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Video-game thread
Batomon Showdown released earlier this week, taking out a lot of my work hours from the following days, I've been waiting for it to come out since playing the demo. It's an asynchronous PvP-ish autobattler in the manner of Backpack Battles or The Bazaar, if you played one of those games you know roughly what to expect; the main difference is that instead of playing inventory tetris, you pick a trainer with a unique passive, deploy a team of up to 6 (hopefully synergistic) 'mons and get matched with another player's team to fight. As the rounds progress, you accumulate StS-style relics that boost your roster in some way, buy and upgrade better and rarer mons, and figure out a way to make number go up to keep up with scaling. Winning gets you a badge, losing takes off lives, amount increasing the further you are into the game. The goal of the game is to win 10 fights before you lose your 11 lives (10 lives + your immortal soul you literally sell to a shady trainer for a last-ditch power boost).
The game's main strength is its relative simplicity compared to other games of the genre; I like Backpack Battles but I hate its late-game optimization which all too often goes "oh great, I rolled a strong item, better spend 10 minutes painstakingly rearranging my entire board so it fits". Batomon has adjacency bonuses too but not all mons have them, and a 3x2 board doesn't leave much room for optimization anyway, so your main focus is deciding what to buy and thinking of how to scale, i.e the actually fun part of this type of games. It's relatively well-balanced, although there are obvious shitmons and some types are stronger than others (Poison/Burn is much more reliable and easier to scale than raw damage, and shields >> healing since you can overshield but not overheal and there are very few ways of boosting max hp), and ranked play does slowly crystallize into metafaggotry as I get closer to Master rank. Also unlike Backpack Battles the scaling is hilariously breakable sometimes, whether that's an upside or downside is up to you.
Its other strong side is the charming pixel art, trainer/fakemon designs are very sovlful (even surprisingly cultured in places) and feel much more faithful to the inspiration than e.g Palworld, although the occasional "ay that's literally just Torterra" overlap is, I suppose, hard to completely avoid 9 generations in.
Main weakness I would say is the relatively small dex, though the type identities are relatively fleshed out - Fire/Electric/Poison revolves around statuses, Rock is all shields all the time, Bugs are cheap and scale with more of themselves, Curio is all about trinkets, etc. I also feel like the RNG fucks you much harder here than in other games of the genre; some archetypes have mons central to the "build" working, and if you burn your entire income on rerolling without a single Dollhime to show for it so all of your trinket generation can actually start cashing out into damage, you are Shit Out of Luck, not to mention greatly behind on scaling compared to opponents, which tends to send promising runs into death spirals. But overall the game is a great time killer and I thoroughly recommend it if you're into the genre or the monster catcher aesthetic.
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People are doing incredibly cool things with LLM integration in Rimworld.
It started off with "journals" where an AI would look at the game state and recent event, and write something about it (RimLegend, RimChronicle). Then came mods that let you "talk" to pawns, taking direction from their personality and relationships (RimDialogue, RimTalk, EchoColony).
That was fun enough, but didn't directly affect gameplay. Well, what I wanted the most is coming to fruition: the AI storytellers the game has being supplemented by actual AI. Or at least significantly more intelligence than dice rolls with various degrees of randomness (RimAI, Rimteller, Claude Storyteller, Tales from the RimWorld). That's somewhere where Rimworld falls flat compared to a much more simulation-oriented game like Dwarf Fortress - your actions have remarkably little impact on the wider world, forcing a lot of dirty scripting to give an impression of responsiveness, and trusting the player to make a coherent narrative out of it.
That means events in the game can be directly impacted by what an external LLM dictates. I haven't tried it yet, but we're about to start a golden-age anytime now, significantly easier in games where you don't need low latency instant decision-making.
No more five quadrillion rabid crows because you made your floors too shiny, or a group of orphans wanting enough medical supplies to stock my hospital in order to ransom their friend (at least in theory). Events can (hopefully) start to make sense in context. Just imagine what you could do in terms of diplomacy - there's already a semi-viral standalone geopolitics sim out there, where instead of a Paradox style interface, you just say what you, as the leader of a simulated nation, want to do.
