Incline Josh Sawyer appreciation station

[rusty_shackleford]

a AAA game from 10 years ago is *checks notes* GTA 5.
If you really believe the average AA garbage is more difficult to make than GTA 5, I have a bridge to sell you.

 

[Alienman]

Note Soyer's complete lack of an argument. "Trust me bro, it's harder now." The games aren't more mechanically complex, their designs aren't more ingenious, their stories aren't more sophisticated. What, specifically, is responsible for games being "harder and more complicated" to make now?

Hard to get anything done when you spend all the time simping for thots on twitter.

 

[Morgoth]

Games get more complicated to make while also getting shittier. These two facts are intrinsically linked.

There really is not much excuse however if Joscha Sauer fucks up a simple game like Pentiment.

 

[what am i doing]

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1561176125530705920

Game dev, spec. AAA game dev, is much harder / more complicated now than it was ~20 years ago. I’m making a small game now but I work w/ and talk to people making AA and AAA. It’s changed enormously. Can people stop talking out of their asses for a second on this dumb site lol

Making a AA game now is comparable to making a AAA game 10 years ago - and it’s *still* harder and more complicated.

If your contribution to the discussion is to disagree without recalling your own dev experience or the testimonials of other devs contradicting what I’m saying, contemplate if this is a) smart b) incredibly dumb.

rusty_shackleford looks like Sawyer disagrees with your take. A question that was asked but has not yet been answered is just why a AA game being made now is harder to make than a AAA game from ten years ago.

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

 

[Roguey]

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

It's true for AAA teams since dev team sizes have bloated to nearly or more than a thousand people but I don't understand how a game with a team that's a little less than or a little over a hundred people will now have a harder time than teams that had hundreds to manage.

 

[Infinitron]

I think that broadly speaking what's going on here is that the difference between releasing a product that's 95% polished and one that's 99% polished can be orders of magnitude more work in terms of grunt work, checklists, procedure, etc. While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

 

[Morgoth]

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

It's true for AAA teams since dev team sizes have bloated to nearly or more than a thousand people but I don't understand how a game with a team that's a little less than or a little over a hundred people will now have a harder time than teams that had hundreds to manage.

It's not just management, it's also engine bloat that requires increasingly more coders for maintaining an ever growing and useless feature set, loss of systemic coding know-how (C# high-level monkeys not knowing how to resolve lower-level issues), a ridiculously multi-layered art pipeline, writing ever more complicated shaders requiring different languages for every hardware vendor etc. It's a perfect invitation for more bugs (thus, more and more testing) and inefficiencies. Basically, productivity goes downhill due to over complexity.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think that broadly speaking what's going on here is that the difference between releasing a product that's 95% polished and one that's 99% polished can be orders of magnitude more work in terms of grunt work, checklists, procedure, etc. While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

What do you consider "bells and whistles"? Releases tend to be buggier now than before, especially so for any developer that targets consoles as console manufacturers have become lax in what they deem acceptable compared to their previous standards.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-costs-of-buggy-game-launches-are-mounting-opinion

Launching games in a somewhat unfinished state has essentially become standard industry practice in the years since consoles became capable of downloading day-one patches. Publishers have shaved days and weeks off already tight development timescales by making the lead time between "gone gold" and a game appearing on store shelves into a desperate, crunch-filled rush to fix outstanding issues - and platform holders have tacitly permitted and even encouraged this behavior by relaxing strict technical quality checks that would, in the era before patches, have seen the "gold" code for many modern games being rejected and sent back to be fixed.

Unless by "bells and whistles" you mean useless features like endless integration into dozens of different platforms that nobody wanted or needs but simply makes devs feel like they're accomplishing something.

In recent memory the only RPG studio that has managed to make a full RPG in a reasonable amount of time is Solasta's dev team. They created what was essentially the entirety of Solasta in the time it took for Obsidian to make DLC for Outer Worlds(kickstarter ended approximately the same date as Outer Worlds released, Solasta fully released shortly after Eridanos DLC for Outer Worlds.) Did you know Solasta actually released into early access months ahead of the estimated 'release date' on their kickstarter page and then proceeded to meet the estimated release date they set? By gamedev standards, that's a fucking christmas miracle.

 

[Infinitron]

By bells and whistles, I mean stuff like, for instance, recording entirely different bark sets for companions depending on their state (stealth, wounded, etc), each requiring multiple levels of sign-off from various leads. Exhaustive levels of detail compounded by the requirement to maintain top-down oversight.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

recording entirely different bark sets for companions depending on their state (stealth, wounded, etc)

While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

?

that's the kind of attention to detail I wish gamedevs had, where are you keeping these troves of games?

 

[fizzelopeguss]

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1561176125530705920

Game dev, spec. AAA game dev, is much harder / more complicated now than it was ~20 years ago. I’m making a small game now but I work w/ and talk to people making AA and AAA. It’s changed enormously. Can people stop talking out of their asses for a second on this dumb site lol

Making a AA game now is comparable to making a AAA game 10 years ago - and it’s *still* harder and more complicated.

