#and I had this artistic direction with all my other designs for veteran players that they would all look bruised and bloodied with dirty-

[mllenugget]

I have only one word and one word only : CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI

"I intended to skip Purgatory 2 to catch up faster on VODs since I was told they were unrelated lore-wise But my biggest mistake was to vibe check all the new players - I was not expecting to completely fall head over heels for Team Capybara, hot damn I love them all so much ????" - Me, February 2024

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I took @sunshinetomioka's werewolf Guill headcanon and ran with it btw, credit to it

[timeless-hollywood-classics]

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American actor, director, author, poet, composer, and singer. Mitchum rose to prominence for starring roles in several classic films noirs, and his acting is generally considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. His best-known films include Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and El Dorado (1966). Mitchum was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He is also known for his television role as U.S. Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry in the epic miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and sequel War and Remembrance (1988).

Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of Classic American Cinema.

Robert Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 6, 1917, into a Norwegian-Irish Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter; his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker of Irish descent.[3] His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), was born in 1914. Their father, James Mitchum, was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919. Robert was one year old, and Annette was not yet five. Their mother was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. Her third child, John, was born in September of that year. Ann married again to Major Hugh Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. Ann and Morris had a daughter together, Carol Morris, born July 1927, on the family farm in Delaware. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.

As a child, Mitchum was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When he was 12, his mother sent him to live with her parents in Felton, Delaware; the boy was promptly expelled from middle school for scuffling with the principal. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister Annette, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaren High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country, hopping on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs, including ditch-digging for the Civilian Conservation Corps and professional boxing. At age 14 in Savannah, Georgia, he said he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. During this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met Dorothy Spence, whom he would later marry. He soon went back on the road, eventually "riding the rails" to California.

Mitchum arrived in Long Beach, California, in 1936, staying again with his sister, now going by the name of Julie. She had moved to the West Coast in the hope of acting in movies, and the rest of the Mitchum family soon joined them. During this time, Mitchum worked as a ghostwriter for astrologer Carroll Righter. Julie convinced him to join the local theater guild with her. At The Players Guild of Long Beach, Mitchum worked as a stagehand and occasional bit-player in company productions. He also wrote several short pieces which were performed by the guild. According to Lee Server's biography (Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care), Mitchum put his talent for poetry to work writing song lyrics and monologues for Julie's nightclub performances.

In 1940, he returned to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence, and they moved back to California. He gave up his artistic pursuits at the birth of their first child James, nicknamed Josh, and two more children, Chris and Petrine, followed. Mitchum found steady employment as a machine operator during wartime era WWII, with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, but the noise of the machinery damaged his hearing. He also suffered a nervous breakdown (which resulted in temporary blindness), due to job-related stress. He then sought work as a film actor, performing initially as an extra and in small speaking parts. His agent got him an interview with Harry Sherman, the producer of Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy western film series, which starred William Boyd; Mitchum was hired to play minor villainous roles in several films in the series during 1942 and 1943. He went uncredited as a soldier in the Mickey Rooney 1943 film The Human Comedy. Also in 1943 he and Randolph Scott were soldiers in the Pacific Island war film Gung Ho.

Mitchum continued to find work as an extra and supporting actor in numerous productions for various studios. After impressing director Mervyn LeRoy during the making of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He was groomed for B-Western stardom in a series of Zane Grey adaptations.

Following the moderately successful Western Nevada, RKO lent Mitchum to United Artists for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). In the film, he portrayed war-weary officer Bill Walker (based on Captain Henry T. Waskow), who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces. The film, which followed the life of an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle (played by Burgess Meredith), became an instant critical and commercial success. Shortly after filming, Mitchum was drafted into the United States Army, serving at Fort MacArthur, California, as a medic. At the 1946 Academy Awards, The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Oscars, including Mitchum's only nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He finished the year with a Western (West of the Pecos) and a story of returning Marine veterans (Till the End of Time), before filming in a genre that came to define Mitchum's career and screen persona: film noir.

Mitchum was initially known for his work in film noir. His first foray into the genre was a supporting role in the 1944 B-movie When Strangers Marry, about newlyweds and a New York City serial killer. Undercurrent, another of Mitchum's early noir films, featured him as a troubled, sensitive man entangled in the affairs of his brother (Robert Taylor) and his brother's suspicious wife (Katharine Hepburn). John Brahm's The Locket (1946) featured Mitchum as bitter ex-boyfriend to Laraine Day's femme fatale. Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947) combined Western and noir styles, with Mitchum's character attempting to recall his past and find those responsible for killing his family. Crossfire (also 1947) featured Mitchum as a member of a group of World War II soldiers, one of whom kills a Jewish man. It featured themes of anti-Semitism and the failings of military training. The film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, earned five Academy Award nominations.

Following Crossfire, Mitchum starred in Out of the Past (also called Build My Gallows High), directed by Jacques Tourneur and featuring the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. Mitchum played Jeff Markham, a small-town gas-station owner and former investigator, whose unfinished business with gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) and femme fatale Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer) comes back to haunt him.

On September 1, 1948, after a string of successful films for RKO, Mitchum and actress Lila Leeds were arrested for possession of marijuana.[10] The arrest was the result of a sting operation designed to capture other Hollywood partiers as well, but Mitchum and Leeds did not receive the tipoff. After serving a week at the county jail (he described the experience to a reporter as being "like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff"), Mitchum spent 43 days (February 16 to March 30) at a Castaic, California, prison farm. Life photographers were permitted to take photos of him mopping up in his prison uniform. The arrest inspired the exploitation film She Shoulda Said No! (1949), which starred Leeds. The conviction was later overturned by the Los Angeles court and district attorney's office on January 31, 1951, after being exposed as a setup.

Despite, or because of, Mitchum's troubles with the law and his studio, his films released immediately after his arrest were box-office hits. Rachel and the Stranger (1948) featured Mitchum in a supporting role as a mountain man competing for the hand of Loretta Young, the indentured servant and wife of William Holden. In the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella The Red Pony (1949), he appeared as a trusted cowhand to a ranching family. He returned to film noir in The Big Steal (also 1949), where he reunited with Jane Greer in an early Don Siegel film.

In Where Danger Lives (1950), Mitchum played a doctor who comes between a mentally unbalanced Faith Domergue and cuckolded Claude Rains. The Racket was a noir remake of the early crime drama of the same name and featured Mitchum as a police captain fighting corruption in his precinct. The Josef von Sternberg film, Macao (1952), had Mitchum as a victim of mistaken identity at an exotic resort casino, playing opposite Jane Russell. Otto Preminger's Angel Face was the first of three collaborations between Mitchum and British stage actress Jean Simmons. In this film, she played an insane heiress who plans to use young ambulance driver Mitchum to kill for her.

Mitchum was fired from Blood Alley (1955), due to his conduct, reportedly having thrown the film's transportation manager into San Francisco Bay. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir Cut to the Chase, Mitchum showed up on-set after a night of drinking and tore apart a studio office when they did not have a car ready for him. Mitchum walked off the set of the third day of filming Blood Alley, claiming he could not work with the director. Because Mitchum was showing up late and behaving erratically, producer John Wayne, after failing to obtain Humphrey Bogart as a replacement, took over the role himself.

Following a series of conventional Westerns and films noirs, as well as the Marilyn Monroe vehicle River of No Return (1954), Mitchum appeared in Charles Laughton's only film as director: The Night of the Hunter (1955). Based on a novel by Davis Grubb, the thriller starred Mitchum as a monstrous criminal posing as a preacher to find money hidden by his cellmate in the cellmate's home. His performance as Reverend Harry Powell is considered by many to be one of the best of his career.[15][16] Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger, also released in 1955, was a box-office hit. The film starred Mitchum against type, as an idealistic young doctor, who marries an older nurse (Olivia de Havilland), only to question his morality many years later. However, the film was not well received, with most critics pointing out that Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Lee Marvin were all too old for their characters. Olivia de Havilland received top billing over Mitchum and Sinatra.

On March 8, 1955, Mitchum formed DRM (Dorothy and Robert Mitchum) Productions to produce five films for United Artists; four films were produced. The first film was Bandido (1956). Following a succession of average Westerns and the poorly received Foreign Intrigue (1956), Mitchum starred in the first of three films with Deborah Kerr. The John Huston war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, starred Mitchum as a Marine corporal shipwrecked on a Pacific Island with a nun, Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr), as his sole companion. In this character study, they struggle to resist the elements and the invading Japanese army. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. For his role, Mitchum was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. In the WWII submarine classic The Enemy Below (1956), Mitchum gave a strong performance as U.S. Naval Lieutenant Commander Murrell, the captain of a U.S. Navy destroyer who matches wits with a German U-boat captain Curt Jurgens, who starred with Mitchum again in the legendary 1962 movie The Longest Day. The film won an Oscar for Special Effects.

Thunder Road (1958), the second DRM Production, was loosely based on an incident in which a driver transporting moonshine was said to have fatally crashed on Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhere between Bearden Hill and Morrell Road. According to Metro Pulse writer Jack Renfro, the incident occurred in 1952 and may have been witnessed by James Agee, who passed the story on to Mitchum. He starred in the movie, produced, co-wrote the screenplay, and is rumored to have directed much of the film. It costars his son James, as his on screen brother, in a role originally intended for Elvis Presley. Mitchum also co-wrote (with Don Raye) the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road".

He returned to Mexico for The Wonderful Country (1959) and Ireland for A Terrible Beauty/The Night Fighters for the last of his DRM Productions.

Mitchum and Kerr reunited for the Fred Zinnemann film, The Sundowners (1960), where they played husband and wife struggling in Depression-era Australia. Opposite Mitchum, Kerr was nominated for yet another Academy Award for Best Actress, while the film was nominated for a total of five Oscars. Mitchum was awarded that year's National Board of Review award for Best Actor for his performance. The award also recognized his superior performance in the Vincente Minnelli Western drama Home from the Hill (also 1960). He was teamed with former leading ladies Kerr and Simmons, as well as Cary Grant, for the Stanley Donen comedy The Grass Is Greener the same year.

Mitchum's performance as the menacing rapist Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962) brought him further renown for playing cold, predatory characters. The 1960s were marked by a number of lesser films and missed opportunities. Among the films Mitchum passed on during the decade were John Huston's The Misfits (the last film of its stars Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe), the Academy Award–winning Patton, and Dirty Harry. The most notable of his films in the decade included the war epics The Longest Day (1962) and Anzio (1968), the Shirley MacLaine comedy-musical What a Way to Go! (1964), and the Howard Hawks Western El Dorado (1967), a remake of Rio Bravo (1959), in which Mitchum took over Dean Martin's role of the drunk who comes to the aid of John Wayne. He teamed with Martin for the 1968 Western 5 Card Stud, playing a homicidal preacher.

One of the lesser-known aspects of Mitchum's career was his foray into music as a singer. Critic Greg Adams writes, "Unlike most celebrity vocalists, Robert Mitchum actually had musical talent." Mitchum's voice was often used instead of that of a professional singer when his character sang in his films. Notable productions featuring Mitchum's own singing voice included Rachel and the Stranger, River of No Return, and The Night of the Hunter. After hearing traditional calypso music and meeting artists such as Mighty Sparrow and Lord Invader while filming Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in the Caribbean islands of Tobago, he recorded Calypso – is like so ... in March 1957. On the album, released through Capitol Records, he emulated the calypso sound and style, even adopting the style's unique pronunciations and slang. A year later, he recorded a song he had written for Thunder Road, titled "The Ballad of Thunder Road". The country-style song became a modest hit for Mitchum, reaching number 69 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. The song was included as a bonus track on a successful reissue of Calypso ... and helped market the film to a wider audience.

Although Mitchum continued to use his singing voice in his film work, he waited until 1967 to record his follow-up record, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings. The album, released by Nashville-based Monument Records, took him further into country music, and featured songs similar to "The Ballad of Thunder Road". "Little Old Wine Drinker Me", the first single, was a top-10 hit at country radio, reaching number nine there, and crossed over onto mainstream radio, where it peaked at number 96. Its follow-up, "You Deserve Each Other", also charted on the Billboard Country Singles chart. He sang the title song to the Western Young Billy Young, made in 1969.

Mitchum made a departure from his typical screen persona with the 1970 David Lean film Ryan's Daughter, in which he starred as Charles Shaughnessy, a mild-mannered schoolmaster in World War I–era Ireland. At the time of filming, Mitchum was going through a personal crisis and planned to commit suicide. Aside from a personal crisis, his recent films had been critical and commercial flops. Screenwriter Robert Bolt told him that he could commit suicide after the film was finished and that he would personally pay for his burial. Though the film was nominated for four Academy Awards (winning two) and Mitchum was much publicized as a contender for a Best Actor nomination, he was not nominated. George C. Scott won the award for his performance in Patton, a project Mitchum had rejected for Ryan's Daughter.

The 1970s featured Mitchum in a number of well-received crime dramas. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) had the actor playing an aging Boston hoodlum caught between the Feds and his criminal friends. Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1974) transplanted the typical film noir story arc to the Japanese underworld. He also appeared in 1976's Midway about an epic 1942 World War II battle. Mitchum's stint as an aging Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Farewell, My Lovely (1975) was sufficiently well received by audiences and critics for him to reprise the role in 1978's The Big Sleep.

In 1982, Mitchum played Coach Delaney in the film adaptation of playwright/actor Jason Miller's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning play That Championship Season.

At the premiere for That Championship Season, Mitchum, while intoxicated, assaulted a female reporter and threw a basketball that he was holding (a prop from the film) at a female photographer from Time magazine, injuring her neck and knocking out two of her teeth. She sued him for $30 million for damages. The suit eventually "cost him his salary from the film."

That Championship Season may have indirectly led to another debacle for Mitchum several months later. In a February 1983 Esquire interview, he made several racist, anti-Semitic and sexist statements, including, when asked if the Holocaust occurred, responded "so the Jews say." Following the widespread negative response, he apologized a month later, saying that his statements were "prankish" and "foreign to my principle." He claimed that the problem had begun when he recited a racist monologue from his role in That Championship Season, the writer believing the words to be his own. Mitchum, who claimed that he had only reluctantly agreed to the interview, then decided to "string... along" the writer with even more incendiary statements.

Mitchum expanded to television work with the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War. The big-budget Herman Wouk story aired on ABC, starring Mitchum as naval officer "Pug" Henry and Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury, and examined the events leading up to America's involvement in World War II. He returned to the role in 1988's War and Remembrance, which continued the story through the end of the war.

In 1984, Mitchum entered the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California for treatment of a drinking problem.

He played George Hazard's father-in-law in the 1985 miniseries North and South, which also aired on ABC.

Mitchum starred opposite Wilford Brimley in the 1986 made-for-TV movie Thompson's Run. A hardened con (Mitchum), being transferred from a federal penitentiary to a Texas institution to finish a life sentence as a habitual criminal, is freed at gunpoint by his niece (played by Kathleen York). The cop (Brimley) who was transferring him, and has been the con's lifelong friend and adversary for over 30 years, vows to catch the twosome.

In 1987, Mitchum was the guest-host on Saturday Night Live, where he played private eye Philip Marlowe for the last time in the parody sketch, "Death Be Not Deadly". The show ran a short comedy film he made (written and directed by his daughter, Trina) called Out of Gas, a mock sequel to Out of the Past. (Jane Greer reprised her role from the original film.) He also was in Bill Murray's 1988 comedy film, Scrooged.

In 1991, Mitchum was given a lifetime achievement award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, in the same year he received the Telegatto award and in 1992 the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globe Awards.

Mitchum continued to act in films until the mid-1990s, such as in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and he narrated the Western Tombstone. He also appeared, in contrast to his role as the antagonist in the original, as a protagonist police detective in Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, but the actor gradually slowed his workload. His last film appearance was a small but pivotal role in the television biopic, James Dean: Race with Destiny, playing Giant director George Stevens. His last starring role was in the 1995 Norwegian movie Pakten.

A lifelong heavy smoker, Mitchum died on July 1, 1997, in Santa Barbara, California, due to complications of lung cancer and emphysema. He was about five weeks shy of his 80th birthday. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, though there is a plot marker in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Delaware. He was survived by his wife of 57 years, Dorothy Mitchum (May 2, 1919 – April 12, 2014, Santa Barbara, California, aged 94); his sons, actors James Mitchum and Christopher Mitchum; and his daughter, writer Petrine Day Mitchum. His grandchildren, Bentley Mitchum and Carrie Mitchum, are actors, as was his younger brother, John, who died in 2001. Another grandson, Kian, is a successful model.

