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#age of empires 4
technicaltrue · 3 months
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Everything we know so far about Age of Empires 4
Age of Empires 4: For those who have not played Age of Empires before or have no idea about it, it is a strategy game for PC developed by Microsoft. There are many versions in the game, but if there are any examples of them, we will rely on the latest version, Age of Empires 3. In the game you choose The tribe or country that you want to represent, you have many options such as the French, the…
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guidemission · 10 months
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Watch out for these games, Xbox Game Pass Coming to GeForce NOW
Exciting news for gaming enthusiasts! The highly anticipated collaboration between Xbox Game Pass and GeForce NOW is finally here. Get ready to experience the best of both worlds as Xbox Game Pass support makes its way to GeForce NOW’s cloud gaming platform. Check out the following article to delve into the details of this game-changing partnership, and the fantastic game titles that await you.
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gattobamboom · 1 year
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bluupxels · 2 years
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"I will fight for the others who have no one to champion their cause."
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felassan · 6 days
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I was sent a link to an 'interview with Mark Darrah about BioWare' video that I hadn't seen before. it's called "Mark Darrah on BioWare, Dragon Age 4, & EA's Impact" and [here is the source] link. the interview took place in 2022, so bear that in mind when watching, but it still has interesting insights and things in there. Mark had been invited on to chat after his BioWare Magic video. the video description reads as follows:
“Mark Darrah spent over 20 years with BioWare and has overseen its many incredible RPGs such as Baldur's Gate, Knights Of The Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and most notably on his portfolio, Dragon Age. He was also present during the pre-EA era and experienced much of the changes within the company after BioWare had been purchased by them in 2007. Today, he joins the show for a sobering conversation on the status of this once beloved gaming titan after speaking out in a recent YouTube video of his on "BioWare Magic" in which he holds the developer accountable for their bad processes. The conversation goes into deep waters no other outlet has reached yet, so we do hope you enjoy our biggest interview yet.” [source]
the rest of this post is under a cut due to length.
this post is just some notes and transcribed quotes of interest from the video, in case that's of any use to anyone, for example for accessibility.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf / 'current or recent general BioWare'
Mark explained the ‘hockey stick’ analogy about game development that he has previously outlined in a video on his own channel. There is a tendency in game development, that is not unique to BioWare, to focus on “microscopic efficiency”, especially so in studios that have gotten bigger and bigger. This ends up building a backlog of content and things being built in isolation from each other, and devs working in isolation from one another. But at some point, a game has to come together for different reasons, like an upcoming demo is approaching or money is running out etc, and when that happens, this completion tends to build upon itself and it ends up happening rapidly. At BioWare, historically the idea of ‘don’t worry, it’ll all come together really fast at the end and it will be great [like magic]’ [I am paraphrasing there] was called “BioWare Magic”. This term is from the late 90s but it still has bubbled around within the studio in more recent times. Mark said, “I think it’s partially because of the way that the leadership works on projects at BioWare. There’s a leapfrogging that happens. So the team that led KOTOR ended up being the team that led ME1-3 and Anthem, but meanwhile, between those games, other games are being done with different leadership teams. So culture can have this weird sort’ve almost, like it takes two steps forwards and then one step back as a new leadership team kinda gets into the driver’s seat. Because basically, what ends up happening is that the team that is closest to ship, at least for the big games, tends to drive the studio to a large degree.” There are other leadership teams in the background at those times, but from a culture perspective they are largely in the background.
Sonic Chronicles had a team of just over 20 devs and Mark led this. The smaller team size meant they had more agility and more ability to control and understand what was going on in a way that doesn’t really exist on larger teams. “Something that BioWare has been struggling with is, BioWare has had big teams all along. In the Baldur’s Gate [era], it was teams of 100+ people at a time, at a time [in the industry generally] when teams elsewhere in the industry were tiny. So BioWare has processes that have been around for a long time that are actually pretty good at dealing with team sizes between, say, 100 and 200 people, but what’s been happening for a while is that those teams have started to get beyond 200.” “What has happened at a lot of other studios, they have processes that work at 60 but don’t work at 150. They’ve had to develop new processes to work at larger sizes. BioWare kind’ve got to skip that step, they didn’t do that, but now they’re having to do that, because now we’re beyond what their processes can handle.”
On what prompted Mark to make his ‘BioWare Magic’ video: “I don’t know, it was just kind’ve, it’d been chewing away at me and I know that James Stephanie Sterling, it’s one of their go-to things, when they’re talking about process, is to go ‘BioWare Maaagic’, when talking about BioWare specifically or just game development in general, because someone did say that, on Anthem, I don’t know who but I do have my suspicions. So I think maybe it was just eating at me for a while. I don’t think anything in particular triggered it.” “BioWare Magic kind’ve became a term that I recognized as something that was being used to kind of paper over things that weren’t great, processes that were problematic, on DAII. Part of the reason it was gnawing at me was I kind’ve felt like this was a term that we had left in the past. We talked this way in the early days of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and DA:O, but that we had learned our lessons – I think most people had, but I think there remained enough people in senior enough positions that hadn’t had the experience of shipping as many games, or had been in places where they hadn’t shipped for a long time, or had just kept this romantic view of ‘just keep going, just keep driving, it will all come together in the end.’”
“As to why the revamps of Anthem and stuff [got cancelled], I don’t know. EA has launched things that have fallen on their face, Battlefield 4, Battlefront 2, that then they’ve spent the time to fix, but in the case of BioWare, that hasn’t been the case. That’s not what happened with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Maybe it’s partially because BioWare is doing multiple things at once. If you’re at Dice, and you want Battlefield 4, and it’s a problem, it’s like, well, ‘you better fix it because you got nothing else to do’. Whereas with BioWare, it’s like, ‘well, you could fix it, but don’t you want those resources on Dragon Age or Anthem or whatever’s coming next?’ So maybe it’s that. I don’t know, I’ve thought about this and I can’t.. It could also just be ‘too big to fail’. Battlefield was too big to fail. Anthem wasn’t. It disappointed but it wasn’t a franchise that needed to continue.” “[looter shooters] It’s a tough genre, there weren’t a lot of people who understood it from a dev perspective.”