Or quests that are truly unique. Base building made easier by telling an LLM what to do (RimAgent). Giving pawns a mind of their own.
As always, token pricing remains the biggest barrier, but $/unit of intelligence continues to drop precipitously.
Any particular reason you declined to include a name or a link?
I forgot what it's called. It definitely exists, and uses some kind of token system to ration gameplay.
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The thing I'm most looking forward to are 4X games getting okay LLM AI by default. Doesn't even need to be great, just passable; So many 4X games are imo unplayable beyond the first few playthroughs bc the AIs are just completely dysfunctional.
They'd be a good candidate. Especially when you can get away with an overarching strategic AI that either writes scripts or queues tactical actions for "normal" game AI to implement.
Could be done even in Paradox games, as opposed to more discrete turn based strategy games. "Ah, I'd like to organize a naval invasion, this is the current map layout, order all units to move to X port" and it just happens.
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The Crust went 1.0, playing the main campaign. Lots of elements from Surviving Mars, but with a bit more factory automation elements.
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I've been playing a little early access indie game called Half Sword. It's a physics-based medieval fighting simulator where you use your mouse and keyboard to control individual arms. It's simultaneously incredibly detailed and incredibly jank. I think I'm enjoying the jank more than the detail.
I've been watching gameplay for years (I am too tired to get the actual games), and I get the strong impression - corroborated by most players - that the game is significantly less jank these days.
Like, definitely plenty of jank, just less of it. The physics has improved to the point that people are using legitimate HEMA tactics and finding benefit from it.
I was able to stand on a dead guy and ride him like a magic carpet onto the top of a nearby building.
I can hardly imagine what more jank would look like, but I'm sad I missed it.
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Finished a Distant Worlds 2 campaign. Love and hate this game. It is vast - I'm impressed it still (mostly) works with thousands of automated private economy ships, like freighters, on top of the usual space 4X systems. Thousands of mining stations, too many luxury resources to keep track of, characters, fleets; and option to automate almost all game systems on case by case basis. It is delightfully idiosyncratic - rarely convoluted, just unusual and unbothered by expectations, an oldschool feel. It leaks and reliably crashes on my 6GB VRAM (and autosaves do not help if you just spent 30 minutes paused fiddling with some details; at least it did not ever crash during manual save). It is criminally underbaked, just begging for another few passes filling details in, balancing, bugfixing. There is so many details I can't resist micromanaging a campaign takes unwise amounts of time for me.
Chronicon, very complete, top quality hack & slash. Tons of fun.
I really like the concept of DW2 (and DW1/DW:U, since they're the same game), but the execution has so many issues I end up regretting any time spent on it.
It's ugly as sin. Picking the Stride engine was a big mistake to begin with, and maybe it was even necessary for performance reasons, but visually it's a complete dud. The game looks about as good as Drox Operative, which is to say absolutely lousy. The ship designs that are mostly just tortured pretzel shapes, the races that are fatally tired science-fantasy zoology archetypes, the tech tree that walks through all the generic technobabble, and the combat that's just a hot mess of oversized particle effects...ew.
Diplomacy is absolutely retarded. Playing diplomacy well requires constant busywork and exploits. Raising relations with other empires requires giving them gifts, which are always of a fixed size, and the relationship effect magnitude is also fixed - you're always giving a fixed sum of credits for a fixed relationship change, regardless of how enormous or paltry that sum is compared to your or the recipient's cashflow. So once you're in the mid-game, you're casually maintaining positive relationships with the entire galaxy, and the only limit is the cooldown on gift-giving. But oh! Instead of giving formal gifts, you could also make deals, and barter some cartographic data or technology or an archaeological discovery or a diplomatic contact. And the problem here is that the costs of those things have no relation to their value. You can trade away some archaeological discovery that's completely useless for several times the net worth of an entire empire, and buy out your interlocutor's entire mining sector, or all of the technologies they had ahead of you.
