Remove ads

What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

DestinyPlayer said:
I feel like I'm the only person on the internet who thinks that Silksong's development time is honestly rather fair.

Have you seen the fucking spritesheets in the first game? Have you seen just how much hand-drawn animation the three people at Team Cherry have to do, with basically no tweening involved, literally drawing every single possibility in the game frame by frame and sticking them into a nightmare non-grid that I still don't quite understand how the hell they're separating at the code level? And with Hornet having an actual personality, unlike Little Ghost, they probably have to do a bunch more for her story beats.

No wonder it's taking so bloody long.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's less the dev time and more the silence. A simple "Hey that Unity thing really fucked us but we're still working on it" would very much calm the situation.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Here's an example spritesheet. And all of them are like this, for every character, every entity. As far as I know, this is how it's actually stored in the game rather than just being someone throwing it together in a weird way.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Oh I see what you're talking about now. That's similar to UV mapping. It's pretty gnarly but not insurmountable code-wise, I think you could just associate every frame with a particular rectangle-corner coordinate and rotation to look it up within the spritesheet. It might have even been automatically assembled as well, so you just give it the individual frames you've prepared beforehand and it just kinda smooshes them all together in the most efficient way (space-wise).
 
Yeah I'm pretty sure having a bunch of associated textures in one image file is a pretty normal way for spritesheets to work.
 
Hykal94 said:
It's less the dev time and more the silence. A simple "Hey that Unity thing really fucked us but we're still working on it" would very much calm the situation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think the Unity licensing hullabaloo last year was ultimately resolved in the space of like a month after they very publicly walked it back, right? They even had someone fall on the sword for it.
 
It's pretty much as Hykal said, for the vast majority of fans. If the devs would just drop a twitter post or something every few months going "game is real guys we are making it", then 99% of the fanbase would be completely satisfied by this and that last 1% wouldn't be worth paying attention to because every fanbase has their rabid outliers we all point and laugh at for being massively entitled. Just look at Deltarune having massive spaces between each chapter release - nobody cares that it's taking so long because Toby Fox pops up every once in a while to go "game exists, we workin' on it, here's a progress update maybe a bonus of some unused/scrapped music tracks".

Instead, Team Cherry is pretty much entirely radio silent, to the point that they have a PR Manager who must have the absolute easiest job in human history because when you check their twitter account it's just reblogging fanart or other metroidvania news every once in a while, not a spot of Silksong news or communication to be seen. Then one of the devs decides to vaguepost about "oh something big happening tomorrow" which turned out to be entirely unrelated to SIlksong, and well.

Personally, I just roll my eyes and get on with my life and will continue to not think about Silksong until the next time it gets mentioned, and I absolutely think there's a chunk of the fanbase going far too rabid that needs to Get Some Help and Touch Some Grass. But also, I totally get why so many fans are disgruntled over the complete lack of news, and why at this point it's boiling over from clown makeup jokes of "haha Silksong totally happening in this gaming direct frfr" to active hostility and dislike. Seriously, we live in a digital news age where it takes all of two minutes to post an update every few months to keep people satisfied, we even have proof that if it's negative news like Metroid Prime 4 being basically scrapped and rebuilt then most fans will totally understand. So, what exactly is stopping Team Cherry from doing that much? They could probably spend less time on it than I spent typing up this very post.
 
Deltarune actually does have a newsletter that Toby publishes every few months. Silksong has a PR manager that doesn't do much as McFluffles said, despite Team Cherry making a big deal of hiring him in the first place.

And unlike Winds of Winter, which I would be sad but understand if George just said he'd stopped working on it, Team Cherry actually DOES owe those backers their Hornet content.
 
Could be that they have gotten into the classic animators mindset of keep on drawing until your fingers snap then just switch to your other hand that has just gotten out of the cast.
 
McFluffles said:
Instead, Team Cherry is pretty much entirely radio silent, to the point that they have a PR Manager who must have the absolute easiest job in human history because when you check their twitter account it's just reblogging fanart or other metroidvania news every once in a while, not a spot of Silksong news or communication to be seen.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You must be looking at a different account, the Team Cherry account hasn't even done reposts of anything since 2023, and that was just the Hollow Knight Nendoroids being announced. The accounts entire posting history since the 2019 holiday sign off has been retweeting the merch announcements from a couple other accounts.
 