On the EA “scapegoat” / blaming EA: “I think there is some truth [in it], I do think it’s an easy scapegoat and I think it’s very easy to say, ‘oh, Big Evil Corporation’, but you have to remember that, honestly, I mean BioWare would have probably shut down in 2007 or 2008 if we hadn’t been acquired by EA. The coffers were pretty empty before it got acquired by BG Holdings or Elevation Partners, the company that sold BioWare to EA. There was no money left. So they kept the company going, it’s hard to be too mad at them. I think that EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is. I think EA ultimately understands sports games, and shooters because you can kinda treat them a lot like a sports game and you get away with it, they’re quite competitive. But if you look at the franchises within EA that are not like sports games, The Sims, BioWare [franchises], they’ve struggled with that, they don’t understand and they’ve had a lot of trouble, and so when they look at BioWare, what they see, RPGs are expensive. So what they see is, thee are expensive, they don’t sell as well as Battlefield, what’s up with that? Has EA had negative effects on BioWare? Absolutely, but I don’t think necessarily in the way that people think. So, like, some of the stuff you’ve heard about Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, it’s like, ‘it’s gonna be a live service extravaganza’, ‘it’s gonna be singleplayer’, like that bouncing back and forth, that’s mostly coming from EA, that’s the kind of stuff that you’re getting from EA. But in terms of second-to-second pressure around what the futures of the individual games are, it happens, but that’s usually just rogue executive, not actually EA saying ‘we need this to be more BIG HEAD TURTLE RACING’, that’s not really happening. Or if it’s happening, a decent Executive Producer can judo it out of existence. So I do think, yeah, I mean, was there pressure on DA:I and ME:A to be on Frostbite? Absolutely, like that was politically basically effectively mandated, so there’s been impacts, and honestly I think maybe, since I did the BioWare Magic video, I’ve been thinking about this. One thing that happened before EA was that BioWare games slipped more, like wayyy more, which was probably why the company was almost out of money. So games have slipped since EA, but other than SW:TOR, games have not slipped years, except because of massive externalities. So Dreadwolf has moved, but because of it basically being restarted, but other than those externalities, things haven’t really moved as much. And I think maybe the reason why BioWare Magic maybe worked in the past was because you pivoted eventually and then you just kept going until it was great. If your date can’t move as much, you’ve pivoted and then you run into the date [and crash], and you’re just, that’s what it is, and you’re done.”
On Frostbite and whether the ‘omg Frostbite Bad’ stuff from players is overblown: “Every time you change engines, there’s a consequence to that. I do think there’s a fetishization of engine use by fans, but also honestly by devs. I think there’s a ‘grass is always greener’ [thing going on/mentality]. My feeling is, the best engine to use is almost always the engine you just used. So if you just shipped a game on Frostbite, probably you should use Frostbite for the next one, because you’ve built things to ship that game, so you can build on top of it. There are extreme circumstances where that’s not going to go, Eclipse was long in the tooth and it didn’t look very good, and so it’s hard to imagine that you could continue going down that road and continue using Eclipse indefinitely. Bethesda has essentially done that with their engine and it shows, but it’s left them being incredibly successful. Honestly, the mistake that I think that was made at BioWare regarding Frostbite, it’s again this sort’ve, independence of leadership. DA:I was made using Frostbite and we went in learning the lessons that Mass Effect had learned on ME1 from Unreal, like respect what the engine is, build on top of what’s there, don’t try to force it to be something else. And a lot of stuff was built and then ME:A started in the middle of DA:I’s development and basically started over again from blank DA:I. And then that’s going on, and then Anthem starts, again before DA:I has shipped, and starts effectively AGAIN from a blank sheet. So for me, for BioWare the problem wasn’t Frostbite, the problem was never Frostbite, the problem was we went through the pain of adopting an engine three times when we should’ve done it once.” “I’m sure there was somebody there that wanted DA:I to be on Unreal, but I didn’t feel that from the team as a whole. What I would’ve wanted to see, in a world where resources were unbounded, would’ve been a fast follow of DA:I, something that came out in 18-24 months, built not just on Frostbite, but on the DA:I tech base. I think there was an opportunity there. You know, we’ve pitched all kinds of stuff inside of Frostbite for, in early Joplin, like making the tools available to the public, like modding and what happened with DA:O and NWN, where the tools were available for building modules and things like that. There was no appetite for that within EA at the time. Interestingly enough, right before I left [his EP job], there seemed like there was growing appetite, but now with the latest news on Battlefield, I’m actually wondering if they won’t ceremoniously take Frostbite out behind the shed and shoot it in the head. They’re definitely laying blame on Frostbite for, in the case of Battlefield, which I mean, of all the franchises where I feel that’s undeserved, that would be Battlefield.”
On leaving BioWare at that time a few years ago: “Casey and I did not coordinate our departures. Certainly I didn’t coordinate with Casey. Casey resigned a day after I did. It is possible that I triggered him to resign. I don’t believe that’s what happened. There was timing for other financial things that sort’ve lined up for both me and him that I suspect was probably the trigger for both of us, but we were not coordinated in this. It was frustrating, and was it getting more frustrating? I don’t know that it was, but for me at least, because we were getting to the period where Dragon Age was going to be in the primary driving position for BioWare - I don’t think that anything corporate changed in November, early December of 2020 that triggered me [to leave]. Casey would’ve been in conversations that I wasn’t in, so it’s possible that there was a trigger for him that I’m not aware of.”
Is the idea of ‘omggg classic BioWare’, the spirit of that era, overblown? “I don’t think so. I think that actually, the thing that makes a BioWare game special, for me at least, is the characters, the followers specifically. Obviously when you look at Anthem through that lens, you can kinda see a glaring problem. You have characters, but they’re not followers, not as present as they are in other games. But the funny thing is, we never said that out loud until, pretty much 2019, in the post-Anthem world, was when I think people started to really say out loud like, ‘you know, it’s about the characters, stupid!’ I think we’ve had conversations in the past where it’s like ‘BioWare tells its stories through characters’. There’s been the knowledge, but I don’t think that there’s been the acknowledgement of, say the thing that’s most important out loud and make sure that you’re respecting that. There was almost like, we were too confident in it and we’re like ‘we don’t need this because we can set it aside, we can have characters that are just in your base, we don’t need followers’. It took us saying it out loud to really acknowledge that. I think that that is still true, and I think there is still a pedigree at BioWare that can execute on excellent characters. The reality is, if you look at the story of, frankly, any BioWare game, they’re not amazing, what makes it amazing is you’re experiencing it through other characters, that elevates the story overall. Of course, that’s how it always has been and how it should be.”
On Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and the then-recent reports on its rumored release time [remember this video is from 2022]: “I don’t know where the ‘it’s got 18 months left to go’ measurement is coming from, but timeline, that makes perfect sense to me. They would’ve needed to adapt, and even like when I was still there, we were probably headed towards, yeah, probably towards 2023 even then. So I think that it’s very plausible to me, and I think that if they’ve been able to increase their completion urgency and bring things to further phases earlier, they could be in really good shape. There was stuff getting there when I was still there a year ago, and if they were able to be stable enough to keep that stuff, then they probably have a really good foundation to build upon. And I would think that they probably were able to keep the things that were nearing completion when I left, so, I mean, they probably have, for 18 months out they probably have - so I’m trying to say this correctly. Not that they have more things that another BioWare game would’ve had 18 months out, because that’s actually the problem, tons of things. [but] they have more done 18 months out than any other BioWare title probably has ever had. So a tighter core, maybe not as much stuff yet, but a tighter core, but that will let them go faster when they’re going. Essentially, if they’ve taken the hockey stick, and they’ve pulled this part up, and I think they have, then I think it should put them in significantly better shape going forward.”
One of the podcast/media folks shared the following comment: “What I personally have been told, I never call it a report or a scoop or anything like that because it’s just a sentiment, but the sentiment that had been shared with me [about DA:D] is sort’ve like, ‘we need to nail this’, not like a desperation like ‘we’re done if we don’t’, but like, we want this high score, we want to remind people why they love BioWare games.” They then asked Mark about whether he views DA:D as a “do or die moment” and about what the vibe inside BioWare was around this. Mark: “Not in the early days [of DA:D’s development], as that’s pre-ME:A and pre-Anthem. But I think, in a post-Anthem world, I think ME:A was, could weather that, but ME:A and Anthem together, yeah, I think there is some truth to that. Now would EA shut down BioWare? I don’t know, as you say they’ve done it before [to other studios], also studios become effectively in-source houses for other studios. There are fates that are almost as bad as being shuttered. So is it actually do or die? Honestly, I think the reputation matters more, because if people give up on BioWare externally, why would EA keep them around? If everyone just decides that BioWare is a bunch of hacks doing garbage then why would EA bother? One of the things that has kept EA kind of interested in BioWare is, BioWare is kind of like the sub-arm of a movie studio that makes the Oscar Bait. So maybe that excuses it for some people, it’s like, well yeah, your games cost more and they sell less than the Battlefields, but Battlefield was never gonna win Game of the Year, even if they made a perfect Battlefield, it’s probably never going to win GOTY, it’s the nature of the disrespect certain genres get. Like how you can make a perfect Marvel movie but it’s never winning Best Picture. So I do think that if BioWare is making quality that is respected and making people excited, that gives it leeway within EA that another studio that’s making things that may sell better may not get. So I do think that this needs to be a good game, and I actually think EA knows that too, and I think EA recognizes that, you know, they deserve some of the blame for Anthem and some for ME:A, less, but some. So I think that when they look at that, when they look at Jedi Fallen Order, a game that honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense within EA, it exists in part because it kind of brought in a studio that made it. Like it’s not the kind of game that EA would typically greenlight. But when they see it and that it did well, they’re not stupid.”
How much corporate-speak is there in a ‘I’m leaving the studio’ announcement letter like Mark’s when he left his EP role at BioWare? “So most public things, if it’s on the website, it’s gone through somebody, like there’s legal, it’s gone through somebody to approve a message. One of my frustrations in EA is just how, I mean, I was effectively like second Community Manager for Anthem because they weren’t willing to tell me ‘no’, and so I was able to basically put out messages that wouldn’t have survived the process. But I mean, they didn’t pay me anything to say nice things, I didn’t get paid anything on my way out to be nice, so I do actually believe that the core of Dragon Age remains strong, that there are definitely people there that know how to make a great game, and there are people there that know what the IP is, and I think that they are well-positioned to do that.”
“In terms of what, like, something that made me say ‘no, that’s enough, it’s over’ [re: his time at BioWare], there’s good days and bad days. I don’t know that there was any particular project that made me say no, enough, I’m done. Anthem isn’t the high point of my career both as a leader and also in terms of the product that came out the other side, but I don’t feel like there was a moment of ‘no, we’re done.’”
Other BioWare things
To a degree, BioWare have been a victim of their past success and were just leaning on that, or the thought from upper management was doing so. “I think that’s also partially weirdly caused by the leadership teams being somewhat isolated. I was responsible for shipping DA2. That was a big wakeup call for me and leaders on that project. But other people didn’t experience that, they were on Mass Effect at the time and then they shipped ME3 and had a different blowback for different reasons, but not for the same kind of development reasons, so they learned different lessons than I learned. They learned a lesson about the endings, but not necessarily about the way games come together.”
On Anthem’s failure and the cancelled attempt overhaul Anthem Next: “I think there’s tons of blame to go around for Anthem, certainly part of it should fall on me. For a lot of Anthem’s development, the team, this was before I was on the project, the team was not really recognizing that it was a looter-shooter. So you have to remember that this was a game that started development before Destiny even came out. No one knew what Destiny was except that they were making it clear it wasn’t an MMO. I feel that one of the early mistakes that was made was that when Destiny came out, when Borderlands was out there, there was a reluctance to draw that connection and say ‘this is BioWare’s Destiny or BioWare’s Borderlands’, that gives that clarity and draws that connection. A lot of it just came together really late. The leadership team had lost its ability to make decisions, or had that ability taken away potentially, so there was just a lot of churning happening, and decisions being made and unmade, or being left unmade for a long period of time. But what that means is, when I came in, I’m great at making decisions, and in a vacuum, decisions got made, but what that effectively resulted in is I just took the stick and pushed it down. I’m used to working with a leadership team that pushes back and I think what happened is this leadership team was so desperate, so hungry for decisions to be made, that rather than pushing back on the stick that I’m pushing towards the ground, they’re actually pulling it towards the ground like ‘Yes, finally!!’ And instead of me aiming like this [motioning with his hands like a plane’s downward flight] and the resistance happening like this, I think what happened is this actually caused us to go way too fast [and crash land]. It’s hard for me to see a path where things are actually way better, because we knew a lot of things, we went into the Christmas break before it shipped having not done a complete balance pass through the loot structure, and we did it in this awful hotseat way with QA playing the game 24 hours a day over that break. So we knew that things were shakey, but the team was tired, and you know, EA wanted it in the fiscal year, and the problem is.. so I do see a path [in an alternate universe] where you get a better Anthem, but that path requires the game to basically enter Beta around the time when it launched, and then sit in Beta for six months, say, and then launch in August or whenever that would have been, but EA wasn’t that company then. I don’t know if it’s that company now [video is from 2022], but it certainly wasn’t that company then. It wasn’t prepared to put a game out into Beta for that long and spend the time. I think if we had just spent six more months on it without having gone into Beta, it would have been better, but it wouldn’t have been what it needed to be. It needed to get out into the world and get the pushback.”
