Tag: games

The End of Bioware

Mark Kern reports on an interview with a tester that appears to spell doom for Dragon Age Veilguard, and possibly, Bioware itself:

@nuhre_ gets the scoop in her interview with a game tester who reveals all. Alleged rumors from testing in 2023 build highlights:

  • Game is super woke. Pronouns in your face.
  • Qunari companion literally introduces themselves with immersion breaking modern language “I identify myself as non-binary.”
  • Romances were, and still may be gender locked UNLESS you choose a pronoun other than he/him, you MUST be pansexual or you were/are restricted to TWO romance options (Neve and Harding) while other choices may romance anyone. (this might have changed due to BG3 success and influence).
  • Solas is SIDELINED HARD. Made into a minor character with little importance or development until suddenly important at end of game, and that ending is “Baffling” and not in a good way, (but no spoilers revealed.)
  • The story is “disappointment after disappointment.”
  • Facial animation is “Andromeda all over again” and “plastic” which I assume is a lot of “my face is tired” quality.
  • Inquisitor and Inquisition is corrupt and may not be of any help even if you didn’t disband it. Choices don’t matter “It’s Mass Effect 3 again.”
  • Rook SIDELINED, backstory wasted. Just a guy in a bar, very much diminished.
  • Tester feedback IGNORED. Boss said “It’s very good feedback, but I can’t send it to them (the devs). It’s very good but …” Basically you can’t talk about how the woke stuff is making the game worse. It’s not something you can talk about, even if it is ruining the game.
  • Grey Warden Davrin, a newcomer who never finished his training, gets to influence and make important decisions for the Grey Wardens solely because he is a PoC. “Gets to decide everything.”
  • The segment of gameplay in The Fade is a boring “walking simulator” with just some fetch quests. Completely wasted opportunity.
  • Other major characters like Varric, turned into mere “advisors” and pushed to the back of the story.
  • “It’s so far removed from Origins, that it’s crazy that it’s in the same universe.”

“THIS IS THE END OF BIOWARE” the interview concludes. Final nail in the coffin of a once great studio and franchise.

I liked Baldur’s Gate, and the investment company for which I worked helped fund Neverwinter Nights, but I generally considered their games to be overrated and more than a little derivative. The fact that they went full SJW and embraced the Diversity Initiative didn’t surprise me in the slightest. If the failure of DAV causes the studio to go down, I wouldn’t care at all. It’s not like losing Origin Systems to the graveyard of developers.

DISCUSS ON SG

Pixel Artists Wanted

A very small team and I have been working on a game project. We’re at the point where we need some art, so if there are any pixel artists interested in volunteering – this is a labor of love, not a business project – please get in touch. It’s a very cool game; imagine being able to play MMO-style battlegrounds without the MMO.

DISCUSS ON SG

Adieu, Old Friends

This one stabs the heart a little bit. Paul was my best friend’s younger brother’s best friend, so I’d known him since I was around 13 or so. Andy, I met through Paul not long after GI got rolling. We played games with them many times, both in the Digital Ghetto and at their offices; I saw Andy’s band play his fantastic THREE-CHORD SONG at the Fine Line, and they both came to our epic Christmas parties back in the day.

Paul’s been gone for a long time and now his legacy is at an end too. Then again, at 33 years it was the longest-running game publication and it lasted a lot longer than our game company did, so I guess you’d have to say the Pro Player won one last game.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Anonymity of the Innovator

One of the early innovators in the knife-training world contemplates some of his business mistakes, and expresses his exasperation with the youngsters in the field who have no idea that they are standing on his shoulders.

My review/remark caused a lot of guffaws and a few smart ass remarks, among the 20 and 30 year old readers, most of whom were so submerged in modern “dynasty jargon,” up to their fad-beards in mystique, and lost in the web world. They’d never even heard of us older guys from the 1990s and 2000s. I mean, who am I to comment like this on their latest fad-boy genius?