Alchemist767676 said:
This is how all but the broadest, most descriptive genres work. Once you go beyond the self-explanatory categories like "First-Person Shooter" and "Platformer," vibes are pretty much entirely what you work off of. And, frankly, what the actual letters in the term originally stood for doesn't mean much, it's basically a proper noun at this point—much like how CRPG is used to refer to games with a specific vibe and cluster of common mechanics to them rather than any RPG that is played on a computer or, as mentioned earlier in the thread, how Roguelike is a term applied to many games that bear only the most passing of resemblances to the game the genre is named after.

I'd also say that the term being invented as a pejorative doesn't really matter, since basically everyone who wasn't around during that era doesn't use it as such and, more likely than not, never even knew that it was used as such.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm reminded of the rather intense debates around the term "science fiction" and its derivatives back in the 00s (I recall it happening in the late 90s as well). Both for the bloodthirsty rhetoric which I'm never sure whether it was intended seriously, and for how it did not seem to have leaked out of the specific fandoms into the greater public sphere. For all anyone outside the fandoms were concerned, "science fiction" was "science fiction", and also a "I know it when I see it" categorization.

The term which garnered the most hate was "scifi" (or "sci-fi"; the hyphen seemed irrelevant to the discussions). Which was attacked from both sides, with the "science fiction" side declaring "scifi" was only for the softest of soft SF (Star Wars, Star Trek) and thus not worthy of being Proper Science Fiction, and the larger critic community dismissing it and the rest of the science fiction genre as not Proper Literature (Kurt Vonnegut famously described it as critics "mistaking the Science Fiction drawer for a urinal").

But today, I see "scifi" used synonymously with "science fiction" and "SF" (or "SFF" to encompass fantasy), and plenty of SF works are considered Literature (Dune immediately comes to mind). I do not know when or why this change occurred.

Hence my comparing "scifi" to "JRPG", with their similar history of being pejoratives, and their very vague and fuzzy definitions, while also being considered "proper" genres for categorization despite these uncertain boundaries. Which is also why I personally use "SFF" rather than "scifi", and "RPG" rather than "JRPG", because I've encountered some of these old forum warriors before in unexpected places, and I don't want to be yelled at without warning for using the wrong term.
 
grommile said:
Persona 3-5 time management RPGs
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Persona 5 Royal literally adding a button that instantly ends battles with a silly cutscene, that pops up whenever the game realizes it accidentally made an encounter too interesting, makes me want to call the series time management games with an RPG aesthetic instead lol

DestinyPlayer said:
I feel like I'm the only person on the internet who thinks that Silksong's development time is honestly rather fair.

Have you seen the fucking spritesheets in the first game? Have you seen just how much hand-drawn animation the three people at Team Cherry have to do, with basically no tweening involved, literally drawing every single possibility in the game frame by frame and sticking them into a nightmare non-grid that I still don't quite understand how the hell they're separating at the code level? And with Hornet having an actual personality, unlike Little Ghost, they probably have to do a bunch more for her story beats.

No wonder it's taking so bloody long.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Another aspect is that basically every pre-release trailer and screenshot of the original game depicted work that never actually ended up in the final game. That's a massive red flag on a planning and project management level.

And for Silksong you can add a complete lack of deadlines, a near-infinite stash of Hollow Knight money and the fact that it somehow worked out just fine last time on top of that. That's a perfect setting for an endless hell project.
 
Morganite said:
I'd just like to note that this very thread is the first time I've ever seen someone suggest that JRPG was a pejorative rather than, say, a compliment.

-Morgan.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

To be precise, the "pejorative" part is specifically the "Japanese" part of the term. "JRPG" as a whole expression gained the negative connotations due to that, rather than "JRPG" in itself being the pejorative.

In the current day, we can see a variation for another genre of games. I've seen it expressed here on this forum a few times, but I can't say it's commonplace here; it's much more widespread in other discussion forums like Youtube and Reddit. The term is "Korean MMORPG".
 