“There was a lot of politics in Frostbite [as an engine choice]. It was Patrick Söderlund’s engine when he ran DICE, he was in a very senior position, he could push for it. I think EA still remembers forcing render-ware down everyones’ throat and that blowing up in their face. So I think they’re reluctant to mandate it simply to save a few bucks. At the time, when DA:I, I can’t remember if it was me or Aaryn Flynn, at the time I would’ve described, Unreal was like a NASCAR car. A good fast car, you can go in a race. At the time I would’ve described Frostbite as a Formula One car. Way faster but way harder to drive, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, in a NASCAR you can probably not kill yourself. In an F1 car, I think you’re gonna plough that thing into a brick wall in 3 seconds and you’ll die. And that’s what you’ve seen happen with Frostbite in that sort’ve time period, back in the 2012 - 2015 time frame. Teams that approached the engine with respect did well, teams that didn’t ploughed their car into a brick wall. But I don’t know that that analogy still holds, I don’t think Frostbite is still the graphically-superior engine to Unreal anymore. Back then it made sense to use Frostbite, we could get a better-looking game using Frostbite than using Unreal. I question if that is still the case.”
“In its very core EA is a publicly-traded company. I haven’t worked in a senior level at other publicly-traded companies, but it is very visible. It is difficult to move a game between fiscal quarters. It’s virtually impossible to move a game between fiscal years, because of just like, that is the way the company, I’m not gonna say it’s run by its CFO, but sometimes it feels like it’s run by its CFO.”
DA:I was a victim of the moment in time it was made in, when open-world games were like taking over the universe. “It’s bigger than it needs to be by somewhere between 20-50%.
The team made DA2 in very difficult circumstances and were very aligned the whole way through.
The perception of a game in its first week after launch can make or break a game forever. This put a cloud over DA2. “Though it’s become the BioWare game that’s most fashionable to love, second after ME:A. DA2 was flawed because of the pace at which it was made. ME:A was flawed because things like bugs and things that should’ve been caught escaped. ME:A is a better game now than it was at launch [patches].” “DA2 has sort’ve recovered from the initial kneejerk reaction it received. ME:A has actually repaired itself into a better game.”
“I don’t think there was a reason that ME:A was excluded from the remaster [MELE]. I mean, the easy answer would be, it’s on Frostbite, the others are on Unreal, so to include it means just from a logistics perspective, it’s just a lot of extra work. I mean honestly, it still looks fine, so it’s not in as desperate of a need of a remaster either, it’s not on last generation.”
On the difference in design philosophy between DA:O and DA2 and why it happened: “It’s mostly marketability. The marketing for DA2 was supposed to be ‘tree houses and frat houses’. It was like, we’re gonna make sure that the game is appealing to the people that love DA:O as the tree house, but we’re also gonna make this thing that’s AWESOME and EXPLODING. The problem is, what happened in practice is that the marketing kinda forgot the tree house completely and didn’t market to them at all, and leapt into the frat house marketing and only made this sorta thing of ‘bruuuh! Bro! You can totally bro, bro!’ It’s essentially a victim of confirmation bias. The marketing said, this isn’t DA:O, this is a heavy metal guitar riff of a game, and then when you played it and it’s more action-y, you just went yep, it’s exactly what I was worried it was going to be, and you basically discounted it. There’s a love-hate relationship with even the term ‘RPG’. I think we’ve grown past this as an industry but also BioWare has as well. I think, ‘RPG’ is seen as inaccessible, that only a very small amount of people are willing to play, so there’s been an attempt to say like, you know, this is the kind of game that anyone could enjoy, to try to reach a branch out to other people. Accessibility does matter because RPGs are expensive, so you want to make something that can appeal to as broad of a group as possible, or alternatively, you need to decide that you’re making a game for a smaller group of people and scope and budget accordingly. The other universe path for DA:O would’ve been to stay in the vein of, effectively, turn-based or pause-n-play, tactical RPGs, and accept that the game sells 4 - 7million copies, 7 on the very upper end, and budget accordingly. So that’s where EA has an influence. If there are two options, EA are definitely gonna say you wanna go for 10 million. And honestly, one of the things that I think that has hurt Dragon Age has been, it’s never been allowed to just be what it is, it’s always been, much more than Mass Effect, it’s been subject to, ‘but could you be more, could be more accessible, could you be bigger?’ Even though DA:I is the best-selling BioWare game of all time, and before that I’m pretty sure it was DA:O. I think because Mass Effect has a cultural impact because of N7 that Dragon Age simply doesn’t have. ME has genius branding.”
[source and full watch link]
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beetolbugs · 1 year
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WTH your art is freaking adorable:D
can you Katherine and Shubble maybe?
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me too, shubs
(thank u!!! :'D)
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apollon-emos · 2 months
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shut down ports and call for ceasefire [and arms embargo and humanitarian corridors.] sit in at/demonstrate before/blockade your government buildings. disrupt political rallies. please get organized, god, we are not in the awareness campaign stage of this crisis. we're not even in the donations stage. please. radical collective action is our only only hope.
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kchasm · 11 months
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Ryu Number Chart Update: Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition
Age of Empires II is the second installment in the Age of Empires series, a line of real-time-strategy games putting the player in control of various historical civilizations during various historical scenarios that play out portraying various historical events that occurred historically. Almost historically, anyway—real life doesn't care much for narrative arcs, so there's some conflation and approximation and whatnot for ludicity's sake. Imagine a movie adaption of some famous historical event—Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is usually at least that historically accurate.
The game abounds with a historical figures you can command around a map, but that's really just the tip of the enchilada. Occasionally, other historical figures who don't actually have a presence on a given historical map poke their heads out to toss dialogue your way—which also counts as appearances. Then there are the interstitial bits that provide context for the playable scenarios, and include illustrations of even more historical characters that don't otherwise appear in levels at all. That counts, too.
Admittedly, the appearances aren't always so straightforward. Take the following screenshot, for example. (You might have to click to zoom in on it. Sorry.)
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(Credit: blasteg)
At first glance, it's some questionable meat—sure, it says "Byzantine Emperor," but which Byzantine Emperor? There were a lot of them!
Do a little look-into-ing, though, and it turns out there weren't that many Byzantine Emperors who were personally irked by Freddie "Barrel Boy" Barbarossa's local stopover—just the one, mostly. That almost definitely counts! Though, if you disagree...
Well, actually, it's totally fair if you disagree. Ryu Numbers can get a lot more arbitrary than you'd expect. I'm not changing my chart, though.
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I'll be real: I went through approximately two hundred playthrough videos, so it really wouldn't surprise me to hear I've missed a uniquely-named unit or two (or three, or a handful, or a league). If you see anything I'm missing, please hoot and also holler.