Piracy is dumb. Pirates attack you early on in the game, and you can choose to either fight them or pay them off. You'd think that fighting them off would be the harder way of handling it, but bring long-term rewards of being free of piracy, and run no risk of the pirates jacking up their prices over time...but in actualy fact, it's universally easier, cheaper and more rewarding to just pay them off. Because paying them off means you needn't raise any anti-pirate forces, raises your relationship with the pirates, and eventually they just stop asking for protection money, and and then you can barter and negotiate with them until they become your friends, and then once the endgame hits all friendly pirate factions turn all their ships and stations over to you. And there are tens of individual pirate factions in each campaign, so you need to do all this rote, repetitive diplomacy over and over. Like regular empires, pirates are 100% deterministic in diplomacy.
The UI is not up to the task of helping you govern a large empire. When you have dozens of planets and ports, which you will, the bottom half of your screen ends up filling with icons representing them all. Icons that all look exactly the same. And if that presentation isn't to your liking, you could instead use the menus that offer lists of such objects - but that are bafflingly clamped to only a small fraction of your screen size.
Ship design, if you don't just automate it entirely and resign yourself to using the game's default designs, give or take your stated weapon type preferences, is a lot of unpleasant busywork. You unlock a new technology, many of which are just iterative improvements on older ones (fuel tanks with +20% volume, that kind of thing), and then you need to go through all of your ship designs and replace the old with the new component. And you have to do that using an interface that, to cut it short, has terrible UX.
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Agreed on most things here.
It's not that bad visually. Planets look nice. Ships, well, I like how busy core worlds can get, no need to zoom in.
Writing is bad, but the race-from-beyond-galaxy total war scripting/framing surprised me positively - they are so far ahead on tech that native empires joining them can actually be catastrophic (but shame you have so little diplo tools available). But again, could do so, so much more.
Teekans talk a bit like Skaven, it's cute.
Many glaring issues, but even at 150 planets, I did not find it too bad. Only maybe a dozen are core. Character and army management is the worst.
I had all state ships on manual design, since you can do a lot better than automatic. Shame you can't do guided auto-design (exclude this, always include that; or did I miss that in the UI?). Components going V1->V2 etc do update automatically now even on manual designs, but what a pain when you get something new, only "Copy as new" then obsolete the previous version works since "Upgrade" treats too many components as same family, pain.
They should open the game source code, it can all be fixed.
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Stride as in https://www.stride3d.net/?Ah, found the blog post. https://www.stride3d.net/blog/distant-worlds-2-development-with-stride/Does it really look like ass? I remember building and running some demos and they didn't look any worse than Unity.
IMO? Yes. if you look at actual gameplay footage instead of carefully curated marketing screenshots, or actually play the game and zoom in, then it's looks very poor.
And yes, it's absolutely possible to make similarly poor-looking games in Unity. And yes, not like I can do any better. But in my personal opinion, DW2 is not really worth looking at for its visual offerings.
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Still playing some Darktide with my brother. I finished all of the Psyker penances that required class-specific activities, and now the only ones left are the supremely grindy mission count ones. 43 missions to go. I'm currently either running a support built that goes all-in stunlocking an entire view cone indefinitely via smite (and which gets inevitably knocked out by something sneaking up on me from behind), or a melee psyker build. The latter really wants to use the Blaze Greatsword, but I already mastered that one, so right now I'm making myself play it with all kinds of other weapons, all inferior. Our gaming buddies almost entirely quit on us. Tired of Darktide, I suppose, and unwilling to accompany us as we go for higher difficulties.
Privately, I still play the odd round of Nuclear Option. I'm actually getting proficient at it, slowly, and I enjoy sinking my teeth into the technical details while still having to make snap decisions based on gut feeling. But now that maintaining stealth, landing without ruining the plane, evading missiles and picking targets are all somewhat in hand, I'm unfortunately free enough to realize that the NPC behavior is entirely too predictable. But playing Multiplayer is not satisfying, on two counts: 1) I can't pause, so in other words I'm certain to eventually just waste lots of team resources by going AFK, and 2) it's all co-op, hardly anybody in my time zone plays PVP.
