See, Lethal Company's real genius is that it somehow marries two normally opposed genres, those being horror and comedy together into something greater. Mechanically it's a multiplayer looter extraction survival type game. It's designed to create stressful and scary situations by forcing you to speedrun mini randomized dungeons while monsters hunt your character to meet a certain quota (our asses are not making quota). That's not the clever part though, no, that's giving the players the ability to fuck themselves over and the hilarity that comes from it.
Anything you say into your mic is said in the game world and can be heard by certain monsters. Many items, similarly, can be used to make noise and you can bet there is little impulse control when a player finds an air horn or gets a walkie talkie. The sound of a distant honk somewhere out of nowhere is not something most players are prepared for while in a pitch black maze. Sound in this game has a doppler effect, which makes it harder to hear the further away the source is, allowing screams to fade into nothing and unintelligible yelling heard for a second before vanishing. You must rely on your senses but those are, by design, limited and regularly tricked.
Because level layouts, monster locations, and item spawns are all random, it's insanely easy to get lost or lose track of thigs, especially in the dark and especially when panicking. Seeing a bracken for the first time will almost certainly send a player running in the opposite direction and get lost, if they even see it all. No one is prepared to have a hand wrap around their face and snap their neck in an instant. It's utterly shocking and will leave you gasping in surprise to first time you experience it.
Certain weather patterns make levels harder, some even nearly impossible (looking at you eclipse), and sometimes your options are avoiding deadly lightning or not being able to see due to fog. High level moons have excessively valuable loot but also feature the worst foes and cost a fee to access, forcing a compromise between greed, ability, and resources.
Dying, likewise incurs a penalties. Your team is fined for dying and not bringing the bodies back but if you all die, all your collected loot goes poof. Gone. A team wipe can and will effectively end the run in an instant if you do something stupid like stick around when you hear "pop goes the weasel" or try to pick up that funny looking roomba. You can almost feel the pressure weighing down on your shoulders when you realize you're the last one left and you need to get back to the ship or miss the quota.
The monsters likewise, are engines of terror that are comically effective killing machines with no cohesive theme to help anticipate them. The already mentioned bracken is one of the scariest things I've seen in a game, and those technically aren't even that bad. They're completely manageable if you keep your head on a swivel and pay attention to your surroundings. Coilheads are these mannequins with bobble heads that will path to and kill you in a microsecond the moment you aren't looking at them, weeping angel style. There's a thing called the ghost girl that I have yet to see but is apparently one of the most terrifying critters in the menagerie. Forest giants. If you know, you know.
All these little mechanics, these choices that are made by and for the player, create a maelstrom of unpredictable chaos that, like a buxom blond transforming into an orgasming pooltoy, turns what would be strictly serious horror into a unique form of dark comedy that layers over it like jelly on peanut butter. You are scared, you are on edge, and it only gets worse when you know what these things are capable of, but the sheer hopelessness is something you all have in common. It's funny how little hope you have. You will die. A monster will wipe your team. There will eventually come a quota you can't beat. You were doomed from the start.
So why not get silly with it? Why not try to fight that bracken with shovel? Fuck him. Why not just run past a turret and try to nab that fat jar of pickles? Why not wander off from the group? You're just as likely to come back with arms loaded and the quota met as you are likely to not come back at all. You're already dead, so take the gamble, do stupid shit, repeat this hell until you can meet its horrors with grim determination and put in the effort to afford that goddamn boombox. Dance. Just press 1 and dance the fear away.
You are all united in your mortality and duty, fragile sacks of flesh working to break even at the behest of perhaps the greatest horror of all: The company you work for. You are so preposterously fucked beyond all belief from every angle there really isn't enough adjectives to describe it. And that's comedy baby, when things are so bad all you can do is laugh.
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New article with more details (from Jason Schreier who first broke the story). If you can't see it, I'll copy the whole text under read more.
About 100 employees were laid off in total (8%) and one of the main reasons listed is "underperformance," "sharp drop in popularity" and "poor reception of Lightfall."
So you know when for the last year and a half content creators have been shitting and pissing on the game as a full-time job and the amount of negativity and ragebait content became the only thing to make content about for them? Well they certainly won't take the blame, but I will let it be known. These people either don't understand the influence they have or they do and they're doing it on purpose, and I don't know which of these two options is worse, but I am 100% confident that their campaign of rage and hate contributed to this.
