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This Week in Games - The Game Industry Uniting Against Bad Decisions


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garfield15



Joined: 06 Apr 2009
Posts: 1517
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 2:35 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
I also saw that Tales of Arise is getting a sequel, Beyond The Dawn. Not much to it outside of a cinematic trailer, sadly.

I'm pretty sure it's a DLC campaign
Quote:
Vanillaware's previous game, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, recently surpassed three million units sold

Boy I wish, but it actually only passed 1 million which is still an overachievement
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 28 Oct 2018
Posts: 504
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 2:41 pm Reply with quote
garfield15 wrote:

Quote:
Vanillaware's previous game, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, recently surpassed three million units sold

Boy I wish, but it actually only passed 1 million which is still an overachievement


Oof, thanks for that, we've made the correction.
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b-dragon



Joined: 21 Apr 2021
Posts: 459
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 3:06 pm Reply with quote
I was eating well with all the rpg news. FF7 was obviously in the pipeline, but a release date is nice. "Vanillaware does Ogre Battle" sounds like a potential dream game for me. And a new SaGa game! I cannot wait to be so bloody confused, as per SaGa game tradition.

The Arise sequel DLC gives me a bit of trepidation though. While the Tales teams have done sequels before, to some success, they also put out Dawn of the New World which is an affront to everything good in the world. Not really, but it is really terrible. And its status as DLC seems odd. We'll see what happens, I suppose.

I'm morbidly curious as to how the Unity situation is going to go. I'd imagine they'll walk back a fair amount of the nonsense...but end up still clawing more money out of devs.
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MegaMooseJam2008



Joined: 20 Sep 2010
Posts: 23
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 3:10 pm Reply with quote
Wasn't the big deal with the Steins;Gate thing being that the upload was of the full game, ending included, for a title that wasn't even officially released yet?
Like, spoiling the story for a game that is literally *only* story before that game has even hit shelves is not a very nice thing to do.
(Though I could be totally off base with my internet hearsay.)
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2312
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 3:16 pm Reply with quote
The Unity debacle is wild. Selfishly hoping this leads to more talent jumping ship to Godot and further improving it. The industry could use an open-source alternative as successful for game dev as Blender is for 3D.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2214
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 3:17 pm Reply with quote
Unity is going to be lucky if they only get sued into backing off instead of being sued into oblivion. Their business decisions over the past few years have been really bad so it's no wonder they're desperate and didn't understand why angering companies like Nintendo, Acti-Blizz, and Disney is a bad idea. Even if they walk this back, I imagine most studios are just going to look somewhere else because Unity has shown it can't be trusted. They're done.

As for better news, neat to see them going full Takarazuka Revue with Peach and having her switch costumes like she's taking on stage roles. Unicorn Overlord looks neat after Grand Knights History never had an overseas release. Altogether, Nintendo showing no signs of slowing down with the Switch


Last edited by AiddonValentine on Fri Sep 15, 2023 6:23 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Pokenatic



Joined: 24 Jan 2012
Posts: 563
Location: Neo Venezia
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 4:58 pm Reply with quote
While plenty of developers have been mad at the Unity service changes, are Disney, Pokémon Company, Hoyoverse (Mihoyo), or Activision-Blizzard actually mad at Unity themselves? Granted this is something I only just heard from discussions around the current controversy, but people said Activision-Blizzard probably has a special deal with Unity already, which wouldn't be too surprising, so the proposed changes wouldn't impact them if that were the case.
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Vanadise



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 498
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 5:53 pm Reply with quote
Pokenatic wrote:
While plenty of developers have been mad at the Unity service changes, are Disney, Pokémon Company, Hoyoverse (Mihoyo), or Activision-Blizzard actually mad at Unity themselves?

AAA developers all have PR and legal teams that very carefully control what they say regarding their contracting decisions. It will probably be a bit before any of them make any official announcements regarding their Unity games, and I'm sure they'll be very carefully-worded, you're not going to see any of them being mad.