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The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
Therefore:
Or, alternatively:
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
Tangential and not your point, but this is a pretty controversial topic in the game.
At least on the America servers, there is a strong standard against sexualizing Lalafells, and the sexy clothes and nude mods you'd find for every other species are completely forbidden among mod hosting sites and in-game communities. Since mods are all clientside and require a modded centralization service to show up on someone else's client, that's pretty effectively enforced in the community.
There was some brief drama when one of the main centralization services got taken offline after legal action from Square Enix and there was a scramble to choose its replacement from a number of forks, and if I recall correctly one of the more popular options was eventually blackballed by the community due to their position on sexualization of Lalafells.
I've heard from a friend of a friend about some individual ERPers that go for that sort of thing, and even accusations of being associated with such people can be enough to split apart a community. Though admittedly that's as much because FFXIV is an incredibly drama-heavy playerbase as anything.
There's a little more going on in the backstory to Snowcloak/Lopporit Sync. Even back before Mare Synchronous got blammed, Lopporit was pretty well-known as a Schelling Point for both lalafell and 'aged down' character models. Since the underlying tools depend on a transmitting bulk files to every client, there's also a lot more pressure involved.
That said, while my impression in-game is that lalafell Mare Synchronos/Lightless users are rare enough and any advertising basically non-existent (where a male hrothgar with Mare/Light references is not a surprise), from people who are in to the ERP side of things lalafell or Twin roleplayers are something they have to go out of their way to avoid.
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I've heard Girls Frontline also has good gameplay for a gacha game. Watched a friend play GFL2 on steam which seemed to have XCOM style 3d grid based combat but it also had an autoplay mode.
I haven't played it because I refuse to play gacha games anymore but I did play Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery which is a standalone title by the same developers also in the GFL universe. It's a tactical turn based RPG with a pretty lengthy story and time travel mechanics. Despite the graphics looking like a mobile game I ended up completing the game 100% (Steam says I have 140 hours on it). You can consider the story to be told in a similar format to visual novels and the script is 300,000 words long. The prologue cutscene of the final chapter takes 2 hours if you let all the voice lines fully play out. Also the game is considered on the more difficult side even amongst people that play tactical rpgs and some of the later missions can take up to an hour with how many enemies there are so it's a pretty hefty time investment to complete this game. I like tactical rpgs though so it wasn't an issue for me.
Time travel is big part of the game and even death is explained as Jehuty (the female protagonist of the game) sending herself back in time via a "reverse collapse" mechanism. You have to play through 4 timelines (essentially replaying story missions in each timeline but with a twist of having the knowledge of the future which changes what you have to do in the missions) to unlock the 5th timeline which has the true ending.
There was a discussion previously here on TheMotte about downer endings and I'd say the ending of Reverse Collapse would count as one since the main character Jehuty has to sacrifice herself to essentially save the world. There's too many plot points to explain but the ending reveals Jehuty was able to go back in time via mind transfer by swapping her consciousness with Lusica which is essentially a clone. Said clone is instrumental in the bad guys plan to destroy the world, and in the original timeline Lusica was the only entity left alive, which she found was too lonely, so she makes a deal with Jehuty to have them swap consciousness in the past to change the future. Because Jehuty loves Mendo (the other protagonist) and wants everyone else to live she agrees to let Lusica take over her body and to let herself be the one captured by the bad guy instead (there's an in game explanation for why this has to be done this way but I can't remember why). At the end of chapter 5 Jehuty swaps places with Lusica (Mendo and everyone else has no idea this swap has happens). Lusica presumably goes on to live on as Jehuty while Jehuty goes by herself to have one final last stand before she lets herself be captured. T
The final mission plays on this one last stand theme and is reminiscent of Halo Reach's ending where you try to survive for as long as you can but you ultimately cannot win. The enemies spawn endlessly and only get stronger and stronger until eventually you lose and get captured. The mission itself is sort of a mix between rougelike (rougelite? vampire survivor likes?) mechanics where you get bonuses you can pick from every number of turns and the standard turn based gameplay you've been playing for the entity of the game and can be replayed endlessly. I think it's pretty interesting and a gridbased tactical turn based roguelike survival could be a standalone game if that mission had more polishing.
