#video game rants

[gamegirlx]

so is no one gonna talk about how this game's graphics are 7 years older than twilight princess???

this game is called Samba De Amigo and despite not playing it as a child i now wish i did 😔🚑✨✨ (pls watch the cool intro cutscene they have here pls pls)

[emptyjunior]

Enough random notes that have a written story on them as environmental storytelling, explore the space, get crazier with it.

You move into a house and aw cute, it has the kids height on the walls but you notice there's a three foot difference in height between measurements, you check the date, they're a month apart. The final measurement is on the ceiling. It's dated two days ago.

You're part of a recovery team that have finally found a stranded ship, they were found too late and have all passed a long time ago. They all died of starvation. You enter their storeroom, it's filled with food. In the dining hall you find the tables laden with perfectly fine looking breads, cakes, cured meats, jams, candies. Your medic says all the people sitting at the table didn't eat a Thing.

You wake up in an apocalypse. You can't find anyone at all as you wander the streets but you do hear faint music playing from somewhere. You stumble into a supermarket, to see all the aisles still full, except for the shelf that was full of ear plugs, which look to be the only thing that was looted.

Like there's light, sound, props. Having a street where every house is decimated except for One. Landing on a planet known for having No Water and a plant is growing and you don't know where it could have possibly gotten moisture from but you can't find the citizens Anywhere.

I'm sorry, I'm just kinda over the "graffiti on the wall to show the bad guy is around". That's not environmental storytelling that's just normal story. Show me I'm in the villains territory by the rain suddenly cutting out above me as I'm driving, even though it's meant to be raining all night. I park the car and step out, and realise the constellations are Wrong, until I see they're Not constellations, they're the blinking lights of a massive ship-

I Will stop now because everytime I go to write a sentence it devolves into another prompt but I'm just saying we have a Lot of senses, engage them, show me the Environment in environmental storytelling.

[theofficialvincenzo]

I only just got into the Legend of Zelda series a few years ago with BotW, and I absolutely love it. But every time I play through one of the older games, I discover connections to the newer games and find myself baffled by how many people just like, actively refuse to interact with some of the lore.

Like, the Zelda community is such an amazing place for community theorizing and conspiracies, and the people involved are so smart and passionate about this stuff. But then the moment I try saying "Hey, I think the Ancient Robots from SS and all the glowing-green robots from TP might be related to the Zonai Constructs from ToTK"

or "Hey the ancient guardians from those astral-realm trials kinda look like the Zonai, and also have 3 eyes??"

or "Hey, ancient mysterious flying islands with blocky Jomun-inspired architecture also appear in Twilight Princess and Four-Swords Adventures..."

"...Do we think the writers had this in mind for longer than we thought? Or maybe they're connecting older unanswered stories to try fleshing out the world's history?"

I'll definitely see a few people point these things out but then I see an overwhelming amount of people who just respond with "hmm. Nope. Can't." or "Stop putting so much thought into it it's not that deep."

Like omg who cares if it's not that deep? What happened to forcing Nintendo to retcon in the "three timeline" thing? Where's the pizzaz? Where's the imagination?

These games are so much fun to try connecting together

[hezekiahwakely]

Hm

[madame-helen]

[soothinghymn]

Need someone to submit a concept for pedialyte

[phantasia69]

As a female gamer, one thing I love about Fromsoftware games is their female characters.

For me, a game having decent female characters is a huge selling point. I literally bought Elden Ring (and therefore got into souls games) just because of Malenia. She is literally the sole reason why I bought the game. I even bought the collectors edition of the game so I could get the figurine of her, which sits at the top shelf of my glass display shelf along with a figurine of Lady Maria.

I love how fleshed out the female characters are in Fromsoftware games. I love how the female characters are allowed to just be people, and not have their entire character revolve around them being female. They're allowed to be kind, mean, caring, selfish, deceitful, cunning, mysterious, vulnerable, strong, weak, and so many other things.

Even in the modern age, there are still so many games coming out that use female characters for just fanservice. All the time, I see games underutilize their female characters or just set them to the side entirely. Not once have I ever felt like a female character was used for fanservice in a Fromsoftware game, or at least, their entire character wasn't based around it.

