It's not evident unless you can show that there's a clear correlation between game quality and WFH (e.g. most bad games are from studios with WFH and most good games are from studios with no WFH). There are many reasons why the quality of games are going down.
UBIsoft in potential financial trouble
- Thread starter Silent_Buddha
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It's not evident unless you can show that there's a clear correlation between game quality and WFH (e.g. most bad games are from studios with WFH and most good games are from studios with no WFH). There are many reasons why the quality of games are going down.
Cappuccino
Newcomer
Ubisoft didn't make good games pre-pandemic so I don't think WFH is the primary culprit here, although their output is way slowed down post-COVID.
I apologize that this site is bad; I can't seem to get rid of the email window but the article here is critical to the discussion at hand:
www.gamedeveloper.com
The only way devs are working longer hours and having less productivity is that, I don't think the tools or processes for developing games translate well to zoom meetings and remoting into dev servers to see the latest build. The tools probably suck a lot more than we think. I mean, we know how much engines and changes to game design late in the process can cause development hell for a game, compound that with remote work and poor tools to get the job done, and you have a recipe for disaster and little ways to mitigate the damage.
GDC State of the Industry: WFH Edition survey reveals COVID-19's impact on devs
GDC today released the results of a special State of the Industry: Work From Home Edition Survey which reveal how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted game developers across the industry.
Then directly from the GDC survey, which unfortunately I can't download the paper results:
The only way devs are working longer hours and having less productivity is that, I don't think the tools or processes for developing games translate well to zoom meetings and remoting into dev servers to see the latest build. The tools probably suck a lot more than we think. I mean, we know how much engines and changes to game design late in the process can cause development hell for a game, compound that with remote work and poor tools to get the job done, and you have a recipe for disaster and little ways to mitigate the damage.
Previous games knew were to draw the line between fiction and history. This one doesn't. Japanese people whose history and culture is reflected in the game even with some science fiction and some creativity threw in, it still depicted aspects of their culture that should be accurate wrongfully and in an effort to be inclusive with blacks, it actually went racist or insulting towards the Japanese. It would have been equally insulting if in Odyssey they decided to bring an Englishman or an African or an Asian into the Ancient Greek history who was supposed to bring balance, wisdom and create democracy to the imbalanced barbarian Greek nation.
Making the game you want doesn't mean you shouldn't expect people to agree or NOT like or NOT be offended with whatever you throw in it
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A lot of it though is also fabricatedYasuke - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Bogus Story of Yasuke & "wokeness" revisionist history
Ok all you Wakanda fans, in this post we are dealing with history only, no racial bias, no fantasy "wokeness", or revisionist nonsense... just the facts.
wayofbushido.com
That's really not really important though right? Fabricated or not isn't really relevant. Good stories, are just good stories. You borrow fiction and you turn it into a game. You can borrow fiction and turn it into a movie. We have tons of anime about Yasuke. We have tons of anime and martial art films that take place during the time periods of X and Y, but none of those stories are true either. But they are still good movies in their own right.A lot of it though is also fabricated
The Bogus Story of Yasuke & "wokeness" revisionist history
Ok all you Wakanda fans, in this post we are dealing with history only, no racial bias, no fantasy "wokeness", or revisionist nonsense... just the facts.
All of our Call of Duty games have single player campaigns that come from war stories, but not necessarily straight up written and proven history. We have tons of this, and it doesn't make any sense that when movies do it, it's fine, and when games do it, it's woke. Do Monkey gods waving staves around exist? That's all fictional mythology, but no one blinks twice here. It's grounded in Chinese culture, but there's no written of history of it.
How far do we want to go here, in which we have written fiction about something, but no real historical fact that it truly happened? We only need to turn to the most read books in the world to see this. Do we have virgin births and men that can part water?
If no, that's fine. Still makes for a good story, and as humans we communicate via stories.
It's a double standard that is unnecessary here.
Call of Duty is mindless war propaganda.