Mitchum is regarded by some critics as one of the finest actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Roger Ebert called him "the soul of film noir." Mitchum, however, was self-effacing; in an interview with Barry Norman for the BBC about his contribution to cinema, Mitchum stopped Norman in mid flow and in his typical nonchalant style, said, "Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That's it." He had also succeeded in annoying some of his fellow actors by voicing his puzzlement at those who viewed the profession as challenging and hard work. He is quoted as having said in the Barry Norman interview that acting was actually very simple and that his job was to "show up on time, know his lines, hit his marks, and go home". Mitchum had a habit of marking most of his appearances in the script with the letters "n.a.r.", which meant "no action required", which critic Dirk Baecker has construed as Mitchum's way of reminding himself to experience the world of the story without acting upon it.

AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars lists Mitchum as the 23rd-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. AFI also recognized his performance as the menacing rapist Max Cady and Reverend Harry Powell as the 28th and 29th greatest screen villains, respectively, of all time as part of AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains. He provided the voice of the famous American Beef Council commercials that touted "Beef ... it's what's for dinner", from 1992 until his death.

A "Mitchum's Steakhouse" is in Trappe, Maryland, where Mitchum and his family lived from 1959 to 1965.

[baconpal]

Bravely Default and BD2

Here it is, the partially prompted bravely default rant/retrospective/whatever the fuck!

With the announcement and demo of bravely default 2 out now for a bigger market than the original game ever had, I feel that as a massive fan of the original I should put some amount of effort into explaining what the appeal of the original is, why bravely second missed a lot of the appeal, and why bravely default 2 has been very, very worrying so far.

If you care about any of that, come on in and I'll try to actually avoid spoilers this time and make this a more legitimate recommendation of a game than usual.

THE APPEAL OF BRAVELY DEFAULT The games obviously have a beautiful art style, especially when it comes to the backgrounds. Every city is like a painting, a beautifully composed shot that you see from just one direction to give you one very strong impression. While the overworld and dungeons are fully 3d and do not have as strong of an artistic impact, they are still very competent and have good colors and cohesive elements. The character design, including the job outfits, the monsters, and all the villains are just top notch. Simple, evocative designs that make the most of the 3DS' limited hardware and build upon the teams skill in making handheld games look good. (its the same team that did the ff3 remake and 4 heroes of light, which looks absolutely kino on original DS) The music is also consistently excellent, with great use of motifing, a full and varied orchestra, and many good slow paced tracks for most of the non-combat segments. Shit like "Conflict's Chime" being the main battle theme, "Infiltrating Hostile Territory" being a common dungeon theme, and "That person's name is" as the rival boss themes makes even the seemingly repetitive songs a constant joy to listen to.

The story is pretty decent, it's not the best part of the game, and there are definitely some aspects of the story some people loathe, but the characters (specifically ringabel fuckin love him) are pretty good and the make for an enjoyable experience. The side material like D's journal are really well done and integrate into the main narrative well for how tucked away and ignored it is.

The gameplay and systems are also some of the best of any RPG I've played, and I've played far too many. The job system from ff3 and 5 is brought to an even greater depth with the addition of universal job abilities, allowing any character of any job make use of another jobs features to create an endless depth to strategy. The way various jobs can mingle together, and how no job is completely perfect on its own makes for very compelling team composition and unit design. The extensive amount of jobs helps as well for replay value and for assuring that no easy winning strategy is found by all players.

The BP system makes battles take on a very unique pacing as the player and enemies can choose to save up turns or blow them all at once to make more complicated strategies possible, or to make the most of an enemies vulnerabilities. This powerful option gives the player a meaningful way to capitalize on their knowledge of the game, while also allowing them to make truly detrimental mistakes. That may sound not good if you're a fucking baby, but nobody wants an RPG you cant lose, but losing because you fucked up is much better than losing because the enemies are just stronger than you or anything to that effect.

But the single greatest part of bravely defaults, which creates the games wonderful balance and unique design philosophy, is that the player is expected to hit the level cap long before finishing the game. Reaching level 99 should occur somewhere just after the middle of the game, at the point where the player has access to almost every job and has encountered almost every type of threat. Reaching level 99 brings with it a certain security, the implication that from then on, all enemies will also be level 99, and that any failure to defeat an enemy will be a result of a bad strategy or the players own mistakes. The game is not easy, and is certainly intended for veteran final fantasy players used to the games with job systems and changing up your entire party to combat a single encounter. Leveling up is not a slow grind part of the game, as you have a lot of control over the speed and frequency of battles, and it is not difficult to keep up with the games level curve.

The other layer to this unique design is that the game expects you to "cheat", or use strategies that would be overpowered and frowned upon in most other games. Bravely default easily expects you to know or discover strategies such as: applying a status to all enemies and killing every enemy with that status using another spell, cycling a counter move over and over to have a nearly invincible party member, applying a healing attribute to a self-damaging character to get huge damage at little cost, casting reflect and dangerous spells on your own party to bounce them at the enemy, or duplicating a move that does maximum damage 15 times in a row. The game builds all of its encounters with the knowledge that your team will be the maximum level and that you will be using the most vile tactics you can come up with, and the game will do the same. Bosses and even common enemies will employ equally vile tactics using the exact same moves that you have access to, meaning you can learn from your enemies or quickly grasp the enemies strategy through your own experiences. One of the late game dungeons is entirely optional, but involves several fights against parties of 4 just like your, using the same jobs and skills you have gained during the game as a perfect test of your ability to develop counter-strategies, instead of relying on your own overpowered tactics. This type of design is really not something you find in many games due to the prominence of grinding or the lack testing strategies, and it is the most true appeal of bravely default to me.

BRAVELY SECOND EXISTS I GUESS So bravely second, a direct sequel to bravely default, definitely is a video game. It uses the original game as a base to generate more content, but completely misses the appeal of the original, and the new content added makes the experience even less focused. Overall, it's still a fairly alright RPG, but it fails to follow up on bravely default in a meaningful way or to provide as compelling of a gameplay experience. Here's some of the things it fucked up.

The game reuses almost everything the original game had, including the same music, world map, and most of the original's towns and dungeons, while adding a few of it's own. Going through areas you've been before never feels good, and the new areas lack the quality or brevity of the original game, leading to uninteresting areas that overstay their welcome, despite being the only break from repetitively reused content.

This extends to the classes but in an even worse sense. One important trait of the original jobs is that they were not perfect by themselves. While every job provided some useful abilities to be shared with other classes, or provided a good base with which to make a character, no class was without flaws. The new classes in bravely second are a lot of the opposite, they are closed loops that think of everything they could have to make a good standalone character. The 4 starter classes you get in bravely second are all brand new, and there's almost no reason to use any class besides those 4 as they are just insanely good. The priest and magician specifically augment magic in a way that makes spells infinity scalable into the end game, completely trampling on any other magic classes territory without needing the extra effort of grinding a new class out. Many of the new job concepts are actually really interesting, like going back in time to return to a healthier state, or a class that changes the stats and attributes of all units in a battle, allowing for all new kinds of strategies; but these classes lack any opportunity to be used to their full potential since they don't mesh well with other jobs and are limited by their self-centered design.

Another completely missed aspect of the original is the level curve discussed before. Bravely second only really requires you get somewhere in the ballpark of level 60-70 to comfortably beat the final boss, and getting too leveled up is really hard to avoid if you are plan to try out various jobs.

Second also fails to account for how many incredibly strong strategies the player can come up with, and even introduces some of its own strategies that it has no way to counteract, such as halfsies (the first skill the first class gets) pretty much splitting the game in two by tripling the value of items like phoenix downs, and allowing for fool-proof strategies by making 1 character focus entirely on defense, effectively making the party unkillable. Essentially, if you play second after having played the original (like any sane person would) then you will absolutely destroy the game with no sense of satisfaction.

The story is also a large step down, enough to become an annoyance, as the writing style changes to a strange romantic comedy situation with, for lack of a better term please forgive my sin, anime writing, but like bad anime writing, ya know the kind of shit that makes people write off all anime cus a lot of it is awkward and unpleasant to listen to. The story tries to mess with some big concepts like "what if new game + was a real thing???" and time travel and shit like that but it doesn't mesh with the tone the rest of the game has and that tone doesn't mesh with the world or art style and it's just a mess.

BRAVELY DEFAULT 2 SEEMS KINDA POOPIE SO FAR So unfortunately, the big appeal of bravely default being part of it's end game makes it hard to judge how 2 is gonna go given we only have a demo of the beginning, but given that the original team behind bravely default has slowly been stripped out of the series as it goes on, the outlook is bleek.

Most immediately obvious is that the artstyle has made a horrible transition from handheld to console, somehow even worse than pokemon. The areas are all fully 3d and lack the style or compositional excellence of bravely default, and the outside environment look like asset store products. The small proportioned characters with simple features to be readable on a small screen have been replaced with identically proportioned characters with excessive detail and ugly features, and look horrible up close on a big screen. Only the negatives of the art style have made it over, and everything good has been made unsavory. The character and enemy design overall is much worse as a result, everything is messy, unclear, and clashes with everything else. It's an absolutely shocking downgrade.

The characters themselves are overly hammy and feel like shallow attempts to have a similar party dynamic to the original without having identical character types, and the writing as a whole doesn't seem to have improved from second, which was already quite a step down from the original.

The gameplay also has not done anything different or interesting yet, and seems to be selling itself to people haven't heard of or gotten enough of the BP system. Enemies being on the overworld as opposed to random encounters shows they have dropped the player agency over encounter frequency, which is dumb. The battles lack any of the flow the original had, especially when using the battle speed option, as the camera does not present everything very well and changes position often as a result. Overall, I have not enjoyed the bravely default 2 demo and feel it shows nothing but a continued decline in the series that likely should have just been a single game. With the release date being set for sometime this year, I feel there is no chance any amount of player feedback could save the game or even begin to pull it in the right direction, as it seems to be fundamentally flawed with an inescapable feeling of shovelware.

SO WHAT? Basically, all I wanted to say here is that the original bravely default is a very unique experience I think every RPG fan should give a good chance (and just do all the optional stuff during the "repetitive" part of the game, it's where all the best content is you bozo) and that the sequels are NOT the same experience. I guess it's kind of mean to just say "hey don't buy or like this new thing cus its not like the old thing" but people should know why there's a bravely default 2 in the first place, and should fight for what made the original great. I worry that BD goes down the same sad path that FF did, becoming a completely hollow, middling series that strayed so far from it's home that a whole new series had to be made to give the fans of the old style a place to go.

Thanks for reading, and hope you got something out of it.

[jackdawyt]

Following Jason Schreier's continued BioWare story, we have direct insight from many BioWare employees regarding the initial Dragon Age 4 BioWare were going to create code named 'Joplin' and envisioned by Mike Laidlaw, against the now in production Dragon Age project that has been code named 'Morrison'.  

Last time we talked about both projects - Joplin and Morrison, equally named after their respected music artists who died at the age of 27, but were both known for revolutionizing their respected industry.

This latest report examines everything that Joplin was going to be regarding the future of the next Dragon Age title.

Let's now delve into the potential game that Dragon Age 4 initially was going to be, before it was rebooted for Anthem and Andromeda's developments.

As I quote:

The plan for Joplin was exciting, say people who worked on it. First and foremost, they already had many tools and production pipelines in place after Inquisition, ones that they hoped to improve and continue using for this new project.

They committed to prototyping ideas early and often, testing as quickly as possible rather than waiting until everything was on fire, as they had done the last time thanks to the glut of people and Frostbite’s difficulties.

“Everyone in project leadership agreed that we couldn’t do that again, and worked to avoid the kind of things that had led to problems,” said one person who worked on the project, explaining that some of the big changes included:

1) Laying down a clear vision as early as possible.

2) Maintaining regular on-boarding documents and procedures so new team members could get up to speed fast; and

3) A decision-making mentality where “we acknowledged that making the second-best choice was far, far better than not deciding and letting ambiguity stick around while people waited for a decision.”

(That person, like all of the sources for this story, spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about their experiences.)

Prepare the tears for this next quote guys....

Another former BioWare developer who worked on Joplin called it “some of the best work experiences” they’d ever had. “We were working towards something very cool, a hugely reactive game, smaller in scope than Dragon Age: Inquisition but much larger in player choice, followers, reactivity, and depth,” they said. “I’m sad that game will never get made.”

You’d play as a group of spies in Tevinter Imperium, a wizard-ruled country on the north end of Dragon Age’s main continent, Thedas. The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition.

(In other words, they wanted Joplin to be the opposite of the Hinterlands.) There was an emphasis on “repeat play,” one developer said, noting that they wanted to make areas that changed over time and missions that branched in interesting ways based on your decisions, to the point where you could even get “non-standard game overs” if you followed certain paths.

A large chunk of Joplin would center on heists. The developers talked about building systemic narrative mechanics, allowing the player to perform actions like persuading or extorting guards without the writers having to hand-craft every scene.

It was all very ambitious and very early, and would have no doubt changed drastically once Joplin entered production, but members of the team say they were thrilled about the possibilities.

The first big hiccup came in late 2016, when BioWare put Joplin on hold and moved the entire team onto the troubled Mass Effect: Andromeda, which needed as many hands as possible during its final months of development.

The Joplin team expanded with people who were rolling off Andromeda and kept working, prototyping, and designing the game. After spending months of their lives helping finish a Mass Effect that didn’t excite a ton of people, it was nice to return to Dragon Age.

One thing that wasn’t discussed much on Joplin was multiplayer, according to a few people who worked on the project, which is perhaps why the project couldn’t last.

By the latter half of 2017, Anthem was in real trouble, and there was concern that it might never be finished unless the studio did something drastic.

In October of 2017, not long after veteran Mass Effect director Casey Hudson returned to the studio to take over as general manager, EA and BioWare took that drastic action, canceling Joplin and moving the bulk of its staff, including executive producer Mark Darrah, onto Anthem.

A tiny team stuck around to work on a brand new Dragon Age 4, code-named Morrison, that would be built on Anthem’s tools and code base. It’s the game being made now. Unlike Joplin, this new version of the fourth Dragon Age is planned with a live service component, built for long-term gameplay and revenue.

One promise from management, according to a developer, was that in EA’s balance sheet, they’d be starting from scratch and not burdened with the two years of money that Joplin had already spent. Question was, how many of those ideas and prototypes would they use?

It’s not clear how much of Joplin’s vision will shape Morrison (at least some of it will, says one person on the game), but shortly after the reboot, creative director Mike Laidlaw left, as did some other veteran Dragon Agestaff.

Matt Goldman, art director on Dragon Age: Inquisition and then Joplin, took over as creative director for Morrison, while Darrah remained executive producer on both that project and Anthem.

In early 2018, when I first reported that BioWare had rebooted the next Dragon Age and that its replacement would be a live service game, studio GM Casey Hudson responded on Twitter.

“Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you’ll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about ‘live’ it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story.”

The game is still very early in development and could evolve based on the negative reception to Anthem. Rumor among BioWare circles for the past year has been that Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”—a snarky label conveyed to me by several people—but a couple of current BioWare employees have waved me off that description.

“The idea was that Anthem would be the online game and that Dragon Age and Mass Effect, while they may experiment with online portions, that’s not what defines them as franchises,” said one. “I don’t think you’ll see us completely change those franchises.”

When asked, a few BioWare developers agreed that it’d be technically possible for a game built on Anthem’s codebase to also have an offline branch, but it’s not yet clear whether Morrison will take that approach. If it does turn out to be an online game, which seems likely, it would be shocking if you couldn’t play the bulk of it by yourself.

(Diablo III, for example, is online-only on PC yet can be played entirely solo.)

One person close to the game told me this week that Morrison’s critical path, or main story, would be designed for single-player and that goal of the multiplayer elements would be to keep people engaged so that they would actually stick with post-launch content.

Single-player downloadable content like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Trespasser, while often excellent, typically sells only a fraction of the main game, according to developers from BioWare and elsewhere across the industry.

Yet this wouldn’t be a “live service” game if it was a repeat of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which compartmentalized its single- and multiplayer modes.

Fans in the past have grown outraged at the idea of BioWare putting a lot of emphasis on multiplayer gaming, but there are ways in which a service-heavy Dragon Age 4 could be ambitious and impressive.

