#surprise secret projects

[kandra-chameleon]

Myers Briggs and Enneagram are out. The only true personality test is which shard of Adonalsium do you identify with most

[lydiannettelizabeth]

Pjsekai magical girl au where all the leaders are recruited by miku to be magical girls send tweet

[mellkellyismyhero]

Spoilers for Tress of the Emerald Sea (this is a meme but it does spoil something)

[presiding]

I'm not a new follower and I've been here long enough but i do have a relatively bad memory

So I've wanted to ask, what's your opinion on "Dishonored: death of the outsider"?

Right now I'm replaying Dishonored games not in the release order, i already finished DH2 and started Daud dlcs. Maybe I'll go for vanilla DH later

But thoughts about going through death of the outsider again makes me feel something that i can't explain... 😬

It has some interesting ideas but antagonists are underused. Locations repeat a lot. And Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

I'm genuinely debating if i should revisit *this* one or pretend that DH2 is the last game. I know that some people love DOTO but i can't find strength in me

love to chat about death of the outsider, ty for the ask!

i feel your pain. it's the one game i struggle to revisit. but! i was thinking about your points and how DotO has the feel of budget cuts.

it's been about a year since my last DotO post - so, essay time -

a measured response to common DotO criticisms

(the thousand bugs of dishonored 2 I had borne as I best could, but when doto ventured upon sidelining billie and retconning daud's arc I vowed revenge*

*can't resist a cask of amontillado joke

criticism is easy and creation is hard, so, if this isn't the type of response you wanted, you can read my other DotO posts:

how i'd write death of the outsider

that post i did after trying to play doto a third time and couldn't make it past the opening scene (you might like my tags on this re: your comment "makes me feel something i can't explain")

billie lurk as a nonprotagonist & misogynoir (more on this below...)

gonna leapfrog off your comments cause I agree!

antagonists are underused/locations repeat a lot.

who is steering the boat?

let's start up at the top; everything stems from there.

DotO was caught up in ownership/transition issues. here's an article about harvey smith and raphael colantanio at that time. if you didnt know, colantonio is the main founder of arkane (semi-related but just for fun look his appearance up then go through arkane's protags and tell me what you notice...).

quote from harvey smith re: DotO -

“Then, just as I move back, [Colantonio is] announcing that he’s leaving. Going forward, I’ll focus more and more on the Austin studio and what we’re going to do there. Death of the Outsider is my wrapping up with the guys in Lyon – the first half of that we planned together while I was living there, but the second half was worked on while I was living in Austin. I’ve been communicating with them through video conferences and stuff, so they carry a lot of the load of the second half of it.”

so the founder jumped ship and the co-creative director has to step away from his usual position (over to sinking ship Austin). meanwhile, DotO is still in development. i'm a big believer in people making art, and not companies (even in this article Smith acknowledges much of their "secret sauce" can be traceable to specific devs but i digress)

$$$ kaching - some speculation

on the note of founders - past this point in arkane's history (ie. the main founder stepping back), arkane would have been being primed for sale. this translates to high scrutiny on project expenditure (such as hiring cheaper early career staff, hiring less workers, denying your best staff raises causing them to leave and hiring cheaper workers in their place, etc) to make the company's EBITDA look more appealing to buyers (briefly, its the piece of paper that proves you're profitable). based on speculative timelines, from a purely $ perspective within the first year of dh2 being released is when you'd be looking to slim down your capitalised expenditure (aka: cutting staff while the revenue is at a peak to make number go brr and make your company look like a better investment) because to maximise the profit of a company's sale, you really have a great track record for a few years.

this is purely speculation based on timelines. companies are very careful to hide when they're doing this, ideally they want ~3 years of a great track record (and staff that will keep working their hardest).

big goals and no money

DotO was meant to be a two-part DLC like the Dh1 DLCs, so shout out to what could have been made if their original pitch had worked.

On locations & antagonists & budget - this dev's site discusses the Conservatory level in game AND specifies it was budget constraints being the reason for cutting off traversable area from that mission. Great link for comparing the original level & the DotO version, especially re: your point about reused assets/levels.