Having played through this game I have to admit it did increase my interest in the GFL lore and universe, although I still refuse to play the two mainline games due to it being a gacha game. Apparently a lot of these gooner gacha games with waifus have pretty depressing storylines and settings. Nikke takes place in a post apocalyptic earth, although the gameplay as mentioned in the parent post seems to be quite something. Arknight (at least the orignal mobile game, dunno about endfield) also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but the gameplay here is more like a strategic tower defense, and friend says the game is quite friendly for those that are f2p and that people have beat end game missions with low tier units so it seems strategic play probably has more importance than having the highest tier waifus. It seems to me the writers of these games stories wanted to create some sort of grimdark, post apocalyptic dystopian world but they also need to make money so they put sexy gooner waifus to capture the gacha playing audience.
The game itself has some interesting facts such as it is a remake of a remake. It also has a remaster of the of the remake you can play after completing the game (completely optional and has 0 achievements) which has the much more bland original story (and blander gameplay mechanics). The original game was strictly a visual novel that the developers made before they made Girls Frontline and the remake was a turn based tactics game, and the remaster of the remake is a mostly faithful recreation of the original remaster.
Another fact, apparently Chinese gacha players got angry that in GFL2 a female character has close relations with a male NPC character that they felt they were being NTRed because only the player should have any sort of relationship with their gacha waifus so they review bombed Reverse Collapse instead. Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
You know, I have to respect it. Their actions resulted in the company making changes to the storyline and firing the writer responsible. I can only dream of Western developers having such respect (or fear!) for their players. I think Chinese and Korean gamers are so defensive about their games because they can look over here and see what happens when the industry gives an inch to the type of people who hate the average player of games. If they detect a whiff of someone like that fucking with their games, they go full nuclear scorched earth. As a result, developers over there are a lot more careful about their actions.
You can protest that it is silly, or that creators should have artistic freedom. To some extent I agree, but again — look at what we're getting out of American AAA studios. It is difficult to imagine a company in literally any other business (besides other sectors of entertainment) having that much contempt for its audience. Imagine a power tool company hiring people who casually talked on twitter about how they hated the average person who uses power tools, and wanted to use their position of influence to make the new generation of power tools appeal to that person less. This is just Wednesday for big game companies, though.
And come on — at the end of the day, GFL is a waifu collecting game. If I were writing for of those, the literal last thing I would ever do is ruin the wish fulfillment fantasy of the story. That's the entire point of the game, that's why people are paying me money. There are places for such storylines and it's not wrong for them to exist, but it is baffling to me that the company who trades on waifuism would ship such a story for what is to my understanding one of their flagship characters.
I agree that the Chinese/Korean gacha gamers, united by their schizophrenia, are a memetic force to be reckoned with (I've seen one hilarious negative Steam review in Japanese which went something like "I was told there would be NTR and I'm disappointed there isn't any, false advertising" but I can't find it now). I can even tentatively agree that Reverse Collapse was unfortunate but acceptable splash damage from the controversy, same developers after all. If all you have is a downvote, you need all the power multipliers you can get if you hope to enact actual change. If Western gaymers had 10% of their unity, camaraderie and total shamelessness, Western gaming might not've become a culturally lost cause. I have a fledgling theory better fit for the CW thread, that this and related incidents in games are local eruptions of a larger conflict, that of self-inserters (who enjoy competent MCs) vs. shippers (who enjoy diverse fleshed-out casts), and even more broadly men vs. women (whose areas of interest in gachas specifically run almost directly counter to each other), and the overall state of the gender war in a particular region/country will by itself tell you a lot about the state of games it produces.
