davidgaider.bsky.social
Co-founder and Creative Director at summerfallstudios.com. Canadian game dev who escaped the winter and is now living in Melbourne, Australia! He/Him
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Let me put it another way: what’s considered a meaty point of discussion to a game dev versus a fan is very different and readily apparent. If the point is to engage one in discussion, the mere fact you can find fault in a game won’t be very interesting.
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Clair Obscur not meaty enough? Umm okay, dude.
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Their marketing team clearly didn't know what to do with it and possibly even went out of their way to avoid talking about what it actually was. From the trailers I saw, I expected an action/cinematic game like the Avengers. If it had been marketed better, supported more... who knows?
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I'm probably reading into it too much, but I felt like the writers really *wanted* to go there but were somehow denied.
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You can criticize any game, if you try hard enough. All you need for that is to be either pedantic or a dick. Finding criticisms that are meaty and worth discussing because they exist in the framework of a game that did other things really well is what a game dev will actually be fascinated by.
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It's funny because, when you boil it down enough, the use of cards is just a power cooldown mechanic with some added randomization thrown in.
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I actually thought the writing was really well done. I'm not sure that tying in a gift-buying mechanic AND making the interactions have actual gameplay effects so they're no longer optional were good ideas... but hence why a dev can discuss this forever.
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I'm not generally one to *ever* say "just play X hours of this game/watch X hours of this show and it eventually gets good!" because who has time for that nonsense? But, yes. The improvement from season 1 to 2 to 3 for Wheel of Time is actually substantial. I almost bailed on season 1, myself.
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The card mechanics are borderline genius. Every hero plays differently, and makes that hero *feel* like they're supposed to. Spider Man? Zips around the battlefield. Wolverine? Rage and slashing. I love that part so much.
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"Clair Obscur is so great, isn't it?"
"Yeah, that thing it did with X? Awesome, right?"
"Yeah!"
(silence ensues)
"You want to talk about Midnight Suns?"
"Whoaaa, okay... I need to sit down for this."
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I remember when I nervously asked the cinematic designers to have someone hanging from a cliff while talking to someone above them they were like "oh yeah no problem" but when I asked to have characters exchange objects? Hell no! ...and I realized I know nothing about what's easy and what's not.
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Right? A friend said I'm middle aged, but I'm like "living until my 80's seems rather optimistic, don't you think?"
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It's weird how, as a kid, I never saw anything really weird about how every Piers Anthony series had the main characters running around naked for significant portions of the books.
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Don't sell it to *me*. I don't have a spare $100 million lying around, so it'd just be a nifty conversation piece. 😅
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And... what does this space being a bubble have to do with what I said, exactly?
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Some of the interviews have been pretty good, actually. But there's an entire industry of websites nowadays which just grab the articles from other sites and then twist & regurgitate them as their own and with their own spin.
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And also because they see me talk about "games" or "RPGs" and assume the only thing I could ever talk about, the only reason I'd say these things, was Veilguard. They're pretty single-minded.
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Meh. If I was worried about it, I wouldn't have done so many interviews to begin with. It's just interesting to watch unfold in completely unsurprising fashion.
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Cue the sudden resurgence of folks who've made it their entire personality to hate Veilguard breezing into my replies. "Stop defending Veilguard!" I... didn't? "Gamers just want good games!" Yes, if you read the interview beyond just the title... that is in fact what I said. 😅
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"yeah I just have two more sets" and then proceeds to sit there twiddling on his phone for 10 minutes in between each set. 😑
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I always love the system which inevitably exists that the engineers don't want to touch because it works - but they don't know *why* it works and it breaks if they try to touch it so they just erect a fence around it and make regular sacrifices to the programming gods on its behalf.
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ooo that's an excellent analogy
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I probably should have photographed it against a dark background, it's true 🤔
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Thanks, Jordan. Appreciate the support. 👍
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I wasn’t talking about Veilguard, and while I didn’t work on Veilguard I don’t doubt that, yes, if it had been given time to cook even the writing would have improved. Good writing takes time and iteration.
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I couldn't, in good conscience, put up a Patreon without offering *something* to supporters in return... and it's hard to imagine that would make a dent, when you consider our regular expenses. But I appreciate the idea!
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I didn’t work on Veilguard, but even so that’s not quite true. As I understand it, Veilguard was the third DA project after two earlier ones were canceled… so 9 years between releases, yes, but not 9 years in development.
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I didn’t work on Veilguard, dude.
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Thank you to everyone who came by! I discovered my ISP *really* doesn't like connecting to a Twitch stream and a Discord call at the same time, but thankfully I recovered quickly enough and the rest went great! I believe the video will be up on Jesse's channel if you want to check it out later.
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There is no solution. If cat pee has touched it, you throw it out. You can clean it, you can use every cleaning agent known to man, it doesn't matter - it will always have that faint "is that... cat pee?" odour afterwards. 😭
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Err... thanks? I did know what it meant, seeing as I used it in the novel.