I can identify. While I don’t fault my fellow GamerGaters who still don’t know, and have no reason to know, about my connection to the initial launch of GamerGate, it was a little astonishing to hear die-hard gamers claiming, with a straight face, that I had no connection to gaming or game development at all. But that doesn’t bother me, just as the litany of my various failures by the usual anklebiters doesn’t

That’s not to say that none of my failures bother me. The failure in particular that haunts me the most wasn’t even my fault, perhaps in part because I keep being reminded of it on a regular basis. And virtually no one who wasn’t in a very small and elite circle even remembers anything about it. As a result, no one wants to believe it, or would believe it if it weren’t a matter of historical and public record.

The Latest News From The Gaming World: Sim Fans—Welcome To The Next Level
ARTIST Graphics’ 3GA Chip Feeds The Need For 3D Speed

ARTIST Graphics, a Minneapolis-based hardware manufacturer, has announced a new graphics chip that may transform your work-a-day PC into a high-performance graphics workstation.

Consider the current state of the art: IndyCar Racing. Papyrus’s hot new game creates a very intense environment for simulated racing action. To do so, it pushes current technology to produce 12,000 flat shaded or 2,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. Bur imagine how much richer, how much more intense, a simulation could be if it could process 12 million flat-shaded, or 30,000 texture-mapped polygons per second at a higher screen resolution than standard VGA. While this might sound as far off as Gibsonian cyberspace, ARTIST Graphics and their 36/1 video processing chips may well make such simulations a very real possibility in ‘94.

ARTIST Graphics has been a manufacturer of graphics hardware used primarily for Computer Aided Design since 1982. Their chips and video boards are used widely by CAD professionals for applications that need heavy graphics horsepower. Adapting ARTIST Graphics’ latest high-end graphics technology to the PC games market is largely the result of a conversation that took place in 1992 between Chris Taylor, senior software engineer at Electronic Arts, and Theodore Beale, “trans-dimensional evangelist” at ARTIST Graphics.

“Chris had called to find out about VESA support on some of our cards,” said Beale. “We got to talking games, and I swapped him a graphics board in return for a couple of EA games. After playing with it for a few weeks, he suggested that we add a few features to our next-generation chip that would make it a really killer device for 3D simulators and action games. I went back to our engineers and asked them about adding the features, and Io and behold, the 3GA.”

According to ARTIST, the chip is capable of displaying up to 12 million flat-shadowed, two hundred thousand Gouraud-shaded, or thirty-thousand texture-mapped polygons per second in a game. These numbers approach RISC-based graphic workstation performance. Simulated benchmark tests have yielded 90 million WinMarks on the WinBench 3.11 test at 1280 x 1024 x 8 resolution on a 486/66 PCI bus machine (an average local-bus VGA video card at 640×480 yields 6 million WinMarks). Games could be written to run with the 3GA from within Windows, with the game’s code written to effectively bypass the Windows’ graphics routines. This would allow 3D intensive games to run under Windows without degradation of performance.

The 3GA chip’s 64-bit wide local memory bus supports up to 4 megabytes of VRAM and up to 8 megabytes of DRAM. The memory allows a game to load a huge portion of a game’s graphic data directly onto the card, thereby relieving the computer of a huge burden. Additionally, the 3GA chip has an on-chip VGA architecture which supports standard VGA text and graphics modes, and VESA SVGA modes up to 1024 x 768 resolution at 8 bits per pixel.

“With this kind of technology,” says Fred Savage, director at Origin Systems, “the limitations of the VGA architecture are removed. Anything that allows us to reduce the load on the CPU is going to let us have a much larger scope for our PC-based games.”

ARTIST’ Graphics is currently working on an OEM deal with a major video card manufacturer. For more information, contact ARTIST’ Graphics at (612) 631-7800.