For example, some ideas I’ve heard floated for Morrison’s multiplayer include companions that can be controlled by multiple players via drop-in/drop-out co-op, similar to old-school BioWare RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and quests that could change based not just on one player’s decisions, but on the choices of players across the globe.

Maybe in two or three years, Morrison will look completely different. It’s not like Dragon Age hasn’t changed drastically in the past. In the office, BioWare developers often refer to Mark Darrah’s Dragon Age team as a pirate ship, one that will eventually wind up at its destination, but not before meandering from port to port, drinking as much rum as possible along the way.

His is a team that, in the past, has iterated and changed direction constantly—something that they hoped to cut down for Joplin, but has always been part of their DNA (and, it should be noted, heavy iteration is common in all game development).

One BioWare employee summed it up well as we talked about the future of BioWare’s fantasy franchise. “Keep in mind,” they said, “Dragon Age games shift more than other games.

”Said another current BioWare employee about Morrison: “They have a lot of unanswered questions. Plus I know it’s going to change like five times in the next two years.”

There are other questions remaining, too: With BioWare’s Austin office gradually taking over Anthem going forward, when will the bulk of employees at the company’s Edmonton HQ move to the Morrison team?

Will Morrison be able to avoid following the lead of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which took on too many people too early and wound up suffering as a result?

And, most important, will BioWare work to prevent the burnout that has led to dozens of developers leaving over the past two years, with so many citing stress, depression, and anxiety?

End of article, so my thoughts on this, of course, I have my worries especially regarding the multiplayer part, it was to my knowledge that there is a separate Dragon Age team working on the multiplayer component completely estranged from the core team.

I hope that this is still the case, however, it's EA that're the ones who plaque BioWare to incorporate multiplayer and live-service.  

Honestly the biggest concern here is how much of Joplin's original vision and resources are going to be put into Morrison's production, because the description of Joplin is everything I've wanted in a Dragon Age game following from Inquisition.

To hear that this initial game has been canned is heart-wrenching, any signs of Joplin's ashes in Morrison is all I can hope for.

Hope is all we really have right now regarding the future of Dragon Age, and don't forget Mass Effect, which is also going to affected by this too.

Of course, I have my worries. But I am hopeful for what the Dragon Age team can do, and I feel to fear when we still haven't seen the game yet is a little blind-sighted. Who knows when we will see or hear anything, I imagine we may see something on EA Play's live-streams next June, just before E3, but honestly, I'm not sure!

The next Dragon Age project is expected to release within 2-3 years from now, all we can hope for next is a reveal of some-sorts, like a title or development update.

It would be incredible if BioWare could come out and share some insight on what the heck is going on with the next Dragon Age, like a development diary which they did with Mass Effect: Andromeda.

To get a glimpse of this next game and the vision for it is what we in the BioWare fandom all need right now. To know what is going on with the next Dragon Age and how true it will stick to Joplin's original vision.

But until we do hear something, like always, you're already in the right place...

[youngandyoungatheart]

Multiple sources say the some of the studio’s most troubling dynamics originated from one person: co-founder Kevin Bruner.

Bruner worked primarily as a programmer prior to Telltale, including during his stint at LucasArts. But he wore many hats during his time at Telltale: first as the company’s CTO and later as a director and CEO. According to numerous current and former employees, Bruner’s behavior became significantly more abrasive and inflexible after the success of The Walking Dead. Thanks to his background in programming, he had been a strong force in creating game development tools for Telltale. As the studio’s popularity exploded, some employees felt he wanted to step into the role of a design auteur, which sources say made him resistant to give the spotlight to other employees at the company.

“That’s when things got really bad,” says a former employee. “I think a lot of the insecurity came from The Walking Dead.” The game’s success had significantly raised the profiles of Rodkin and Vanaman and earned them widespread praise. “I think that that really irked [Bruner] a lot,” says the source. “He felt that… he deserved that. It was his project, or it was his company. He should have gotten all that love.”

Some say Bruner’s behavior led Rodkin and Vanaman to ultimately leave after the wildly successful first season of The Walking Dead. “They were tired of fighting with [Bruner],” says a source with direct knowledge. They jumped into indie development and founded their own studio called Campo Santo, where they released the award-winning game Firewatch. One source points to Campo Santo’s success, along with Night School Studios and its supernatural thriller Oxenfree — co-created by former Telltale veteran Adam Hines — as a catalyst for Bruner’s tightening grip.

“He was hesitant to give anyone much credit for having significant creative vision,” one source says. “He thought they would leave and become a competitor because he had a couple of strong examples of people doing exactly that.” If Bruner’s behavior was aimed at quashing future competitors, however, it only wound up driving more people out the door. Those who stayed as project leads often felt that they were no longer trusted to do their jobs, and were shuffled to the side in favor of giving Bruner the limelight. “There was a dark period of time where if you were in charge of a project, you are not getting any interviews,” one source says. “He’s going to be the one on the panel. He’s going to be the one doing the interviews. He’s going to be the one in the magazine.”

Former employees and sources with direct knowledge of Telltale’s inner workings consistently describe Bruner as a creative bottleneck who micromanaged every part of the development process, from pitch to final product — even going so far as to personally rewrite tutorial text. “He wanted to be consulted on everything from the color of the walls to who they’ve hired to write specific dialogue,” a former employee says.

Bruner took over as CEO of Telltale in 2015 from Connors, who former employees described as a far less imposing figure. Numerous employees describe Bruner as cultivating a culture of fear, and a running joke at the company compared Bruner’s attention to the Eye of Sauron, the fiery gaze of the villain in The Lord of the Rings. “Inevitably, the Eye of Sauron looks at you, and that beam of light just blows everything up and makes it a hellscape where you don’t believe in a thing you’re building anymore,” says a former employee. “A lot of times at Telltale, you don’t feel like you’re wanted there.”

Executive review meetings with higher-ups like Bruner became infamous within the company as brutal, hours-long arguments where Bruner would belittle and question the choices of those involved with the studio’s projects, according to half a dozen sources. “When [Bruner] saw something he decided he didn’t like — which very often was exactly what he had asked for — [that] was really undeserved, and often really difficult for teams to deal with,” the source says.

But multiple sources told The Verge that they often felt like they weren’t making the best games possible, but rather the ones that Bruner personally preferred. “It often felt like we were building games specifically for him,” says one source with direct knowledge of the process. “We were tailoring the type of content we were building — not just gameplay mechanics, but tone, the types of characters we chose to use — to his taste. This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone’s taste.”

Bruner’s time at Telltale came to a close in March 2017, when employees spotted him leaving the Telltale offices with his backpack. He’d left most of his things in his office; shortly after, the company got an email from him announcing that he had stepped down as CEO, and Connors would once again resume the position. Though rumors of Bruner’s departure had circulated widely, many were shocked when it came to pass. Others were more surprised by the quiet way Bruner had chosen to leave.

”My guess is that he saw writing on the wall,” says a source with direct knowledge of the company. “We needed to break out of the Telltale formula, do something different, surprise and delight people, multiple years ago. It’s reflected in [online] comments in articles about us. It’s reflected in our review scores. It’s reflected in our sales. It’s reflected in our game scores. Everyone [could] see that, not just people who work for Telltale.”

And there we have it. Four years later, I finally have a name and a face to attach to cataclysmic shift from original TWDG to the worst sequel ever made: Kevin Bruner. He stepped into the role of CEO, he bullied, belittled, and demeaned the hard-working artists, programmers and coders of the company, he forced his idiotic and often changing personal whims on already over-worked development teams, he ruined literally everything Telltale Games ever built. But he’s not all bad. From the same article there’s also this: “One of the most recognizable mechanics in Telltale games, where players are told that a character ‘will remember that,’ was his idea.” Well Mr. Bruner, you took a company hot off its heels from a massive sleeper-hit that won over 80 GOTY awards, codified a new sub-genre of games, and was famous for literally moving jaded YouTubers to tears, and destroyed it and everything it ever built, and only in six years time, the last year and a half of which you couldn’t even be bothered to stick around for, all because you wanted to be the center of attention.

[aion-rsa]

Demon’s Souls Review

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

You don’t walk away from a game like Demon’s Souls without a few good stories to share. When I think back on my time with the PS5 remake, two moments that occurred fairly early on in the game spring to mind. 

The first happened when I unlocked the door to one of the game’s first bosses. Excited by my progress, I ran down a stairwell to a nearby shortcut, took a wrong turn, and fell to my death. I could have easily walked into the boss room from the respawn point, but I was determined to retrieve my lost souls. Because I had died before actually unlocking the next shortcut, that meant having to risk going through the entire level again. It was ultimately a point of pride, and in a Soulslike game, pride and headlong actions are what get you killed. Ultimately, I decided to take the risk. 

I made my way back to the spot where I had died. Just before I opened the nearby shortcut, I viewed a note that another player had left by the door. It read: “I’m proud of you.” It was a stock message likely meant for those who had just unlocked the first boss, but at that moment, it felt like a personal bit of support in a game that is otherwise notorious for its cruelty. 

Stories such as that are fairly common in Soulslike games. However, the next moment I remember is fairly unique to this next-gen title. It happened when I was walking down a tight corridor packed with enemies wielding crossbows. As I slowly made my way towards them using my shield to block the incoming bolts, I felt my controller rumble. Specifically, I felt the very bottom of my PS5 DualSense rumble. As the threat neared, the console’s haptic feedback sent the vibrations further up the controller. I realized what was happening just quickly enough to turn around and watch a cluster of boulders bowl me over. 

That’s what you get with the PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls: a next-gen version of one of the most important games ever made that impresses with its technical advancements, even as it leaves you wondering whether its developers relied a bit too much on the fundamental appeal of this genre and not enough on their own creative input. 

As you probably know, Demon’s Souls is a remake of the 2009 PS3 game that (spiritual predecessors aside) gave birth to the Soulslike Action RPG genre. The remake is developed by Bluepoint Games, who you may know as the team behind the stunningly beautiful Shadow of the Colossus remake.

And that’s where any breakdown of Demon’s Souls must start: the graphics. Even if you typically don’t care about graphics, you’re going to be blown away by Demon’s Souls. The game certainly impresses from a raw technical standpoint (you can really see where all those teraflops went), but what really matters are the ways that the PS5’s power lets you appreciate the timeless beauty of FromSoftware’s artistic direction. Fans have long praised Demon’s Souls for its Gothic architecture and macabre aesthetic, but this remake makes it easier than ever to appreciate how even the game’s darkest corners were carefully designed to display a twisted sense of beauty. 

In terms of visuals, I’d go so far as to call Demon’s Souls the only real next-gen game on the market. It could be months before we see a PS5 or Xbox Series X title that comes close to challenging its visual presentation. 

That’s hardly the only way that the power of next-gen gaming improves Demon’s Souls. The PS5’s SSD eliminates Demon’s Souls‘ often crippling load times, which isn’t just a great quality of life improvement but makes soul and resource farming far more efficient. The DualSense controller adds an extra layer of immersion to the experience, while the PS5’s Command Center offers unique challenges for certain battles which allow series veterans to flex their abilities and creative muscles.

Release Date: Nov. 12, 2020 Platform: PS5 Developer: Bluepoint Games Publisher: PlayStation Studios Genre: Action RPG 

The PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls is, in the ways that matter most, the best version of the game, but that still leaves us with the question of why you should care about Demon’s Souls in the first place. 

Well, aside from its historical significance, there are many fans who consider Demon’s Souls to be FromSoftware’s best game. While much of that praise is rightfully reserved for the title’s art direction (which, again, shines brighter than ever in this visual masterpiece), others say that Demon’s Souls features some of the best Soulslike gameplay. 

That last point is going to depend on your preferences. If you jumped into the Soulslike genre with Bloodborne, Sekiro, or Nioh, you’re going to find the action in Demon’s Souls much slower than you’re used to. More of an emphasis is placed on deliberately studying your opponents and playing defensively until the perfect time for attack presents itself. While magic users and some melee builds will be able to play a bit more aggressively, Demon’s Souls just isn’t designed to support that more active style of combat that has defined modern Soulslike games. 

Personally, I prefer this slower style. At the heart of most Souslike games is a trial and error component which rewards persistence and forces you to learn the language of every encounter in order to survive. Faster-paced Soulslike games are absolutely capable of capturing that element, but there’s something to be said for how Demon’s Souls‘ more methodical combat really lets you savor the carefully constructed dance of every battle. It’s a better representation of the ways that the genre’s challenges so often come down to your ability to recognize and execute on an opportunity. 

Yes, Demon’s Souls is often as difficult as this series’ reputation would lead you to believe it is, but I’m struck by how balanced much of this game feels. A big part of the credit there has to go to the game’s character building and equipment systems. There are some builds that are “better” (or more optimized) than others, but generally speaking, it’s easy to build your character based on your preferences rather than what you assume the game wants you to do. Some paths are more difficult than others, but even the act of getting there against overwhelming odds can be fun in and of itself. 

The fact of the matter is that Demon’s Souls has, in most respects, aged remarkably well in the 11 years since its release. Yet, it’s that very quality that raises questions about whether or not Bluepoint really maximized its opportunities with this remake. 

There is new content in the Demon’s Souls remake, despite what popular perception would lead you to believe. There’s a new character builder, new items, fresh mechanics, New Game+ options, and even new music that is remarkably just as beautiful as the game’s legendary original score. This is not just a strict remake of the original game with better graphics. But it’s easy to see how someone would walk away from this game believing that to be the. From enemy locations to attack patterns, many of Demon’s Souls‘ core mechanics are identical to the ones found in the original game. If you played the original, you’re going to know exactly what to do during your first playthrough of the game.

Is that a problem? That depends on who you ask, but there were times when I was begging for Bluepoint to take the wheel and make this game its own. Namely, there was a part of me that wondered what would happen if Bluepoint had remade Demon’s Souls as more of a Metroidvania-esque experience without the game’s hub world, or if the team had just added a couple of new enemies where you weren’t expecting them. These additions would undoubtedly be called blasphemous by longtime fans and purists, but the point is that Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus confirm that Bluepoint is one of gaming’s greatest restorative artists but we’ve yet to see what the studio’s team can do with a blank canvas. 

Whenever I felt that Demon’s Souls could have done more, though, I remembered the Old Monk boss fight. See, the Old Monk is a unique boss in Demon’s Souls which can actually be controlled by another player if they invade your world at the right time. It’s a brilliant use of the series’ PvP mechanics that has been incredibly difficult to properly experience in the years since Demon’s Souls‘ official servers went offline. Well, the remake lets you experience the proper version of the Old Monk boss fight, which also benefits from better visuals, enhanced controls, and a crystal clear soundtrack. It’s a nice touch.

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Demon’s Souls resurrects a game that could have easily become a historical footnote overshadowed by its more popular successors. In the process, it also manages to get everyone excited about the potential of next-gen console gaming. It’s the best next-gen launch game and a damn good entry into the Soulslike genre.

The post Demon’s Souls Review appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[samleheny]

“What’s Happened to Bungie?”

There’s a lot of hubbub about Destiny, and its developer Bungie lately. I’m not interested in cataloging their various deceptions and plain old dick moves since the launch of the original Destiny, that’s been covered EXTENSIVELY already. But the accompanying questions: “Are Bungie in trouble?” ,“Is Bungie going to be bought out by Activision?”, “Has Bungie lost its mojo?”, and just generally “My god people, what’s happened to Bungie?”

I believe can answer this. But it will require some... philosophy.

Specifically Theseus’ Ship. A very old, still very relevant philosophical thought experiment. You’re probably familiar, and there are multiple retellings varying in unimportant details that don’t change the question posed by the story. This is the most succinct version: A ship leaves from a port in the town of Theseus. Its voyage will be long, spanning many years. As it sails, some of the ship’s components wear or get damaged and need to be replaced, be it a torn sail, a broken mast, or a rotted plank. As the ship visits various ports and islands, some of its crew decide to stay behind, and are replaced with new members. By the time the ship finishes its voyage and returns to Theseus, not a single component of its original structure nor a single member of its original crew remain. The entire ship has gradually been replaced, piece by piece.

The question posed by the story is this: Is the ship that returned to port the same ship as the one which left all those years ago?

There’s no definitive, correct answer. Maybe you feel like the ship should be considered technically a different vessel as soon as one of its pieces is swapped out, or maybe you think it retains its original identity so long at least one piece remains unchanged. Or maybe you feel like it’s a question of degrees, and that identities can be altered, stretched some way before being considered a properly disparate entity. Or maybe you feel like the ship’s identity should be considered changed when the amount of it composed of new pieces exceeds half.