(It doesn't help that various updates of the game have mixed things up—for example, a Soomra unit you had to kill in Prithviraj's campaign was at one point named "Dodo Soomro"—a real dude who ruled from about 1181 to 1195—but has since been retconned in subsequent updates to the generic "Raja." Do I count him? I guess not.)
(And of course there's the regular complications, like the research I have to do whenever a name appears to make sure they're a historical figure and not not a historical figure. An example of the latter is Togortac, who appears a few times in Kotyan Khan's campaign. There was a real Cuman figure of historical note named Togortac...)
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(Komnene, A. (2009). The Alexiad (E. R. A. Sewter & P. Frankopan, Trans.). Penguin Group. (Original work published ca. 1143-1153 CE))
(... but he was active around a hundred years before when the setting of this campaign takes place, which suggests to me that the game character isn't supposed to be the Togortac and is more likely an original character created for the game that the writers named after the historical Togortac because coming up with non-anachronistic names for historical figures is really friggin' hard.)
As for Ryu Numbering yourself through that topologist's nightmare, though, it's not nearly as complicated:
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What's a Teppen? Teppen (stylized "TEPPƎN" because somebody in Nigeria is shouting at you I guess*), is a mobile card game, except instead of numbers, the cards have Capcom characters. And also numbers.
This creates something of a quandary. Do you count (and I'm pickin' a random character here; don't at me) Zangief as appearing in Teppen if it's allowable (even strategically advantageous even) to have a hand stuffed with hella Zangiefy (He's Russian, so I think that's the pluralization)? Sure, he's in the game, moving about within the borders for his card, even... but he's no longer unique. In fact, you could argue that he's on the same level as a generic recurring video game enemy.
Teppen clarifies and complicates the issue by classifying certain cards as "Heroes," which means that you're only allowed one in your deck. These are easier to swallow as unique, Ryu-Numberable characters. Ryu is one Hero (natch), but Oda Nobunaga... isn't.
(Side note: Yeah, Oda Nobunaga—the Japanese dude frequently credited with revving up the unification of Japan after its collapse into a bunch of warring clans—counts as a Capcom character, owing to Capcom's Sengoku Basara video game series. If you've never heard of Sengoku Basara before... well, I can't help you, actually, because neither had I. Judging from a random minute of game footage I hauled up from YouTube, though, it looks a lot like something in the same ilk as Samurai Warriors.)
(... And suddenly, I strongly suspect I've pissed someone off.)
Anyway, the whole point is moot, actually (American definition), because for most of the Heroes, Teppen also has "Hero Stories," wherein the characters are characters, and not cards at all, and Oda makes a cameo in Amaterasu's story leading a demon army alongside Nōhime and Mori Ranmaru.
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I have wasted your time.
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*The Venn diagram of "People Reading This Post" and "People Who Understand This Joke" has an intersection that is at most the size of an atom, within which is fully contained a third circle titled "People Reading This Post Who Understand This Joke and Additionally Find This Joke Humorous." The population of this third circle is 1.
The Genpei War* was a late 12th-century civil war between the Taira and Minamoto clans over which one of them would be the power behind the Emperor of Japan. There was a lot of drama involved, but the end result was that the Taira lost, the Minamoto won, and the Japanese Emperor effectively became a figurehead with the shogun—Minamoto no Yoritomo, at this point—being the actual dude wearing the boss shoes (which is what you call a "shogunate").
Unfortunately, according to the Namco game Genpei Tōma Den, Yoritomo's tyrannical rule resulted in Japan becoming overridden with demons, and ultimately required the resurrection of previously deceased Taira samurai Taira no Kagekiyo in order to put the land (violently) to rights.
... Maybe forget that last paragraph before you take your history quiz or your teacher will be very annoyed at you.
But anyway that's why Minamoto no Yoshinaka/Kiso Yoshinaka appears in Namco × Capcom.
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*Who was Genpei? Nobody was Genpei. If you take "Minamoto," i.e. "源," and "Taira," i.e. "平," and mash 'em together, you get "源平," which is pronounced... "Genpei." This is because kanji often have multiple pronunciations, including what's descended from the native Japanese pronunciation(s) they used and assigned that character to, and what's descended from the Chinese pronunciation(s) of that character.
Oh and Rollo was a Viking who did attacks on France. Then Charles the Simple (i.e. Charles the Straightforward, from the misleading Latin "simplex") of West Francia (sort of the precursor to France) was all, "Look, if I let you have Rouen (and you swear allegiance to me) will you quit it with the ruckus?" and Rollo was all, "'Kay," and that's how the Duchy of Normandy became a thing. He's also known as "Hrólf the Walker" (or "Hrólf the Ganger," which means "Hrólf the Walker"), and he's a skin in the Norse Mythology Mash-Up Minecraft DLC.
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Look, sometimes it's not complicated.
There are a few points of curiosity attached to this game and the historical population within, that deserve attention, though. For example, there's the oddly overachieving Mr. Motamid of the Moors.
If you play through the El Cid campaign, the relevant bits go something like this:
King Alfonso takes advantage of the instability caused by a political assassination in Toledo, sending in his army—headed by El Cid—to fold the locale into his empire. While on the scene, El Cid meets Motamid of the Moors, who can only react with gratitude when he hears that the Emperor of Spain has come to restore order to the land.
On a side note, the primary function of the superior rectus muscles is to effect elevation of the eyeballs.
It turns out that Motamid is actually the lord of Zaragoza, which means that El Cid has somewhere to serve when he's exiled by King Alfonso. El Cid, ever-loyal to King Alfonso, eventually convinces Motamid to ratify a treaty that makes Zaragoza part of King Alfonso's empire as well, since, uh… well, the story doesn't actually give a reason for Motamid to have done that, but rest assured that it was a Good Thing That Happened!
Keep working those superior rectus muscles!
King Alfonso is still pretty leery about Motamid and El Cid being the cool kids in Spain, though, so he ends up sending an army down to Zarazoga anyway. El Cid, still loyal to King Alfonso for some reason, cannot fight against his lord/former lord/it's complicated, and so avaunts, forcing Motamid to seek help from the Almoravid Dynasty just past Gibraltar instead.
El Cid comes to King Alfonso's aid, driving back the Almoravid forces, and Alfonso recognizes El Cid's loyalty by, uh, exiling him again. El Cid, once more needing somewhere to hang out, ends up conquering Valencia for himself—Motamid's no longer in the picture, unfortunately, as when the Almoravid folks moved in, they sent Motamid on his own bout of exile into the desert.