I'm seeing indie developers en masse announcing that they're going to immediately stop using Unity, though, so I'll bet there are individual people at the big studios who are very unhappy about this.
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light turner



Joined: 13 Aug 2022
Posts: 122
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 7:05 pm Reply with quote
This Week In Games wrote:
For folks who have never played Thousand-Year Door, Vivian is a put-upon shadow witch who joins Mario in his journey to recover the seven Crystal Stars before her evil sisters do. While the English localization has Vivian's sisters belittle her for her perceived incompetence, the Japanese script, Spanish script, and German scripts have the sisters making fun of Vivian for being a boy who looks like a girl. The Italian localization goes the extra mile and declares Vivian as a trans-woman—and proud of it. Many fans, including Yours Truly, prefer this interpretation, and Vivian has been accepted as a trans representation by pretty much anyone who's played Thousand-Year Door. Nintendo was in a very different place in 2004, and with the greater visibility and acceptance that the trans community has now, many people--again, including myself—are hoping that Nintendo actually Does The Thing™ and lets Vivian be trans in a new script. It'll be very disappointing if it doesn't happen.


Honestly I would rather they kept to the Japanese script and have Vivian be a femboy. It was nice when Zoicite and Fish-Eye could finally be feminine men in America and escape the prison DIC put them in back in the day and now everyone knows and sees them as men.

That being said, I could see them doing what they did for Catherine/Birdo and just... ignore their origins. Birdo is treated and considered a full on female now and always has been in canon. I guess to be fair Birdo is a special case since the original game she came from was not a Mario game so the character initially wasn't a Mario character. This change could just be the Mario-specific version of the character since DokiDoki canon has been osmosised into the Mario canon. I could honestly see Nintendo sidestepping the issue entirely and just having Vivian always be a girl now and shrug their shoulders and go "Huh? Guy? Nah, don't worry about it".

As for the localization: watching the new English trailer I noticed that there are script changes between the same scenes in the original version, so it's not just using the original TTYD localization. I did notice a couple of odd mistakes/changes though. Christine/Goombella introduces herself as a third-year student in Japan, but in the localization she says she's a Junior, which is inaccurate as third-year high school students would be seniors since Japanese schools only have 3 years rather than 4, so I can see where they made the mistake from. In the original localization she does not specify the year or her age so it's interesting and maybe means they're being more faithful to the Japanese version?

MegaMooseJam2008 wrote:
Wasn't the big deal with the Steins;Gate thing being that the upload was of the full game, ending included, for a title that wasn't even officially released yet?
Like, spoiling the story for a game that is literally *only* story before that game has even hit shelves is not a very nice thing to do.


From what I know from watching Game Center CX, Vtubers, and other Japanese streamers, companies really don't like spoilers in story-heavy games. For the longest time Vtubers could not play Persona 5 past a certain point in the game and it was only relatively recently that they were allowed to play the entire game, which is why so many Holomems started doing Persona 5 Royal playthroughs this past year. When Oozora Subaru streamed Persona 4 Golden last year she wasn't allowed to show the epilogue/Golden ending on her stream so she had to play it off-screen and give her reaction and commentary without gameplay. This year when Sakura Miko streamed it, she was allowed to show it on screen. I believe Atlus changed their policies and guidelines this year which is why it's being handled differently now.

Also, from what I heard, this guy also had anime clips on his channel as well which probably didn't help his case.

I can understand not liking the draconian guidelines, but at the same time I think there is something to be said about how charming it was they went into Persona 4 and 5 without any spoilers and seeing their genuine reaction to things. Good luck playing those games spoiler-free these days if spend time on the English side of the internet without already being spoiled on the various twists because of all the MURDERS! and PANCAKES! memes. Even when I was watching Subaru and Miko play them a few English viewers couldn't help themselves and bring up hiimdaisy Persona 4 comic memes in their chats.
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Pokenatic



Joined: 24 Jan 2012
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Location: Neo Venezia
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 8:27 pm Reply with quote
Vanadise wrote:
AAA developers all have PR and legal teams that very carefully control what they say regarding their contracting decisions. It will probably be a bit before any of them make any official announcements regarding their Unity games, and I'm sure they'll be very carefully-worded, you're not going to see any of them being mad.

I'm seeing indie developers en masse announcing that they're going to immediately stop using Unity, though, so I'll bet there are individual people at the big studios who are very unhappy about this.