Morganite said:
I'd just like to note that this very thread is the first time I've ever seen someone suggest that JRPG was a pejorative rather than, say, a compliment.

-Morgan.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The first ever documented use of the term "JRPG" comes from a saved group chat in 1992 where the context was an argument about Western RPGs (in particular ones made by US programmers) being "much more interesting, innovative, and in many other ways superior to Japanese RPGs", with that particular phrasing being shortened to JRPG for the rest of that conversation.

For a long time, the distinction was between Console RPGs and Computer RPGs, with the understanding that most if not all RPGs from Japan were Console RPGs and made up a large part of the library, but in the early 2000s games magazines and TV shows started to split off Japanese RPGs into their own subsection for no real reason, most often coupled with scorn and mockery—just give a look to some of the things that came out of G4 like X-Play's review of Baten Kaitos Origins.

The conversation around the term mostly began about two years ago when Naoki Yoshida had an interview where he talked about how the feeling for a lot of Japanese developers was that the term "JRPG" was discriminatory, used exclusively by the west, and that the majority of developers in Japan were just developing RPGs. I'm not saying that everyone who uses the term is using it in an insulting way, but the origins of the term were rooted in insult and an attempt to silo off the products of Japan for being weird, lame, dumb, gay, campy, etc.
 
Squirtodyle said:
I'm not saying that everyone who uses the term is using it in an insulting way, but the origins of the term were rooted in insult and an attempt to silo off the products of Japan for being weird, lame, dumb, gay, campy, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Notably even Yoshida himself doesn't think that people use it in an intentionally negative way:

"For us as developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term. As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past. It wasn't a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it's being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative."

He really is talking about the feelings that he and at least some other developers they have based on historical usage. However to a great degree the arguments in favour of using 'JRPG' over the past couple of pages have basically repeated some of that pejorative meaning.
 
Squirtodyle said:
I feel like I'm going insane a bit.

We're distinguishing Japanese RPGs from JRPGs where the J in JRPG stands for "Japanese".

"Most Japanese RPGs are Japanese RPGs."

Earlier in the thread we had people saying that RPGs developed in Japan by Japanese companies weren't Japanese RPGs, but a game developed in Los Angeles by an American company is a Japanese RPG.

The term is useless, maybe we should just retire it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Final Fantasy VI is an adventure game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is a crpg, Fallout New Vegas is a JRPG
 
You always only see those Yoshida quotes talking about and that guy's embedded within a franchise that has dedicated entire games to its complex relationship to its own past and has steadily been triangulating itself to a generic action flavour.

Meanwhile all other corners of the genre haven't really shown any signs of feeling pressured to be something different.
 
Pidl said:
The Atelier-series switched over to real time combat, Like a Dragon switched over to turn-based, Trails-series went for a hybrid system and Persona will probably do so as well.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I doubt that this means exactly a rejection of "Japaneseness". Many of these games have anime graphics or something else.
 
I feel like I'm the only person who doesn't see the point in an update that boils down to "yeah we're working on it". Like I can intuit that they're working on it, I don't need them to show up every month and say they're working on it. The only thing I'd want to hear about Silksong is when it's coming out and I'm perfectly fine with waiting in radio silence until they can give that update.
 
I guess to be genuinely actually contrarian too

I don't think being a KS backer entitles you to like, infinite work on a project? Especially for what was originally a stretch goal. They decided to turn a thing you backed (extra hornet campaign) into a sequel, and that's kind of the end of the part of it that's from the KS campaign - i'm not even sure if original backers get silksong for free or anything. If they do that's just a nice move on Cherry's part.

But Kickstarter campaigns in general are very clear that you invested money in the hopes of funding development, not that you purchased a product with any sort of direct entitlement to receiving anything. Plenty of projects fail, have huge delays, or change scope to get something out the door, and game dev is not an especially predictable process.

At this point, the original backers have slightly more moral claim to expecting some sort of status (like "sorry it's cancelled" or "sorry we're still working on it") but that's about it. They certainly shouldn't heckle the devs online or follow things as minor as "one of the devs was making a cake" and then be upset that it isn't a secret silksong ARG or whatever.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top