The point is to make you consider what it is we mean when we speak of identity. When we say something is one thing and not another. It’s the same existential quandary we engage with when we talk about ourselves being different people than we were some years ago because so many of the cells composing our bodies have died and been replaced with newer ones.

It could be that you believe the ship is still the same ship that left Theseus as long as the pieces, new or old, are assembled in the same way. A question of how much of identity is a matter of that which can be physically measured and how much of it is perhaps historical, or even imaginary.

So what the hell is going on over at Bungie?

Bungie are one of the best and most storied game developers around. They achieved fame and glory with the Halo franchise, one of the most beloved and influential videogame series of our time. During Halo’s development back in the year 2000, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, and in 2001 the first Halo game became a sensation that almost single-handedly put Microsoft’s new videogame console the Xbox on the map.

10 years and 5 highly successful Halo games later, the people working at Bungie, yearning for creative freedom, had secured their company’s independence in exchange for leaving the sole rights to the Halo IP with Microsoft.

The world was once again Bungie’s oyster, and after wandering around exploring different ideas for their big new IP, they began work in 2010 on what would eventually be Destiny... and the source of a whole lot of headache for Bungie.

Bungie had entered into a 10 year development contract with publisher Activision, and some of the bigger names to leave or be forced out felt that this relationship was becoming poisonous to the company spirit that had served Bungie so well. This deal was for a whopping $500 million, the largest development contract in videogame history, so valuable did it seem to secure Bungie’s next big series. Pete Parsons, Bungie’s COO told press they expected people would “...put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Star Wars,” And this game which had started out with the intention on the part of some of Bungie’s heaviest hitters of getting as far away from Halo as possible in search of a fresh new experience, ended up being, by their own admission, a lot closer to Halo in genre and design then they had wanted.

When it launched in 2014 Destiny was rife with problems, some slight, some pretty glaring and certainly surprising of a game with Destiny’s pedigree. And while through iteration and expansion Bungie eventually managed to steer Destiny in a direction at least decent, and while Destiny 2 released this year and was far better received (at first...), It’s pretty clear that those dreams of creating a cultural touchstone to stand with the likes of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, or even Bungie’s own Halo remain pretty illusive.

I’m still somewhat fascinated by the way the fans Destiny 2 earned for the franchise all now seem to be turning on the game and reporting that once you reach the end game content, Destiny 2 turns disappointingly back into Destiny 1, ie. a little bit shit.

And this is all to say nothing of the way Destiny (perhaps at the behest of Activision, we can’t be sure) has been treating its players with cloak & dagger design choices secretly aiming to sabotage any attempt of progressing through the game without turning to its in-game storefront and spending real world dollars. And whatever amendments they’ve attempted to make as they hop from one scandal to the next amounts to a cynically charged Peter Molyneux-esk cycle of 1) Enact predatory design decision/business practice. 2) If caught, apologise, fix problem(optional), vow to do better in future. 3) Repeat step 1. Immediately.

And news that Bungie is committed to making sure Destiny’s design going forward will revolve heavily around the Eververse (the in game storefront and source of greedy post-sale monetisation many are so upset about) comes out right as an organised online campaign, #RemoveEververse is firing up.

Destiny is nobody’s favourite franchise right now (which is a shame, because it was for a brief, glorious moment) and Bungie, of all developers, are nobody’s favourite people.

So what gives?

The details of what made Destiny’s four year development so turbulent have been covered pretty extensively by journalists, including an entire chapter in Jason Schreier’s excellent book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Suffice it to say that the Bungie that came out of Destiny’s development in 2014 looked a hell of a lot different than the Bungie that went in in 2010.

Jaime Griesemer - a major designer at Bungie for 13 years, Marcus Lehto - with Bungie also for 13 years and the creative director of Bungie’s last Halo game, Marcus Lehto - A lead designer at Bungie for 10 years, Adrian Perez - a programmer at Bungie for 9 years, Vic Deleon - a senior environment artist, Marty O’Donnell - composer and sound director at Bungie for 12 years, Harold Ryan - the motherfucking president of the company,

Over the course of development, all of these noteworthy figures at Bungie would either quit or be pushed out due to frustrations in Destiny’s development, not always on very good terms from the sound of it.

I’ll be frank but, I feel, realistic, in saying that while a studio’s artistic identity is a conglomerate of all of what each and every member brings to the table, some members’ input counts for a larger chunk of that identity than others. Some are more replaceable than others in terms of how much sway they have over the creative vision that the company will all work to bring to its audience, and what’s worrying was not that so many people left Bungie during Destiny’s development - people leave and join studios all the time - it’s that so many veterans, the kind of people who make up the majority of their studio’s identity left in such a compressed period.

Whether this is a sign that the project was mismanaged (it was), and that those who left should have something to feel betrayed over, or just a natural part of Bungie’s transition from one major chapter in its life as a Microsoft subsidiary to the next chapter as a free bird with new responsibilities and a new direction to chart, the point made by Theseus’ Ship is very relevant here. How much of the unique creative energy we know as “Bungie”, remains?

People have been calling the last couple of years “The Downfall of Bungie” or claiming that Destiny is the game that destroyed Bungie. Are they that wrong when considering that changing to a new identity does technically involve the destruction of the previous?

How many members, and which members of a group must leave and be replaced before that group can no longer be said to still be, even if the corporate entity known as “Bungie” is still well and truly operational?

“What’s happened to Bungie?”

Simple. It’s died. And was replaced by a new Bungie. It happens all the time (though usually more gradually). Change is inevitable. To try and resist this constant shifting of identities is foolish. After all, Bungie changed a lot to become a Halo factory we all loved for 10 years. The important question is what has Bungie changed into? We’re looking at a new Bungie. But is it a change for the worse? If 2017 is anything to judge by, I fear it very much is.

While the story of Destiny 1′s development from its initial release through to the Taken King expansion can be read as a developer releasing a... ‘not great’ game and working to make it better, Destiny 2′s post launch development so far is the story of a developer releasing a much better game and then doing everything they can to poison people’s experience with it.

I don’t know the size of the boot Activision has over your throat right now, Bungie, but do you want this new chapter of your life having left your overlords at Microsoft to be defined by an even more cynical and corporate Bungie?

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - April 2017

Justin - Creative Director

It’s been bloody mental here at Dream Harvest this month and the rush hasn't even let down one bit!

I had the clever idea of wanting to demo Failure at three events this month while trying to move to a new house half way across the country. What could go wrong? 

I type this update currently surrounded by boxes and acoustic foam as we had to fly out to Croatia the day all of my studio equipment was delivered by the removal firm and since getting back on Wednesday morning it's been full steam ahead while we prepare to move into our new office, did I say new Office? 

Yep, so we're finally going to have a place to call home, next month, as the funding from certain sources come in later this month, yay!

We'll be sharing more about our new Studio setup, including lots of photos and videos as we move into the new space. I'm super excited to finally be working with a large portion of the team in the same building rather than online and this will allow us to pick up the pace on development immensely as several members of the team move into full-time work with Dream Harvest.

Anyway, for now, I wanted to share some of the feedback we received from the three events we went to over the past month:

First up was the monthly WeGeek event. This is always a fun little event held at a number of the WeWork offices around London. Unfortunately, this one wasn't really the right crowd for us this time around and I made the big mistake of only bringing a single laptop with me so demoing the core focus of our game, multiplayer, was almost impossible. 

The small number of people that sat down and played Failure: NeuroSlicers seemed to really enjoy it, but I very quickly realised that there were some usability and readability issues; things that we actually already knew about, but in the process of fixing for the next two events we were due to attended this month, Intel Buzz and Reboot Develop.

The Intel Buzz event was a completely different story. 

We had quite a few people coming to play the game. I even had to pitch the game with our new teaser trailer in front of a big audience of people in the main hall. 

The demo we were showing off still lacked the tutorial we were building for Reboot Develop and there was still some issues with player's struggling with new game-play concepts that we'd introduced. 

Although Failure: NeuroSlicers is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) at heart there are quite a number of new mechanics and systems which are new to this genre and without a tutorial, the learning curve is a bit steeper than we'd like. 

What we've found though is that once players understand these new concepts they really enjoyed the fresh experience we're giving them with the game. We're even finding players who aren't normally competitive gamers really getting into the matches.

Last up and by far the coolest experience of last month was Reboot Develop in Dubrovnik Croatia. What a mind-blowingly, beautiful place to have a game conference. 

We met some amazingly cool people creating some really amazing games; the quality level from some of the teams in Eastern Europe is amazing.

Milcho and I spent three days at the conference and was happily joined by Amelie and her boyfriend Charlie (who's developing a super cool Portal like first person puzzle / space game) in a great spot which allowed us to really observe people playing through our work in progress tutorial and then play a couple of multiplayer matches, either between Milcho or I or even other attendees. 

We had several people come back again and again over the three days to play more matches with some even telling us that "they could play the game all day!" - it was a really lovely thing to hear.

My one regret was not putting us forward for the Reboot Indie Game Awards as several people came up to us after saying that we would have had a good chance of possibly winning some of the categories or at least being nominated. Well, there's always next year!

Anyway, if you want to check out some of the photos from the event check out the Reboot Develop section of this month’s newsletter where you can see some nice shots of both the Conference and magical city of Dubrovnik.

Until next month - Keep Gaming!

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what happened in the last month? I got a year older, had some non Failure related changes in my life so I was a bit busy outside of working on Failure.non Failure related changes in my life so I was a bit busy outside of working on Failure.

As we had Reboot coming up I was mostly working on smaller improvements and bugfixes as I didn’t want to mess up the build we did for Reboot. Not much else to say about that, nothing really new, just less bugs, minor graphical improvements etc.

While it didn’t make it into the build for reboot I was also investigating some graphical effects for level loading. A good example for the stuff I did is this little test

Also, we upgraded the project to Unity 5.6, so I’m currently looking into existing code/shaders etc. to see if we can make use of some of the improvements that came with 5.6. 

The most useful feature so far has been the additions to the frame debugger as they helped me to detect a few possible performance issues as some stuff isn’t exactly working as it’s supposed to. I'm also looking forward to seeing what Kelvin can do with the new particle system stuff when he’s back working on effects.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Justin had the astonishing idea to sign us up for three events in one month while having an incomplete game. Yeah… you can imagine how that went for the poor soul that had to prepare a build for all of them. Oh, you thought that poor soul was someone else? Of course not.

Apart from my suffering, the rest of the team did a great job of fixing issues and polishing different aspects of the game – UI/UX, VFX, Environment etc. The main feature of the builds was a newly designed tutorial which eased people into our core systems and gave them a good chance to compete in a multiplayer match. 

Plenty of people were able to enjoy the game because of it, which fills me with confidence that we’re making something that not only we enjoy playing, but also and there’s market for it. All-in-all it went smoother than I would’ve ever expected – the only downsides being a lack of sleep and exhaustion. The only thing we need to do next works restlessly until and after final release – it’s all good.

Now that all the excitement is beginning to settle down, we’re planning lots of changes based on the feedback and observations from those events – from small UX tweaks to big system changes. We’re in full production force here, so expect lots of content in the near future. I’ll leave you with the rest of the team now, because (as we all know) people love talking about themselves. 

Loic - Art Director / Designer 

This month the art focus has been on cards for our user interface and polishing our main level to show the game at Reboot Develop. 

so I sculpted on-board fixed blockers to replace the placeholders we had before, with real-time lights that gives much more volume to the center of the board.

I then created more environment assets to have a wider diversity in the city-scape to create a symmetrical layout instead of the chaotic one we had before.

Lastly, I created the Access Node, which is your base building, from modeling to animation so we can emulate the feeling of the player jacking into the level and being ejected or destroyed when the Access Node loses all its Hit Points (HP).

Kelvin - VFX  Artist

Hello all, for me this month it’s been a lot of UI work with some FX fixes sprinkled in. Reboot was around the corner and there was a lot we wanted to get done so that the players could give us feedback on it. Along with some fixes to the Transmission tower FX, I've been doing a ton of UI iterations. 

We built a look for the script cards (both small and large versions), resource visuals, and general in-game UI. The most challenging task, besides reformatting my brain to think of UI again, was creating the script cards. We really had to find the balance between visually appealing cards and the amount of information given to the player. 

I lean more towards giving the player a little bit less information and making the UI more appealing. This way, new players will have an easier time trying to adjust to the UI. You can't give them every piece of information and expect them to look through the UI thoroughly. So by putting less information, the players will be able to adapt to the game easier in the beginning and then look for more detailed information later down the line. 

Also, by putting less information, this will keep the UI looking clean in the long run. Once players become veterans of the game, they need less information on the screen anyway. Although the current UI is still a WIP, I think the route we're going is heading in a good direction. 

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hey, everyone! So this month we focused a lot on the UI and the UX in order to show the best possible version of the game at Reboot Develop. The dynamic of the team was great and everybody was really motivated to iterate on the UX. 

Our main interrogations were mostly about how to fit all that info on the cards that describe the scripts but still keep them easy to read, we need to prioritize information between the mini version of the card that remains visible at the bottom of the deck and the larger version of the card that you can access by hovering over it. 

Other aspects we've worked on and are still investigating are how to make the link between data and territory more obvious and how to make your tech resource really intuitive to read when you're purchasing new scripts. 

What we've got is much better than our previous version, I think, but there are still some tweaks we need to test. Apart from that, we worked on a first version of the tutorial. It was really valuable at Reboot to have this because we can now analyse the data we collected in our observations and interviews with the players and see where we need to focus more or how the steps and pace of the tutorial flow. 

I wrote a questionnaire that our players filled in after playing which also allows us to set our next priorities regarding the improvement of the UX.

Last but not least I started to work on the narrative, this is probably the most exciting part for me. I just love the cyberpunk atmosphere that the team is bringing with this game and the really deep and contemporary questions that we want to broach on in Failure. 

I believe that the narrative is going to be a central part of the game identity and so everybody's expectations are quite high with this, it's very challenging but when we'll get to the nitty gritty part it's going to be very rewarding as well. Maybe the title of the game even will take an even deeper meaning then... 

Anyway, I have loads of ideas. I'm reading Snow Crash at the moment and it's the perfect inspiration, the characters are in my opinion very compelling and the themes are tackled in a subtle way, I'm also a big fan of Ghost In the Shell, the original anime and the comics. Using those masterpieces and others help me organize my thoughts and think about how we want to approach this question of the link between our access to unlimited information and the definition of our humanity. 

When Ghost in the shell came out in 1995, it was a completely different context, the internet was a very new thing, and it's within this context that they questioned the definition of our humanity, through the dilemma of the body and the mind. 

Today we're glued to our phones, we are connected almost constantly even if it's not yet through implants but I believe this relation to information and our ability to verify what is true or false instantly without relying on each other so much creates a whole new environment to look at this same old question. 

We already started to work on an intro and we're going to iterate on that probably ten times before we get it right! I'm reusing the timeline that Anthony wrote for us when he could work on the project and of course, the work done on the factions from David but my focus now is to develop our main character. 

What is his or her motivation at the start, what brings him into this slicers universe and how will this evolve as we progress in our investigation and understand what brought humanity to this state?  Work on the antagonist force as well, our conflict, our controlling idea, the values and the emotions we want to manipulate, oh dear.... there is so much to do I should probably get back to it!

Ciao ciao

Daniel - Composer

This month we say a warm welcome to our latest member of the Dream Harvest Team, Daniel Elms. We’ll let his impressive bio speak for itself because it helps solidify his thoughts on the world of Failure: NeuroSlicers.

Composer of humanist, post-minimal music. Daniel crafts emotive soundscapes from intricate orchestral textures that are bursting with geometric rhythms and patterns; this rich orchestral language is interwoven with the electroacoustic instruments and urban sounds synonymous with his hometown, Hull, which together create a unique voice in the world of contemporary composition. He uses his music to make intimate commentaries on the plight of the individual, and to address the social and economic inequalities of his home, taking inspiration from the ideologies and philosophies of anarcho-syndicalist and progressive literature.

