It's still really good game, but I still believe the older titles are better.

Yeah, I realized not too long after that this was the solution, but the thing is, I virtually never use X-input mode as it causes problems in the vast majority of games that I play (e.g.: not recognizing the controller, not recognizing all of the buttons like the triggers).

Any game review site that gets their games for free AND gets paid by a lot of these game companies to review them positively should be disregarded. They have zero objectivity.

You also have to ask yourself who owns Kotaku and who owns the one that owns Kotaku. In this day and age critical thinking skills is a must to avoid propaganda.

As seen in this thread, the critical thinker reads, accords with and links to news websites where every article was created by an AI. ;)

I don't know about soulless, but going into the game expecting anything but Hollywood style writing for anything with this budget might be slightly unrealistic.
Really? I don't use my Logitech controller with the switch often, but that's the opposite of what I remember: Almost everything requires X-input mode.

so, a couple of things have come out of my question, all of which i /mostly/ anticipated and expected.

there's a lot of "do your own research" here, which - i think - somewhat misses the point of my actual query, which was "who do you trust?"

"do your own research" is problematic for a number of reasons, chief of which is that you, as a reader of blogs and the like simply DO NOT have the sort of access that the blog writers get. all we can do, as readers of the information is look at it across different sources and draw our own conclusions, which isn't especially helpful, because:

it's quite easy to infer whatever we like out of whatever we're seeing.

[which is some of what's happening with the sbi situation in particular.]

---

there was another sentiment that i saw, which was interesting in and of itself and that was: "just trust specific authors on particular sites." the thinking here is: the sites in toto are generally bad, but those particular writers are good.

this is a cannon you can aim in both directions, i'm afraid.

as a collective, most of you don't like kotaku and that's fine, you're welcome to not liking kotaku, but then your advice was to turn around and say, "but there's particular writers on OTHER websites that aren't as bad that you should trust."

the thing is, if i'm going to charitably read that sentence in that way, then i can just turn around and say, "hey, that article about sbi was pretty reasonable, actually."

i read the article: it lead with the accusation, it explained the situation and it outlined how the perception of reality wasn't borne out by the facts.

it's fine that you don't believe the article. but it leaves us back - again - at square one: who do you trust?

ESPECIALLY when sbi explained what they actually do [which is MUCH less than the detractors would have you believe, it would seem.]

---

i want to swing back around to this idea, in fact.

let's pretend for a minute that sbi actually do everything they're accused of. it makes LOGICAL sense to me [and the evidence would be empirical, in fact] that sbi would STOP GETTING WORK.

i'd like you to follow my logic for a moment:

i have two specific problems which i find difficult to reconcile:

problem one: i can posit [but i don't know, of course - game development is largely a closed-box affair] that MOST of the writing is done by the time someone like a sbi shows up. from that perspective, it would be AWFULLY difficult to crowbar ANYTHING into the plot of the game that didn't make sense.

i'd like to pile one more idea onto this problem and that is: i'm generally inclined to believe that the writers of the game are /generally/ happy at this point with the story they've come up with. sbi just wholesale destroying it to write their own makes little sense given their stated mission.

the second problem is an optics issue: i simply cannot see a world where a company would operate the way the accusers suggest. they simply wouldn't get work in the long run. video games are a big enough industry now that the landscape is largely flat. by this i mean that, though the industry is big, there's only a handful of actual players in said industry and news travels fast as a result.

if the consulting firm you're hiring is going to go out of it's way to torch your plot and characters, you will take that information to OTHER companies that are thinking about hiring them. the consulting firm would simply not be able to make money long term.

---

in short:

"just do your own research" has issues.
the sbi hand-wringing seems...a little much?

I suspect that bsmrk_95 has the controller set to D-input and should therefore switch to X-input to fix this problem. ;-)

At risk of re-igniting the discussion; Could our resident media analysts tell me what is wrong with these accounts of the Sweet Baby Affair?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-company-called-sweet-baby-inc-has-become-the-target-of-anti-woke-gamers-because-it-offers-consultancy-work-an-industry-standard-service-that-s-been-normal-for-years/ar-BB1jvCIh

https://www.xfire.com/sweet-baby-inc-detected-controversy-shutting-down-critics-on-steam/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sweet-baby-inc-detected-controversy

Have to say this is fascinating, from a sociological viewpoint. Cancel Culture at it's finest! :-P

