Shadywack
@Shadywack@lemmy.world
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good 2 weeks ago:
I wish critics wouldn’t even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I’m finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself “Who doesn’t like talking about dragons?” or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven’t seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody’s really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.
My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don’t do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.
Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don’t address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It’s well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there’s no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don’t get fixed on the technical backend.
On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine’s performance, this is the best release of the year by far.
I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.
- Comment on Last-minute PS5 Pro leaks indicate system will pack 16.7 TFLOPS GPU with 16GB dedicated GDDR6 VRAM — plus 2GB DDR5 system RAM 2 weeks ago:
Interesting in their choice of TFLOPS announcement. They could’ve simply claimed 33 and put an asterisk for FP16 performance on the precision and called it a day. They’re listing AMD’s FP32 spec, which is divergent from Ampere/Ada which has the same output regardless of precision.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
Lol, how is that political? It’s a “water makes wet” kind of thing. I’m sorry you have such fragile feelings about Bioware and don’t like the narrative. If it’s any consolation, it’s not even the same people who made the prior games. Whether the game’s a massive success or financial failure, EA’s just going to fire them all anyway. That’s cool though, we’ll see how it looks on the Steam reviews this weekend. If past experience is any indicator, whenever a publisher resorts to funny business, it’s because they have to. Nobody was needed in the defense of BG, MDK2, BG2, NWN, Kotor, Jade Empire, ME, ME2, DA:O, DA2, SW:TOR, DA:I, etc.
I don’t even really care about the studio anymore to be honest, after the layoffs and turnover, we have no idea whether this crew delivered or not, and judging from the review oddities, it paints a bleak picture. Let them sink or swim based on what EA allowed them to do, then through no true fault of their own, face a studio closure because of the obtuse fuckwads in EA corporate. Either way, the future sucks for the gaming studio called Bioware, in name only.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
This sure seems to indicate coaching on catchphrases. As for conspiracy theories, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty obvious. IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and Polygon have a long history of rating games higher based on their budget and publisher influence. Standard review outlets are inconsistent, and since 2010 have been the butt of many jokes. This seven year old video from Dunkey albeit, satire, rather well breaks down the inconsistency between review outlet staff even highlighting their own subjective contradictions from individual reviewers (look at the bit about the Sonic game in this one).
When you look at the first wave of reviews given by those issued pre-release review copies, the trend speaks for itself.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard Reviews Are In — Is BioWare’s Back in a Big Way? 3 weeks ago:
Fextralife was not given a review code due to their pattern of objectivity
Fextralife also mentions they host the most widely used DA:I wiki, they went through the effort of preserving the original Dragon Age forum threads from the Bioware forums prior to EA’s closure of them. They have a long history of being one of the central hosts of the largest community of Dragon Age enthusiasts, and longtime proponents of the Dragon Age series overall. When they expressed cautious optimism after the reveal trailer, their press contacts at EA went silent and they were not selected for an advance review code due to the risk of them being critical or not giving a high enough score to the game and dragging down the initial metacritic score.
Either way, if the company is worried about the perceived quality of the game, they wouldn’t have cherry picked favorable reviewers. It looks bad.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
It depends on how you frame it. I don’t see it as “hate” as I don’t hate Bioware, but objectively speaking, the work speaks for itself. Hyperbole such as disaster, catastrophe, etc are embellishments, but to say the game isn’t bad or just so-so isn’t a scathing criticism.
Anthem was treated the way it was due to ME3 and the narrative choices, for better or worse. People wanted to tell off Casey Hudson, and the game suffered unfairly. Granted it wasn’t a good game, it wasn’t as terrible as it was made out to be either.
Now on Andromeda, however, it was fairly criticized. The gameplay was fun and engaging, but the narrative and storytelling were given their fair treatment. That stuff was just bad, and the developer responses didn’t help either. The pathetic rants amounted to “I put mah heart and souuuulll into it”, and just because people worked really hard on something, doesn’t mean it was a good thing. People worked really hard in the sewers of London to get rid of fatbergs, but in the end all they achieved was moving shit around, and that’s more dignified than the trash we got in Andromeda’s writing and character animations.