Computer Gaming World, February 2024

One of these days I’ll go into more detail on the panoply of mistakes that were made, by me and others, that opened the door for Nvidea, and also answer some intriguing anomalies, such as why Artist Graphics held the original trademark for the 3D Blaster and how my biggest, most massive mistake until 30 years after the fact.

DISCUSS ON SG

None of the Above

None of the above, noobs. None of the above!

In fact, neither of my first THREE controllers are even on the list.

  • Mattel Intellivision gold disc
    • Apple //e joystick
    • Analog Plus Apple //e joystick

    I still love the Intellivision approach, especially with the overlays that allowed for much more detailed inputs and probably inspired the Warmouse design. Its only real flaw were that the side buttons were too hard to press, so the controller had to be gripped firmly in order to prevent it from being pushed to the side when the side buttons, which were usually used for firing, were pressed.

    But I think it’s worth noting that all of the subsequent controllers were fundamentally based on the Intellivision’s thumb-based controller, and most of them were both technically and practically inferior, having as few as four directions in the place of the Intellivision’s 16. To this day, I’ve never understood why Nintendo and Sega put the thumbpad on the LEFT side, when right-handed people have better fine motor control with their RIGHT thumb.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Why Warhammer Survived So Long

    Games Workshop has been converged. Warhammer Fantasy Battles is long dead. Warhammer 40k has fallen. But there are still lessons to be learned with regards to how and why it survived its corporate cancer as long as it did.

    Warhammer 40k was resistant to the Left for so long because it was a universe that (unintentionally) founded itself in very basic truths of mankind. And it presented those truths in such an obvious way that it was next to impossible for the Left to deny. It is difficult for the woke to corrupt a property that outright acknowledges how the woke corrupts IPs to begin with.

    Shall we raise a few examples? In 40k, there are the Chaos Gods which are the Sci-Fi equivalent of the devil. The woke can try to depict heroic gay romances and represent obese persons, but to anyone with common sense, these narratives ultimately twist themselves into the corruptions of Slaanesh and Nurgle (two of the Chaos Gods). In outlining the existence of a hell, the Right now has the vocabulary (and the canon) to section off Leftist controlled portions of the narrative.

    You might have an atheistic character, but when the God-Emperor of Mankind is raising up saints, that character goes from a noble objector to a skeptic fool. When you create a definite good and evil in a fictional universe, then it becomes ever more difficult for the Left to pervert. And the more unabashed you portray these truths, the more tenuous the Left’s depictions become.

    The Left can easily get away with perverting Star Wars because Star Wars is a quasi Buddhist Sci-Fi adventure. But what happens if there were definable universal constants that went against Leftist interpretations? What if the Jedi Order were explicitly defined as a male only society and that to deviate from this was heresy? Yes, the Left can go and insert their narratives, but there is now plausible deniability from the Right.

    What if we can create a fictional universe so grounded in obvious realities that any Leftist interpretation could be canonically discarded as a sham? I know there’s no such thing as an airtight creation, but it would be a tremendous leap forward if we could create spaces resistant to Leftist encroachment. The concept of a Rightwing fictional universe has always been tantalizing, but what makes a fictional universe Rightwing? It is grounding those narratives in the Truth.

    I don’t have all the answers, but I think the future of Rightwing entertainment is creating properties which explore the truth in very basic ways that the Left cannot. In acknowledging the truths of the human existence, we can come to art that inherently resists Leftist adaption. In delving into the deepest parts of the human condition, we can better understand the world and better condemn the perversion the Left wants to create.

    Everything is potentially subject to convergence and eventual destruction. Even Arkhaven. Even Selenoth. But the more we learn about how the great intellectual properties of the past were acquired, converged, and destroyed, the better we can protect the worthwhile ones of today going forward.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Old Games are Best Games

    You are not alone in your lack of interest in all the new games, as the WOWmaster himself observes:

    60% of gameplay time was spend on games 6 years or older in 2023. Older TV shows dominate streaming networks as well.

    This is not a coincidence, as streaming has prioritized wokeness over quality, and AAA have also prioritized profit and the narrative over fun.

