Rarden

Low-voltage dragon

  • They/She/It

Shapeshifting therian dragoness thing from the UK. Currently marinating in sci-fi and fantasy media.

Avatar by hr_bananabird


Bluesky
rarden.bsky.social

Campster
@Campster

It seems like a lot of the "Baldur's Gate 3 is causing developers who hate their audiences and want to make dogshit titles to panic because now they can't be lazy!" stuff is coming from one specific op-ed piece at IGN by one Destin Legarie. I've put a few of his YouTube thumbnails above to give a sample of his work.

And who could have foreseen that a pundit who has spent the past few months on his personal YouTube channel defending the Activision merger seemingly at the exclusion of all other content would have some dogshit takes about video games?

To be clear: he doesn't seem like a hardcore culture war reactionary dude. He's not out here openly posting hate speech, and he's not overtly evil in the various ways YouTube video game people can be. It's not like IGN gave a platform to The Quartering or something, and I don't want this rant to be conflated with that sort of thing.

Instead, giving Legarie a platform sucks in a much more quiet, passive, insidious way. He makes bad arguments designed to stoke outrage based on his shitty, incurious worldview and then takes no responsibility for it.


nic
@nic

it’s wild how Gamers are at this strange intersection of capital, meritocracy, and consumerism.

the highest quality bar a videogame can reach is a combination of how much money, time, and labor can be shown at once on screen, and a justification for the excessive technology purchased to render it. but within the game, it must be Fair, in that to spend money to increase your power within it is gauche, meddling, and disastrous to its social fabric. but Content for the game must be a never ending treadmill - predictable, deferential, but also cannot use the same asset or clone an idea from anywhere else. a Gamer understands the violent inequality of the society they live in, because any replication of that inequality in their game is met with anger. Every Gamer's ideal game without gambling, microtransactions, DLC, needless remakes, or free of bugs is the ideal of a socially and economically equal and just society. But in the real world of capital, the consumer's demands supersede all others, and so the brain worms chew on


panicattheopticon
@panicattheopticon

the consumers demands supercede all (from the consumers pov) because very often they have that expectation hoisted upon them.

I used to work in the hospitality sector, and I've now had a medical professional drop his nerves on the ground like a bunch nervous school students because I worked on a game his friends play that he's bad at

it felt wildly uncomfortable because a decade ago I was Just Like Them, now I work in an industry that is, imo, incredibly banal and unexciting, and the degrees of alienation it's created is wild.

this is their outlet, their power fantasy, it's their one bang-for-buck thing they devote a lot of their free time to because capitalism doesn't let them have enough free time at all. And the weight of the grind is so harsh they forget it's a system, not the people in front of them to blame.

we wanted to make video games, not make the salve that soothes the psychic wounds of everyone from nurses to waitresses, from financial workers to farmhands. the little decisions we make determine the psychological well-being of millions for better or worse, and we're just trying to work on a cool thing!

the responsibility, the impact, it's far too much..I have to wonder if this same kind of discourse erupted around Hollywood films in the 90s when escapist fantasy wasn't just a niche but became mandatory to ensure the alienation of our daily lives.

people are being squeezed to death for nothing, they feel the profound pain and the heat is cranking up in every possible meaning and they have zero agency. the one thing they get to do is yell at us because someone at a cafe, an auto shop, a warehouse, an office yelled at them.


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in reply to @Campster's post:

He's Doug Walker's Nostalgia Critic firing guns in the air in anger over a Batman credit card while ignoring (or incapable of asking) why the card is there to begin with.

It's funny you should mention that cause Destin used to be part of Screw Attack which before its acquisition by Rooster Teeth had a very close relationship with That Guy With The Glasses/Channel Awesome.

He also thanked two youtubers who, let's say, have a less than stellar reputation with the gamedev community with their "reporting."

The only good thing that podcast has done is be baffled by the walking talking Gamer/Streamer/Internet Personality bunghole that is DSP and even then thats firmly under "You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, 'Gotta Hand It To Them'" territory.

Everything else made under that label/name has been scalding hot dogwater.

I'm not as inclined to be as charitable with someone who's inviting Colin Moriarty to talk to about videogames tbqh. The best case in that circumstance is that he's simply too ignorant to have a coherent take on anything in the industry, but more likely he's an intentionally malevolent force on the discourse

Intentionally malevolent makes sense tbh. "Baldurs Gate 3 is so good that it makes other developers envious because they can't compete" sounds less like intelligent game criticism and more like industry puffery, and his other videos seem to be slanted in favor of big publishers.

I literally just chosted about a video I saw where the “games pundit” said without irony that “nobody expects this” and “why don’t more developers do this” again and again.

The way this has all played out is a bummer because I think Baldur's Gate 3 is a really interesting example of this trend of critically and commercially successful games that are seen as at least somewhat groundbreaking for the AAA space and that are in many ways defined by their huge scope, or at least would be fundamentally different with a smaller scope (alongside titles like Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom) and I think there's an important conversation on how to square the value of these titles with the importance of building a sustainable industry (and would love to see any examples of people having this conversation).
And it's an important opportunity to provide the context on how unsustainable AAA development has become to those who don't know this stuff - if you're saying "the average consumer doesn't know what goes into making a game" as a GAMES JOURNALIST shouldn't your instinct be to try and answer that question for your readers, rather than using that knowledge gap as a way to bludgeon people trying to talk about a problem?

It's really disheartening to see how a small number of bad actors can convince so many people of things clearly incompatible with observable reality.
This whole time I've been reading the "lazy dev" takes and thinking "wait, what? None of this happened, nobody said this. This is mad.".
It is indeed quite mad.

While Legarie is an intellectually lazy hack, it's pretty silly to dismiss all criticism along these lines. To start with, I've seen very few people suggest that small or medium game developers can or should try to replicate Larian here.

Any anger I've seen has been pointed very squarely at the largest AAA developers. BG3 had a long development cycle but this is an argument for games to have longer development cycles! We've seen the development cycles of AAA games consistently decrease and the industry move toward a model of charging the most possible money for the least amount of value.

Yes, this is just capitalism. Some people realize this but most do not. Instead of saying that their complaints about the changes in the industry that they have seen with their own eyes are wrong or ill-founded we should explain what that driving force is. It's not developers, it's their bosses.

I remember talking with a colleague at GDC a couple months back, and we were guessing if pre production started now(or at least when Starfield released), Fallout 5 might release at the tail end of the next generation of consoles. Like minimum 2030 release window. We were making jokes that Fallout 4 would have been released closer to the first game than 5.

I can't imagine what it's like to develop games in this once-shot-per-hardware-generation era. You've gotta be doing technical, tool, and art pipeline planning for projects that are looking ahead at least 3-4 years, minimum, and projects with the scope of a Rockstar or Bethesda game even further than that. That's absolutely terrifying - decisions made in 2023 can haunt projects that are nearing completion in 2028, etc.

Something else to consider now is trying to predict the average hardware with the current knowledge of the chip shortage. I was discussing with a tech artist the other day about how wild that the NVIDIA 1660 and AMD 580 were still the most used cards today. A lot of games were being built 3-5 years ago, expecting us all to at least have the equivalent to an NVIDIA 30 Series or an AMD 6000 series by now.

Right? I read the first comment and thought I had missed something

Like, no, AAA game dev cycles aren't getting shorter, they're getting so unbelievably long that companies are choosing to announce products months before release, because it's hard to make a hype cycle for a game not releasing for ages (unless you're a particularly big name)