As well as creating music for both expansive and intimate performance venues, Daniel has a large and varied repertoire of collaborative works across feature film and theatre, including: the BAFTA- nominated ‘Ralph’, the Academy-Award-nominated ‘Library of Burned Books’, ‘Plaques and Tangles’ at Royal Court Theatre, and additional music for ‘Taboo’ by Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy, for which he worked closely with fellow composer Max Richter. In 2016, Daniel was commissioned by the British Film Institute to create a new work to celebrate his hometown as part of Hull City of Culture 2017 and was awarded Performing Right Society Foundation’s New Music Biennial Award as part of the commission; he was the recipient of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund Emerging Excellence Award in 2013.

In 2017, Daniel will record and release his debut album of concert material, ‘Islandia’: an album of new music written for chamber orchestra and electronics in which expansive sonic landscapes are interspersed with driving rhythms and expressive textures. His BFI/PRS Foundation commission ‘Bethia’ will premiere as part of Hull City of Culture 2017 and will be performed in Hull and at the Royal Festival Hall, London, with a recorded broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Daniel will also be working on a soundtrack for the computer game ‘Failure: NeuroSlicers’ by game developer Dream Harvest Games, create the score for Abner Pastoll’s second feature film ‘A Good Woman is Hard to Find’, and record and produce various musical artists from his hometown, Hull, as part of City of Culture 2017.

ON FAILURE: NEUROSLICERS

Beneath the awesome visual styling and game mechanics of Failure, there are a lot of pertinent questions being asked by the story that can — and should — be applied to our own lives in the face of recent political, social, and technological upheavals. What this means for me as a composer is that there is a vast amount of content within the game that has the potential to bring relatable questions and commentary to the fore for those playing it and that there is the opportunity to blur the lines of distinction between our world and the world of Failure.

[ciathyzareposts]

Lemmings 2: The Tribes

When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings, they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final product more playable. They finally ended up with just eight skills, the perfect number to neatly line up as buttons along the bottom of the screen. In the process of this ruthless culling, Lemmings became a classic study in doing more with less in game design: those eight skills, combined in all sorts of unexpected ways, were enough to take the player through 120 ever-more-challenging levels in the first Lemmings, then 100 more in the admittedly less satisfying pseudo-sequel/expansion pack Oh No! More Lemmings.

Yet when the time came to make the first full-fledged sequel, DMA resurrected some of their discarded skills. And then they added many, many more of them: Lemmings 2: The Tribes wound up with no less than 52 skills in all. For this reason not least, it’s often given short shrift by critics, who compare its baggy maximalism unfavorably with the first game’s elegant minimalism. To my mind, though, Lemmings 2 is almost a Platonic ideal of a sequel, building upon the genius of the original game in a way that’s truly challenging and gratifying to veterans. Granted, it isn’t the place you should start; by all means, begin with the classic original. When you’ve made it through those 120 levels, however, you’ll find 120 more here that are just as perplexing, frustrating, and delightful — and with even more variety to boot, courtesy of all those new skills.

The DMA Design that made Lemmings 2 was a changed entity in some ways. The company had grown in the wake of the first game’s enormous worldwide success, such that they had been forced to move out of their cozy digs above a baby store in the modest downtown of Dundee, Scotland, and into a more anonymous office in a business park on the outskirts of town. The core group that had created the first Lemmings — designer, programmer, and DMA founder David Jones; artists and level designers Mike Dailly and Gary Timmons; programmer and level designer Russell Kay — all remained on the job, but they were now joined by an additional troupe of talented newcomers.

Lemmings 2 also reflects changing times inside the games industry in ways that go beyond the size of its development team. Instead of 120 unrelated levels, there’s now a modicum of story holding things together. A lengthy introductory movie — which, in another telling sign of the times, fills more disk space than the game itself and required almost as many people to make — tells how the lemmings were separated into twelve tribes, all isolated from one another, at some point in the distant past. Now, the island (continent?) on which they live is facing an encroaching Darkness which will end all life there. Your task is to reunite the tribes, by guiding each of them through ten levels to reach the center of the island. Once all of the tribes have gathered there, they can reassemble a magical talisman, of which each tribe conveniently has one piece, and use it to summon a flying ark that will whisk them all to safety.

It’s not exactly an air-tight plot, but no matter; you’ll forget about it anyway as soon as the actual game begins. What’s really important important are the other advantages of having twelve discrete progressions of ten levels instead of a single linear progression of 120. You can, you see, jump around among all these tribes at will. As David Jones said at the time of the game’s release, “We want to get away from ‘you complete a level or you don’t.’” When you get frustrated banging your head against a single stubborn level — and, this being a Lemmings game, you will get frustrated — you can just go work on another one for a while.

Rather than relying largely on the same set of graphics over the course of its levels, as the original does, each tribe in Lemmings 2 has its own audiovisual theme: there are beach-bum lemmings, Medieval lemmings, spooky lemmings, circus lemmings, alpine lemmings, astronaut lemmings, etc. In a tribute to the place where the game was born, there are even Scottish Highland lemmings (although Dundee is actually found in the less culturally distinctive — or culturally clichéd — Lowlands). And there’s even a “classic” tribe that reuses the original graphics; pulling it up feels a bit like coming home from an around-the-world tour.

Teaching Old Lemmings New Tricks

In this Beach level, a lemming uses the “kayak” skill to cross a body of water.

In this Medieval level, one lemming has become an “attractor”: a minstrel who entrances all the lemmings around him with his music, keeping them from marching onward. Meanwhile one of his colleagues is blazing a trail in front for the rest to eventually follow.

In this Shadow level, the lemming in front has become a “Fencer.” This allows him to dig out a path in front of himself at a slight upward angle. (Most of the skills in the game that at first seem bewilderingly esoteric actually do have fairly simple effects.)

In this Circus level, one lemming has become a “rock climber”: a sort of super-powered version of an ordinary climber, who can climb even a canted wall like this one.

In this Polar level, a lemming has become a “roper,” making a handy tightrope up and over the tree blocking the path.

In this Space level, we’ve made a “SuperLem” who flies in the direction of the mouse cursor.

Other pieces of plumbing help to make Lemmings 2 feel like a real, holistic game rather than a mere series of puzzles. The first game, as you may recall, gives you an arbitrary number of lemmings which begin each level and an arbitrary subset of them which must survive it; this latter number thus marks the difference between success and failure. In the sequel, though, each tribe starts its first level with 60 lemmings, who are carried over through all of the levels that follow. Any lemmings lost on one level, in other words, don’t come back in the succeeding ones. It’s possible to limp to the final finish line with just one solitary survivor remaining — and, indeed, you quite probably will do exactly this with a few of the tribes the first time through. But it’s also possible to finish all but a few of the levels without killing any lemmings at all. At the end of each level and then again at the end of each tribe’s collection of levels, you’re awarded a bronze, silver, or gold star based on your performance. To wind up with gold at the end, you usually need to have kept every single one of the little fellows alive through all ten levels. There’s a certain thematic advantage in this: people often note how the hyper-cute original Lemmings is really one of the most violent videogames ever, requiring you to kill thousands and thousands of the cuties over its course. This objection no longer applies to Lemmings 2. But more importantly, it sets up an obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist loop. First you’ll just want to get through the levels — but then all those bronze and silver performances lurking in your past will start to grate, and pretty soon you’ll be trying to figure out how to do each level just that little bit more efficiently. The ultimate Lemmings 2 achievement, needless to say, is to collect gold stars across the board.

This tiered approach to success and failure might be seen as evidence of a kinder design sensibility, but in most other respects just the opposite is true; Lemmings 2 has the definite feel of a game for the hardcore. The first Lemmings does a remarkably good job of teaching you how to play it interactively over the course of its first twenty levels or so, introducing you one by one to each of its skills along with its potential uses and limitations. There’s nothing remotely comparable in Lemmings 2; it just throws you in at the deep end. While there is a gradual progression in difficulty within each tribe’s levels, the game as a whole is a lumpier affair, especially in the beginning. Each level gives you access to between one and eight of the 52 available skills, whilst evincing no interest whatsoever in showing you how to use any of them. There is some degree of thematic grouping when it comes to the skills: the Highland lemmings like to toss cabers; the beach lemmings are fond of swimming, kayaking, and surfing; the alpine lemmings often need to ski or skate. Nevertheless, the sheer number of new skills you’re expected to learn on the fly is intimidating even for a veteran of the first game. The closest Lemmings 2 comes to its predecessor’s training levels are a few free-form sandbox environments where you can choose your own palette of skills and have at it. But even here, your education can be a challenging one, coming down as it still does to trial and error.

Your first hours with the game can be particularly intimidating; as soon as you’ve learned how one group of skills works well enough to finish one level, you’re confronted with a whole new palette of them on the next level. Even I, a huge fan of the first game, bounced off the second one quite a few times before I buckled down, started figuring out the skills, and, some time thereafter, started having fun.

Luckily, once you have put in the time to learn how the skills work, Lemmings 2 becomes very fun indeed, — every bit as rewarding as the first game, possibly even more so. Certainly its level design is every bit as good — better in fact, relying more on logic and less on dodgy edge cases in the game engine than do the infamously difficult final levels of the first Lemmings. Even the spiky difficulty curve isn’t all bad; it can be oddly soothing to start on a new tribe’s relatively straightforward early levels after being taxed to the upmost on another tribe’s last level. If the first Lemmings is mountain climbing as people imagine it to be — a single relentless, ever-steeper ascent to a dizzying peak — the second Lemmings has more in common with the reality of the sport: a set of more or less difficult stages separated by more or less comfortable base camps. While it’s at least as daunting in the end, it does offer more ebbs and flows along the way.

One might say, then, that Lemmings 2 is designed around a rather literal interpretation of the concept of a sequel. That is to say, it assumes that you’ve played its predecessor before you get to it, and are now ready for its added complexity. That’s bracing for anyone who fulfills that criterion. But in 1993, the year of Lemmings 2‘s release, its design philosophy had more negative than positive consequences for its own commercial arc and for that of the franchise to which it belonged.

The fact is that Lemmings 2‘s attitude toward its sequel status was out of joint with the way sequels had generally come to function by 1993. In a fast-changing industry that was fast attracting new players, the ideal sequel, at least in the eyes of most industry executives, was a game equally welcoming to both neophytes and veterans. Audiovisual standards were changing so rapidly that a game that was just a couple of years old could already look painfully dated. What new player with a shiny new computer wanted to play some ugly old thing just to earn a right to play the latest and greatest?

That said, Lemmings 2 actually didn’t look all that much better than its predecessor either, flashy opening movie aside. Part of this was down to DMA Design still using the 1985-vintage Commodore Amiga, which was still very popular as a gaming computer in Britain and other European countries, as their primary development platform, then porting the game to MS-DOS and various other more modern platforms. Staying loyal to the Amiga meant working within some fairly harsh restrictions, such as that of having no more than 32 colors on the screen at once, not to mention making the whole game compact enough to run entirely off floppy disk; hard drives, much less CD-ROM drives, were still not common among European Amiga owners. Shortly before the release of Lemmings 2, David Jones confessed to being “a little worried” about whether people would be willing to look beyond the unimpressive graphics and appreciate the innovations of the game itself. As it happened, he was right to be worried.

By the time Jones made that comment, Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings had already sold in the millions across a bewildering range of platforms, from modern mainstream computers like the Apple Macintosh and Wintel machines to antique 8-bit computers like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum, from handheld systems like the Nintendo Game Boy and Atari Lynx to living-room game consoles like the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Lemmings 2, being a much more complex game under the hood as well as on the surface, wasn’t quite so amenable to being ported to just about any gadget with a CPU, even as its more off-putting initial character and its lack of new audiovisual flash did it no favors either. It was still widely ported and still became a solid success by any reasonable standard, mind you, but likely sold in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. All indications are that the first game and its semi-expansion pack continued to sell more copies than the second even after the latter’s release.

In the aftermath of this muted reception, the bloom slowly fell off the Lemmings rose, not only for the general public but also for DMA Design themselves. The franchise’s true jump-the-shark moment ironically came as part of an attempt to re-jigger the creatures to become media superstars beyond the realm of games. The Children’s Television Workshop, the creator of Sesame Street among other properties, was interested in moving the franchise onto television screens. In the course of these negotiations, they asked DMA to give the lemmings more differentiated personalities in the next game, to turn them from anonymous marchers, each just a few pixels across, into something more akin to individualized cartoon characters. Soon the next game was being envisioned as the first of a linked series of no less than four of them, each one detailing the further adventures of three of the tribes after their escape from the island at the end of Lemmings 2, each one ripe for trans-media adaptation by the Children’s Television Workshop. But the first game of this new generation, called The Lemmings Chronicles, just didn’t work. The attempt to cartoonify the franchise was cloying and clumsy, and the gameplay fell to pieces; unlike Lemmings 2, Lemmings Chronicles eminently deserves its underwhelming critical reputation. DMA insiders like Mike Dailly have since admitted that its was developed more out of obligation than enthusiasm: “We were all ready to move on.” When it performed even worse than its predecessor, the Children’s Television Workshop dropped out; all of its compromises had been for nothing.

Released just a year after Lemmings 2, Lemmings Chronicles marked the last game in the six-game contract that DMA Design had signed with their publisher Psygnosis what seemed like an eternity ago — in late 1987 to be more specific, when David Jones had first come to Psygnosis with his rather generic outer-space shoot-em-up Menace, giving no sign that he was capable of something as ingenious as Lemmings. Now, having well and truly demonstrated their ingenuity, DMA had little interest in re-upping; they were even willing to leave behind all of their intellectual property, which the contract Jones had signed gave to Psygnosis in perpetuity. In fact, they were more than ready to leave behind the cute-and-cuddly cartoon aesthetic of Lemmings and return to more laddish forms of gaming. The eventual result of that desire would be a second, more long-lasting worldwide phenomenon, known as Grand Theft Auto.

Meanwhile Sony, who had acquired Psygnosis in 1993, continued off and on to test the waters with new iterations of the franchise, but all of those attempts evinced the same vague sense of ennui that had doomed Lemmings Chronicles; none became hits. The last Lemmings game that wasn’t a remake appeared in 2006.

It’s interesting to ask whether DMA Design and Psygnosis could have managed the franchise better, thereby turning it into a permanent rather than a momentary icon of gaming, perhaps even one on a par with the likes of Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog; they certainly had the sales to compete head-to-head with those other videogame icons for a few years there in the early 1990s. The obvious objection is that Mario and Sonic were individualized characters, while DMA’s lemmings were little more than a handful of tropes moving in literal lockstep. Still, more has been done with less in the annals of media history. If everyone had approached Lemmings Chronicles with more enthusiasm and a modicum more writing and branding talent, maybe the story would have turned out differently.

Many speculate today that the franchise must inevitably see another revival at some point, what with 21st-century pop culture’s tendency to mine not just the A-list properties of the past, but increasingly its B- and C-listers as well, in the name of one generation’s nostalgia and another’s insatiable appetite for kitsch. Something tells me as well that we haven’t seen the last of Lemmings, but, as of this writing anyway, the revival still hasn’t arrived.

As matters currently stand, then, the brief-lived but frenzied craze for Lemmings has gone down in history, alongside contemporaries like Tetris and The Incredible Machine, as one more precursor of the casual revolution in gaming that was still to come, with its very different demographics and aesthetics. But in addition to that, it gave us two games that are brilliant in their own right, that remain as vexing but oh-so-rewarding as they were in their heyday. Long may they march on.

One other surviving tribute to Dundee’s second most successful gaming franchise is this little monument at the entrance to the city’s Seabraes Park, erected by local artist Alyson Conway in 2013. Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto… not bad for a city of only 150,000 souls.

(Sources: the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Compute! of January 1992; Amiga Format of May 1993 and the special 1992 annual; Retro Gamer 39; The One of November 1993; Computer Gaming World of July 1993.

Lemmings 2 has never gotten a digital re-release. I therefore make it available for download here, packaged to be as easy as possible to get running under DOSBox on your modern computer.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/lemmings-2-the-tribes/

[otakunoculture]

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

The news of a miniatures based board game set in Ancient Egypt has me over the moon, if not the sun, in anticipation of its eventual Kickstarter launch. The original press release suggested it will launch in 2019, but with everyone now in Christmas mode, I don’t think the listing will appear until early next year.

The teaser images of the demo on Twitter (see below) is merely a tease. After receiving CMON’s Cthulhu: Death May Die board game last week, the super high quality of the minis is as I expected. The Egyptian fanatic in me is hopping! An unboxing video will be coming soon.