When a piece of media gets adapted, it's not uncommon for characters to be simplified for the sake of narrative ease, but it feels a little hinkier when it's real history it's happening to. In this case, Motamid is an amalgamation of at least a coupla different folks:
Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud, the actual ruler of Zaragoza who was served by the mercenary troops of El Cid, and
Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad (note the name), the ruler of Seville and vassal to King Alfonso until the taxation got onerous, at which point he stopped paying and also asked the Almoravid folks for help to keep not paying. This ended up being a Very Bad Decision, as the Almoravid folks decided that the best way to help was by making Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad not the ruler of Seville anymore and exiling him to Morocco.
That said, the in-game character is at least named "Motamid," which I've ultimately arbitrarily decided means he's a vagarious portrayal of Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad rather than being a fictional character created by the writers to serve the function of multiple non-fictional characters. Don't at me.
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Ludovico Trevisan and Pietro Giampaolo Orsini appear in Francesco Sforza's campaign, except for the fact that they don't appear in Sforza's campaign at all. What an apparently self-contradictory statement! Don't you feel the piquing of your interest?
If you've never heard either of these names before—which, fair—suffice to say they were a coupla folks around during the time when the Italian Peninsula was a buncha states jockeying amongst each other for power. Trevisan was a Catholic bishop, serving the Papal States—the Pope was basically another king, back then, with his own kingdom and whatnot—while Orsini was a condottiero, which is Italian for "worked for whoever paid him." Both men participated in the Battle of Anghiari in 1440, a battle immortalized by Leonardo da Vinci...
Or at least it woulda been. Unfortunately, da Vinci's The Battle of Anghiari was infamously unfinished and also infamously lost. The most notable remainder we have of the work is actually a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens (who, you might have noticed, is a totally different person)—a copy of a copy of the central portion, which would have featured, among other elements, a bunch of horses having a very bad time.
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Now, I'm really not that learned in Italian history, or Italian art (or non-Italian of either of those, for that matter), but I've been informed by The Art Books that those two folks in the upper right hand portion of the sketch are, in fact, Trevisan and Orsini.
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(Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2003). Leonardo da Vinci: Master draftsman (C. C. Bambach, editor). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Zöllner, F. (2000). Leonardo da Vinci: 1452–1519 (F. Elliott, trans.). Benedikt Taschen.)
Names are different, but those are the same guys. I'm pretty sure.
(Also, before anyone chimes in, I'm aware Wikipedia says the rightmost guy is Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo instead, but the Wikipedia pages have no sources for that. If I'm gonna be wrong, I'm gonna be wrong post-doing-the-research, dammit.)
So why is this relevant at all to Ryu Numbers, considering that neither of these folks appear in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition at all, even plotwise? It's relevant because of the dude just to the left of those two, who, if you've read those little snippets rather than just taking my word for it, you already know is Niccolò Piccinino, who does appear in the campaign and the plot of the campaign. And when it came time to illustrate Piccinino...
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(Credit: ClearSights)
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(You could argue the faces look different enough to throw identification into doubt past the margin of error, and you know what? That's fair. I wanna give you the option, at least.)
Yes, Joan of Arc is in Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate.
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(Credit: Xaldin)
That might seem weird, but it's already a game about significant historical and pseudohistorical figures from Japan's Sengoku period and China's Three Kingdoms Period getting isekaied into a temporary crossover thanks to the shenanigans of Greek deities et al., so sure, why not? She's actually in from a previous Koei game, Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War, which I'm given to understand is a Hundred Years' War musou and which I really have to watch at some point. It's on my List. I'll get to it. Eventually. Probably.
Point is:
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Something something but it's weird that it happened thrice, right?
Wait, isn't Robin Hood in Fate/Grand Order?
No, he's not.
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Yes, I know it says his name is—
Okay, listen. I know what it looks like, but this isn't Robin Hood. This is a totally unrelated guy who lived in a forest, dressed in green, used a yew bow, and fought against the local feudal lord.
If you're thinking that that sounds pretty Robin-Hood-like, you're not the only one who noticed. He ended up being another guy to bear that name, and was eventually betrayed (Robin-Hood-like) and shot one final arrow to mark his burial preferences (Robin-Hood-like!) before dying. All this Robin-Hoodedness was apparently enough such that when the Character Gacha Device went rummaging for any Robin Hoods it had in stock this guy met all the qualifications and got the moniker all slapped up on into him once more.
Look, I don't make this stuff up.
Speaking of Fate/Grand Order lore, Attila the Hun is—okay, actually, this is gonna need another tangent. Like, more than that Robin Hood stuff did. You know that part in Captain Underpants where the narrator's all, "But before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story"? Steel yourself.
In Fate/Grand Order lore, the "Velber" is an observational device created by an ancient alien race. It works on a set orbit, passing through the Milky War Galaxy once every fourteen thousand years, selectively targeting and destroying all intelligent life in its path. Why? lol aunno.
Inside the Velber are "Anti-Cells," organic life forms developed from the data of destroyed civilizations, which are specifically designed to be deployed and actually do the intelligent-life-destroying until there isn't any intelligent life left to destroy, at which point the Anti-Cell effectively starves to death.
One such Anti-Cell was deployed to Earth in 12,000 BC, where it proceeded to destroy much of Earth's earlier civilizations, including Atlantis. Fortunately for us (but unfortunately for you, since you have to read this explanation), the Anti-Cell was killed by a human wielding of Excalibur—yes, that Excalibur, the one King Arthur would end up lugging about later. It was made by fairies, but that's not important right now. Don't worry about it.
Bits and bobs of the Anti-Cell remained on Earth, giving rise to a number of mythological characters and mechanisms. One particular piece of the Anti-Cell was discovered by the descendants of the Xiongnu people, woken, and—yeah, you see where this is going by now—dubbed "Attila." Attila, acting on instinct beyond understanding, went on to destroy civilizations until expiration.
Also she was a girl, because Type-Moon keeps doing that. We probably can't stop them anymore.
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Oda Nobunaga was a girl, too. That's right, scroll up. Bet you thought that was just a bishounen aesthetic, right?
Anyway, the only problem with counting Fate/Grand Order's Attila as Attila—okay, the only relevant problem—is: Does this count as "Attila," or does this count as "the Anti-Cell that already had a distinct identity, but was referred to as 'Attila' by the Huns"? (That is a difference, as far as The Chart is concerned.) Is this still the Anti-Cell? Would this be more like a piece of the Anti-Cell given its own ego? Does that make her a different character than the original Anti-Cell?
lol aunno.
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But of course, you can neatly sidestep that entire issue by just going through Age of Empires instead.