AC is covering actual culture,mythology and history even with science fiction. Of course people will treat it differently than CoD
People DO give some room for creative freedom. Wukong is inspired by an actual Chinese literature called Journey to the West that was already in fantasy lore and mythology. The game still respects Chinese culture without mixing other cultures and nations and reducing their culture in any form.
AC games always had some science fiction and some creative changes.
But they did it so far without insulting or crossing lines.
Some lines if crossed of course will receive complains. This AC game depicted aspects of Japanese culture and history, at least in the first reveals, wrongfully, such as showing Chinese architecture within Japan instead of Japanese. It also presents Yasuke as a more important figure and influence than what he actually was to the point where Ubisoft diminishes the actual Japanese historical aspects and importance in order to give prominence to an insignificant foreigner. The complains came from Japanese themselves. I understand that too.
I would have felt the same for Odyssey if so e thing similar happened
I dunno dude. There's 0 anything real about AC. Other than the backdrops and environments, there's nothing there.
Like for me, are just giving the spotlight to a handful of people who are just angry? Our algorithms have a very good ability to show people what they want to see, and in this case, people who believe in woke destroys shit, will likely pick this up. but on my youtube, I never see a damn thing about it. My father, who is pro PRC, he only watches chinese channels, and when Black Myth Wukong came out, he told me the westerners were trying to take it down. That's the type of information he got, when everyone else was saying how well this title was doing.
The perspective is really based on what you watch, and what you watch, may not be at all representative of a population.
Do these same japanese people feel the same about the Shogun show? About a British white man who came to Japan and became someone of a promiment figure? In the show, he just fails upwards the entire time and doesn't seem like anyone gave 2 shits about how a man keeps failing upwards is a great story and yet, at the same time the show diminishes the actual Japanese historical aspects and importance in order to give prominence to an insignificant foreigner (tldr; the dude was not insignificant, but he certainly didn't fail upwards like he does in the show); the show won numerous awards for the Japanese acting community, and they were blessed to be apart of it's construction.
I'm not saying there can't be controversy, I'm just saying, we can't pick and choose which games should be fiction and which games should not. I don't know any game, that isn't mainly fiction.
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Maybe. Or maybe the fanbase knew where to draw the line between fantasy and history before, and now can't fathom that a work of fiction that uses Trancers style time travel and featured several historical figures in the past performing actions that there was no historical record that they had performed might feature a historical figure portrayed in a way isn't 100% historically accurate.
None of the AC games are historically accurate. The COD games that were set in the past.... Not historically accurate. Wolf3D? Nope, not historically accurate. Hogwart's Legacy? Nah, not accurate. We used to be able to play a game and just have fun, and now we are relegated to debating the historical accuracy of games and RPS motivations of the developers, writers, and publishers. This isn't a game problem, it's a problem with how we must make everything into an action that's pro or anti something.
All of the complaints? All of the Japanese? That's a generalized statement that I can promise you the answer is a no to both of those. Yasuke is a a playable character in the Samurai Warriors games, an action game set in the Sengoku period and featuring several people from Japan's history, where he's referred to as a Samurai, in a game made by a Japanese developer and published by a Japanese publisher. Is that historically accurate? Who cares, the game is fun.
Quote from the Koei Tecmo website regarding Yasuke
What do you mean there was nothing 0 real? The games had large references to actual historical facts, people who existed, real life events, actual myths/mythologies specific to the countries' culture with an added amount of AC lore, science fiction and of course some changes and spice.
The games had huge contributions and consultations from historians for that reason.
Different genres, different games,different aims and presentation
Did the game you mention receive the same amount of complains and petitions by Japanese?
"It’s cultural appropriation”: complaints about Assassin’s Creed Shadows reach the Japanese government | LevelUp
Politicians are concerned about the way their history and culture are represented
www.levelup.com
Tkumpathenurple
Veteran
Reject the dialectic.