The quality of the scale model pieces are amazing and the painter in me can’t wait to give colour to not only the game I currently have but also with adding to my collection. Technically, they’re not usable with other games like Games Workshop’s Warhammer series. Sadly, the Khemri was removed from the game and are deeply buried under the sand. The same can be said for Reaper Miniatures’ Warlord which no longer sees updates.

It’s not ank-hpected (had to say it) that enthusiasts of any game product in this setting desire a quality game, and I can’t wait for CMON to launch this project. I’m sure they are still fine tuning the 3D models for mass production, hence the delay. From the press release delivered over the summer:

CMON is pleased to announce Ankh, a new board game from the mind of Eric M. Lang, award-winning designer of the smash hits Blood Rage and Rising Sun. Play as a God of Ancient Egypt, competing to survive as society begins to forget the old ways, so that only you and your followers remain.

Ankh, the symbol of life itself, that even the Gods must fight for.

Build caravans, summon monsters, and convert followers in your quest to reign supreme. With great artwork by Adrian Smith and miniatures art directed by Mike McVey, who both worked with Eric on Blood Rage and Rising Sun, Ankh is the final instalment of Eric M. Lang’s strategic trilogy.

Deities, monsters, and the people of ancient Egypt have been lovingly reimagined and interpreted in beautiful illustrations and detailed miniatures, and players will truly feel like Gods as they shake the very foundations of Egypt. All gameplay in Ankh, including combat, is streamlined and non-random. Compete and win solely on your godly wits alone.

CMON Announces Ankh Board Game

“It was amazing to ‘get the band back together’ for this game. It’s always great to work with such phenomenal talents like Adrian and Mike”, said Eric M. Lang. “We all really poured our heart and soul into this game. It’s the finale of our trilogy of sorts, and we wanted it to really be something special. I’m really proud of what we’ve come up with and can’t wait to see those grand figures battling on the beautiful game board.”

Eric M. Lang Bio: Eric is an industry veteran, having created tabletop games for over 20 years. His history with CMON includes fan-favorite titles Blood Rage, Arcadia Quest, Bloodborne: The Card Game, and more. In 2016, Eric was the recipient of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, and other accolades include multiple The Dice Tower Awards and five Origins Awards.

Adrian Smith Bio: Adrian’s career as an illustrator is prolific, spanning over 30 years. He was one the defining artists for Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 line, and his work with Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering is beloved by fans. He has illustrated popular CMON titles like Blood Rage, Zombicide Special Guest Artist boxes, The Others, and Rising Sun.

Mike McVey Bio: Mike is well known for his ability to produce some of the best miniatures around, with three decades of experience in the industry. His resume includes work for Games Workshop, Wizards of the Coast, and Privateer Press. Mike’s figures for CMON include the miniatures in Blood Rage, The Others, Rising Sun and more.

So When Will @cmon Ankh: Gods of #Egypt Kickstart? #boardgame #miniatures #editorial By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest) The news of a miniatures based board game set in…

[thearkhound]

CGWorld: Monster Hunter World interview

The following is a translation of an article that was published on the Japanese site CGWorld Entry where they interview the character designers involved with the 2018 video game Monster Hunter: World by Capcom. The interview involves veteran designer Shin-ichi Shiohara and newcomer Mika Mekada as they discuss the process of coming up with characters for the game, as well as the training process that new hires must go through before joining Capcom’s design department.

This was part of a series of articles published by CG World Entry aimed at amateur CGI artists who wish to create characters at video game companies. The Metal Gear Survive interview I’ve previously translated was also part of this series.

You can read the original article at the following link

https://entry.cgworld.jp/column/post/201802-c-capcom.html

Profiles

Shin-ichi Shiohara - Lead character artist. Joined Capcom in 1999. Has been involved in the development of titles such as Forbidden Ground (2005), Devil May Cry 4 (2008) and Lost Planet 2 (2010), as well as the Monster Hunter and Dragon Dogma franchises. He’s been involved in the latest entry, Monster Hunter World, designing characters, equipment, backgrounds and otomos, in addition to drawing concept art. He is currently working as a design section leader for a currently unannounced title.

Mika Mekada - A native from Nagoya. She graduated from the Aichi University of Art with a design major and joined Capcom in 2017. She’s currently in her first year of employment and is working as a character designer and modeller for an unannounced title. She is struggling everyday to come up with character designs that attract many people.

Capcom - Established in 1979. They’re currently headquartered in Chuo, Osaka, where they plan, develop, manufacture, and distribute PC/console games, online games and mobile content, as well as manage amusement facilities. They are responsible for numerous hit franchises such as Street Fighter, Resident Evil and Monster Hunter.

Monster Hunter: World - The latest entry in the Monster Hunter series, released on January 26, 2018. The player must hunt monster who live in various places. The design works of hunters, weapons, equipment, monsters and such that appear throughout the game will be covered in this article.

Be Sure To Give A Reason For Every Design

Let’s start by telling our readers what kind of work both of you do in the Design Section you’ve been assigned to.

Shiohara: Our section is responsible for designing the characters, weapons, equipment, props and such that appear in the game. Many of the artists specialize in certain field. I am the lead character designer myself. When I first joined Capcom, I was assigned to designing and modelling environments, but I transferred over to the Design Section since I wanted more variety in my work. Lately I’ve been in charge of designing many characters and their equipment.

So do you practice your design work while also acting as leader?

Shiohara: That’s right! Many of the artists at Capcom want to be creative in their jobs and don’t want to concentrate only on management. While it’s difficult to be creative while being manager, they also have privilege of assigning themselves the job they most want, so it’s fun in that regard.

Are the designing and modelling work assigned to different sections?

Shiohara: While there are indeed separate sections for design and modelling, most artists do both jobs anyway. Some people are already using 3D tools during the design stages. Particularly when designing monsters, many people find it a lot easier to use Zbrush to sculpt a form than it is to do a drawing.

Mekada: While I’ve been assigned to the Design Section myself, I do a lot of 3D modelling myself. Back when I was in school I used to believe that designing and modelling were two different careers, so I was surprised to learn that some people tend to do both jobs.

Was Shiohara-san in charge of the characters and equipment in Monster Hunter World?

Shiohara: Yes. When it comes to Monster Hunter, the equipment wore by the characters are no mere armors and clothes, they’re almost characters themselves. Because Monster Hunter is a series where you hunt monsters [of course], create weapons and equipment using materials you acquire and then fight stronger monsters, the designs of the monsters are naturally given precedence. We expand ideas such as wanting to play the game a certain way or bring about a certain strategy when confronting a certain monster and then stuff them into the designs of the monsters. For example, there’s a creature called Anjanath that lives in the ancient forest that is established as a very warlike creature that attacks other monster that invade its territory and will pursue the player everywhere once it gets angry. As a result, characters who wear equipment created from a slain Anjanath will also have a wild warlike look to them. Its weapons have also been designed as something that such a warrior would love to use.

Mr. Shiohara talking about his designs. In front of his hand is the costume design of a character wearing armor created from the remains of a slain Anjanath

Ms. Mekada also talking about her designs.

So all the weapons in the game have a basis in something?

Shiohara: We always try to give a reason to every design. Just drawing something because you like the colors or shape isn’t enough to convince the users or its surroundings, nor will it make for an interesting game. You will need a design that suits the characterization that you’re aiming for.

Can you tell us about the process that leads you to complete one design?

Shiohara: We started by drawing many rough designs in order to expand our image. In the case of the Anjanath gear we’ve mentioned a while ago, we also drew a rough design that invoke the image of a tribe from an undiscovered land that was even wilder than the finalized design. During this stage I try to draw as many rough designs as I could come up with and then show it to other artists in the Design Section to get their feedback. The final decision is made by the art director who oversees the game’s worldview. In the case of Monster Hunter World, that person would be Kaname Fujioka, who serves as the game’s executive director and art director. Once you narrow down the direction for the finalized design, we fill-in the details while keeping in mind the overall silhouette.

So everything from the rough design up until the finalized one is done by a single artist?

Shiohara: If there’s room in the schedule, we might have multiple artists working on various rough designs of the same idea, but usually we only have one artist assigned to a specific design from beginning to the end. The same applies even to newcomers like Ms. Mekada. We give no restrictions to rookies just because they can only do certain things, they’re responsible until the end. However, those artists who cannot complete a job because of their lack of experience will often be supported by their surrounding seniors and supervisors.

Are there artists who specializes in weapon designs, like there is for monsters and environments?

Shiohara: There are artists who specializes in a variety of things, but usually we have artists who specializes in weapon designs. There are a variety of weapons that appear throughout the Monster Hunter series and a great deal of them have a transformation functionalities. Specialized knowledge and technique are required since it is necessary to come up with a design that doesn’t collapse before and after transformation.

Realizing The Oddities in One’s Drawings

Ms. Mekada is currently in her first year Capcom. Can you tell us what you studied before joining the company?

Mekada: I’ve studied design at the Aichi University of Arts. During the first two years I studied a wide range of design styles from flats to solids, while during the last two years I’ve majored in visual communication design. I love drawing since I was a child, so I thought about learning how to design in order to make the best use of my illustrations. For example, I used to be interested in the Ainu culture, so I depicted their stories as illustrations, printed them on a pamphlet and distributed them around for free.

Why did you pursue a path in game development?

Mekada: I decided to purse a career in video games after studying various design styles at college and was wondering what to do. I love video games since kindergarten and I would often play with my sisters and other neighborhood kids who were also into videogames. I would cry so much when I lost, it would bother the other people around me. I wanted to draw videogame characters during my later years in grade school, but I wasn’t very skilled at all. I would practice by trial and error while wondering about how I would draw a cool character or a cute one. I also wanted to work on creating videogame characters since I love coming up with a character’s backstory.

It sounds like you’re working dream job.

Shiohara: I was interested in Mekada from the beginning, since I was the teacher for the rookie training program this year and she herself wanted a character designing job, so I transferred her to her current section by the end of July.

Mekada: Almost everything I learned from the rookie training program I’ve applied in my current job. At first I thought I was simply doing my best to learn new skills and knowledge, but later I realized that the people training me were trying to determine the suitability of the new hires and were already planning my future assignments.

How long does the Rookie Training Program lasts?

Shiohara: Around three months. Every year we even get graduates from art universities who majored in oil painting and sculpting that had never touched a 3DCG tool or even Photoshop. However, our lecturers are people who are active at the frontlines and are pretty good at teaching the new hires to make something up to a certain extent. In fact, Mekada was practically an amateur when it came to using 3DCG tools, but she quickly learned to use them.

What was the most impressive thing that you learned during your training period, Ms. Mekada?

Mekada: The Capcom-style human body drawing training was quite practical and educational, unlike the drawing examinations done in the art universities. Instead of drawing a nude model, they give you a stick figure with only a specified pose and you’re asked to flesh out and fill-in the details with your drawing.

Shiohara: Since we deliberately assign angles and poses to artists that they don’t usually draw, even those artists who are proud of their skills are forced to conceit and end up realize that they did not know the human body as much as they thought they did, usually resulting in a humbling experience. Thus, after we have a grasp of their understanding and abilities, they are trained in how illustrate the anatomy of the human body.

Mr. Shiohara and Ms. Mekada talking about the new employee training program. On a hand is a clear file containing concept art, rough sketches, CGI and such made during the training period.

Mekada: Because my major was design arts, I never had a formal education in human drawing, even though I had been drawing human characters on my own volition. I learned a lot from the training program, making me examining my own work and realize which parts of my drawings looked odd. It was a huge revelation. I wouldn’t say my art is perfect, but now I know which mistakes to avoid, what isn’t possible and where I need some practice, which helps in setting up goals in my own work.

How Much Fun Gameplay Can Be Suggested Within The Limits of the Game

Shiohara: During the training, I ask the recruits to design a character, turn it into a model, insert the skeleton, implement it into the game engine and then move it using existing animation patterns. In her series of assignments, Mekada designed a character, to the point that she even thought about the character’s gameplay style, and then provided a very throughout presentation.

So it’s not just about drawing a character, but also about thinking how you want players to use and enjoy your character. That’s why artwork and plans are made to communicate to other people.

Shiohara: That’s right. In fact, we often give presentations to the other staff members in our daily work in order to convey the idea that such a character fights in such a matter, such as by drawing a small scene like a comic strip or by mimicking the intended actions ourselves. We convey the values of designs and ideas through such explanations, which is how we increase supporters. Mekada was able to do it to an extent during her training period, which is why I thought she was suitable for the job. The enthusiasm of wanting to create the game you want is not something that can be taught during training. I believe the most important ability is knowing how to communicate with others.

Mekada: I was able to experience the process up of my design being into 3D and being implemented in a game on my assignment, so I made many new discoveries. For example, there is a limit to the amount of wavering objects, such as hair styles or accessories and apparel that interferes with the arm and leg movement of a character cannot be realized when it comes to fighting game characters. Therefore it is necessary to make it into a unique silhouette while making a costume that fits the character’s body to some extent. It was through much guidance from my instructors and a process of trial and error that came to realize the concept of a “form that doesn’t work no matter what.”

Shiohara: It’s important for designs to understand such circumstances in a game, but there’s also the drawback that if you end up learning too much, the amount of designs you can contribute end up being reduced. Designers are expected to come up with as much fun gameplay as possible, as long as they can be realized in the game. If your scope shrinks more than it is necessary, then your designs might not entertain or even surprise users. Art directors have pointed out to me that “you should keep the modeller in mind and do what you want without being too reckless”. First you try to draw what pleases you and then you discuss it with the modeller as you try to find a common ground that approaches the limit of expression. Given that it becomes harder the more experienced you become, you shouldn’t try to be overcautious when it comes to coming up with ideas either.

All artists who have worked for a long time have their own “Fetishes”

Finally, Ms. Mekada, can you tell us about your future aspirations?

Mekada: I want to create a variety of characters and perhaps someday create a character that will change the outlook and values of the player. I played many history-themed games during my years as a grade schooler, so I’ve experienced not just videogames, but also history. As such, I wish to convey new discoveries to the player through the characters that I create.

Shiohara: Mekada can be almighty when it comes to both, designing and modelling, but I really want her to think about what she can express best and try to show it to me. All artists who have worked for a long time tend to have their own fetishes that they try to express in their work whenever the opportunity arrives. When you show me your fetish, it’s easier to assign you a job by saying “this is Mekada’s specialty. If you rely on her, she will give you the best.” Once you get used to your current job, I want you to gradually refine your fetish and put it out there.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Problem With ‘Porn for Women’

Pornhub launched a “porn for women” category last year, but the adult content monolith certainly isn’t the first or only corporate entity to identify a demand for “female-friendly” porn. Platforms like Bellesa, ForHerTube, and Sssh.com are now more accessible than ever, and that’s mostly a good thing. Women deserve affirming adult content that centers women’s agency and portrays them as active, consenting players enjoying realistic sexual experiences.

However, much of the rhetoric surrounding “porn for women” emerges from misguided assumptions and broad generalizations about the kind of porn women enjoy, and the kind of women who enjoy porn.

“The term ‘porn for women’ is problematic because a lot of porn does cater to an assumed cis male audience, and as part of the general porn consumer base women should feel free to select films from any genre,” artist and performer Courtney Trouble said. “In one way, creating a porn for women genre allows for a ‘men only’ genre to perpetuate itself. It just buys into an either/or dichotomy that doesn’t even begin to disrupt the foundational issues that create the market gap.”

A short history of porn for women

The idea that women watch porn isn’t new. In the early 1980s, director and producer Candida Royalle rose as an industry icon for her work creating adult films from a woman’s perspective. Lesbian production company Fatale Media and On Our Backs, the first woman-run lesbian porn magazine, also emerged as porn innovators around this same time. These pioneering enterprises sought to create porn that centered women’s physical pleasure—a rejection of the frenetic thrusting, oily bodies, and theatrics that defined mainstream porn for years.

These early woman-centered enterprises were part of a largely political movement for porn that freed women’s sexual expression from the male gaze.

“If you look back at the emergence of porn for women, or lesbian porn, or feminist porn, it was a call to arms, so to speak,” Lynn Comella, author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure said. “It was a desire for cultural intervention into a marketplace of images and discourses related to sex and sexuality that catered primarily to men.”

This era also marked a truly revolutionary moment in porn history.

“This was incendiary in the 1980s,” Sociologist and author Chauntelle Tibbals said. “Because although women had always been involved in content production, this was not generally acknowledged or understood by the viewing public.”