We could pick other examples here but this post is already long so -

Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

i would forgive this game anything if there was any good billie storywriting.

:')

its never just the writers

after revisiting articles to fact-check for this essay, i've seen a lot of articles blaming writers by name (you didn't do this anon which i love <3)

games are made by teams, and decision making is generally done top-down, so blaming individual contributors is shit. 1) writer's pay isn't good enough to cop this kind of abuse. 2) it's rarely in their control - you can write a beautiful scene only to have that level cut due to costs (etc), and then you need to work out how to make the story make sense. ideation & decision-making are separate and i guess 'this idea was [X]'s' should not be mistaken for 'this is the fault of [X]'s.'

on hiring fans (& imm-sim writing strategies)

the new writers [...] already had an idea of the world, as they’d seen it from the outside, as fans. “These are all people that knew this world we had created and they took it as canonical, as the gospel. Whereas, for us, it was bits and pieces we’d made up along the way.”

as someone who used to hire writers, and i promise this isn't in bad faith: don't hire fans unless your priority is cost then, sure, fans are likely to put in overtime (and not be in a position in their career where they can ask for higher remuneration - they'll pay the passion tax to be involved).

writers (esp new career writers) have to be open to receiving feedback assuming healthy/functional processes, and being a fan makes that harder because you care more. and, as a fan, you know what loose ends exist and that's where you'll naturally jump to, even though writers should start with target audience and branding, and build from there. if i expand on this i'll get offtopic so let's keep going!

DotO feels lifeless because it doesn't add anything to the DH universe, it only takes away by closing storylines without the satisfaction of closure. sure, stuff was added - the cult subplot, locations, some NPCs/enemies, etc. but they feel like part of the objectives, not part of the dishonored universe. you can feel the decision-making process when you play: there's a feeling that the priority was to finish the assets required for missions, instead of writing a story that feels immersive.

compared to standard videogame writing, where you can generally get away with "everything you touch and read relates to your objectives as the protagonist", as an imm-sim writer, you need to focus on:

how does this text build the universe so that the player feels like they're only seeing a small part of the world?

of course - this is difficult with budget/time concerns. i've said it before but this is part of why we rarely have games as rich as dishonored 1 & 2, because imm-sim design philosophy flies against the current videogame industry trends of microtransactions & cheap-to-make addictive mobile games. given a tight budget you focus on the high level story, but player immersion is a function of details.

most likely, dh2 was the end of an era. typing that out makes me sad.

what did the devs say about writing billie

*breathes deeply*

the death of the outsider protag was originally pitched as being about a regular human, someone not related to emily and corvo but instead an overseer or a brigmore witch. daud was also pitched.

this could have worked! really cool to have a nobody, or a heretic, or an overseer, be involved with the death of a god. and i've mentioned before that storywise DotO's protag could have been anyone (i think i made a joke about wyman? hah) and wouldn't change the story much, bar some daud bits.

quote from the same article:

eventually Arkane settled on Billie Lurk, Emily's companion from Dishonored 2. [...] Bakaba tells me that because Billie had already received her redemption arc in Dishonored 2, Death Of The Outsider's story could be about something more than that.

welp.

so there's two things here - a redemption arc claim, and DotO's actual story.

in addition to not being the first pick, the view was that billie's story was over. i question the 'redemption arc' claim - sure, billie helps the protag in dh2 but after her confession, if you tell her she's changed, she brushes it off and you part awkwardly without forgiving her... does that count? if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? if a character redeems themselves but the story never tells you, are they redeemed?

billie's role in dh2 isn't really that different to the dlcs, where she follows you around being Mr Exposition while withholding a LOT of information that could have actually helped the protag. given DotO's plot, going after the killer who shaped her doesn't scream 'reformed' either. ludonarratively speaking, the lack of chaos implies billie never changed from being a callous killer - which i'm not against, it would have been a cool story.

and! contrast this with daud who already had his redemption arc!