This fact-based non-biased summary linked earlier gives a good overview:
https://www.theshortcut.com/p/sweet-baby-inc-detected-what-actually-happened

( this post will be in 2 parts due to GOG's ancient forum CMS bugs and limitations, thank you for your understanding )

There's no such thing as "brand loyalty" for a sane person.
In this day and age you simply CANNOT blindly assume your "beloved insert-name thing" is 100% the way you think it is.
You cannot 100% trust GOG, even if you love them. You cannot 100% trust Steam, even if you deeply appreciate what Gabe Newell's company has positively done for the gamers and especially for gamedev industry.
You cannot 100% entrust ANY brand of ANYTHING.
We are all humans ( for now ), humans make mistakes.
People change jobs, HR departments overlook things.
People leave, people get fired, people get mood swings, people get tired.
Things are imperfect in the world.
It would be LOGICAL FALLACY to take ANY journalistic website / paper / source and claim it's "definitely 100% everything is ALWAYS 100% correct".
There's no such website IN THE WORLD.
Again, people even UNintentionally make mistakes, even if they have good will, with many humans NOT having said good will.

There is, TO MY KNOWLEDGE, right now, NOT A SINGLE WEBSITE in the world, which has 100% reliable game related information 100% of the time in 100% articles, with 100% sources provided 100% accurately.
You are looking for a legendary urban legend of a website.

Like I said, you need to go look at the subject PER-JOURNALIST ( per-REAL-person ), NOT per-website / per-organisation!
You may not like my words, you may get upset by how things are, but this is ultimately what it comes down to.


It is NOT and NEVER WAS about "liking Kotaku" dude.
PLEASE finally understand this!
NO source is 100% correct 100% of the time!
However, Kotaku has such abundant disregard for information accuracy and quality, PROVEN and PROLONGED bad track record, they are just NOT WORTH the time of referencing it as a source.
It DOESN'T MATTER that "MAYBE there's some few articles on Kotaku in recent years which were accurate". MOST AREN'T.
And if you KNOW the website is "GENERALLY INACCURATE" and "generally withholding crucial details", IS IT worth your time to seek this "ellusive EXTREMELY RARE article with accuracy", this legendary "hidden gem", and then MANUALLY VERIFYING said information?
NO, it's not worth the time.
It's better to look for a " more reliable on average " source of information, where there is a HIGHER CHANCE the information is correct.

Kotaku, has fallen out of the grace. Big time.
It DOESN'T MATTER that they are a "big entity" - that BY ITSELF does NOT make them automatically trustworthy!


Wow, you REALLY are going out of your way to ignore sentences and misinterpret words!

" Kotaku is BAD AS A WHOLE, on OTHER websites there are SOME people who are trustworthy. "
Here, happy now?!

Yes, eg 'crmaris' ( an EXAMPLE I made ) is one of the VERY FEW people IN THE WORLD, who BOTH "know what they are doing" AND are REVIEWING power supplies ( instead of eg working on DESIGNING them ).
This DOES NOT make his worth less just because he HAPPENS to post many of his reviews on TPU ( TechPowerUp ), a website where many staff members are controversial, many articles are biased beyond belief, and many are clickbait hell.
HIS articles are trustworthy, and btw he also has his very own independent website where he does even more PSU reviews fyi.

You HAVE TO look at things through prisma of WHO writes it, not under WHOSE flag / organisation tag!
You may not like this. But it's the de facto reality!

You CANNOT look at a WHOLE organisation and give it a UNIVERSAL benefit of a doubt.
Company / journalistic website / organisation is composed of INDIVIDUALS with MINDS OF THEIR OWN, NOT a hive mind!
Everyone differs! They aren't all the same, they don't share the same qualities, same way of thinking, same ETHICS, etc.

You cannot GENERALIZE! Cannot put everyone in the same bag.
Eg I would trust Destin Ligerie from IGN with his content to a high degree, while I wouldn't trust MOST of IGN as a whole.
I am not DUMB. I will not assume "everyone in the same company is doing exactly the same".

And reg Kotaku once again - if it is UNIVERSALLY KNOWN it's content is "USUALLY GARBAGE" WHY would you BOTHER yourself giving them a benefit of a doubt at this point?
It's fanboy-like behaviour.
Just get a hint and move on to a more reliable source!