I'm not saying that fanservice is inherently bad, I'm just saying that it gets a little exhausting when all of your favorite female characters, especially in video games, get over sexualized to the point where there's NSFW content of them everywhere. I know the same thing happens with some male characters, but I see it a lot more often with female characters.

I feel like a lot of newer games should take some notes from Fromsoftware when it comes to making female characters. It's 2023, after all.

[ganondoodle]

made this for twitter since most people here that engage with my totk rants are the like-minded people my rants are intended for but i thought its kinda funny too and maybe it clears something up for anyone potentionally confused why i rant so much about it

[sanshofox]

At this point I am really wondering how the entertainment industry, especially gaming industry, is going to uphold/maintain themselves.

One layoff after another. How are people from that industry supposed to find a new job there when layoffs are happening everywhere? Do studios really think there’s longevity when they aren’t even willing to hire newcomers/juniors so there‘s adequate supply in the work force? Because look at how it’s currently going: investors want more and more money, the workload increases, but people are getting fired, leaving a smaller team to do said work, even distributing them for 2 or 3 projects at the same time, only to crash in a burnout or in later years go into retirement. Then who’s left? AI? Are you kidding me? As if games aren’t becoming more and more repetitive anyway, because of some „safe recipe for good numbers“ strategy. Creativity and the people behind it are suffering.

It’s been almost 2 years since I saw a junior 3D character artist offer. Ever since then it’s been a desert. And it’s not looking all too bright in other departments either. It’s now even a thing in job descriptions where they want you to have „AI abilities“. So as a junior or regular they want you to feed their machine, so in a few years they can fire you. The audacity.

Another audacity are those layoffs just to rehire people for a smaller price (can’t tell me otherwise. For me this is a tactic to put pressure on the work force to say yes to less money otherwise they will stay jobless). People that made projects what they are today, who are seniors and leads for a reason, out of a job just like that. Make it make sense (it doesn’t).

Studios like ubisoft now openly saying that they want to focus on AI, like assets completely made by AI to „save time and money“ and expand AI onto more fields. Shame on them.

The way creative industries like gaming finance themselves is also their biggest poison. And I only see a solution in that by regulating investors demands and upper positions sheaningans. They can’t have „absolute power“ anymore. It’s destructive and greedy and not realistic. Games can not be linearly successful. For the game design „recipe“ to improve it needs iteration just like when you work in a project for example and work on a design that needs to be iterated until it‘s improved or solid even. We see time and time again that „business/numbers people“ and creatives do not go hand in hand. We see an extreme imbalance.

I would predict that with less creative new input and letting mainly AI do the work consumers will be less and less entertained because everything seems to be and look the same. It will stagnate. And then crumble. And the industry needs to start like it did before. And that’s what I guess for the big companies.

With the layoffs happening and not enough job offers in return I could see that big talents get together to build their own studios now and we may get an era of new successful and growing studios happening that may even replace the current triple A studios one day in the future. They may even change the financing game. We saw successful games happening through platforms like kickstarter more often. So it might lead back to a „power to the people“ thing. Having an idea for a project and seeing if enough people agree and invest to see it happening. There’s room for improvement in that system. That’s all what it leads back to; in the end the consumers need to be satisfied to make it a creative and monetary success. BG3 and larian studios was a good example for that. It’s what made coral island grow and grow too. So there‘s potential.

Feel free to comment your theories. I really would like to see what others think about the current state of gaming studios and how it will or could develop.

[lumiereswig]

I'm still seeing a lot of angry takes in the tags about how excessive Watcher's current costs are and how all fans really want, apparently, is "just shane and ryan sitting in a basement" back again. While I do think Watcher is probably spending over budget and that's a real issue, a lot of the takes I'm seeing show a fundamental misunderstanding of how video production works and where costs actually lie. So a few quick things that I just keep seeing that are bothering me:

It was never just Shane and Ryan in a basement. BFU did a great job selling that conceit and making sure you never saw anyone beyond them and maybe TJ, but they absolutely had other crew members with them on ghost hunts and they didn't do all the work on BFU themselves. This Q&A from Season 2 lists 36 people on staff for Buzzfeed Unsolved. It's fair to make arguments that Watcher may or may not need 25 people, but those arguments should not be coming from a place of "before it was just Shane and Ryan and nobody else."