Still, the audience having sway over the writing is a double-edged sword: Chaos Zero Nightmare, a Korean deckbuilder gacha, has had its Raymond moment (decent r*ddit summary) literally immediately upon release, and compounded with rumors of internal mismanagement eventually forced the director to make an "Emergency Livestream", a public apology, and a big shuffle at the studio, with the creative lead and some of the (female, as is tradition) writers getting removed. One
obsessed schizocommitted poster dutifully maintains a list of fuckups on namuwiki.The story from that moment on has taken a sharp, almost jarring swerve towards the audience's apparent wishes, every waifufag's desires have been granted to the best ability of the writers (which to be honest is still not much). Most of the girls in the new chapters take an immediate interest in
SKKthe Captain, Chapter 1 in particular (the biggest offender, as the source of the Owen incident) got rewritten entirely - with a new twist of your loyal bodyguard Renoa, previously the butt of reverse-NTR jokes, turning out to actually be some sort of time goddess from the future who is personally and intimately familiar with the Captain, and literally gives him the plot device to turn back time which is a key quirk of the Captain's station and a prominent mechanic of the game. Male characters are almost entirely absent from the new story chapters, and one particular male that occurred in the story before the rewrite was, I shit you not, referred to by female pronouns in the new chapters that came after the rewrite (I'm honestly surprised Owen hasn't gotten retconned into a girl, as Raymond apparently was come global release). Whether KR translation error or actual retcon I'm not sure but uhh... based?All of this is to say that while the KR audience largely got what it wanted, the game didn't actually get better in the story department, and if anything the omnipresent MC wank and the whole new-girl-every-banner dynamic that being a gacha necessitates, all in a setting that was originally intended to be grimdark elder-gods space opera stuff, and still retains the dressing of such... idk, maybe Asian gacha players are built different but even as a waifufag myself I can't take it seriously, it's way too on the nose. The handling of the MC in particular feels to me like the writers are desperately trying to ape the infamously-based GFL Commander, without understanding what makes skk work as a character of his own with a presence in the story despite also driving around a veritable whorehouse of T-Dorks, all of which lust after him to various degrees. Which is a real shame, CZN is another example of a gacha that is actually a good game at its core.
Those CZN links are a real rabbit hole, I hadn't been aware of that controversy. It's a shame about the writing issues, as I am really liking the game's art and character design from what I saw. It does seem like the game was rigged from the start for CZN, though, with the original writer being pushed out, so it's hard to see a situation where that happens and the writing is good no matter how they handle the fanservice.
I would like to see your theory on these incidents fleshed out in a longer thread. It really does seem like a proxy for the gender war. Even unrelated things are downstream of this - proximity voice chat in Halo 3 was removed because too many women were made fun of in comms. I think by this point most men into these kinds of games understand the shape of the conflict fairly intuitively, as all media and elements of media made to appeal to them have been systematically attacked in the same way again and again for the last decade+. A lot of them will admit that there is an impasse between the sexes and that it's best if games are made differently for men and women, a position I find very defensible. In my experience women who get involved in these battles are unfortunately not as honest about preferences. A lot of them get upset at fanservice, can't seem to accept the idea of something being made to appeal to men, and will agitate to have those things made to appeal to them. The me of ten years ago was much more sympathetic to women wanting to be included, not I see it and get annoyed because, well, I've played these games before. Now there is plenty of media made to cater to their tastes, but that never seems to be enough.
Part of me thinks Western games becoming how they are is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the Civil Rights Act, and no amount of gamer rage could have prevented it. If it's illegal to maintain a bro culture that values bro things in the office, you're going to see that reflected in the product. If you're successful enough, eventually you're going to have to comply with CRA hiring and workplace requirements, and if you don't do it fast enough, you're going to get body slammed by the government for millions and take a massive reputational hit. A court ruled that Riot Games requiring its employees to play their games to be a discriminatory hiring practice against women. I don't know how you can maintain a good culture for making games under conditions like this. I'm not sure if CN or KR have an equivalent law, so I can't say for sure.