" We have conducted internal investigation and concluded we did nothing wrong " - this is exact same logic you are pulling here.
Sorry, but not all of us are falling for blatant PR statements that hold no weight by themselves.
It doesn't mean squat what SBI themselves claim. Their PR can spin whatever reality flex they want to, it doesn't mean anything if they do differently than they say. PR exists precisely to manipulate those who are unwilling to verify their words. Many people will believe others at face value, just "take their word for it", without verifying anything - PR takes advantage of that, exists for that VERY REASON.
PR by definition is a corporate propaganda tube - regardless if they say truth or not - people will gobble it up, because MOST people don't verify jack shit! PR's speciality is damage control and reality bending, twisting words, saying half-truths, etc.
Surprise surprise, PR does NOT represent given company's true deeds.
They exist precisely as a loudspeaker to overpower general public with a narravtive the company currently wants, in hopes that most people will take their word for it without verifying anyting - and they would be correct, after all we live in a worldline where a HEADLINE ALONE can be enough to fuel a "wish com quality public unrest". Most people don't verify information they consume. That's simply a fact.
Mark my words:
PR is an art of manipulating the public by twisting and withholding information!
Rarely what they say has any bearing in reality!

And if you want to take their ( SBI ) words at face value - I WONDER what would you say if you would listen to SBI employee's talking at GDC ( Game Developers Conference, a regular big event for gamedev industry professionals and insiders, plenty of big names showing up there, but also some indie devs, SOMEHOW SBI showed up there too at some point ).
I'd wait impatiently how you try to excuse THOSE words they uttered there - "nono guys, you misunderstand, they totally mean well"...

They use guerilla tactics and bully their way into contracts.
Do you want to know more?


Gamedev isn't like movie production, script doesn't have to be finished by the time production starts, and often isn't.
If a company like SBI gets hired early in development, they can force a lot of changes.
Hollywood and the likes usually requeires a script to be mostly ready BEFORE production starts. Whereas for gamedev world, you need as little as "pitch the general idea to the Activision execs to secure your financing", after which game grows "up" over several years, during which many things often change, concepts get scrapped or reshaped, decisions are changed, etc.


It would be awfully easy. Just some coertion and bullying the management into an idea, Inception style. If the writer disagrees with you, you just " "convince" " someone higher in power ( eg "the money flow source" ) and THEY force the writer to change things around.
You'd be amazed how much games change in their development cycle.
There's no such thing as "we go from point 0 to 100 on the exact same script" most of the time. Things develop over time.
Things change, oftentimes half-way through the development cycle there are major changes being made ( sometimes this causes entire game projects to overextend financially and consequently get scrapped altogether, eg Project 'Titan' ).

Counter-argument, as someone who doesn't live in the USA ( SBI is Canadian, close enough ) and never was there, it is insane to me to look from the side for the general level of average collective entitlement out there, compared to the rest of the world. The general lack of self awarness and self reflection, brazen cringe, and other things.
It doesn't have to make logical sense to us in EU what they do in US, they will do that anyway :P
In other words, your or mine logic about their "missions" and things doesn't apply to SBI, they simply do what they want, being based next to country with impressively high 'entitlement average per population' ( where common sense MIGHT be overriden by egocentrism and personal bias at times ).

( second part will be posted in 15+ minutes or if someone posts in the meantime, then earlier )

( part 2 / 2 )

Their stated mission doesn't have to have anything to do with their internal mission. It's called PR for a reason ;)
Also, welcome to ambiguously worded "mission statements" - a swiss-army knife of guerilla PR tactics :D

This is USA / Canada we are talking about. World's most impressive capitalistic wet dream, where corpo ALREADY kinda runs the country ( at least USA anyway ).
No offence to any Americans / Canadians!!


Now, this is your mistake. You are assuming they "CARE" what their audience thinks, haha.
Believe me, very few people in the gamedev industry "CARE", it's mostly indie devs, and low level developers ( actual people doing the work ) in "big studios". The execs and whatnot? THEY DON'T CARE. They generally care about MONEY tho...
And the SBI situation is precisely because some just DON'T CARE what their CORE audience thinks!