    This is why we fight.

    Nobody wants to play the new stuff if it means being preached at and scolded while they destroy our most memorable IPs and characters.

    There has always been a problem with the suits devoting all the resources to graphics while the designers fight, mostly in vain, to place the emphasis on gameplay. One need only compare the difference between the original Fantasy General, which I stil play from time to time, and its 3D successor, to understand why most of the time and money that went into “improving” the original game was not only wasted, but dowright detrimental.

    Most, if not all, of the games that feature a substantive focus on gameplay are now in the independent space.

    And that doesn’t even begin to get into the way in which convergence not only distracts from character, plot, and story, but downright destroys them, as the Dark Herald has chronicled repeatedly, and in great detail, on the Arkhaven blog. Mary Sue cannot be permitted to be less than strong, independent, and perfect in every way. The Magic Negro cannot be permitted to be less than saintly and beneficient. Saint Gay can never be less than charming, tolerant, and perfectly committed to the love of his gay life, whom he met approximately 5 seconds after coming out.

    Convergence requires ideal caricatures, not strong characters. And the plot is always predictable, even more predictable than the pre-social justice Hellmouth plots were, because every episode has a moral that is more explicitly obvious than He-Man lecturing the kids at the end.

    And so, we build our own entertainment, one meme, one short story, one RPG module, and one comics episode, at a time.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    The Roots of GamerGate 2.0

    The Dark Herald delves into the latest iteration of GamerGate at the Arkhaven blog:

    It all began with GamerGate.

    Well, no it didn’t. It began with decisions that the editors of PC gaming magazines made.

    Back in the 1990s I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World. It was a don’t miss back then. Given what the internet was like at the time, a print magazine was an absolute necessity. At least if you were going to find out if Master of Orion II was anywhere near as good as the first game, (BTW, it was better). Is the full version Redneck Rampage as difficult to run as the share-ware? (Yes, definitely). Or is John Romero really going to make you, his bitch? (No, he wasn’t.) You would also get interviews with people like Roberta Williams and Richard Garriott. Plus, you would find out which conventions were going to have the best computer gaming room. (It mattered in those days because it might be the only place you could play some titles if your friends didn’t have a copy.)

    Here’s the big thing. There was a real sense of community back then and gaming magazines were the glue that was holding us together. The guys that wrote those articles were part of our tribe. They spoke our language, shared our concerns, and agreed with us on what was cool.

    The gaming magazines were huge and I don’t just mean within gaming culture. They were physically gigantic. There was a point where CGW had 500 pages. That was where the trouble began.

    When you have that many pages, you need to fill them with something. The editors of gaming magazines had run into a problem there. They could hire more gamers and teach them how to write, a longer process to be sure but in the end, you would have more in-depth articles by people who know and love gaming. However, given how fast the gaming magazines were growing and how much original content they needed month to month, a shortcut beckoned siren-like to the editors.

    There was always a pile of resumes from journalism majors who were shotgunning any publication in the hopes of landing a gig. They knew absolutely nothing about gaming, but they did know how to write, (sort of, they were journalism majors after all). The view clearly was, just give them something easy to play until we can find someone better.

    So, the editors started hiring journalism majors as a temporary shortcut. The kind of temporary shortcut that stays forever. Journalism majors could write about games, but they didn’t love them. They didn’t care at all about game mechanics, what they had a passion for was narrative story structure and pretty, pretty pictures. So long as a game had those it would get a ten-star review even if the gameplay sucked.

    It was obvious that these journalism majors were setting the game difficulty on Toddler Mode and playing through as fast as possible. They wanted to experience the narrative with as little interruption by gameplay as could be managed.

    This temporary fix stuck around. The journalists got promoted. Then the magazines started getting bought by media conglomerates like Ziff Davis, who definitely preferred to work with journalists. Consequently, the gamers at the gaming magazines got shunted to the side and the journalists started making the hiring decisions. Guess who they hired?