When first conceptualising Death Of The Outsider in around 2014, Smith and Duval knew they wanted two things: Billie Lurk being used to get to The Outsider himself, and closure for Dishonored villain (and later ally) Daud.

in the two DLCs, as we know, he comes to realise his actions sucked, and as the player you actively make things right (related: my post about ludonarrative dissonance in dh2). so if billie had "already received her redemption arc", why was this another daud story?

imo this isn't a budget issue but a misogynoir issue. "we want this story to be not about the protagonist so any random NPC will do, how about we go with billie lurk and get a black woman as a dishonored protag?" this logic, which is what i'm reading of the above two quotes, feels frustratingly tokenistic when she's an established character with a rich background. it's an example of surface level diversity because DotO is not about her by arkane's own admission. it's a similar vibe to the companies who say they have a diverse team but you check their staff page and all the people of colour have 'assistant' in their title and the board is all white, so it's not people of colour who are driving the business. maybe this was entirely by accident but these accidents add up to systematic failure - billie gets her own game but never her own story. it feels like she got assigned the caretaker role for these two guys. great.

for fairness, let's compare to dh2. corvo & emily are relatively hands-off protags in terms of their ongoing thoughts about their surroundings and the lore placement about them specifically is sparse, and this style continues in DotO. the issue is the core narrative: corvo & emily are both the protagonists of their story in the sense that dh2's story reflects their goals ("take back what's yours"), whereas Billie is an established character who has arguably little reason to go along with each mission. worse, the main plotline she's literally forced into going along with. in the opening scene billie gets assaulted and still helps the guy who assaulted her.

fundamentally, DotO's narrative is not about billie but about daud and the outsider, and this article makes clear that was by design.

whats the takeaway

DotO is the weakest entry in the Dishonored series for most people, and blaming budget & a corporate changeover makes me feel... uh well it doesn't really help me tbh but your mileage may vary. it does interest me to think about what we could have had!

for me, my opinion is that if writing billie was a priority (link to my own post where i describe the feeling of playing doto as someone interested in billie) arkane would have made it a priority, even amidst constraints. billie's redemption arc was not resolved imo, and putting her in a game without a chaos system feels like as much a backwards slide for her as daud's plotline to kill the outsider was for his arc.

we absolutely 🤝 on not being in a rush to play the game again.

on the upside. dishonored 2 is a really wonderful game and i love it very much.

[ambereddragonfire]

i was thinking about a grass type castform and then wanted to somewhat redesign the others too….

[szkicel]

now that artfight is over i can update my toyhouse bc my preparations for AF kinda made it the site with more accurate character info and references, when toyhouse was supposed to be that jhbdjhbd

[theonethatyaks93]

You guys!!! Ngl I'm kind of excited! I'm wondering if this is going to be an official conclusion to the mice or a series of shorts or an episode (i.e. "But That's Not All Folks", "The Pinky and The Brain Reunion Special"). I'm curious! I watched the teaser and there's new animation! This is a surprise for sure! (Also, is this the Brain version of the Pinky's How To segments?)

[blujayonthewing]

for that one oc ask - GHOST and DESIRE for uhhhhhhh Melliwyk! I know very little about your OCs yet so i'm tempted to just keep throwing asks at you but I don't wanna overwhelm lol

hi hello first of all please do feel free to send more... if the spirit moves you...... 👀

ghost: Who or what haunts your OC? What happened? How do they live with their ghosts?

When asked about the scars up her arm, Melliwyk usually explains it very briefly as the result of a lab accident when she was still a student, laughing off almost dying and how the discharge launched her across the room, but it also launched her academic and research career. What she does not generally explain is that the other thing that happened was her then-roommate happened to walk back in unexpectedly at the exact wrong moment, got caught in the face with magically charged electrified shrapnel, and was permanently blinded... the incident may have accelerated Mel's arcane studies, but it ended Amberly's.

It set the tone for the rest of her career. Even having exploded, her experiment was highly impressive and promising, especially from someone so young and still early in her arcane studies, so it opened up a lot of opportunities for her-- and on the other hand she got a reputation for keeping an eye on the bigger picture and not letting personal risk or others' feelings get in the way of meaningful progress, a reputation she leaned into an benefited heavily from despite the fact that Amberly getting caught in the accident in their dorm wasn't even really her fault. There were lots of other times in the years following where she was more than a little flippant with risk management or others' wellbeing in the pursuit of her work. It got her a lot of professional respect, and mostly her reputation ensured others kept themselves out of risk around her; she got really used to not thinking about anybody else whenever she did anything, for better and for worse.