Now, this is your another mistake. This company is generally NOT being hired by "small indie dev studios". It's being hired by "the big of the industry", and there, it's not YOUR game ( you who write the game script ) - and it's not YOU hiring this company - your "higher ups" / publisher is hiring them and forcing YOU to listen to THEM ;)

One of the very basic mistakes most gamers on the internet make is assuming that a low level developer, like a script writer, or an concept artist can influence such decisions in the product's cycle in the "grand way", they can't ( at least excluding "small indie studios" ). "Big decisions" are made by "people high up", and eg if your game gets a highly controversial change, chances are 90+ % it's "someone high up" who FORCED it onto the dev team.
Eg Overwatch 2 - people on the internet are OH SO HAPPY to rag on the DEVELOPERS to no end, blaming the DEVELOPERS for EVERYTHING, for the AWFUL battle pass ( change for the worse, compared to Overwatch 1, at least according to most players anyway ), REMOVAL of previously present content, shutting down Overwatch 1 servers, etc.
When in reality, NONE of these changes are up to the developers, and the begrudged playerbase should have a gripe with the "HIGHER UPS" ( HIGHER than Jeff Kaplan, who left btw, after which things took a nose dive for much worse ), the management, the Activision execs, etc.
It's THEM making such decisions.
And it would ALSO be them ( NOT developers ) to hire "consultant companies" in such big gamedev companies.

( here a WARNING - my native language ISN'T English, while I have been learning eng for more than 20 years now, I am not an expert, and there are times I use wrong words due to random reasons. None of this is meant to be offensive towards anyone. If you think I meant something "wrong", if in doubt, ask me, instead of jumping to arbitrary conclusions like in that "pointing at cat" meme )

Like I said before.
As a game developer it is YOUR PRIMARY JOB to make people HAPPY, make them ENJOY your game, it should NOT be your priority WHO plays your game!
It SHOULDN'T matter to you. You aren't SUPPOSED TO be making "a game for this or that group of people". You are supposed to make a game for HUMANITY to enjoy, regardless of gender, whatever segregation metric, or other bs.
There is no problem with inclusivity. IT IS FINE.
HOWEVER, it should be ORGANIC, not ARBITRARY. To make an exaggerated example, let's say you are a Japanese gamedev studio, and you already have "2 whites, 2 asians, and 1 black" in your story, the story centers about current day Japan, and you want to put in one more Asian, but your hired "consultant" goes "nonono! It cannot be Asian. You need to have 1 more black for eQuAlItY!".
It's like THOSE companies who are like, we are having a "free and fair" HR process, and we already have 49 women and 51 men in our company, this 1 man has better resume than this woman, but we will hire this woman instead "because EQUALITY".
What is "EQUAL" about it is a NUMBER on some spreadsheet. NOT *fairness*.
It's not organic, it's ARBITRARY.
It could be argued this is DE FACTO segregation in fact, making arbitrary "buckets" for each group, and once a buffer reaches a number, noone else from given group can get in. This isn't equality by any sane definition.

It DOES NOT matter whatever gender, skin color, etc your hero in the story has! What matters is that this needs to be NATURAL in the story, for it to make SENSE in the story, and to be explicitly MEANT to be. Not be FORCED BY ARBITRARY "EQUALITY BY NUMBERS"!
As a game developer, you should make the characters first and foremost WELL WRITTEN, the story IMMERSIVE and ENJOYABLE.
Any segregation and "arbitrary inclusivity" should be the LEAST of your concerns.
You are supposed to develop your script NATURALLY, not "go through an inclusivity checklist" - real world doesn't work like that ( checklist ), because TRUE EQUALITY isn't about NUMBERS of each group ( that would be more like arbitrary POPULATION CONTROL ), it's about equal RIGHTS, equal CHANCES, equal TREATMENT, etc.

When I cherry pick my games to play, I seek things I will ENJOY, the story that will be GOOD, something I can immerse myself in, enjoy my time with it, etc.
I DO NOT play games to seek my "personal ideals validation". I do not seek "echochambers" in games. I do not want to play a game SOLELY because eg "someone looks like me", or "someone has same ideals as me". I do not care.
I want to play a game that I consider GOOD, for it's story, it's immersion, it's general value, etc.
I DO NOT CARE what gender, color, etc the character I am playing as, is.
I simply want the game to be ENJOYABLE, to be GOOD.
As a game developer you should make a game that is UNIVERSALLY ACLAIMED, universally ENJOYED, with GOOD writing and storytelling, well written characters.
You are supposed to TELL A STORY, NOT "showcase characters". STORY should come first!