    You guessed right. Other journalists.

    Most readers here know of my involvement in GamerGate, including the hosting of #GGinParis with Mike and Milo. But I was much more deeply involved with game journalism starting more than 20 years before the exposure of the GameJournoPros list.

    Computer Game World was arguably one of the greatest magazines in publishing history. I read it from cover to cover, carefully taking notes as to who did what and worked for which company, to the point that when I started attending industry events, I could speak substantively to pretty much anyone of note that I met.

    I eventually started writing for them, had one of our games reviewed by them, and even contributed by writing the initial review for the much-anticipated id-and-Raven game Heretic. In fact, I was the only game developer who was permitted to write for them, for as Editor-in-Chief Johnny Wilson once said, correctly, “Vox would rather cut his arm off than cut a bad game any slack.” Johnny was eventually replaced by Chris Lombardi, who was also excellent and possessed of a formidable intelligence, but once Ziff Davis bought them and Chris was hired away by one of the early gaming networks, the quality declined rapidly, to the point that I no longer even bothered subscribing even though I was a game developer.

    So, I can state with some authority that it’s a good history. Read the whole thing there.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    GamerGate 2.0

    Buckle up, boys. The ride never ends. A summary from /pol/

    • DEI-gaming consultants “Sweet Baby Inc” exposed for harassment and coercion to insert wokeism into video games (example: CEO talk admitting to their coercion tactics
    • Issue mostly ignored by Media/Gaming “Journalists” for at least a week
    • A group on Steam forms with a list of games that employed Sweet Baby to consult on their creation, along with a discussion board and chat about the issue
    • Group swells to just under 200k users as of the time of this post
    • Kotaku and other gaming “news” start posting articles over the past 24 hours to start calling the group and users a bunch of wayciss chud nazis
    • Alyssa Mercante, “Journalist” who wrote the Kotaku article, starts taking heat for defending the Sweet Baby company and CEO for her own racism vs whites
    • “Journalist” then hauls off her mask to obliviously spout critical theory talking points after posting said article denying that Sweet Baby pushes critical theory agenda. “hi! you can’t be racist against white people! thanks for tuning in!”

    I think we all know who is going to win the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Related Work now. I’m a little surprised Kotaku is still around, to be honest, given the fact that no one who is actually interested in or plays games reads them anymore.

    UPDATE: Curiouser and curiouser…

    • Sweet Baby Inc is funded by Baby Ghosts
    • Baby Ghosts co-founder is Eileen Holowka
    • Eileen Holowka’s brother was Alec Holowka
    • Alec Holowka was LITERALLY WHO’s boyfriend

    DISCUSS ON SG

    The PC Master Race Does Not Mourn

    The Xbox is reportedly being put down by Microsoft. To which, the PC Master Race says, in a thunderous choir of golden masculine voices, “Good.”

    It’s real. Bond’s hacking Xbox to pieces. They want to move to a stadia-like platform because XB hardware hasn’t been financially viable since the One. They were told this during yesterday’s morning minutes meeting that Spencer is furious with her about this but Corporate MSFT is backing her on it. This year’s new model XB MAY be their last.

    I hated the Xbox, hated its stupid Atari Jaguar-like controller, and even disliked HALO from the start. Xbox was never anything more than a crippled PC, and it did massive harm to the PC games industry just so Microsoft could attempt to exert even more direct control over the individual gamer. The total inferiority of the console approach could be seen in the way that multiplayer games had to cordon off a special zone so that the console weaklings could play by themselves without getting repeatedly obliterated by their technological superiors.

    JC Denton spoke for all of us when he said: “So many games were crippled in order to run on consoles or appeal to the console multiplayer market. We PC Master Racers will gladly view the ruin of Xbox with a smile on our beautiful Aryan faces.”

    The PC Master Race contemplates a glorious future without Xbox.

    DISCUSS ON SG