Gormongous

Yeah, I was going to post something like that in this thread, but I had a sleep first. It's really odd to read his posts in the comments thread defending his Thief interview, particularly that he enjoyed the game immensely, with almost no reservations, but he felt it "dishonest" or something not to mention the serious design flaws the game has, so he included them in his review, which skews the tone of the review wildly towards the defensive. It's... not a very good review in sum, not compared to the thoroughness and coherency of something like the Sneaky Bastards review, which granted has a huge bone to pick. I like some of Walker's other stuff, though.

Prone control.

Yeah, I love my Logitech MX518, which was deprecated in favor of the G400 redesign, of which the G500 is a more deluxe version, so my vote's going there, too.

It reminds me of that one episode of Idle Thumbs about Chris' in Prison Architect.

Not to take your bait after we'd all agreed to disagree, but the claims are coming from an interview with Levine from over a year ago when, after the departure of four major project leads and untold other staff, he came out to specifically state that "people join and people leave" in a company of a certain size and it was totally normal. The assumption here is, if it were really normal for several important people (and again, untold others) to leave during the final stages of a game's production, it wouldn't require a special interview to say so. There are other instances of Levine mischaracterizing the development at and culture of Irrational, so mistrusting him could be defended as legit. Furthermore, when compared with statements after the fact by Leigh Alexander and other journalists as well as by former employees like J.P LeBreton (his "toxic egomaniacs" tweet was deleted, but he still has up a plea for journalists to ask other employees for "stories to tell"), that it was common knowledge among people they knew in the industry that Irrational Games' culture was toxic and its turnover high, it feels fair to suggest that maybe it really was not normal, unless you're suggesting that all these journalists and employees have no idea that Irrational was perfectly average. So yeah, you're fine being skeptical and no one's disputing that, but I myself don't need hard numbers to see these statements as more than the grumblings of a few malcontents. Everyone's entitled to their opinion here, negative or positive. EDIT: ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

No worries. It's clearly been my instinct too, although I haven't found it very validating. I don't want to see Levine hanged or anything, I just got creeped out by everyone who passed over the layoffs as "business as usual" in the industry in order to cheer for Levine's new project. But that creepiness shouldn't leave me arguing with reasonable people about whether anyone deserves anything they get.

Yeah, I was just going to post the same thing. We've been talking in circles for a couple pages now, because evidence either shows Levine to be more or less responsible. There's arguments for both sides and everyone's said which one they're on. Better now just to wish for onward and upward, maybe.

Any good genre fiction from at latest the nineties is well aware of its tropes. I think it's emblematic of the genre ghetto, diminished but not gone, that genre fiction is defined by its worst and mainstream fiction is defined by its best. Anything too good in genre fiction gets assimilated into the mainstream discourse and anything too bad in mainstream fiction gets demoted to genre. Honestly, it's a fairly fascinating form of culture-policing.

Yep, it's more or less confirmed on various forums that townspeople do nothing to stop fires right now. The in-game wiki says that lakes and rivers are also used to put out fires, so the fact that literally half my town burned is even more absurd, because I had a pretty cool seed starting on a peninsula in a vast lake fed by a huge river. It was impossible for any of the townspeople to be more than maybe twenty squares from water, even ignoring the eight wells I had built. If the dev does a good job of quashing bugs, I strongly suspect that this will be a great rainy-day game to zone (or zen) out playing, but right now you're on a death timer until fire wrecks your town beyond repair or the AI glitches out in a way that causes a starvation spiral (or, if you're lucky, both at the same time, like me). Also, the guy who is calmly walking into the burning house on the left is the best guy.

I think I am done with this game for now. I enjoyed building up my city a lot and I was even excited for the challenge of surviving the fire, but two things have ruined any hope of that excitement: The pathing and job AI. Townspeople will always inhabit the nearest house to wherever they are when they become homeless and always go to the nearest storehouse when they are hungry or cold. I lost about a hundred people before I realized that I had to use the "destroy building" tool to force people to move closer to a storehouse that was still getting filled by nearby farmers and fishermen, otherwise they'd just path back and forth between their empty home and the empty storehouse before dying of starvation. It also would have helped for me to use the tool on the empty storehouses too, but I no longer have enough people to see if that helps matters even more. The population control tools. Seriously, if the AI won't do anything itself, my best options to force people to move is to trick them with the "destroy building" tool? That's almost as bad as having to use the "build road" tool as a ersatz terrain leveler. These two things have convinced me that I'm playing an unfinished game. Not broken, mind you, because the systems themselves seem fine, albeit a bit opaque. But if the game's AI cannot adapt to disasters and I can only force it to do so with extremely kludgey tools, something needs a lot more work. By the way, my town's still starving to death. There are twenty-five people still alive, eighteen adults and four children. Twelve of the adults are fishermen, two are foresters, one's a woodcutter, and three are laborers. They all live next to a storehouse fed by the three fisheries. About ten people die of starvation a year. I'm beginning to wonder if the fire somehow introduced a pathing bug, because it's absurd that twelve fishermen can't fish enough to feed twice their number. EDIT: Four fishermen cannot feed four fisherman. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he starves to death in a month.