Remember the 2016 Ghostbusters film? When Sony found out they had a damp squib on their hands, they set about a marketing campaign on social media to whip people up into a frenzy: "do you love the new Ghostbusters film or are you a racist exist?" and "do you hate the new Ghostbusters film or are you a cuck?"
Both ridiculous stances, but the only two camps permitted on manipulated social media discourse. Really, it was just another, generic, slightly naff film wearing the skin of a well known, beloved film - much like Ghostbusters 2.
I saw a good chunk of it when working on the dementia ward one night and it was, y'know, fine. Not awful, not amazing, just mediocre like 95% of any medium. And yet we (myself included) were at each other's throats over this wet fart.
We were tricked. Don't let sleazy marketing departments trick you again. Reject the dialectic.
Remember the 2016 Ghostbusters film? When Sony found out they had a damp squib on their hands, they set about a marketing campaign on social media to whip people up into a frenzy: "do you love the new Ghostbusters film or are you a racist exist?" and "do you hate the new Ghostbusters film or are you a cuck?"
Both ridiculous stances, but the only two camps permitted on manipulated social media discourse. Really, it was just another, generic, slightly naff film wearing the skin of a well known, beloved film - much like Ghostbusters 2.
I saw a good chunk of it when working on the dementia ward one night and it was, y'know, fine. Not awful, not amazing, just mediocre like 95% of any medium. And yet we (myself included) were at each other's throats over this wet fart.
We were tricked. Don't let sleazy marketing departments trick you again. Reject the dialectic.
The drop in game quality and quantity across an overwhelming majority of game companies is a very strong correlation IMO.
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It's not necessarily due to WFH. Since the pandemic there were many factors which could affect production qualities, where some studios are significantly affected and others are not. I mean, some believe it's because of the rise of DEI. Or it could be because that during the pandemic so many large studios expanded too quickly because they saw huge increases in game sales, not realizing that it's just temporary. It cuased them to spread too thin and trying to make too many aggressive projects in too short time. Or some might have to cut back after the expansion and have to reduce their workforce and sometimes good people leave.
I certainly can’t deny the possibility that WFH wasn’t a primary factor, but I think that’s a much less likely reality. There were various employee accounts over the years discussing how much WFH was hurting the workflow. I don’t disagree that certain studios could be more negatively affected than others, but I think at most, it would be a very small minority who saw no negative effects.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
Its a bit daft to have a game set in Japan where at the time 99.999% of the people were Japanese and they just had to pick a black dude in a game with stealth elements that at least pretends to be somewhat realistic and not some hack & slash everything goes type of game. Imagine the next AC game set in Africa with the playable character being a white dude chopping up the locals. How do you think that will go down? Same difference. Its stupid and unnecessary.
Shogun is a different story. Most Japanese produced shows are generally of questionable quality. Shogun showed what Japan can do if the actors are allowed to do their jobs and the budget is there. The white dude wasn't taking up most of the screen time nor did the show pretend like he was the guy everything evolved around. His role inside the show was at least somewhat plausible. If you'd live and work in Japan in this day and age without speaking Japanese your experience really wouldn't be that different lol. High chance of being paraded around in front of customers etc. like a pet monkey who occasionally happens to do a half decent job. Same as the guy in the show.
It still is only 97.8% Japanese today! It’s not like that’s a massive difference. Japan is home to the largest Nigerian population outside of Nigeria! But I digress, what does it matter?
There are 2 characters in AC. One is Japanese, the other is a known mythical black person. Perhaps more importantly; have you played the game enough to know how Ubisoft is handling it? With Shogun you’re looking in post production. Pre production did anyone know it was going to be good? It could have been really bad?
What about the last samurai? What about the last of the Mohicans? There’s no shortage of media like this. So why are we pretending like it’s the reason this game is going to bomb?
Ubisoft game design, that’s the reason it’s going to bomb. Poor polish, poor production, poor gameplay, poor storyline.
As See Colon says, you’re not forced to pick a side. You can just enjoy games and saying hey that would be cool. That’s how we used to be, and that’s how we can still be.