, Intel, etc. are in trouble because they became pay pigs for MBAs instead of contenting themselves with keeping up their status as the best actual producers of important goods in their respective industries.

The MBAs are easy to blame. It’s far harder for big legacy American companies to blame old, entrenched corporate bureaucracies (and in the case of cars and planes, highly overpaid unionized workforces strongly resistant to automation) full of overpaid workers unable to compete with hungry Chinese companies staffed by ambitious people with nothing to lose (and state-backing, but that’s really a pointless insult because all these big companies are hugely supported by the US taxpayer).

I think there is a lot of truth to what you say, but that part of (say) Intel's or Boeing's problems seems less applicable to the question of what video game companies are doing.

Entrenched corporate bureaucratic interests are just kind of part of the American landscape.

You've succinctly explained my major issues with how the game industry handles/ruins popular IPs and blows up game studios' reputations with the hopes of making quick money at the expense of gaining loyal customers. Which also happens in other industries, but probably to a lesser degree.

Right now I think Rockstar is the only game company that has retained an impeccable reputation for the sheer quality of every product. And they've got a stranglehold on a global, multi-billion dollar market because of it. (EDIT: I forgot Valve, but they currently have a reputation for rarely releasing games, these days)

And even that came under threat from releasing a poorly-done remaster of their previous games.

It also has a reputation for crunch, burnout, and generally being a miserable company to work for, but honestly that seems necessary for achieving greatness in this competitive industry.

If you tried to distill a GTA game down to its minimal elements, a naive person would probably say "You can steal cars, drive them around a huge map, shoot bystanders, fight the cops, and enjoy a story full of 'colorful' characters and crude humor. Also you can bang hookers."

And then you try to make a game that meets that minimal description and you get the Saints Row series. Which really only gained popularity when it took off in its own direction by leaning into absurdity, parody, and optimizing for 'fun.'

And, of course, recently blew up its goodwill with a shitty attempt to reboot that series. Nobody even TALKS about it anymore.

Probably because some MBAs tried to distill Saints Row down AND take it in a stupid direction.

Surely there are other game companies with impeccable reputations, right? From Software is extremely respected, for instance; I would also put Nintendo in the running for mostly having very well made games put out for their main IPs (maybe not Pokemon, but I don't care about Pokemon). Perhaps also Remedy Entertainment, maybe a little lesser known.

It does make me realize how many IPs on this page have had at least one serious misstep, though.

How about Atlus? MegaTen/Persona?

From Software

Could count it. Demon Souls came out in 2009, and every game since then appears to have been a banger and financially successful. They get points for being prolific in that period, vs. Rockstar.

I would also put Nintendo in the running for mostly having very well made games put out for their main IPs

Also fair. I'd literally put them in a class of their own. I want to read a book that explains how they have such high levels of quality control for even the silliest of their game releases.

It does make me realize how many IPs on this page have had at least one serious misstep, though.

Now I'm trying to think of any IPs or studios that had a horrible sequel that trashed the series' reputation, only to come roaring back with a later entry.

Maybe Resident Evil? I know that it allegedly fell off after RE5 (the last one I played) but Village was well-regarded and popular.

Now I'm trying to think of any IPs or studios that had a horrible sequel that trashed the series' reputation, only to come roaring back with a later entry.

Final Fantasy XIV might count here. In that case it was the same game which came back, but it came back in a big way.

Heroes of Might and Magic, perhaps? 5 is considered much better than 4 (I think. I mostly know 3). Hm. There's got to be better examples out there.

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