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I have wasted your time again!
Here's a question: Can we use Tamerlane to get to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem?
Context: Roberto Bianchi's level in Eternal Darkness starts off with him captured by a warlord and to ordered to apply his architectural knowledge to a monument the guy is having constructed. Spoilers: Things get worse for Bob.
The armor the warlord and his folks are sporting have a real Timurid inspiration about them, but the most Tamerlaney resemblance comes at the scenario's ending cutscene:
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(Credit: NineWheels)
This admittedly awesome quote didn't come from anyone at Silicon Knights—it's a thing the real-life Tamerlane/Timur/whatever he wants to be called said himself, according to Bertrando de Mignanelli (and the guy who translated him in 1956):
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(Fischel, W. J. (1956). A New Latin Source on Tamerlane's conquest of Damascus (1400/1401): (B. de Mignanelli's "Vita Tamerlani" 1416). Oriens, 9(2), 201-232. https://doi.org/10.2307/1579274)
Also an issue of Nintendo Power straight up says he's Tamerlane, so.
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(Nintendo of America Inc. (2003, January). Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Nintendo Power (164), 134-137)
There's kind of a serious issue here, though, which is that Timur died in 1405 (at nearly 70 years old), and Bianchi's level takes place in 1460. A couple of years off is one thing to overlook, but fifty plus is more than a little difficult.
"But you know, K.C.," I hear the version of you I made up entirely within my own imagination say and also it is past midnight so I am not feeling very gracious toward the construction of imaginary-you right now, "Eternal Darkness is a game where reality Gets A Little Wonky, including potentially time. Is there a possibility you can count this as Tamerlane nevertheless?"
And the answer remains a definite no for the most important reason of all: Whether this warlord is supposed to be Timur or not, it doesn't change the fact that—and spoilers, here—he doesn't exist. The dramatic irony, unbeknownst to Bobby (but beknownst to us), is that this warlord is just another identity taken up by Pious Augustus, who technically isn't the Big Bad of the game but is the closest thing the player has considering that his direct boss is one of three of four (of five?) eldritch Lovecraftian ancients. So no, that's not Tamerlane, even if it is Tamerlane. At best, that's Pious Augustus Who Has Taken On The Name of Tamerlane, and as far as The Chart is concerned, that's Different.
... I mean, not that you can't still get to Eternal Darkness anyway. You just can't use Tamerlane. You can use Charlemagne instead, since there's a whole level about catching up to him before he can get hit with All The Curse.
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(Credit: Super Best Friends Play)
Spoiler: You fail, and he gets hit with All The Curse. Route still works, though!
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Also you don't need Age of Empires in the first place. Just use Civilization.
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I continue to waste your time!
(A non-Ryu-Number-related tangent, for a sec: Maximillian Roivas was voiced by the great William Hootkins, who appeared in the flesh in a bevy of supporting movie roles, but who you might especially remember as one of the many doomed X-wing pilots going through the Death Star run at the end of the original Star Wars. Specifically, he plays Porkins, who actually gets identified by name shortly before becoming unidentifiable. If you still can't recall (or if you're stuck the sound off and no subtitles), he's the pilot who, if you already knew one of the pilots was named "Porkins," you'd expect to be the one named "Porkins." Someone in production was mean.)
Finally, at the bottom of this post, I want to talk about a particular connection through Minecraft and The Cursed Crusade that isn't on the chart, actually, because it is Very Iffy At Best and iffy on two fronts besides. Why bring it up, then? Because this is my post, and I'm allowed to ramble fuddy-duddily about the things that interest me if I want.
Anyway, this one depends on two particular appearances: the "Grim Reaper" skin from the Minecraft Halloween Mash-up DLC, and, uh... this other guy from Cursed Crusade.
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(Credit: LoadingReadyRun)
Right, so, who exactly is this guy? Well, the game calls him "Death," and he calls himself "Death," subtitled with a capital D and everything, but can you really say an armor-clad depiction of the personification of Death and the Grim Reaper are the same character? Yeah, they're both incarnations of Death, but are they really the same?
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(Credit: LoadingReadyRun)
It doesn't help that The Cursed Crusade is so irritatingly vague when it comes to its own lore. For those who have never had the misfortune of experiencing this game, The Cursed Crusade takes place during the Fourth Crusade to Jerusalem, i.e. the one where they ended up sieging Christian cities for money. The protagonist of the game, Denz de Bayle, is Cursed, which effectively means that every now and then someone sets the "Hell" layer to visible in Photoshop and the guy with the slightly techno armor in the screenshots there starts hunting Denz down.
Alright, so that's the big obvious symptom of Being Cursed. But what is the Curse actually doing?
Game doesn't say.
Why is Denz Cursed in the first place?
Game doesn't say.
What is the nature of the knight of Death that seeks to drag Denz to Hell (if he has any nature, beyond simply "Death"), and what tasks him to this duty?
lol aunno.
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... Yeah, no, that really doesn't work (hence the asterisk, which usually marks ungrammaticality, but which has taken a part-time job here). If you want to Ryu Number your Cursed Crusade, you have to get in the other way around:
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The Cursed Crusade ends in a very And-The-Adventure-Continues! fashion, with the protagonist on his way to Egypt to find his father and said father in Egypt being confronted cliffhangerily by the game's primary baddie. It's all very Hinting At A Sequel, but considering that the game came out in 2011 and, more importantly, Wasn't Very Good, I seriously doubt explanations are forthcoming anytime soon. Or just "anytime," really.
Still, speaking as the dude who made a monstrous Historical Figures Ryu Number Chart in the first place, it's kind of a loss. The Cursed Crusade had a bevy of historical figures, and I can only imagine that a sequel would have done similarly—
(Credit: LoadingReadyRun)
On second thought we are all worse off for this game's existence.
... Wait, am I done? Hey, I'm done! This post took a lot longer than I thought it would to put together, and I thought it was going to take a long time in the first place. Watching two-hundred-plus Age of Empires II videos will make anyone's brain melt, even with the Firefox extension that lets you play YouTube videos at quintuple speed.
But you know what this means, right? It means I never have to watch an Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition video again. Thank goodness.
... Sorry, what's a "turnarome"?
"Return of Rome"? What's "Return of Rome"—
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Oh.
Oh huh.
Motherf—
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the-heaminator · 9 months
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@helianskies
HELIA
CURSE THEE
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lord-squiggletits · 9 months
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Onyx Prime = Shockwave time travel plot is such shitty writing I could and WILL (eventually) write multiple essays about it it's so fucking bad.