Looking at the current marketing situation and the “Bioware hate” as you refer to it, I really think there’s more EA hate at this point. EA is blatantly manipulating the review scores by means of review embargos and selectively cherry picking only favorable review outlets, and in some cases we are even spotting reused catchphrases that indicate signs of coaching by EA to say positive things about the game. They do this in light of the consumer sentiment about preorders “Not touching this or preordering, I want reviews first” is a common sentiment amongst their video comments telling their marketing engagement experts to use dirty tricks like review manipulation.
I’d honestly love for Veilguard to be fantastic, but the layoffs and staff turnover tell me they didn’t value their developers, didn’t value the product, and don’t value the art or anything really beyond making some flashy flim-flam with marketable gimmicks. The reviews I’ve read mention that the characters in the game must definitely know what Tiktok is, due to the cringy dialogue, and that’s a review that gave it a favorable score.
Just wait until the objective reviews hit and this game is widely panned. That will draw the line between “hate” and “oh, this is actually shitty”, and make things especially clear.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
EA’s been manipulating the review scores, and can still only muster their current metacritic rating. I’m interested to see what the audience scores look like later this week.
- Comment on Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done' 4 weeks ago:
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
- Comment on After Gorging on Stock Buybacks for Years, Boeing Announces Mass Layoffs 5 weeks ago:
This new Boeing is not the same as the Boeing that America stood on. If this new Boeing is swept away and we lose American dominance in Aerospace, it’s something I can live with perfectly fine. There’s no patriotism in corporate success, let it all burn down. We’ve faced this before in the first gilded age, if we come out of the second gilded age, we’ll be a better country for it.
- Comment on Starfield: Shattered Space - Official Launch Trailer 1 month ago:
I didn’t even get past the mid point of the story, game’s too boring and the loading screens are too ass.
- Comment on Ubisoft Cancels Press Previews of Assassin's Creed Shadows 1 month ago:
A delay or a layoff, or both!
- Comment on More than 28% of Americans are now searching for a new job — the highest rate in a decade 2 months ago:
I’d love to see some of your thoughts against the hopelessness. One of the things I hear about a lot is how companies are good at union-busting. What’re some of the suggestions you have in general on overcoming that?
- Comment on Google’s ex-CEO blames remote working on the company’s AI woes 3 months ago:
An ex-CEO dipshit who got ran off because he fucked around too much, and he pretends that his old stodgy ethically bankrupt perspectives mean shit. That’s hilarious.
- Comment on "My maternity leave was supposed to start next Monday and I got laid off today," former Bungie employee says 3 months ago:
That really is understated and underfocused on. They’re trying to save face and be hire-able, but the reality is that “stay afloat” means millions spent on vintage cars while people like that family struggle towards their future. Stay afloat my ass. It’s the sneering face of evil greed that equates to “staying afloat”.
- Comment on In Most States, Undocumented Immigrants Pay Higher Tax Rates Than Top 1% 3 months ago:
I was going to say, they pay the lowest percentage of real income, and that’s just for the ones who do it legally. Illegal or ethically questionably speaking, they pay far less even.
- Comment on Gen Z job seekers should be willing to work for free, long hours, ‘willing to do anything,’ says Squarespace CMO 3 months ago:
This right here. They go down the fixed hierarchy rabbit hole really hard really fast, no mobility or movement in the company either.
- Comment on The workers at Bethesda Game Studios have fully unionized 3 months ago:
Makes me want to play some Fo76 now, a unionized developer with worker protections. I’m going to show my support.
- Comment on Paramount Cancels Halo Series After Two Seasons 4 months ago:
Good riddance, it was Halo in name only. That trash won’t be missed one bit by anyone.