If you don't know how many people are needed to make a professional video from a TV/film standpoint, you will not have a reasonable grasp of why Watcher wants to keep 25 people on staff. Sure, some YouTubers get by with a ring light and a contracted editor. The Watcher team have stated repeatedly that they do not want to work as just YouTubers and see themselves more as a production studio—so why do people keep referencing the YouTube model to understand their business? This is like asking the local shake shop why it doesn't function like the kids' lemonade stand down the block. The item category is similar but they're not trying for the same products or process.

The "gold dusted food" is not the big budget sink you think it is. On most TV shows I've worked on it's normal to partner with businesses that are shown onscreen and work out a deal where the price of the product (in this case the gold food) is reduced or eliminated in exchange for the free publicity. Watcher very likely made a deal with every restaurant it worked with to make the Korea trip affordable for the company. The real budget spends are on things you're probably not seeing but that still matter: camera and lighting equipment is expensive, insurance for that equipment is expensive, business overhead and paying your staff are expensive. So again—it's fine to critique Watcher for the streaming plan and the perceived budgetary issues, but go into this knowing the costs might not be coming from the things you see onscreen.

My source is that I work in TV and film and actually have a clue on how the industry functions. Again, 36 people worked on Unsolved (and those were the people mention in Season 2—who knows how big the team blew up past that in later seasons). Entertainment work is real work, and demands decent equipment, competent staff, and the same types of business and budget problems you'd find in any other business (overhead, staffing, etc.). Feel free to critique Watcher's business model, but first try to understand where that model is coming from and what goals it's attempting to serve.

[sorrelpaws]

no offense but i genuinely fear that their potential dynamic will go severely underutilized

[msdoodlesposts]

I need fanfics where we save dogday and like dogday is like the worried one of the group of our health and I want a scene where like he ask if we’re tired cause I’m betting our character is still awake because of pure adrenaline from all the heck we been through and like he offer to watch over us while we sleep (even though he can’t really do much he tries )

[froschli96]

You know what, fuck it, I have to speak my truth! (this is gonna be a rant, so anyone who actually likes assassin's creed revelations and/or the secret crusade, be warned or maybe don't read this at all)

remember how altaïr talks to king richard at the end of ac1, and richard is like "[humans] come into the world kicking and screaming, violent and unstable. it is what we are. we cannot help ourselves."? and how altaïr answers "no. we are what we choose to be." and how that ACTUALLY has meaning bc he himself was "violent and unstable" at the beginning of the game but he has learned and is now CHOOSING to be a better person who cares about others and humanity at large? remember how his calmness and gentleness was something that he ACQUIRED over the course of the story?

and remember how in revelations they then suddenly had a PRE-AC1 altaïr say about the first of his targets "no man should pass from this world without knowing some kindness." and be all wise and calm and collected during a nice little chat with al mualim, who suddenly acts all fatherly? (like, this is suddenly supposed to be a positive relationship? what??)

also, during the confession the target says to altair: "you put too much faith in the hearts of men, altaïr. [...] humans are weak, base, and petty." and altaïr answers: "no. our creed is evidence to the contrary." KJASJFJDKL???? like, it’s almost insulting how close this exchange is to the one with richard. you know, the one that was actually earned after a whole game of character development. like WTF??? cool congrats now that development means nothing. like, apparently that was just altaïr reverting BACK to being the exemplary assassin who understands and believes in the creed that he was apparently just born as. (i also hate how having a young inexperienced altaïr saying this implies that altaïr's faith in humanity is a sign of naivete instead of a sign of the wisdom he has gained after being confronted with counter arguments for a whole game, and also something that distinguishes the assassins from the templars who use humanity's supposed wickedness to justify controlling them like in AC1, but whatever)

altaïr’s development in AC1 mattered BECAUSE he is not NATURALLY a good person, it actually said something about humanity's capacity for both bad AND good and how humans don't have to be forced to be good through mind control bc they can by their own free will choose to be better when taught how and when allowed the freedom to grow. but no. apparently altaïr has just always been calm, wise and gentle. and he just sort of forgot about that during AC1 bc…. ? bc of adha?? bc of abbas???

