The comic was always played straight - but the content and premise was hella kooky.
Engineered for the deadly environment? Okay.
Lone survivor of a deadly ambush. Excellent.
Out for revenge against the guy who set him up. Sure.
He now wears his dead buddies as his equipment. Wait, what?
His development process is a bag of cats. For any team, dealing with the fallout from any of his proclamations is an absolute nightmare.
But it was always well intentioned - there was never any malice.
That would have required a Plan.
I want to be clear on something - I don't honestly believe he ever set out to deceive anyone.
Would he ever say 'no' in response to someone asking if the game would do 'x'?
No.
Would he ever have a creative thought in the middle of a presentation and just roll with it?
Absolutely.
Next perhaps hit up roguetrooper.com or www.imdb.com/title/tt8707... to find out who's involved with this thing.
If that doesn't make you, at the very least, intrigued then I fear you have no soul or sense of whimsy.
Right. First of all, go and watch the teaser for Rogue Trooper. www.youtube.com/watch?v=byd5...
It won't show you much but it has... a mood to it.
If you weren't a fan of the strip in 2000AD then it'll do nothing for you.
But...
Then another one that makes them bounce on a sin wave.
Die Hard is on TV and I’m watching it.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Well that was silly, wasn't it?
So back to ARC Raiders and yeah - I can blow up a faceless robot. Or an avatar. No problem - line them up and show me the score.
But a person?
A real life person?
Why would I want to do that?
/🧵
I could press the button and have my character do the bad thing - that wasn't a problem at all. All I did was press a button.
But me saying the words gave it weight. Gave it my taciturn approval.
See, having to say the bad thing was really hard.
I didn't believe in what I was saying. It made me actually uncomfortable to do so.
Because it wasn't me. It wasn't who I am.
But you could also use voice during the conversations and this is where things got really interesting.
I usually did at least two playthroughs. One as a Paragon - always picking the 'good' choices - and one as a Renegage - picking the 'bad' ones.
And it's the Renegade that gave me the problems.
See, you could use voice commands to make your squadmates do stuff.
That bit sucked.
Voice commands in those days were pretty flaky and certainly not suited to a real-time, tactical environment. Most of the time they didn't register and even if they did work, they took too long to execute.
Thinking back, the first game that made me feel this way was actually Mass Effect 3.
That came with a lovely sticker on the box that proclaimed 'Better With Kinect'.
It was... but not in the way I imagine they were thinking when they came up with that.
And, to the video's point, voice is a lot to that. It's the humanising element. You're not just a faceless AI. You're a person and that makes it hard(er) for someone to do bad things to you. It's why so much stock is placed on dehumanising The Other in politics, for example.
I do enjoy co-operative encounters though. Helping the server take down an errant Bombardier. Sliding in with a Defib when a Rocketeer was too much for someone else to handle. Pointing out where you have to go to complete the next part of a quest. Or, indeed, finding out where I need to be for it.
This is key for my enjoyment. I'm not here for the PVP - at least, I'm not here for the *ganking*. Being outplayed? That's fine. A well-worked ambush or an interesting trap? Sure, you've earned it.
But by and large, I don't want hostile player engagement.
I'm playing solo, so make of that what you will but the aggression-based matchmaking has done it's work admirably and, 150 hours in, you can count the number of times I've been killed by another player on no more than two hands.
Now, I'm really enjoying ARC Raiders. Mechanically, the looting and gunplay is right up there and very satisfying indeed.
The enemies are the right level of engageable whilst demanding respect - just like Dark Souls.
And then there's the players.
Here's an interesting ARC Raiders video served by a single, simple hypothesis - Voice Comms. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWP9...
🧵
On the one hand, I'm glad that it's not just me being unlucky with where I've ended up working.
OTOH, this industry is fucked...
I mean, at one point, none of us really knew what we were doing. We fucked up then we either learned not to do it like that again or the people that came before us put us straight before we did.
Nowadays though, that crucial correction doesn't seem to be happening at any stage of development.
Anyway. Happy Wednesday everyone!
And once the project is done, any useful learnings or processes are almost immediately lost as the team gets gutted as the studio restructures itself.
Then, once there, no-one is subsequently teaching them. Or they're not being pulled up for their mistakes. Or they're assuming that, because they've made it, they've got nothing else to learn. Or because some random guy on YouTube who has yet to ship a title said it, it must be right.
The loss of institutional knowledge at these places is criminal. Experience gets dumped and replaced by people who, despite having the enthusiasm and raw talent in spades, just simply don't know what they're doing because no-one has taught them how to do it before they got there.
It can be anything as well. From not considering localisation until the last minute when you've baked a bunch of text and everything else is strings all over the project to mesh optimisation and sensible poly counts or simplified collision.
The last couple of studios I've done work for have displayed a shocking amount of lost knowledge. That is, there are (and have been for a while) best practices in many aspects of #gamedev and these places seem to have forgotten them.
I used to bunk off school to play Populous on my mate's ST.
Funny how things work out.
It was impossible to walk past a screen of uneven land without turning the whole thing into a car park.