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meiam

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Is he wrong, though?

Fantasy (and sci-fi for that matter) are generally less hopeful than they were close to a century ago. Compare Lord of the Rings to A Song of Ice and Fire for instance. Compare something like Star Trek (TOS/TNG) to The Expanse. A grim setting is hardly a dealbreaker (see Dark Souls for instance), but as an overall shift? Yeah, pretty much - the world's more cynical now, and that's reflected in its art.
Oh not really my point, I'm just saying the game he picked are terrible example. I can't speak for Aveum (whose failure is obviously because they stupidly decided to release it in a very busy window with almost no marketing, 2 months earlier or later and it would have been fine) but Forspoken is a very poor example of "hopeful" setting, the game start with 99% of the world population having been wiped out and the main character couldn't give a shit about that (she only start caring when she find out she's partially related to the people, ie "racism is awesome"). By the end of the game the big bad guy is still out there, will soon come back and nothing has been fixed (things are actually slightly worse).
 

CriticalGaming

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Oh not really my point, I'm just saying the game he picked are terrible example. I can't speak for Aveum (whose failure is obviously because they stupidly decided to release it in a very busy window with almost no marketing, 2 months earlier or later and it would have been fine) but Forspoken is a very poor example of "hopeful" setting, the game start with 99% of the world population having been wiped out and the main character couldn't give a shit about that (she only start caring when she find out she's partially related to the people, ie "racism is awesome"). By the end of the game the big bad guy is still out there, will soon come back and nothing has been fixed (things are actually slightly worse).
Final Fantasy 16 would have been a better example. It is dark and miserable all the time, and it doesnt really fit in the world of people turning into giant monsters and large chickens used as horses.

Dark Fantasy is a great setting potentially if done right. Dark Souls does it right in the sense that the player is mostly dealing with the aftermath of everything. Other stories like The Dark Tower series do it right by adding moments of light heartedness or otherwise something funny or pleasant to break up the misery. A story miserable all the time is not going to hold up for most people because we generally cant handle everything being awful all the time.

Forespoken shares a different fate in the sense that it is dark and miserable but the cheeky dialog meant to break it up is also cringy and juvenile. On top of being filled with bad characters who are just annoying and insufferable.
 
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XsjadoBlaydette

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Best of luck and solidarity.🍻
Staff at CD Projekt Red are uniting with others in the Polish video game industry to unionise.

The union was formed after CDPR announced a third wave of job cuts in as many months, driving developers to unionise as a means of "improving their workplace/industry standards in a way that has legal power and amplifies their voices".

"We started talking about unionizing after the 2023 wave of layoffs when nine per cent of Reds (that is roughly 100 people) were let go," the union explains on the Gamedevunion.pl website (as translated by Google Translate).

"This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.

"The above shows how employers tend to view their interests to be in conflict with those of their employees," the statement continues. "While employees are the ones creating value in this arrangement, they lack any decision power in company-structure-related matters. That is why we need to organise to enter those situations on equal footing.

"We believe that the mass lay-offs are a danger to the gamedev industry and we believe that unionising is a way for us to preserve the industry's potential," it concludes (thanks, TheGamer).

The union is part of the wider nationwide union, OZZ IP, and welcomes members from across the Polish gamedev industry to join its "support network" and "get a platform to exchange experiences and know-how with your peers". It does not cover CDPR staff working in Vancouver, though, or those not on a Polish contract.

According to an interview with the founders of the movement, Lev Ki and Paweł Myszka, they "haven't had any response" from CDPR management, but all the necessary legal documentation has been submitted, so the exec team is aware of the union.

The decision to unionise follows three sets of CDPR layoffs in the past three months. In May, 29 employees lost their jobs at CDPR-owned studio The Molasses Flood, which is currently working on a separate Witcher project codenamed "Sirius". In June, CDPR let go of 30 employees who were part of the team working on Witcher card game spin-off Gwent as the studio scales back development on it, and in July, 100 people – about nine per cent of the studio's entire headcount – were laid off.
 