If your contribution to the discussion is to disagree without recalling your own dev experience or the testimonials of other devs contradicting what I’m saying, contemplate if this is a) smart b) incredibly dumb.

rusty_shackleford looks like Sawyer disagrees with your take. A question that was asked but has not yet been answered is just why a AA game being made now is harder to make than a AAA game from ten years ago.

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

You can even outsource your art assets to chinks for dirt cheap.

 

[Twiglard]

How much is AA? Is Underrail AA? How about Age of Decadence?

 

[what am i doing]

writing ever more complicated shaders requiring different languages for every hardware vendor etc.

? GLSL if you're using OpenGL, HLSL if you're using Direct3D, MSL if you're using Metal, and any one of them that you want if you're using Vulkan.
This doesn't change with different hardware. Available device features might, but you can write all your shaders in the same language. And at least in GLSL's case it doesn't matter if you're doing graphics or compute, GLSL is fine for either.

 

[Infinitron]

that's the kind of attention to detail I wish gamedevs had, where are you keeping these troves of games?

hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

As I was saying. The Outer Worlds, for instance, does this.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

that's the kind of attention to detail I wish gamedevs had, where are you keeping these troves of games?

hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

As I was saying. The Outer Worlds, for instance, does this.

I think that broadly speaking what's going on here is that the difference between releasing a product that's 95% polished and one that's 99% polished

Outerworlds never even got close to the 95% mark to begin with, that's why people shit on it.
I in fact already praised it for the kind of things you're mentioning, and it seemed many codexers agreed:

After combat if a banter gets interrupted one of them will say "Now where was I" and then continue talking.

There is no escape from the POZ.

That's incline though.

Just had this happen to me, neat feature. I hope other party-based games pick it up.

The issue is that it was nowhere near enough to carry the rest of the abortion of a game.
I also praised it for extensive reactivity, yet that does not offset the terrible parts.

 

[Nortar]

Who's the milf, and why is she under an Orthodox icon? And what is an Orthodox icon doing in his office?

It's not just a random orthodox icon, it's the "three-handed" mother of god.

Larger version

I wonder if it has more meaning then just being an "exotic picture" for Sawyer.

 

[Infinitron]

Outerworlds never even got close to the 95% mark to begin with, that's why people shit on it.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing in terms of what it means for a game to be polished.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Outerworlds never even got close to the 95% mark to begin with, that's why people shit on it.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing in terms of what it means for a game to be "polished".

I don't subscribe to the notion of polishing a turd.

 

[ciox]

seems bullshit

i was playing and modding an alleged "AA" game that sold for 40 bucks on steam, aliens fireteam
- almost all gameplay logic is simple and implemented with blueprint LEGO blocks that a total newbie can use
- very simple combinations and recombinations of the forementioned LEGO blocks are used to deliver most new content in updates
- scenes are built with random asset packs from the unreal marketplace
- devs create bugs with patches and repeatedly bring back very old bugs, community is understanding
- game shipped with an ability that didn't work at launch, and still doesn't work 1 year later
- on discord when discussing bugs you can tell devs the exact place where they made a mistake in a blueprint, as in what checkboxes they need to check and uncheck to fix the bug, and they won't find time to put in the fix through multiple seasonal updates

Spoiler

 

[Roguey]

How much is AA? Is Underrail AA? How about Age of Decadence?

"AA" or Double-A games are mid-market video games that typically have some type of professional development though typically outside of the large first-party studios of the major developers; these may be from larger teams of indie developers in addition to larger non-indie studios. Double-A studios tend to range from 50 to 100 people in size.[27] A double-A development studio will typically be backed by a publisher but not fundamentally part of that publisher, and thus have somewhat more freedom to innovate and experiment compared to triple-A studios, though will still be constrained by specific risk-limiting targets and goals from their funding source. Double-A games tend to be priced $10–40 compared to $60–70 (as of 2021) that triple-A games are priced at.

As of 2022 Game publishers and studios that are currently considered to be AA include Devolver Digital, Warhorse Studios, Obsidian Entertainment, and PlatinumGames.[29]

To me, single-A is a budget in the single millions, AA is tens of millions (what was AAA in the 00s), AAA is now hundred million and more. Those are just regular basement dev games.

 

[Toady]

 

[santino27]

WTF is wrong with this man?

 

[ciox]

soyrizo... do NOT google that

 

[mediocrepoet]

It's soy chorizo, figured that'd be obvious based on context. That being said, I always thought the "soy" thing was just a meme, but I guess "Soyer" really earns his name. He(?) is such a walking cringefest.

 

[Sardine Dev Poster]

This makes me think he's simply playing into the codex's perception of him, as if this is his way of saying "look codex i'm being so ironic about being undercover as one of the cat ladies that cancelled MCA."