This was decades ago, now; for most of that time, she's consciously thought about it very little-- and definitely less and less over the years (although it subconsciously has affected her decisions sometimes, like moving out into the middle of nowhere alone to get into weirder and possibly more volatile experimentation). She's been thinking about it a lot lately, though. Adventuring is the first time in a long time she's had to live and collaborate with others, and relies on mutual trust for her own survival. Doing Hero Shit in the real world, with real people enduring real suffering, has also put her back in touch with her humanity after spending so much time in magical academia and then total isolation. She's had to think, a lot, about how many people have been hurt or killed by things like not barring the door while working on something dangerous, or thoughtlessly drawing aggro to an already injured NPC, or failing to safeguard her loved ones after knowing that her becoming an enemy of the state would put a target on their backs as well. She liked Amberly. She hadn't meant to hurt her, and hadn't even meant to be careless about her safety; it worries her how hard it seems to be for her to protect others from her own actions, even when she wants to-- how dangerous she is to the people she cares about. She's not entirely sure what she can do about it other than isolate herself again, and that isn't really an option anymore.

desire: What's one thing your OC wants more than anything in the world? Are they open with that desire? Why or why not? What would they do to fulfill it?

Oh man this is a really interesting question for her right now! For her entire adult life, her greatest desire was to either reinvent or rediscover artificing, which was a millennia-lost art in her world; she kind of figured, you know, either she'd do that under less fraught circumstances, or it would be a lifelong pursuit that she could work to further but would never personally live to see the end of, so, honestly she's feeling more than a little unmoored right now in terms of, you know... personal goals..... entire life's purpose...... that kind of thing. Fortunately she's still got the broader overarching desire for discovery in general to keep her going, and slightly-more-dubiously-fortunately the Ongoing Adventure demands all of her attention right now (more, I would almost argue, than she has to give...), but Being An Artificer when that was a theoretical/ experimental field has been so central to her identity for so long that I think if you asked her right now what she desires most she'd get really stressed and existential about it, lmao. She hasn't had a chance to figure it out yet! I mean, of course, there's always going to be an answer, and right now it's probably 'to destroy the sorcerer king [our bbeg]' for various plot and personal reasons-- but even that, you know, I think she'd be uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the thing she wants the most being 'to beat the bad guy' instead of something more personal and/or interesting.

ask about my OCs!!

[twotales]

I am doing things hehehehehwhehehwhwhe

[animeweeb115]

“Heh heh heh. That went perfectly♪”

[puddlejumper38]

Slightly skeptical about ssp2... Haven't started it yet but Branderson's sense of humour doesn't always match mine :/

[pochapal]

upd8 on things: there's been problems and issues with my Secret Project beyond my control that may take time to stop being an issue and will force me to reconsider how i'm going about all this. since i literally Can't work on this thing right now i'll probably liveblog some more umineko this weekend.

[mikussabbath]

On his third month of working at the Nibel County Morgue, Cloud is tasked with caring for a John Doe. This isn’t altogether unusual, but there’s something about this corpse in particular that feels… wrong.

When the corpse starts following him home, Cloud thinks he’s finally losing it after spending too much time alone. As things begin to escalate, he realizes that what he’s experiencing is all too real, and that the Doe is so much more than a nameless corpse.

[octo-crafts]

Will anyone else be in costume tonight when I go out? Probably not, but I don't have any other excuse to dress up this week.

The vest, skirt, and shirt are all the same ones from this post. For the shirt decor, I bought a cheap steampunk choker and dismantled it for parts (one piece was already falling off from where it had been hot glued to the lace) and sewed snaps to one side of each little metal piece. Then, I sewed the other sides to my shirt, and attached the other side of the snaps. This way, I can still button and unbutton my shirt, and if I want to just have a black shirt again/get a better steampunk shirt (i did also buy a brown sheet i'll eventually turn into a shirt, but there wasn't time for that this year) I'll be able to pick out the stitching with relatively little damage to the shirt.