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I have the same response I gave to @Grant_us_eyes - they can go wild complaining about the issues they have on GFL2 reviews and forums, I don't appreciate them taking the drama to another game, the issues they had with GFL2 did not apply to Reverse Collapse. They may share the same universe but as far as I know it has completely different characters from the main GFL and GFL2 games with the exception of a few cameos.
When you see a game being review bombed, it's normal to want to know why. Sometimes it's legitimate, like Silksong butchering the Chinese translation. But when the review bomb is because people did not like what developers did with an entire other game, that's a level of pettiness that I actually don't respect, especially because it's a game I ended up enjoying and almost didn't' buy because of the lower rating. Lower review rating = less sales = lower likelihood another game being released.
I'm someone that mostly only plays games developed by Asian developers and Indie developers and almost never Western AAA games, so I understand their concerns quite well. I even previously wrote about Korean gacha gamers before mostly in their defense. But there is a line between players passionately advocating for the games they want and just being unnecessarily vindictive. I will note that I do not know Chinese so the information that I had access to comes from English sources which naturally will be more biased towards the EN community and against the CN community, but here's a post that seemed to summarize all the drama and has some understanding for Chinese gamers and providing sources and comments from both sides of the controversy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ifexp8/video_games_the_cuck_chronicles_a_saga_on_the_cn/
According to that post, Chinese gamer harassed the voice actor but there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence for why they did so other than her being the voice in the drama. This also goes into the entire cancel culture concept, I'm sure it's different in the Chinese community but to me it seems there is a remarkable difference between anger towards someone who has contempt for gamers and lets that contempt seep into the work, and someone who just happens to be in the crossfire for doing the work they were hired to do. I don't see evidence of the voice actor showing contempt for gamers and if there was any I'm sure that context would've been included. Even then, I've never been a fan of cancel culture (in the west typically tactics employed by the blue tribe), so I also don't condone a group of Chinese gamers employing cancel culture tactics to harass people that had little to do with the source of the controversy. It'd be one thing if the voice actor is tweeting anti gamer stuff and egging on the playerbase, but that didn't seem to be the case here.
There's also a difference between wanting a company to change directions to go back to course in the direction you want, versus active wanting to sabotage everything related to the thing you dislike as punishment. Obviously #notallchinesegachagamers, but there was a significantly loud enough group of Chinese gamers that actively wanted to kill GFL2. Here's a funny thing that happened:
Side observation, it also seems like the Chinese gacha gamer communites have their own share of trolls and fans of different games go to war with each other. As an outsider this is the information about the drama happening in Chinese gacha games I get to read about. I don't know how common this type of behavior is but it's quite funny to read about.
But this also lead to an active campaign to kill the sales of Reverse Collapse by review bombing it, which again is a completely separate game, and how I learned about this controversy to begin with. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
A big issue seems to be how different customer bases view the purpose of a review on a global platform like steam. It's pretty common sentiment amongst Chinese gamers that reviews are a way for their issues to be heard considering steam forums are banned in China. We saw something similar happen in Slay the Spire 2, which was review bombed about half a year ago by Chinese players that didn't like the direction the game was going in. In this particular case, since it was issues specific to the game itself, their complaints are legitimate as they saw the game moving towards a direction they didn't like. But for pretty much everyone outside of China, the game continued to have high ratings even with the changes. Steam tries to mitigate this issue by having overall ratings and language specific ratings, but the overall rating is featured first. Cursory reading seems to indicate that a lot of this is downstream of popular Chinese influencers/streamers who play Slay the Spire 2 in a very different way, so the Chinese audience has a different idea of how Slay the Spire 2 should play compared to everyone else.
This seem like one of those situations where differences in culture on how people use a platform leads to friction between player bases. Actually, Chinese players review bombing games is a topic in and of itself, as I previously mentioned sometimes they seem relevant and even necessary, but other times it just seems to be extremely petty and vindictive. Looking around various gaming forums, steam, reddit, it does seem like most non-Chinese gamers have a pretty negative perception of Chinese gamers though due to how many popular games have been review bombed by Chinese gamers, which can also be downstream of the general anti-Chinese sentiment that seems to be part of Western (or mostly American) culture.