oh don’t get me started on the whole abbas thing. (it doesnt even make sense that abbas is so hung up about his father and "his family’s honor", like what about the whole point of al mualim not allowing parents to be close to their children bc it would make them weak? like, my dude, you’re not supposed to HAVE any family aside from the brotherhood)

they used the throwaway character that had like 5 lines and made him into altaïr’s main antagonist in revelations… like, abbas wasn’t supposed to be this ONE dude who had personal beef with altaïr, he was just supposed to show how while altaïr’s revered by many, a lot of his brothers also hate him, bc 1) altaïr is a shitty person at this point and 2) bc there’s no real feeling of community and family in this version of the brotherhood, but just a pervasive sense of competition and jealousy — these assassins don’t care about their goal of safeguarding humanity bc they’re too hung up on petty squabbles and divided by rivalries (you know, the things that made malik hate altaïr even before solomon’s temple and that he overcomes in the end which enables him to forgive and to reconcile with altaïr so they can work together and stop al mualim? (you ever just think about "we are one. as we share the glory of our victories, so too should we share the pain of our defeat. in this way we grow closer. we grow stronger." and cry? bc i do. all the time. malik, the man that you are))

and now abbas is altaïr’s childhood best friend turned lifelong enemy?? like, bowden bent over backwards to come up with an explanation for why altaïr is an arrogant ass at the beginning of AC1, when the explanation is right there: he was raised to kill without asking questions and was constantly praised for how good he is at murder, which resulted in him becoming arrogant and disregarding human life. like, it doesn’t have to be some shakespearean family feud type shit. and guess what, this "simple" explanation actually plays into the story’s themes, who’da thunk!

(like, abbas might not have been a "fleshed out" character in AC1, but he had a specific function and now that function is gone. mr bowden, mr mcdevitt, you know characters are allowed to simply exist to tell us something about their worlds and the systems they live in and sometimes that’s more important and also more interesting than having every single character have a detailed backstory to explain all their behaviors, right?)

with all of this revelations loses all nuance in regards to the levantine brotherhood and also the creed in general. like, altaïr being a master assassin at the beginning despite being a terrible person and not actually understanding the creed is a criticism of the brotherhood and the creed itself. like, it said something about the order that someone like altaïr was able to get that high in rank, simply bc he's good at killing, which also tells us what is considered important in the al mualim era assassin order. when you make altaïr’s arrogance the result of his personal conflicts instead of how we was raised by a brotherhood that only valued one's ability to kill, you lose that characterization of the assassin order itself!

and by suddenly making al mualim a semi good "father figure" you also downplay his manipulation of not only altaïr but all those under his care. (altaïr says something about al mualim being "as a father" to him exactly twice in the codex, but he doesn’t mean by that that he WAS a father to him, what he means is that he was the CLOSEST THING he had bc HE DID NOT HAVE PARENTS, not because his mother died in childbirth and his father was executed when he was young btw, BUT BECAUSE IT WASN’T ALLOWED, like his parents actually lived but weren’t allowed to be close to him, he says he came to view al mualim’s "weak and dishonest" love as enough and even better BECAUSE HE HAD NOTHING ELSE, BECAUSE AL MUALIM ISOLATED HIS ASSASSINS FROM THEIR FAMILIES. al mualim "loved" him bc he was good at killing people for him! hm, i wonder if this could be trying to say anything about cults and indoctrination and the inherent contradiction in fighting for peace and free will by taking children away from their parents and raising them to become killers?? like, altaïr wasn't ~the special orphan boy~ taken in by al mualim bc his father died a hero's death, it was "the way of the order" to have al mualim be the closest thing to a parental figure for everyone to ensure absolute loyalty! altaïr saying al mualim was like his father is not supposed to make you go "oh, he must have actually been a good guy for altaïr to consider him a father", it should make you go "oh that's kinda fucked up that he considers the dude who made him into a killing machine and who manipulated him a sort of father figure"!)

and then in revelations they suddenly portray that relationship as positive and healthy??? like, it would be one thing to give it some nuance by delving into the psychology behind al mualim’s "love" and maybe showing how al mualim did care about altair in a complicated, fraught sort of way (like, you know, there’s a lot of interesting things you could say about al mualim at several points addressing altaïr as "my child" in AC1 and how that parallels Garnier referring to the people he drugged and abused as his "children", and what that says about how the templars view the people who they say they want to save and in whose best interests they supposedly act (in any case, al mualim doesn’t use that phrase because he has any real parental feelings but rather to patronize and to invalidate any objections, like in a "mother knows best" way))

but they even fucking DARE to parallel that relationship with that of altaïr and darim in revelations, by having the reflection in the puddle of darim hugging altaïr showing altaïr hugging al mualim…. like their relationship wasn’t inherently abusive but just tragically cut short because al mualim was just "corrupted by the apple"… like WHAT???? so it’s not the very real problems like grooming, manipulation and indoctrination and the hierarchical structure of the brotherhood itself (all of which are antithetical to the assassin ideology), it was just the evil apple all along. great. that’s DEFINITELY a lot more interesting.