#squiggposting#for a brief preview of what i would be writing#1. time travel was done better in the same continuity by JRO#2. the plot by barber completely contradicted and undid most of the themes he was trying to build up#3. the plot introduced a lot of shit out of nowhere with no foreshadowing and had to be done via excessive exposition#4. it's just a really fucking bad logic loop that relies on a character doing things 4 THE EVULZ and not because he's like a person#can't believe ppl are actually defending it because 'oh it's silly lol'#it's not just silly it's stupid and it destroys most of the agency and drama of the rest of the story#including parts of the story that the same people who like S = onyx also praise as good writing#have higher standards for writers ffs don't accept shitty writing just because he made some points you agree with#genuinely don't understand it at all lmao#like barber made a whole story about the legacy of colonialism and how history is propagandistic and corrupt or whatever#and then introduced the big plot twist that actually it was all machinated by just one guy#hmmmm and here i thought this story was about responsibility and the way bigotry seeps into society's instutitions or something#NOPE actually the reason society is racist and imperialistic is because one guy went back in time and decided to make all of it happen#and the reason that guy wants a cybertronian empire is because he was raised during the golden age... which was brought about by the primes#...who were created by that very same guy. so like it's just an infinitely repeating circular logic error#in which this guy's motivations exist bc of the times he lived in but he literally invented the times he lived in
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veshialles · 1 year
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hey uh 👀
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alainas-sims · 2 years
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“I came down the chimney. Ho, ho, ho.”
A remake of my Helga Sinclair Sim from back in 2016, before I used any CC. Atlantis: The Lose Empire (2001), one of my favorite underrated Disney movies, takes place in 1914, but Helga’s outfits are definitely more 30s-40s film noir femme fatale than Edwardian. I included her main look and her fur coat/black dress combo.
WCIF Friendly!
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valoniaart · 1 year
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Age of empires II 🏰
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Illustration made for the sports event "REDBULL WOLOLO" on the Age of Empires license. The event took place in Heidelberg Castle in Germany (October 2022). I made two illustrations that were hung on the stage, this one is for the game "Age of Empires II". The Shelby Cobra car, accompanied by scouts on horseback.
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gruelproponent · 8 months
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They need to stop releasing video games that look cool and fun I literally do not have the patience or time to complete a single player game anymore
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felassan · 23 days
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A conversation/interview video with Mark Darrah called "Mark Darrah on Mass Effect, open world games, and sustaining a fandom (Channel 44 Chat)": [source and watch link]
Video description:
"Fred and Dan chat with Mark Darrah about his career at BioWare, including his work on Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, and more. Join the veteran game devs as they discuss the art of storytelling in an open world, and highlight the influence of The Ur-Quan Masters on the Mass Effect series. 0:00 - Theme music 0:14 - Introductions 1:54 - Ur-Quan Masters and Mass Effect 4:14 - Exploring open worlds 10:25 - Storytelling in open worlds 12:18 - Multiplayer storytelling 23:27 - Main content vs side content 25:14 - What do fandoms like 30:30 - Storytelling techniques 34:18 - Making games in teams 43:25 - Conflicting visions and Dragon Age: Inquisition 53:23 - Making a satisfying sequel 1:10:56 - Mark and UQM"
Some quotes under the cut:
"Now I'm consulting with [BioWare] on finishing up Dragon Age: Dreadwolf right now." (Introductions segment. it sounds like the video was recorded around Thanksgiving/the holiday period in 2023)
"Something that Mass Effect 2 struggled with is a lot of people just went planet-scanning, for, like, they basically planet-scanned every single planet, stopped playing the game, planet-scanned every single planet and then sort've picked it up. So it's almost like they had, ME2 for some people turned into essentially three games: everything you did before you started planet-scanning, all of the planet-scanning, and then 'in the end'. And then a lot of people just kinda stopped playing in the middle of planet-scanning because it was pretty thin. So I think if you want people to dip in and out you do sometimes kind of have to force the issue. So something that was discussed after the fact for ME2 was, you know, if the Normandy can only carry 9 probes or something, then it's like, you go out, probe 9 planets, then you gotta do something else, get more probes." "If you want people to be dipping in and out, it's important to push them back and forth somehow. So if they're on the critical path, there's something that's gonna push them back out into the open world, if that's what you want them to do. Dragon Age: Inquisition does that with Power. You need more Power in order to advance the crit path. So you've reached a blocking point, you have to engage in the open world. Now what DA:I didn't do a very good job of was, now that you're out in the open world, pushing you back to the critical path. So you've got some people kinda getting lost out there forever." (Exploring open worlds segment)
"If there’s too much there, if everything is in the box, like, 'I’m gonna give you the box and it contains literally the entire universe', then there’s nothing to kinda chew on. You want there to be unanswered questions and things to think like, 'well how did we get into this situation? Let’s talk about it on the Reddit board/post'. In fact, I’ve seen this happen with Dragon Age games when, like, David Gaider, back when BioWare had its own forums, would go into the discussions about lore and stuff, and answer the questions. They didn’t really want that. But they thought they did, but when he did it it just, it just sucks all the life out of the conversation, because if I’m like, ‘oh, I really wonder if maybe the Qunari are secretly bird people??’. And someone comes in, ‘no, they’re not’, and you’re like ‘ohh… well.. Okay…’" (What do fandoms like segment)
"With a Dragon Age game, you're sort've trying to get people, the writers thinking from the perspective of, imagine this is a television show, or a movie or something like that, and if you wouldn't say it out loud in a television show or a movie you probably don't, you probably shouldn't be saying it out loud or writing it down in this game. But it's still incredibly expensive to do cinematics. So sometimes you succeed at that, you get them to trust, and that trust is, maybe not misplaced, but simply we didn't have the budget to do the three minute long cinematic that would've been a better way to do this and in fact we needed you to say, 'and then a castle full of castles crashed into another castle and blew the entire universe up'. Like you're not filming that. You gotta just say that. Or you gotta find another way to do it through visual storytelling, like during a 2D scene or something. So I guess my short answer is I don't know that I've ever successfully gotten the departments to fully trust the others to do this properly." (Storytelling techniques segment)
"One thing that has been a struggle for me is even just getting players to engage in the environment art. Like, it's the most expensive thing in your entire game, in most cases, and a lot of times players just sorta stare at the minimap and dive around on the minimap and it's like well, wait a minute, why are we spending all this money on this beautiful vista if you're not even looking at it?" (Storytelling techniques segment)
[source]
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I think it would be cool if there was a Fallout game that takes place in an Asian or European country. Just to see what’s happening over there.
Also I think it’d be cool if there was an Age of Empires style Fallout game where the point is to rebuild civilization rather than just living off the garbage from 200 years ago.
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