Satinavian

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Is he wrong, though?
Yes.

Success and failure have little to do with how dark/hopeful a setting is. There is and has always been a market for both. And it also has not really changed recently.

Fantasy (and sci-fi for that matter) are generally less hopeful than they were close to a century ago. Compare Lord of the Rings to A Song of Ice and Fire for instance. Compare something like Star Trek (TOS/TNG) to The Expanse.
I hope you are aware that LotR was written only a couple of years after most of the successful Lovecraft pieces which are literally about futility and hopelessness. TOS was at a time where SciFi was generally pretty full of very hostile aliens/robots and some really dark universes and when TNG launched, Sci-Fi was still full of postapocalyptic stuff and utterly dystopic cyberpunk genre just had started.

And now i am going back to the very saccarine game of the very succesful Atelier series i am currently playing.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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I don't know if you can call this news, but apparently Hollow Knight: Silksong isn't featured at PAX Aus this weekend. It's only been... like 1700 days since Silksong was announced, February 14 2019. This despite the official Xbox Twitter account trolling fans hard with a punny tweet about SONG and SILK. And despite the game being scheduled for release "within a year" of June 2022. The delay was announced rather infamously on May 2023. Half a year later Team Cherry still has nothing to show for. I don't get it.
 

Chimpzy

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I don't know if you can call this news, but apparently Hollow Knight: Silksong isn't featured at PAX Aus this weekend. It's only been... like 1700 days since Silksong was announced, February 14 2019. This despite the official Xbox Twitter account trolling fans hard with a punny tweet about SONG and SILK. And despite the game being scheduled for release "within a year" of June 2022. The delay was announced rather infamously on May 2023. Half a year later Team Cherry still has nothing to show for. I don't get it.
Just ruminating here, but it could be a result of feature creep. Or maybe perfectionism. Or because afaik og Hollow Knight took about two and a half years to develop, and it's assumed Silksong will be a larger game. Assuming Team Cherry hasn't increased it's team size, and possibly some setbacks due to Covid, it's not outside the realm of possibility for it to not be done yet despite their efforts.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Just ruminating here, but it could be a result of feature creep. Or maybe perfectionism. Or because afaik og Hollow Knight took about two and a half years to develop, and it's assumed Silksong will be a larger game. Assuming Team Cherry hasn't increased it's team size, and possibly some setbacks due to Covid, it's not outside the realm of possibility for it to not be done yet despite their efforts.

Some considerations:

1. The game wasn't just announced four and a half years ago. The trailer they put out back then showed what looked like the complete thing. There was even a demo.

2. Radio silence from December 2019 until... actually they never tweeted or posted anything ever again. They RT merch a couple of times a year and that's it. So no news in 2020 or 2021.

3. In June 2022 they announced, or let it be announced, that the game would come out within a year. They waited until May 2023 to tell people they wouldn't make their own deadline. Six months later they haven't updated their situation.

4. It's still "just" essentially three people, though one of them got replaced.

I seriously think they either fell for feature creep (because they're no longer playing by Kickstarter rules and have all the money in the world) or restarted development at some point (because of mismanagement or maybe even feature creep).

Whatever the reason the radio silence and the delays (two, counting the original Steam release date) are killing my good will towards TC. It's not even that we're not getting announcements, but at this point we're getting announcements for announcements that never happen.
 

BrawlMan

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...are they expecting money for this? Because Newgrounds and Kongregate had much better-looking Flash games ten years ago.
To say it looks underwhelming is a big understatement. Smash TV and Total Carnage look better than this. Nex Machina (2017) is pretty much the modern version of Robotron and Berzerk. Just stick that game.
 

CriticalGaming

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BrawlMan

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You know, even if this is alleged, I won’t be surprised if it turns out to be true given how lazily the game was put together
It all makes sense.
There's more!

 

FakeSympathy

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