god im sorry i really dont want to spread negativity but this is driving me INSANE. like, somebody please tell me im not crazy bc i feel like somehow most of the fandom is in agreement that revelations and the secret crusade have better storytelling and characterization than ac1.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, can we talk about how, even IF we completely ignore AC1 and treat revelations altaïr as his own character…. the narrative still doesn’t really work?

basically, the whole point of his story in rev is that "he gave his whole life to the brotherhood", this obsession led to him not using his time with his family which has him ending up dying alone in a dark library and this in turn makes ezio reevaluate his life choices…. except. he doesn’t? neglect? his family? or whatever? like, his devotion to the assassins is sort of painted as this tragic flaw that leads to a lonely death bc it supposedly comes at the cost of his family, but… his wife has joined the assassins, (at least) one of his sons is in the brotherhood and even when he goes to protect the assassins against the mongols, he takes his family with him (except for the son who stays behind bc he has a family of his own and who, ironically, ends up dying bc of that)… like, you can’t describe altaïr as a good husband and father in the database and have his son tell him that "everything that is good in me began with you, father" when they say goodbye, and then want to make us believe that he put his family behind the brotherhood and that that is a character flaw that leads to his tragedy.

because you HAVE to have a character’s tragedy be the result of a character flaw. like. that is how tragedies work. otherwise it just becomes tragedy for the sake of tragedy which is… boring bc it has no purpose. and we know it is SUPPOSED to have purpose bc ezIO FUCKING QUITS BEING AN ASSASSIN AFTER WITNESSING IT!

it’s like they want to have their cake and eat it, too — they didn’t want to actually make altaïr a bad husband/father, but still wanted to make his life a tragedy where he loses his family which is why instead they outsource all responsibility to abbas who now has to be the reason for ALL the deaths.

like, they try to make at least maria’s death kind of sort of the result of altaïr’s rashness or whatever but like… these guys KILLED THEIR SON and TOLD HIM THAT ALTAÏR HAD ORDERED HIS DEATH. like, altaïr losing it in response to that is not rash, it’s fucking logical and justified! if anything the scene made me angry at maria for trying to stop him. like, GIRL, he was YOUR son too??? but god forbid we give female characters actual real emotions, she has to fill the role of "voice of reason who dies for altaïr’s man pain" i fucking guess.

like, it’s this weird mix where his tragedy is simultaneously painted as his own fault but also not really bc abbas is the one responsible for all the shit that happens. it just… it just doesn’t really go together.

the only way to make his story make sense narratively and to give it actual purpose is by looking at it in the context of ezio’s story, bc the things he sees in altaïr’s memories are supposed to be a revelation (ha!) to ezio specifically. and i guess that’s maybe the crux of it all — altaïr’s story in revelations was conceived of first and foremost to support ezio’s story and development. which is probably also why many people maybe don’t notice bc, having skipped ac1 and started with ac2, the majority of people mostly care only about ezio and only really appreciate altaïr’s story in as far as it serves to push ezio forward. (tho i’ve also seen a few people say that ezio is also written kind of weird in rev, but i’ve never really been an ezio girly myself so i can’t speak to the truth of that)

like, altaïr dying alone in the library doesn’t really have to make sense for his character, i guess, bc it’s only really supposed to be a cautionary tale for ezio.

so, i guess, for once, they actually had a MAN dying for another man’s character development, which is pretty woke actually. ubisoft, i take everything back jksdsfjhgdsahfhsdhfghfdsgjhsdgjh

[madame-helen]

[starrysharks]

i want to delete my twitter account so fucking bad

[vanityeden]

I think this whole shitshow could have been avoided if all members of the Seed family just started YouTube channels instead of taking over a county. They all would’ve been too busy defending their shit takes online to actually do anything irl.