I had sixty laborers at hand, because I'd just shut down my two quarries and two mines in order to start a land-clearing project to push my village beyond 300. Thankfully, the fire stopped when it hit the old town, which is all stone, but half the buildings are destroyed and it's started this weird starvation spiral that I can't puzzle out. There's food in the marketplace, food in the storehouse, but people aren't taking it to their homes or eating it. I wish the game would tell me why... EDIT: Yep, this town's dead. From three hundred people to thirty in five years, for reasons I am unable to divine. There was enough food, but people kept starving. The best guess I can venture is that people don't move closer to the town center when better housing's available, so once resources were not as plentiful, many people would die in the process of trekking to the storehouse or marketplace and then back to their homes to eat. It feels... really stupid. A town pulling in more food than it consumes shouldn't collapse from starvation, not if the people AI is doing its job. In the end, the crash stopped, either because there's so few people that they can hoard enough food to survive even the long trek home or because I forced them to move to more optimal housing by manually marking every house outside the town center for destruction, but the town's gone. I'm pretty miffed, all in all.

WHY DOES RAIN NOT PUT OUT FIRE? WHY DOES RAIN NOT PUT OUT FIRE? I almost grabbed a screenshot of a villager just standing there, by a well, as the house they were looking at started burning. They stood there for a good two minutes in 1x time. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

I'm sorry, but you don't know what's inside my head. Sure, I may have wrong impressions of what you believe game development to be, but it's not like I haven't been an observer of the art and business of making video games for almost two decades. You don't get to talk down to me and write off my opinions because of your vague claim to a position of knowledge and authority. You have just as little idea what went on inside Irrational as me. As for the content of your post, I understand very well that iteration is industry practice, which is why I explicitly didn't ascribe the failure of Bioshock Infinite and Irrational Games to your typical AAA bloat. I am saying that six years and hundreds of people and millions of dollars of large-scale "developing through failure" under a brilliant designer, resulting in a game still widely criticized as half-baked in theme and mechanics, shows a process that does not work (or at least does not scale). Maybe you do not see that, but then maybe you need an outsider to tell you that over half a decade of development shouldn't produce a game that's less successful by any metric than a predecessor developed in half that time. I really do not understand why you are so adamant that the dissolution of Levine's company cannot be Levine's fault, even in part. When I go back and read your posts, I get the sense that making a good game and succeeding in the business is to you almost an accident, in which case I have no idea why we bother paying the big bucks to people like Levine when anyone has about as much of a shot.

It's funny, before I went to grad school, I consumed fantasy voraciously. I wasn't a Tolkien nerd or anything, not that it's a bad thing, but I really just liked medieval history but was enough of an aesthete to dislike most historical writing. I figured that was the draw of genre fiction for me. But when I actually went for a Ph.D in medieval history, I quickly lost my taste for anything with swords or magic, not that the latter ever had much draw for me, and found myself reading a great deal of sci-fi. I'm thankful for the shift, not only because it introduced me to my favorite writer, the late Iain M. Banks, but because it showed me that I enjoy fiction that is different more than anything. Certainly, I enjoy more mainstream fiction if it's written from an interesting perspective or in an interesting way, but so much of what makes me like genre fiction so much is that it needs to be interesting from its premise in order to be successful at all. Even though the most recent book I read, Blindsight by Peter Watts, turned out not to be my taste at all, mostly because its efforts to be interesting in composition obscured its other strengths, the way he explored how intelligence could exist without sentience made it worth it anyway. It's usually the case with books that are less successful too, like Asimov's Foundation series, the ideas in which have aged terribly. I actually have an odd relationship with the media I consume right now: if I want something that's the same, I watch a TV show, but if I want something that's different, I read a book.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. When I say a "heavily and wastefully iterative" development process, I'm not just talking about the bloat of AAA game development that's already everywhere. I'm talking about the "developing our games through failing" philosophy that Levine proudly espoused in several interviews three or four years ago. Such an attitude sounds good, which you can tell from all the starry-eyed comments for the interview I just linked, but it seems to double down on all the weaknesses already present in the AAA development model in a way that I'm not sure wouldn't doom any project. The one quote, "You can't care about sunk cost," makes the closing of his studio less than three years later, after releasing a controversial but still wildly popular game, feel a bit more pointed than it otherwise might. EDIT: You aren't referring to me! I'm a dumb.