There's always an option of using an controller wrapper layer ( eg DS4Windows, if you're on Windows, or eg xboxdrv if you are on NIX ).
It would possibly fix some issues ( while ALSO hiding the original controller, so that you DON'T get "double input" ), while providing more customisation options ;)

I swear by Zwilling myself, made in Solingen from german stainless steel and to be passed down through generations.
Not this model but a much older similar looking one, from the 50s or 60s, I think. Top-shelf this.

I'll play along!

Some questions, if you don't mind.

1. Can you summarise the Kotaku article?

2. After reading the Kotaku article, can you point to the factual inaccuracies in it?

2. Given that they went to the primary source on one side (Sweet Baby Inc.) and attempted to go to the other (the conspiracy theorist community and Discord group/Steam group), how would you have represented the other side? What would you have done differently? Do you think both sides should get equal representation in an article like this?

Once, BBC made a feature interview about climate change. Their mandate at the time was to represent both sides of the issue as much as possible. They had a renowned climate scientist on one side, and a (science-denying) "skeptic" with no peer reviewed publications to his name. They both got the same amount of time to argue their points. Even though the matter of anthropogenic climate change is settled science, and there hasn't been a single credible peer reviewed article published in the past two decades refuting it, the guy got equal footing than the factual scientist.

Do you think both sides should get the same exposure in such a case?

3. Do you think that a video gaming article built on one side on conspiracy theories and non-verifiable facts, could ever be comprehensive and conclusive?

4. Don't you think the burden of proof is on the ones making the claim that Sweet Baby Inc. did all those terribad things? Why does Kotaku have the responsibility to get to the bottom of the matter, when the accusers don't even have any verifiable facts (and indeed declined to argue their case, instead banning the journalist)?

5. What is your opinion on the Sweet Baby Inc. controversy, and do you base it on any verifiable facts?

6. Do you think your own prejudices and preconceptions have anything to do with the way you view the articles? Meaning, if the message was different (Sweet Baby Inc. is the devil in disguise and the ruin of the whole video gaming industry due to "wokeness"), would you have accepted the article?

7. Do you think sources should be dismissed outright, without even going through them and objecting to its content? Can someone just dismiss an entire source, like if it comes from Fox News, it's automatically bullishit and shouldn't even be given the benefit of consideration? Should the reader at least attempt to read the article, and establish whether they have major objections to its content, before acategorically dismissing it?

8. What does journalistic integrity mean to you? Is the fact that the source admits when they are wrong, and redacts articles/corrects them after the fact, enough to say that they have journalistic integrity? If one source redacts articles, and the other never does, which one has more journalistic integrity?

pardon me for throwing away most of your post. i don't have the time right this second to put my thoughts on it in some sort of order that'll make sense, but i DID want to talk about this for a second.

i'll come back around again and talk about the other stuff later.

i beg to differ, here.

i have been playing video games in some shape or form since 1980.

and i can tell you now that video games - as a medium - have gone through several rather seismic shifts as they've gone along.

i'm going to speedrun a lot of this to get to my point, but:

we had coin guzzlers. we had arcade conversions. we had proto-rpgs with threadbare stories. we had adventure games with better stories. we had action adventures that tested reflexes, etc.

my point is that the medium is an evolving one.

one thing that's happened along the way - and almost since the very beginning of gaming as a whole is that /some/ games are - for want of a better word - aimed at being artistic expression. some games are also designed to talk about political issues.

a very early "artistic" game - for example was "moondust." "moondust" is essentially just a generative art exercise, but it was - absolutely - sold to players of games. [on the c64, no less.]

likewise, a very early "political" game was "a mind forever voyaging." this was a game that posited what life might be like if reaganism just kept going to it's logical endpoint.

are both these games good [edited in later: since you were talking about fun, i'm going to go ahead and re-posit this question as: "are these games fun"]? not especially? but they're designed as thought experiments first and games second, but they're STILL - absolutely - games.

i was quite affected by the end of my play through of amfv, both in the 80's when i played it for the first time and recently when i replayed it. that character goes through so much in such a short space of time that it is wonderful when they earn their happy ending.

so, i somewhat reject your fundamental thesis here: games CAN be about more than just pure enjoyment. from that perspective, it then makes perfect sense that if games can be about more than that, they can also include different sorts of characters. and those characters don't just have to be default young men and women.

with regards to games - like with most art - there's nothing a developer is "supposed to" be doing.