The social and political discourse surrounding this first wave of porn created by and for women eventually reached mainstream consumers and creators, inspiring cultural conversations in support of ethical porn, the importance of paying for porn, and the need for racial and gender diversity both in front of and behind the camera. Thanks in part to extensive media coverage and corporate interest in recent years, public discussions about women and porn are far less taboo, but still lack the depth and complexity necessary for a truly evolved cultural understanding.

“In 2019, women have more opportunities to find sexual commodities, products, materials, that are designed with them in mind, but the way in which they’re imagined as sexual consumers or porn consumers continues to be narrow, overall,” said Comella.

Generalizing the Female Gaze

Angie Rowntree, founder and director of Sssh.com, believes “porn for women” functions primarily as an SEO-friendly marketing term for mainstream tube sites. “It’s very misleading and dishonest,” Rowntree said. “The term puts women in a box, and it’s one I don’t particularly care for. ‘Women like these things, but not these other things.’ We’re pigeonholing people. It’s a huge injustice to the diversity of our desires.”

The same glowing media coverage that normalized women as porn consumers—as well as some of the language these sites sometimes use themselves—seems to assume that women as a whole are straight and cisgender. Porn site Bellesa claims on its website that it features “hot guys. Storylines. Natural bodies. Free erotic stories. Real orgasms.” On Sssh.com, Rowntree prefers terms like “female-focused” and “female-led” to distinguish Sssh.com’s content from male-oriented offerings, like a popular woman-on-woman category that includes a scene centered on same-sex marriage, though the images featured on the site’s homepage only depict heterosexual couples.

“It’s a huge injustice to the diversity of our desires.”

On most adult content sites, “porn for women” now occupies its own genre and aesthetic defined by soft lighting and vanilla sex, with a narrow view of what can—or should—turn women on.

Women in general have a widely varied and diverse set of sexual proclivities and expressions and enjoy consuming content in different ways,” Tibbals said. “In this way, current use of the phrase ‘porn for women’ is frustrating, as well as being generally dismissive and judgey in and of itself.”

Some of the most recent iterations of “porn for women” use marketing language that seems to uphold a sense of sexual respectability politics and moral policing. CEO Caroline Spiegel reportedly described her new video and image-free porn site Quinn as “a less gross, more fun Pornhub for women,” a description that suggests women who enjoy typical tube sites, or create content themselves, as deviant sexual outliers.

“This fits a larger historical framing of ideas, that women in particular need a certain amount of handholding. That, if we’re going to entice them to be sex toy consumers or porn consumers, then we have to lead them to our product very gently,” Comella said. “It suggests that women are easily ‘grossed out’, or they don’t have the fortitude of their male counterparts, they’re more delicate creatures, or they’re more easily offended.”

According to Trouble, creating a distinction between porn “for women” and “for men” also erases queer identity in consumers and performers alike.

“One big problem with this genre is that it exploits male bodies in a really corrupt way,” Trouble said. During the early 00s, Trouble launched nofauxxx.com to trade links and network with other adult content creators. There, Trouble met a producer on the who frequently bought pre-made gay porn content that was “straight enough” to resell on a separate porn site for women. “In this case, the producer was erasing queer identity to cater to a straight cis female audience. This isn’t subversive. It’s marketing. I do not see how it is any different than Bic making pink pens for women,” Trouble said.

Filmmaker Erika Lust doesn’t refer to her work as “porn for women” or market it as such, because she believes the term reduces women’s sexuality to a stereotype. She prefers the term “indie,” and creates adult films grounded in a feminist ethos instead of search engine optimization.

“I have always said I am a feminist, and naturally my values are injected in all what I do,” Lust said. “My cinema has my feminist values behind it, and I put female sexuality and pleasure at the forefront.”

Even as a soft, gentle aesthetic generalizes what women want out of a sexual experience, the appeal of friendlier, less seedy, feminist-oriented adult content can serve as entrypoint for many women exploring their sexuality and interest in porn—particularly those looking to avoid depictions of gratuitous violence or anonymized, identity-less sex.

“In the past, when I’d visited other porn sites, I felt like an intruder—like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be,” Michelle Shnaidman, CEO of female-focused porn content site Bellesa, said. “I wanted to see sexuality content that really related to my personal experience.” Bellesa features content that claims to center women’s pleasure and sexual agency, and curates videos based on user data indicating a wide range of sexual preferences as well as general trends.

According to Shnaidman, Bellesa users tend to prefer videos with strong storylines and narrative context, and the videos users consume tend to run longer in length than on other mainstream porn sites. “There is no excessive derogatory profanity, exorbitant moaning and screaming, fake orgasms, or objectifying narratives. There is no violence,” Shnaidman said.

Controversy around ‘porn for women’ and ‘feminist porn’

The language of empowerment, feminism, and ethics make great selling points, but porn for women isn’t immune to the many industry-wide traps producers purportedly work to avoid. Originally, Bellesa’s video platform allowed users to find and share content from other sites, but accusations of stolen content soon followed after its launch in 2017.

“We were, unintentionally, disempowering the people who create the content in the first place quite at odds with our core mission,” Shnaidman said. Bellesa plans to launch their own production company in the near future, which Shnaidman said will follow ethical practices regarding talent safety and compensation.

Rowntree, a longtime veteran of the adult industry, is keenly aware of widespread issues with content piracy. “Everyone in this industry is at risk of having their content stolen, regardless of genre. It’s just the sad truth,” Rowntree said. Sssh.com produces most of their own content, which is available for streaming only, digitally fingerprinted, copywritten, and blocked by a paywall. Rowntree also maintains a direct relationship with the producers and filmmakers whose curated content appears on the site. “We have had success with this method and have been able to significantly slow down the piracy process,” Rowntree said.

The cultural conversations sparked by the #MeToo movement also raise questions about sexual consent practices in the porn industry, including producers of feminist porn and porn geared toward women. In 2018, adult performer Rooster came forward with allegations of sexual abuse against Lust Films, including incidents of boundary violations and poor working practices on set. In a detailed account on their personal website, Rooster writes that director Olympe de G. allegedly dismissed his request for a break during a masturbation scene. Rooster proceeded with the scene, unsure if pushing the issue or refusing to shoot would damage their reputation.

Lust denied Rooster’s allegations of sexual abuse and assault on set, citing Lust Films’ zero-tolerance policy against sexual harassment, abuse, or violence. However, she acknowledged that de G. may not have handled the incident appropriately. “It can be argued that this incident was not a good example of best director practice in the production of a film set, but it is certainly not sexual abuse nor assault,” Lust said.

The ‘basic facepalm’ of porn for women

Catering to a heteronormative, mainstream view of feminity and female preference can leave some consumers with limited options that ignore the scope and diversity of women’s sexual expression and lean on gender stereotypes. Many women enjoy gay porn, or even ultra-violent porn, but this reality isn’t easily marketable.

“Therein lies the basic facepalm quality of ‘porn for women,’” said Tibbals. “All women? No. Nothing can meet the needs of all women, as all women have very diverse interests.” Porn that is truly created to break the stigma surrounding women and porn must first stop stigmatizing itself.

“What would be more successful is to create genres of porn that are transparent about which of their scenes depict masculine domination, or other factors that may present themselves to be undesirable to an audience that’s seeking something ‘feminine focused,’” said Trouble. “These words really mean nothing, so to just be able to read an actual description of what’s happening in the porn you’re buying—one that’s written by the producers or curators and accurately represents the performers and performances—that’s powerful. Then people of all genders can make informed decisions based on what they want to see.”

The Problem With ‘Porn for Women’ syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[mrmichaelchadler]

Galaxy's Edge, Panels, Argus Panox and More: Highlights from the 2019 Star Wars Celebration

Regardless of what level of Star Wars fandom you subscribe to, it's quite clear that what George Lucas originally intended as a fairytale has become more than he could possibly imagine. I was reminded of this while attending my first Star Wars Celebration in Chicago this past weekend. Being a lifelong fan of the movies (and pretty much all things related to them), I've always wanted to attend a convention solely dedicated to Star Wars. Overall, it was a full and rewarding experience, confirming that real life is so much better than internet life.

In case you weren't aware (if so, I envy you), a certain faction of online Star Wars fandom has become toxic since J.J. Abrams brought back the Skywalker sage in 2015. Outraged from so-called fans could be found online due to the presence of a black stormtrooper and the focus on a female protagonist. Other complaints and bemoaning could be found online, some directed at the two "A Star Wars Story" movies, "Rogue One" and "Solo," but the good news is I found none of that negativity in the five days I attended Star Wars Celebration. 

There were signs warning against harassment all over the convention floor and that was mainly due to non-consent advances that cosplayers have received in the past. I can truly attest that all my conversations, either with colleagues or regular attendees, were filled with fruitful Star Wars conversations revolving that were constructive and enriching. Any disagreements were rare and drowned out by a bountiful love for what Lucas created and what others have developed and maintained.

That in and of itself was certainly one of the highlights of the long weekend. It confirmed not only the differences between online and real life interaction, but it also reaffirmed that passion and enthusiasm far outweighs cynicism and apathy. The fervent fandom I encountered at and in-between panels or walking the exhibit floor, confirmed acceptance, respect and the desire to include others instead of ostracize them.

The people I engaged with were as diverse as the panel presentations offered at the WinTrust Arena or the ones across the street at the McCormick Place West Expansion. The biggest events were presentations for "Episode IX" and "The Mandalorian," and panels that offered a look at a new entertainment venue for Star Wars, updates on existing properties, and behind-the scenes information on the making of some of the movies.

Galaxy's Edge / photo by David Fowlie

The panel titled "Bringing Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge to Life at Disney Parks" helped promote and detail the work that has gone into the Star Wars theme parks the House of Mouse will be opening in May 31st at Disneyland in Anaheim and on August 29th in Orlando. The idea behind it all is for visitors to basically walk into and interact with a Star Wars environment. Buoyant host Josh Gad came out on stage and brought out Imagineers (a patented Disney term) Scott Trowbridge, Chris Beatty, Doug Chiang, Asa Kalama, Margaret Kerrison, and Matt Martin, to discuss the creativity and authenticity that went into bringing the environment to life. 

As many already know, a life-size Millennium Falcon has been built for each location, parked at the Black Spire Outpost located on the planet Batuu. It's a brand new location for Star Wars, yet it will feel familiar and be considered canon in relation to the universe. There's already books out there pertaining to the location, and this summer Marvel Comics (owned by Disney) will release a Galaxy's Edge comic. They even got the vocal talents of Jim Cummings, Paul Reubens, and Frank Oz involved, playing some deep cut characters and a recognizable one, respectively. 

Galaxy's Edge will be a place where you can participate in the story at every turn, with each decision bringing you closer to The Resistance or the First Order (which means it takes place post "The Force Awakens"). No doubt, the big draw will be flying the Falcon, which will require six people in the cockpit - two pilots, two gunners and two engineers. The state of your ship afterward is dependent on how successful your mission was. If you took on damage, it will be visible. You'll smell and see smoke when you exit the same Falcon corridors you entered, adding to the visceral experience. 

I attended this panel with a modicum of trepidation, knowing the parks will be astronomically expensive and that the presentation would have the propensity of being all hype. In a smart move, Disney made it so attendees of Star Wars Celebration can be part of Galaxy’s Edge at the convention by recording a statement in a booth (what Star Wars means to you or what about the park you are looking forward to the most) on the show floor, which will then be added to a holocron, which will be on display at the park. Bottom line: this is likely to be an amazing experience for fans, but there's no doubt it will be crazy crowded the first year it opens. 

"Vader Immortal - A Star Wars Series - Episode I"

Two highly-anticipated video games were announced as well, both of which will be released this year. On Friday afternoon, there was a presentation for "Vader Immortal: A Star Wars Series - Episode I," which was created by ILMxLAB for the Occulus Quest and Occulus Rift VR game systems. The designers, writers and producers of the game were brought out on stage, and they discussed how the story of the game is considered canon as well and has ties to the comics and films, specifically "Rogue One." 

Set between "Revenge of the Sith" and "A New Hope," the game finds you playing a smuggler who is hired by Vader (voiced by Scott Lawrence) to carry out a special job. You'll have a droid named ZOE3 (Maya Rudolph) to assist you and offer some levity to a game that's quite dark, with most of it taking place on the molten lava planet, Mustafar, home to Vader's lair. Aside from the 40-60 minutes of the game storyline, there's also a demo that occurs in a lightsaber dojo where you can test your skills as you feel the heat and vibration of a Jedi's weapon. 

Saturday afternoon came the presentation for EA and Respawn's new game "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order," a single-player Jedi fantasy story. It occurs after the events of "Revenge of the Sith" and follows a Padawan named Cal (played by Cameron Monaghan using performance capture) who managed to survive Order 66 - which branded all Jedi traitors to the Galactic Republic and targets for execution by the Grand Army of the Republic’s clone troopers - and is now hiding in plane sight. Of course, that won't last long, and soon Cal is being pursued by an elite Inquisitor and a new type of stormtrooper (designed specifically for the game). With the help of assistant droid BD-1 (veteran Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt gave life to the character) and the mysterious Cere (Debra Wilson), Cal will work his way through what appears to be a compelling story arch. During the panel, an exciting trailer and informative behind-the-scenes clip was shown, which confirmed that this is more up my alley than a VR game. The game will be released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on November 15th.

The most memorable panels for me had to do with the talent that made the fantastic visuals of Star Wars possible. On Friday afternoon, there was a presentation called "The Creatures, Droids & Aliens of Star Wars" in which award-winning special effects and make-up artist Neal Scanlan came out and discussed his work. Scanlan has been working on Star Wars movies since "The Force Awakens" and had plenty to talk about, from the changes the Chewbacca costumes has undergone to the development of the new droid D-O for "The Rise of Skywalker." He also had a fully-functioning head model for Six Eyes, aka Argus Panox, the cheating alien who played sabaac during Han Solo's first card game with Lando Calrissian in "Solo." The fact that Scanlan and his crew are responsible for convincing viewers there are living and interactive beings apart from humanoids in these movies is impressive.

Doug Chiang / photo by David Fowlie

Another talented artist, Doug Chiang, led two presentations, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, and both provided a revealing look at how the look of Star Wars vehicles and characters are developed. I've long admired Chiang's work, starting with his designs for "The Phantom Menace" and on to his work on "Rogue One." He led a class called "The Art and Techniques of Designing for Star Wars" and also delivered a tutorial "The Evolution of Star Wars Design - Designing Episode I," in which he provided valuable examples of his work. He humbly described what it was like when he began working with Lucas in the mid '90s and how his artistic approach has developed over the years. Hearing from this extraordinary concept artist/production designer and meeting him was a personal highlight for me. 

The panels I attended were energetic, fun and often enlightening, but there's more to Star Wars Celebration than these presentations. One could easily get lost for hours on all that the convention floor has to offer, but what struck me the most in the five days I attended was the obvious passion and camaraderie I witnessed from the fans. There's been 12 of these conventions within the last 20 years and it's clear they've become a place where fans from all walks of life can commune around something that has impacted their lives in a meaningful way.

Star Wars Celebration is a place where you can talk all things Star Wars with anyone there and not get a weird look in return. It's a place where you can feel understood and accepted, which is something needed considering the toxic vitriol that tends to surface online when it comes to Star Wars fandom. I left the Celebration quite fulfilled and inspired, with a renewed appreciation for all things Star Wars. 

from All Content http://bit.ly/2PkjdM1

[thomsen73mccormack-blog]

Shoujos Manga Finest Manga For Ladies

Shoujos Manga Finest Manga For Girls

Updated - 09-Mar-2015:MangaCrazy v5.0 is launched early! On the very least, we learn each major manga journal at the moment revealed when it is launched. Just learn it now and take pleasure in. Why Must you Read Manga? Publisher: Kim Chariz Levita Anime characters from Tv and manga are actually broadly embraced by everybody, particularly youth. This step is one that's suggested for collectors who've hopes of later reselling their anime Collectibles for a profit. The older one beloved the boy however as soon as she handed away, she gave him a process to perform. Nevertheless, before his dying, Gold Roger advised the crowd about his treasure, "One Piece". It isn't like Naruto, One Piece and Bleach nevertheless it at all times has a great story to it. There is not any stopping to the Asian culture dominating the world by means of their shows particularly their story line-up. Hayao Miyazaki, the much known title in Anime, directed the movie and was praised by followers all around the globe for laying stress to every minute detail in the film. Like most different anime action movies, it's an adaptation of a manga series of the same name. All you have to do is downloading this consumer, set up it and enter a sound mail adress (free mails like gmail work high-quality), after launching it.