I don't mean this passive-aggressively or insincerely, but we might just have to agree to disagree then because, based on what you said about the inherent problems with the process of developing large-scale software, I find it profoundly irresponsible for Ken Levine to consciously structure a two hundred-man company making a two hundred million-dollar game around a development process that is heavily and wastefully iterative. It seems almost to guarantee that any project beyond a certain ambition and scope will run over time and over budget, without guaranteeing anything more from the end product. I can understand if that process is the one he knows and trusts -- in fact, I'm incredibly sympathetic if that is the case, because that makes him (purely in the context of developing Bioshock Infinite) just the kind of noble failure that I care about enough to write my dissertation on -- but I still can't help but blame him mostly for the fate of the studio he subjected to that process. Is that fair? It feels fair to me.

There's a definite bug (feature?) that people can only die of anything besides old age if they have a house to go die in. If you have insufficient housing, the game will go on forever, albeit in the most pathetic way possible.

I am sad. Rewatching along with a friend, I don't think season six has a single bad episode in it, although One Little Ship is to taste, and has the two best episodes Star Trek has ever produced. I really really hate people saying, "Stick with X until Y, that's when it gets good," so please please quit when you aren't getting any enjoyment out of it, but I will be sad still.

Theoretically six, although a couple has to have a lot of kids for a house to be filled up like that. Usually it'll only be a couple and whatever kids they do or do not have.

I really don't have anything else to say, except that I've been on the forum for almost two years now and this is the first time I've had someone use their own experience in the industry as an argument from authority against someone else. Maybe fairly, maybe not, but it bums me out. This whole thread bums me out.

aperson, I understand your complaints about "rudeness" and mostly agree myself, but I don't really get your whole "unfounded criticism" thing. So long as Levine is famous and respected, anyone who goes on record saying that he's a bad boss or that Irrational was mismanaged is sacrificing their livelihood, full stop. Anyone who wants to work in the video game industry, no matter how bad the conditions, can at best hint to reporters that things might not have been great all the time for some people they know, but that's it. All we're going to get is "unfounded" assumptions because the culture of the video game industry freezes out anyone who violates that conspiracy of silence in order to protect the poor working conditions on which it sustains itself. You can make plenty of arguments about how, if more people found the courage (or maybe just the means) to speak out, that all might start to change, but right now your refusal to accept anything but firsthand testimony with a name attached stacks the deck impossibly in favor of Levine, the only person who wasn't and isn't and will never be in danger of losing his job. Also: Dude, you just said a couple posts ago that laying off an entire company and sailing away on a golden parachute is somehow "life", whatever that means. Literally anything in the universe can be defended by calling it "life" with no further comment. There's a good conversation going on in the I Had a Random Thought thread about pots and kettles being black, actually.

Great cast. I always heard that Blow was intense and thoughtful in a quiet way, so it was great to hear that play out over an hour (and in particular to hear him talk about the trajectory of a game design career from an earlier decade). Invisible Cities is the Italo Calvino book upon which Einstein's Dreams was based, I'm guessing lordgankoo will find what he's looking from either you or me.

Can I just speak to this for now? The reason this is getting more comment than other layoffs, besides just culture fatigue, is that it was announced by Levine himself as "I want to 'refocus my energy' with something different, something smaller, which I wish didn't mean layoffs, but it does." It's a very peculiar place to put himself if he's just the victim of circumstance. I mean, maybe part of his agreement with Take Two was that he'd take credit/blame for the layoffs in exchange for the new arrangement, but man, to be a fly on the wall in that meeting. I also really don't appreciate the way that you caricature what people you disagree with are saying in every post you've made so far on this forum. It's a cheap way to make you seem more reasonable in comparison, which you shouldn't need if you really are the voice of reason here.

I think there's a Twiglet somewhere around here, too. Lots of Twigs into the Thumbs...

Remember the friend who was dating a girl he didn't really like but also didn't want to break up with? Well, their breakup started happening two hours ago while I was over, so I've just been walking around the block since then. At least I'm getting great cardio!