I enjoyed that post of yours, I'd had it saved from a few years back. I get what you're saying, but I guess I disagree that Reverse Collapse is not a valid target, as long as you grant that this type of pressure campaign is acceptable or necessary. It's a game by the same developer with a release date somewhat lined up with the GFL2 controversy. If you're trying to put the screws on a company for taking a direction you don't like, there are few targets more fair than review bombing their other games. It's not just an East Asian thing; Bethesda's whole catalog has been review bombed on steam during paid mod controversies centered on individual games. It's a bit unhinged, but there just aren't that many real avenues for players to influence the direction of these games, so they're going to reach for any lever they can pull, and it's a big, easy lever to pull. Funnily enough, I also found out about the controversy through Reverse Collapse, so if the players' aim is to drag the company's name through the mud through any means necessary... it clearly worked for both of us.
I feel bad for the voice actor in this situation, she obviously didn't deserve to have that happen to her. I would like to say that should never happen, but realistically it probably just isn't possible to have a playerbase willing to go this far to defend their games and not get ugly collateral damage like this. If everyone involved was level-headed enough to not go after unrelated people, they'd probably be level-headed enough to just not freak out in the first place, and then bad actors never get pushed out of the industry. I hate to say this at risk of sounding like a mind killed partisan, but the optimal number of wrong scalps to take is probably not zero.
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It's a bit more involved that this; the character in question was from GFL1 and represented the QBZ-14 rifle - which, for those not in the know, is the national rifle of the Chinese army, so there's a bit of national pride involved there. Second, when the company that owns GFL took a look at the matter, resulted in an official statement involving potential corporate sabotage, atleast one fired(female) writer, and a flood of original writers coming back from working on thier side-project Project Neural Cloud and noting a marked increase in writing quality from the early game in GFL2 to the current.
So there's a bit more teeth there than just 'blooh blooh chinese weebs are weird fucks'.
That really doesn't have much bearing on review bombing an entirely separate game. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
I don't care too much for drama happening in GFL1 and GFL2 but I do care people review bombed a game I ended up enjoying which could have an impact on the overall success of the game and subsequent future games beings developed. The EN and CN GFL fans can duke it out or whatever but as a mostly outsider looking in from the perspective of someone wandering why the game got review bombed the information I had access to on explaining why the game got review bombed did not paint CN fans in a positive light, and even if their anger is completely justified and I agreed with whatever issue they had with GFL2 that should not lead to review bombing a completely separate game.
Ah, skimmed over the review-bombing portion. A fair opinion.
I confess to being just a tad thin-skinned about the topic, as I've found people who bring up the entire 'GFL2 Chinese gatcha players' tend to run either toward casual bigotry and/or the kind of people whom would be making fun of nerds back in high school, with a strong whiff of grifting/tourism 'how do you do fellow gatcha players'.
Still, like I said. Understandable, coming from your PoV. Admittedly, I haven't played Reverse Collapse, mostly due to my first exposure being GFL and knowing how, uh... look, I know how these guys go in their writing. It's good stuff, don't get me wrong, but there's only so much existential depression I can take.
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The pictures on these pages are weird. They look AI-generated, but at the same time I'm not entirely sure they are.
Given checks notes ~450k hits on danbooru and the game coming out in 2021 (huh, somehow I thought it was older than that), I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of this game's assets and fanart got into the training corpus for various imagegen models, and as such looks AI-generated because it, among many others, actually contributed to the emerging telltale sloppa style. Back when I was screwing with Stable Diffusion as it was gaining traction (and playing Genshin Impact at the time), I remember plugging "tags" of popular named characters into the prompt - no LoRAs, just rawdogging the base checkpoint with tags like
ganyu_(genshin_impact)- and getting surprisingly close results just from that alone; of course it would mix up clothes and stuff, especially if there were other things in the prompts, but the overall "vibe" of the character generated would be broadly recognizable.More options
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Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
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