Naughty game titles are perfect for spicing in place a dull night time inside, or making mild beyond downtime at work. And so, it has turn into a lawless and chaotic place where everyone is just making an attempt to stay as regular as they'll to outlive. The visuals are slick and normal and positively nothing to complain about. There are various anime present inside your planet most applicable now. Anime is getting standard both in terms of audience and vary. And yet learn we do and have a great time getting unnoticeably edu-ma-cated in addition! You don’t should take every bit of criticism, however it's worthwhile to hear. Watch what occurs between the punk brother who has to take on his twins future and the childhood pal. Childhood buddies, but once the superstar brother dies, the older has to take on his future. In actual fact all the genres are complementary to each other. Media conventions are very a lot about television and film. Players might want to play this gap in an aggressive fashion to try for par, however these who are taking care of their rating card might want to play safe by finding the fairway from a shorter drive off the tee.

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Nicely you'd hardly want to use your personal shared experiences of the pure world particularly when drawing manga online. Since the late 1980s, Japanese manga has taken the world by storm to become Japan’s most popular cultural export. Hopefully, I may also help make somewhat sense of the appeal of Japanese comics. anime expo know that that is simply an expression that is different, not the subject itself, however while you say Japanese Cartoon, it sounds much less animated within the sense, which I need to apologize if that offend somebody. The well-known Japanese artist Hokusai (he lived from 1760 until 1849) coined the time period manga in 1815 when he referred to some of his comic sketches as "man" (which means whimsical or careless) "ga" (which means drawings). The early sketches of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, as an example, have larger eyes than most current sketches of the characters do. Identical to blockbuster movies do not all the time win Oscars, and the highest-selling music artists don't always win Grammys.

And a pair of. I came upon that my ardour never was about making motion pictures in any respect, this was merely the floor. Even, a few of them argue that the term 'cartoons' denote to western cartoons unique of animated alternatives underneath this category. A sordid case if there ever was one, it makes a veteran prosecutor marvel what the bastard is basically after. To look at Pleased Tree Pals falls within daily routine of a big inhabitants of anime lovers comprising of both kids and grown up adults. 4. Anime Animal - Begin with a giant circle for the pinnacle after which add the facial pointers. He then joins to get the attention of the woman. A panel software designed specifically for comedian creation. You run smaller risks of performing prohibited actions on the web if you don't download mangas from homepages. Navigate to an internet cartoon effect software equivalent to Befunky, intoCartoon or KusoCartoon (see Sources).

[raystart]

Perfecting Your Sales Pitch to Get Your Ideas the Green Light

Artists and designers, for the most part, strive to create beautiful products and solve an array of visual, aural, and tactile challenges. They don’t often pursue their careers with the hope of becoming professional number crunchers. And yet, as more designers strive to build businesses and brands of their own, many find they need to be fluent in more than Photoshop to spark the interest of the investment community.

Veteran investor Tige Savage, who co-founded venture capital firm Revolution and co-leads the firm’s early state investment fund, Revolution Ventures, knows a thing or two about what it takes to successfully grow a business. And he’s willing to look anywhere for a good idea. One of his most recent investments is the design-focused start-up Framebridge, a direct-to-consumer custom framing company that just announced a $30 million Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price.

In the interview below, Savage offers keen insight to creatives on how they can perfect their sales pitch.

When somebody is coming to you with an investment proposal, what do you look for?

The key things that you really want to articulate to your investors are your background, your team, and the elements of the team. There is a tendency to get into great detail. Take it to the high level. Say, this is what our thing does, this is how we monetize it, and here is what the competition look like. An investor will ask who your competitors are. Many people will say “our product is so new and different we have no competitors.” This is not right. VCs want to understand your awareness of the competitive environment. They want to know why you think you have strengths that carve out a reasonable niche versus the rest. 

Then you need to explain how you expect to deploy capital. How, ultimately, you expect for the investors to get their money back? Know your numbers; investors will want to see objective evidence of success. Ask yourself: What’s my customer acquisition cost? How is that trending over time? How did those customers acquired at different points in time behave vis-a-vis each other?

“An investor will ask who your competitors are. Many people will say “our product is so new and different we have no competitors.” This is not right.”

What are some of the most common mistakes you see?

One of the greatest mistakes first-time founders make is thinking they need to know the answers to everything, and that VCs are just out to fire them if they don’t. Neither of those things is true.

Nobody expects you to know the answer to everything. What they are expecting is that you hire the best people. Often, founders feel that hiring super qualified people somehow undermines them. They think, “maybe this person knows more than I do and the VCs are going to want these guys to run the company and I’m gonna end up with some political fight.” The truth is, nobody ever gets fired because they have a great team. It’s the opposite.

“One of the greatest mistakes first-time founders make is thinking they need to know the answers to everything, and that VCs are just out to fire them if they don’t. Neither of those things is true.”

It’s also important for founders to remember that when companies mature, the needs of the senior team change. Often, you can hire a better person when you’re a bigger, more established, better capitalized, higher growth company. But what happens is that founders who have a very small team of two or three people early on feel too great a sense of allegiance to these people. They think: “Gosh, they got me from A to B. I need to give them a shot to get to C. If they fail, then they fail.”

In reality, once you get to B, you can hire a person with the necessary skills set and find a new role within the organization for the other. Put them underneath a highly qualified person to learn a new skills set, empower them, but don’t let there be room for ego. There’s no room for the attitude “I was the chief product officer at a three-person company and now we’re a 100-person company and I’m not giving up that title.”

One of Tige Savage’s more recent investments, framing start-up Framebridge, just received a $30 million Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price. Image courtesy of Revolution Ventures.

How do you go about figuring out how much money to raise?

Raise enough capital to achieve an important business milestone that is an inflection point in the business. Plus, enough capital for a little variability around achieving on the timeframe that you think. Plus, enough runway to raise your next round of capital.

Hypothetically, if you’re an entrepreneur you might think: “Hey, what I need is 10 customers, each of whom is at least $100,000 in sales, and I need to populate my database with these people and I need to find a business development deal with this important partner.” Now you have to think, what’s the sequencing for me to be able to achieve these things?

So, I’m going to get my first customer, then second, then eventually five. That’s going to be enough leverage for me to start my negotiations for this important business partnership. I’m going to hire somebody to populate that database and, by the time they bring us up to our tenth customer, I should have that business partnership done and that’s going to allow me to hire this many people. And I’m going to have to make some investments in order to do it. It’s going to take me 15 months.

Again, all hypothetical. You add it up and say “Oh, that 15 months is going to cost me $450,000, or $30,000 a month.” How certain am I that I’m going to get that? Let’s say I’m pretty certain; I have a list of 20 customers and we already have a conversation going. I’ll give myself 18 months to give just a little room.

“Raise enough capital to achieve an important business milestone that is an inflection point in the business. Plus, enough capital for a little variability around achieving on the timeframe that you think. Plus, enough runway to raise your next round of capital.”

It typically takes six months to raise capital. You say 15 months, I’m gonna make it 18 to give myself a little bit of room, plus another six is 24 months total. If I estimate $30,000 a month, that’s $360,000 a year, or $720,000 for two years, so I want to raise $720,000. What that all does is it gives me certainty that I hit these inflection points.

It can feel like creatives and VCs speak two different languages—right brain, left brain. Do you have any recommendations on how creators can best communicate ideas to investors?

VCs aren’t looking for a business plan; they’re looking for a pitch that’s crisp, tells the story well, is well presented and is substantiated by data. Stress test your pitch with everybody you know. Put it in front of as many people as you can. Ask them to ask hard questions. Come up with answers to the hard questions. Practice and be ready.

Two, consider a co-founder. If there’s a real vacancy in the skillset—if you just have the right side of the brain and you need both—go find the left side of the brain to fill that in. Incubators and accelerators are good places to go looking for a co-founder. They’re also good ways to be put through the paces to refine an idea into more concrete set of business opportunities.

What was your fastest ‘yes’ to an entrepreneur that pitched you?

The company is called Framebridge—they do custom framing of either physical or digital goods at great price points and with incredibly good customer service. It’s a very design-oriented business. The founder is Susan Tynan, who I’ve known from a few prior lives. She had worked with us, then left to go to the White House, then ran business development at LivingSocial. We met for breakfast to talk about other opportunities and part of the way through she said, “I have this idea. It’s this custom framing business.”

As I listened to her, I realized it’s exactly the kind of thing I like. Custom framing is a big category, $5 billion in the United States a year. There’s only one scale player, which is Michaels, the crafts store, and prices are extremely high. The customer experience is downright terrible. You have to go in, you make all these choices, you wait three weeks, you have to go back and pick the thing up, you find out it costs $400 and you’re like “Gosh.”

So Susan was describing this terrible experience and I could see how technology could make it better. And it was coming from a person whom I knew, who had learned the demand for this kind of thing exists from her experience with LivingSocial. I like disruptive consumer-oriented products, so it was right in my sweet spot, I told her, “I think it’s a great idea and I want to invest.”

You told her you’d invest before she even asked for an investment?

Yeah. I thought it was a great idea. I told her she ought to do it. I wanted her to go back and do a little bit of homework but I said, “I love it. We’ll find a way to make it happen.”

Interview edited for length and clarity.

[nazih-fares]

Three months after its release, Destiny 2 finally launches its first expansion: Curse of Osiris. Suffice to say that Bungie had no interest in skipping on expansions with this sequel, especially since hardcore fans of the series were already feeling a lack of challenge for veterans, and Curse of Osiris was the optimal thing to renew the experience and add some new challenges. While I was incredibly excited by the announcement of this expansion being centered on the iconic guardian Osiris, the hype was killed within hours of playing the new content, and I’ll explain why in this review.

Released early September on home consoles, then around the end of October on PC, Destiny 2 was a sure enhancement of the original title from Bungie. Despite a longer campaign, a better written story than the first, more logical leveling mechanics, or even redefined PvP content, the game within several weeks after its launch started to witness the same annoying faults of the original game. Starting with an obvious lack of challenge in the long run, especially for those with little interest in its endgame content like the raid or harder PVP modes. The issue is that despite the many activities offered in Destiny 2, those who returned from the first game in search of exotic weapons and hidden quests found themselves having to farm the same strikes in hope to get some extra loot, which is not very exciting, when we did the same thing more than three years ago in the Vault of Glass.

Curse of Osiris now released on all platforms as a standalone expansion pack (or part of the Destiny 2 Expansion Pass which includes the second upcoming one coming in Q1 of 2018) will take you to planet Mercury, where this new adventure begins. Kicked off by Ikora, the warlock Vanguard, this new story will send you on a mission to the planet after the discovery of Sagira, Osiris’ ghost, found inanimate and the planet now filled with Vex ever since the Traveler woke up. A rather attractive pitch for fans of Destiny, for whom the name of Osiris has a particular resonance, long been surrounded by mystery. For fans of the lore, Osiris is known to those that played the original game as an infamous Warlock guardian, probably the most powerful of all time, which was banished from the City because of his obsession in the Vex. Over the course of time, he had amassed a horde of worshipers and had come into conflict with the Vanguard, and hasn’t been seen since his exile on Mercury. Nevertheless, in the original Destiny, the only true link to this iconic guardian was limited to . the Trial of Osiris, a high-level PvP activity which used to be one hell of a challenge, awarding the best with Egyptian themed guns, armors and loot. Suffice to say that this extension was eagerly awaited by those who were eager to learn more about Osiris, including myself.

Sadly, the Curse of Osiris does not take long to disappoint. Extremely short (count less than three hours to complete the main story mission), this expansion’s campaign is of an appalling banality, chaining levels with uninspired design and uninteresting goals. If the first steps on Mercury are promising, thanks to its amazing artistic direction, you quickly understand that most of the game will take place in the Infinite Forest, which probably will be remembered as Bungie’s most tasteless creation. While the concept of travel through space and time opened up endless possibilities, the Infinite Forest consists mainly of platforms suspended above a void, without ever being able to create this amazed feeling of discovering something truly great. This area seem to be the weakest part of the Destiny lore artistic direction, rather flat and missing true originality, almost as if it was randomly generated with a basic level editor, and extremely repetitive. Some would argue that this is precisely the concept of this Infinite Forest, which is above all a tool of the Vex collective consciousness, but for a millenia of enhancements, I believe that these robots would’ve simulated some better looking possibilities. I mean c’mon, think about all these amazing Vex locations we’ve visited already, like Destiny 2’s Pyramidion or even the original Destiny Vault of Glass which are impressive.

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Nevertheless, some of the adventure missions will make you return to some fun part of the European Dead Zone, and other very successful trips back in time which will allow you to visit Mercury before the Vex came. The planet takes on the appearance of an Eden with absolutely splendid orange and pink hues; you’ll also discover the other sad truth of what Mercury would look like if the Vex completely take over the system, plunged into darkness. The settings offered by these two temporal realities are absolutely superb, but unfortunately we spend barely any time in those areas, as the Curse of Osiris expansion keeps on having us venture, again and again, in this boring Infinite Forest that you’ll end up hating after couple of visits. As for the character of Osiris, this was my biggest disappointment, as no time does the adventure do him honor: you will meet him only a few times and the script of the story is such that at no time will the player feel the weight of the threat that scares him. Without real stake, the player is content to eliminate mechanically everything that is in between him and his final objective.

I can’t help but to my discontent on that front, especially after three years of lore pieces put together to understand who Osiris is, for in the end get an expansion pack that doesn’t live the hype of the character is just mean. In truth, the legendary Warlock should’ve deserved an expansion of scale, in the manner of The Taken King or even Rise of Iron, with a proper care of the narration, attention to details, exotic weapon quest, other hidden secrets, and a wide environment to explore… Instead, Bungie gives us this expansion pack that is worst than the original game’s first expansion – The Dark Below – which at least gave us more content including two new strikes, a brand new raid even if it wasn’t that great.

And so when the story missions are over, what’s left for Destiny 2 players? Well not a lot of things as you will quickly realize. Brother Vance, the mysterious disciple of Osiris well known to players that competed in Trials of Osiris the original game, will propose a small series of missions, which will eventually toss you back into the Infinite Forest, and unlock some extra weapons which can be forged in the new social hub known as the Lighthouse. It is thanks to this Forge that player will be able to build Osiris themed weapons, which are mainly a series of grinds to find new collectibles which will be formed into 12 new weapons. For this, you will first recover a relic, by completing one of the Heroic Adventures proposed by Vance (which are three in total), and harvest the various resources needed to build it by farming public events, strikes and PvP games. Those who were looking for a reason to farm the game will be satisfied, but on the long run it will be really boring as the Curse of Osiris adds only one public event (which is rather well done at least) and two Strikes which feel more of recycled missions of the core game.

What remains is the new Raid, on which many veteran players were hoping to get some extra challenge. The good news is that Bungie did not miss this, and while it will also take place on the Leviathan, as the first raid of the game, the “Eater of Worlds” leads the Guardians to another area of ​​the gigantic ship with new challenges. Where in September the players had been able to discover the habitable areas of the Leviathan, this new Raid leads them into the bowels and deepest parts of the ship. Here we find a progression and level-design similar to the raids of the first Destiny, with large open areas, more conducive to exploration. There’s a great pleasure to play several phases mixing platforming and puzzles, in the manner of what I remember from the good old days of the Vault of Glass or King’s Fall raid, except that the players must progress together.

I’m really worried about the future of Destiny 2, especially since after 3 years in development, the team should have known what players wants in term of content and challenge. This expansion marks a sad return to the “dark days” of Destiny, a sloppy way to cut content into more paid content, which I get are critical for the remuneration of the studio and publisher, but are starting to be unfair for the players. Let’s hope the second expansion fixes this.

Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris was reviewed using an Xbox One digital copy of the expansion pack purchased by the writer. The expansion pack is also available on on PlayStation 4 and PC via digital and retail stores. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

Destiny 2's first expansion Curse of Osiris could've been a unique opportunity to tell an exciting story around a legendary figure of the lore, but instead added a disappointing amount of new content and bland story. Three months after its release, Destiny 2 finally launches its first expansion: Curse of Osiris. Suffice to say that Bungie had no interest in skipping on expansions with this sequel, especially since hardcore fans of the series were already feeling a lack of challenge for veterans, and Curse of Osiris was the optimal thing to renew the experience and add some new challenges.