maxnichols.bsky.social
He/him. Game designer. I make worlds that you want to explore. Sr. Tech Design in AAA. Prev: Bungie, Turbine. I run @HyruleInterviews.bsky.social
Blog: namelessquality.com
Portfolio: maxnicholsdesign.com
4,944 posts
4,407 followers
355 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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good god Michelle, I'm so sorry
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Yeah I was interviewing there just a few months ago
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✅ Secret files with plans for how to take out [Link/Wonder Woman], [Mario/Superman], and Kirby
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No, there is a 0% chance of that returning good results, and even if it did they had to use the ecologically destructive plagiarism machine to do it.
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Lol yup
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Skulls made 90% out of teeth
Absolutely terrifying
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Kill la Kill (2015)
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Fair enough, hahah
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It feels like you’re letting a very cynical read of humanity that I don’t agree with lead you to a false equivalency, to me.
But I now see what you were getting at, at least.
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Yeah Newsom, like most Democratic and all Republican leadership, is a deeply horrible person
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Ok. I respect you so I do want to hear why you say this.
To my eyes there’s one side that _maybe_ fails to empathize enough with like, rural white voters, and another whose entire political ideology is based on hatred+fear of out groups, and openly pushes for discrimination
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Both siding this one??? The presence vs lack of empathy seems like THE fundamental difference between the aisles to me
There’s no world where you could possibly argue that both sides are equivalent on this issue of all issues
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Yeah I spent about 20 minutes doing it and kinda felt like I'd seen everything it had to offer
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Just a garden variety egregore
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Yeah it's true that sometimes you do have worthwhile new stuff going on but it's not apparent enough at a glance and you need to dress stuff up to feel new. I don't think it's... inherently the wrong or a bad choice to have "plus up" or "change up" as a product goal.
But when it's the ONLY one...
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It's also why I think it's fine that the Switch 2 OS is just the Switch 1 OS again, or looks and feels like it anyways. If it works it's ok to let it just keep working. I've seen that complaint here and there and I think it's missing the forest for the trees.
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Sometimes when you watch major companies that want us to buy a new iteration of a thing every year, it's very clear that "Reinvent things to make it seem new" is the one and only creative impetus behind the new version >_>
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After this there were various places where we were running with the same UI or systems as #1 and we changed them not for any UX or gameplay or art direction goal, but purely to change them for changes' sake. It HAD to feel more like a new product and less like an expansion or DLC.
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No war but class war, etc.
Fighting exploitative employers and fascist governments are the same fight
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Yeah, the cops
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Find a partner who looks at you the way @paigeedits.bsky.social looks at this vending machine game
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I don’t think so? This was a law that let R&D salaries be deducted
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Good question! I have no first-hand experience with this myself, but if I get a chance I’ll ask
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Yeahhhh it’s pretty disappointing. A major awards show with judges who are not games-literate as a body gets to vote on what is, because of inherited prestige from other mediums, one of the biggest honors in game writing
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Optimized Cow
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Oh I didn't know about that one, thanks for the rec!
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But the feedback loop of AI copying the dominant style will supercharge that dynamic compared to the past
At least that's what Megan is getting at here I think
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It sounds like the tax did make a distinction between production and R&D work. So one side effect is that the relative cost of prototyping new concepts went up and the relative cost of just executing already-proven concepts went down.
The tax code itself incentivizing AAA stagnation
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And of course it dramatically shifts the optimal strategy around where companies do their hiring. This was a big benefit that R&D heavy roles like game design and engineers would have had in the US that suddenly went away, making outsourcing to other countries more appealing.
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Not so big that it eclipses the other big factors I already knew about, like the market contraction after the COVID boom, and the cost of debt going way up, but
this is maybe AS big as those factors, at least for US-based companies.
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I waited to talk to one of my friends, who runs a A/AA-size studio, before I posted because I wanted to make sure I wasn't overstating things. She confirmed: yup, this was a huge fucking deal for her company and she assumes all game companies in the US.
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Oh yeah I should really have linked to it, thanks for the reminder!
bsky.app/profile/maxn...
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Whoops forgot to link to the interview!
www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/...
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(Personally a lot of this reminds me of how Nintendo approached Splatoon)
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A lot of concept art focused on road-trip or travel experiences, not just racing, as part of the effort to realize the feeling of being in a big world
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The reason the game features food so much is because tasting new foods is such an important part of the experience of traveling around the (real) big world
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