- Comment on Petition to pass paid leave nationwide delivered to all members of congress 4 months ago:
I’m sure one or two of them will read it and have an “awww, bless your heart” moment. The rest of those shit-cunts would throw it back at their staffers and fire them for letting such a thing reach their eyes.
- Comment on LGBT Workers Need Unions, Not Rainbow Capitalism 4 months ago:
This is exactly why I call corporate DEI fucking worthless. It’s pinkwashing with nothing substantive behind it. We see all the rainbows during pride month, while at the same time companies disregard all protected classes (and unprotected classes) quite equally in the layoffs and unethical worker treatment. Cis, trans, gay, straight, queer, furry, binary or non binary, old, and young are all equally getting fucked.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Official Reveal Trailer 5 months ago:
Dragon Age:Failguard. They made it too easy.
- Comment on Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda 6 months ago:
I never played Hi-Fi rush, Redfall, Mighty Doom, or The Evil Within. That said it looks like Tango hit their sales and quality strides. Alpha Dog and their Mighty Doom shit-ware deserves the dust bin and closure.
As cold and callous as this all sounds, I read about the Redfall development and it was leadership start to finish on that disaster. The employees, even at Alpha Dog, don’t deserve this treatment. Dinga Bakaba from Arkane Lyon stated it perfectly
Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
Fuck me, this part hurts the most, and I highly recommend anyone who didn’t read the article at least look at what was said here. Everyone knows damn well that the corporation has the ability to flourish in keeping all the talented workers who got fucked by shitty leadership, instead the leadership will fail upward and keep ruining projects. Companies have so many chances to really disrupt and show the world a better way and they continually take shallow short sighted routes to cheap monetary victory, discarding humanity along the way. Fuck companies.
- Comment on Union leader endorsing Biden: ‘We’re not gonna waste a lot of time’ on Trump supporters 6 months ago:
I’ve seen this too, the ones who bitch the most will trash the union and the company, but seldom if ever actually show up at union meetings. It’s inherited from a culture of apathy, and this “give nothing in return” is a big issue.
Usually the democrats at least show up to the meetings, conservatives bitch and do nothing.
- Comment on 70 percent of devs unsure of live-service games sustainability 7 months ago:
Underrated comment honestly. That’s nailed on the head, greed drove billions in investments to compete for whales and now it looks like a wasteland…compounded by the fact that the whales were always unsustainable users in the first place. Sometimes rich people were whales but the majority of the time they were users who didn’t have a pot to piss in, in the first place.
- Comment on Star Wars Outlaws Requires The Internet To Install It 7 months ago:
Ummm, so do most other games???
- Comment on All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds 7 months ago:
Maybe if you weren’t dismissive to facts and cherry picked timeframes that support a narrow point of view, you wouldn’t be such an unpopular ass. (Oh shit I can link stuff too, oh man, fuck, that means you might have to look at information too).
- Comment on All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds 7 months ago:
How do those boots taste? That kind of shit right there is exactly how we backslide. Life expectancy is also higher than it was 1000 years ago. The only reason we left the first gilded age was a whole lot of legislation that’s been dismantled in the last 40 years, that if we go uncorrected we’ll be more impoverished than we were in that time period you referenced. “LOL” - as if to say it’s great that two generations can’t own a home, pay for healthcare, or retire. Real funny shit, asshole.
- Comment on All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds 7 months ago:
Oh so medical bankruptcy isn’t a thing? Decline of ownership isn’t a thing? The unwinding of worker protections isn’t a thing? Shove off, bootlicker.
- Comment on All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds 7 months ago:
It’s not their stuff that’s wanted overall, to me it seems like hope is what’s in question here. They stand in the way of hope, voting doesn’t work, so I wonder if violent removal would.
- Comment on All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds 7 months ago:
not a single person’s (poor or not) bank account would get bigger as a result
Likely not, but I’d like to think the social reforms with an attack on the wealthy would bring some of our rights back and help with our standards of living issues our poor currently face thanks to the wealthy systematically disabling the things that brought prosperity and protected people.