You don't base your entire community around constantly hating everything about the only game you play (despite clearly not enjoying it anymore) and somehow avoid galvanising thousands and thousands of people into perceiving the game negatively. Imagine being employees who have barely worked there for 2 years and the only community reception they've seen is 24/7 hate train for their work and then they get fired because of "poor reception" and "drop in popularity." How can they not take that personally? I am absolutely devastated for these people who delievered a banger product and who were met with an unrelenting barrage of toxic gamer children which ended up having more sway over their boss than them.
Which brings me to the next bit and that's FUCK THE CEO. He is now my mortal enemy #1. I am projecting psychic blasts directly into his brain. What an absolute spineless coward who is more willing to bow down to fucking gamers than to protect his own employees. This is absolutely rage inducing because this has happened before. From the article from 2021 about the toxic culture at Bungie:
Reading this shit from the new article absolutely fucking sent me into blind rage because I immediately remembered this. Another instance of employees suffering because of comments on reddit. And because of toxic players. And proof that leadership is not protecting employees and is instead siding with players.
Match made in heaven. Asshole gamer content creators and asshole CEOs, all of whom sit at home on piles of money made from someone else's labour. I hope they all explode. None of the people that worked on this game deserve this.
Another article with an infuriating comment from the CEO:
In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
"Kept the right people." Really. Veteran composers weren't the right people? Die!
Bloomberg article in full:
Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2.
Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting.
Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall.
The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product.
In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up.
But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts.
Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month.
The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office.
TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.”
PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign.
Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
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Whoops I tripped and my hand slipped and all of a sudden this Sonamy art just kinda spawned outta nowhere haha that's crazy
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it this is almost entirely inspired by a specific Slowed & Reverbed rendition of Ariana Grande's "Into You" and 90% of it just came from the gif they used for the chorus vdsbfvjhkbfdv
I saw it and thought "Okay how can I make this about Sonic. Hm. This song feels Sonamy-coded, and Sonic feels like the type of guy to give a girl a motorcycle ride but like romantically. Oh but he doesn't have a motorcycle. That's, like, Shadow's thing. He has a hoverboard though. And letting someone else ride with him on a hoverboard would arguably be even more dangerous than on a motorcycle...so it's right up his alley." all in the span of like 2 seconds.
Of course this also meant I needed to finally design my own Amy, usually when other artists draw her they choose one of 3 options: they draw her normally, they give her long hair, or they give her Sonic's hair; as you can see I couldn't make that choice
So why am I yapping so much about all this? Idk I just think it's neat hdbfsvjhbhvbd
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forgive the brief jesus chris superstar rant but. there is a very important difference between the pharisees being villains and the pharisees being antagonists. they're technically antagonists because they're actively working against the interests of our protagonist, but i don't believe they should ever be played as villains. they're not evil or bad or wrong. they're terrified just like literally everyone else in the show is, and their actions are completely justified. to me that's the entire point of the musical. it's not about christianity; it's about the impact the roman empire's brutal and violent imperialism had on everyone on all levels. including jesus and judas, but also including the pharisees, and even herod and pilate. when a powerful coloniser forces their presence on innocent people they are the only winners. everyone else suffers, even the puppet kings and high priests who look like they're reaping some sort of benefit from it all. that's roman propaganda. the romans kept native rulers like herod and caiaphas in power to maintain the illusion of provincial autonomy, and keep populations appeased and therefore under control. everyone in the show is acting out of fear of the romans. the one roman character we do see (pilate) is acting out of fear of his own emperor. it makes no sense to cast the pharisees as two dimensional Bad Guys, especially when the same productions that do that usually offer a sympathetic portrayal of pilate. it would be so easy to stage and direct a production in a way that makes it obvious that the pharisees are doing what they're doing because they truly have no choice, and not because they're pure evil and want to kill jesus for the sake of it. it's not only an antisemitic trope but also undermines a really important theme of the musical. if you can see the humanity in the violent roman governor installed forcefully on conquered land then you can afford some humanity for the pharisees too. they are victims of pilate and victims of rome just like everyone else
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