[all-of-the-good-ones-are-taken]

Wasia Project | ur so pretty (2022) ❤

[daincrediblegg]

no you know what I'm going to scream about the stuff I talked about in the tags of this post publicly

I'm tired of the well-meaning "don't feel bad if your work only gets 20 notes your genius is what counts and do it for you!" bullshit. I've had a good handful of friends who have straight up DEACTIVATED in recent months because their work was not getting reblogged AT ALL. No, it wasn't from lack of not being well-liked, no it wasn't from lack of trying to make sure it was getting out there to the people they knew would engage with it. It was because no matter how much they were praised privately for their work, when push came to shove, absolutely NOBODY reblogged it and gave it the audience that it was due, and I'm tired of people shoving the "unsung genius" narrative as an excuse for it. Nothing excuses that. And the boop event really proved that.

because I know given the opportunity, indiscriminately pressing a button (sometimes 10 thousand times, as I did) is not beyond this website's capability. y'all loved doing that. and look at what it wrought. nothing but love and affection and happiness. just from a couple of quick clicks of a little paw button. sure. nobody knew who you booped but the other person (which is how likes used to work on this website, btw). there was an element of anonymity to it. but that is kind of the core of this website that no other social media platform still has: the ability to be anonymous. and hyper-curating a blog on here like you might on twitter or instagram to project an image is simply not viable. and hey. you wanna know a secret: literally nobody cares what you post or whether it goes with the "theme" of your blog or not. yeah. I know. CRAZY concept in this day and age. but literally. I myself have reblogged things that have had nothing to do with whatever I am currently fixated by and you know what happened to my follower count? not a damn thing. in fact, I actively try to reblog things specifically BECAUSE it's my friends who made them (even though I'm not always good at KEEPING UP WITH HOW MUCH THEY POST @prismatica-the-strange will NEVER GO UNRECOGNIZED by me).

And you know what fucking sucks? I have to deal with this too. surprise right? you ever wonder why I reblog fics or art I post like 20 times the day that I post them? do you ever wonder why I ask about tag lists and beg for asks all the time? IT'S BECAUSE EVEN I GET LIKE. 5 LIKES ON THE THINGS I POST. AND THE REST OF THE REBLOGS ARE MINE SO I CAN MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SEE WHAT I MAKE GET TO SEE IT. and I say that knowing that I'm certainly not an unpopular blog, or an unpopular writer. I know that people love the stories that I create. Hell, half of the people that I've talked to about lady terror have told me that they consider her to be canon (AND EVEN SOME!! THOUGHT SHE WAS!!! WITHOUT EVEN HAVING WATCHED THE SHOW! WHICH IS STILL SO SO WILD TO ME!!!) But especially in the last 4 years (which really dates this phenomenon), my posts, no matter how well received they've been amongst people I've talked to about them directly, I still go into the notes and at least half (often more than half) are MY reblogs to make sure people saw what I posted. and it happens every single time, and I can't tell you how much it crushes me considering that it used to be that I would be able to post it only once, and people would reblog it sometimes even HUNDREDS of times.

It's not about popularity. it never has been. it's not about anxiety. or shifting website cultures. even if you lurk, the simple fact is, that if you want people to keep making what you love. you have to reblog. your theme won't suffer because you reblogged a fanfiction that you really admire. your posting won't be ruined because you reblogged some fanart from someone in a different fandom. really. I promise. and if people do unfollow you for that? who needs em. followers come and go but you should NEVER have to cater to them. on this website it has ALWAYS been the other way around. lean into it. make it yours. put stuff you ACTUALLY WANT to be seen and that you love and appreciate on your blog. no matter how old it is, how new it is, no matter how niche or off-theme it is.

so please. if you really want to show your appreciation for someone's work? you reblog. it's really as easy as that. check the tags. add some when you reblog if you like. but please for the love of god reblog. it's as easy as booping and even more rewarding for the people who you reblog from. if you want to let someone know that their work is genius and appreciate it? show it. reblog. then DM them if you're too nervous to say what you want to say but not in a public forum. but for christ's sake. REBLOG.