Honestly, I was being a bit gripey about how the excerpt felt clickbait-y when it came to Disney, Pokémon Company, China, and Activision-Blizzard. Like, that gave me the impression that they already gave out statements on the matter (or something about the Chinese government not being happy about this) spoiler[(NGL, why was China named instead of Hoyoverse/Mihoyo?)]. Also, when it comes to Disney, I honestly would not be surprised if they don't even notice themselves since they partner with game studios and publishers so they aren't as directly hands on.
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Vaisaga



Joined: 07 Oct 2011
Posts: 13230
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 9:33 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
More importantly, it's rare to see them distribute digital copies of fan comics—usually, they only make digital copies of their original stuff.


Not so rare. Sites like DLsite and others have a large digital cateloge of non original works. Some even post their older stuff to Pixiv in full for free.
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Zimmer



Joined: 08 Jul 2015
Posts: 182
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 9:52 pm Reply with quote
Hopefully F-Zero 99 means they might be looking to make a new game.

Sure hope they actually do Vivian justice. But whether or not they do, not looking forward to the inevitable freak outs over it.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 28 Oct 2018
Posts: 504
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 10:26 pm Reply with quote
MegaMooseJam2008 wrote:
Wasn't the big deal with the Steins;Gate thing being that the upload was of the full game, ending included, for a title that wasn't even officially released yet?
Like, spoiling the story for a game that is literally *only* story before that game has even hit shelves is not a very nice thing to do.
(Though I could be totally off base with my internet hearsay.)


Not something I've heard. It's my (limited) experience that most folks try to avoid spoiling if it's asked of them, though. ZUN had asked Touhou fans to not spoil the endings to their games, and by plum, Touhou fans make sure to never do that.
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DKL



Joined: 08 May 2005
Posts: 1951
Location: California, USA
PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2023 11:54 pm Reply with quote
When they announced F-zero 99, I was surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly?) puzzled by people's initial reaction to it... since it seems like what I've always wanted out of this series: a way to play the game competitively with a large number of people since they will offer more than the AI in terms of challenge and pushback on my autopiloting.

(though I believe most people, outside of the most closed-minded holdouts, are now walking back on this since they realized the game is actually very fun)

Here I was thinking that Street Fighter 6 was going to be the sweatiest game I played this year, yet here we are with yet another banger in 2023. I'm pretty happy.

I'mma be real and say that most of the people crying about the use of the SNES engine for the 99 game were probably not people that actually put any serious time into this game series.

(even more annoying than people that insists this random "F-Zero-like" game is an F-zero substitute, but it feels like they never actually played the game enough to say stuff like this... though, to be fair, these do in fact exist: I put like $100 into the Aero GPX kickstarter since it's apparent that the dev actually played this series and did a bang-up job of recreating the F-zero game feel)

I have like no time with the original SNES game, so this was the perfect opportunity to at least somewhat learn about it even with the knowledge that I'm probably gonna be bodied by people with legacy skill in this particular game in the series. Having looked at tutorials for the original game, this is definitely a bit different, but F-Zero 99 appears to use a lot of the fundamentals I picked up while playing F-Zero X and GX.

(not that I played those games at high level since this was before it was easy to get youtube tutorials on how to not suck, but I was at least vaguely aware of how the gameplay worked at a slightly more than casual level)

The actual game is pretty close to what I'd considered my ideal of what I want a competitive F-Zero game to be like. I do have a misgiving, however.

On paper, it seems like the amount of players would make this a clustertruck. However, the devs did a very good job of balancing how collisions with other players work, so I never felt too out of control despite being in a large school of drivers. The cooldown on spin attack was probably a good idea.

You would think that the skyway comeback mechanic is "scrubby", but there's a lot of times where I could get so far ahead of the crowd that the extra help didn't matter because you couldn't always grind out the meter fast enough depending on the situation. If anything, I think the orb stuff is the most interesting application of the drafting mechanic or whatever I've seen in a racing game since you end up in a scenario where you have to choose whether or not to hold onto this thing and not boost while waiting for a part of the track that gets you the biggest advantage upon activation.

What actually annoys me to no end is how they handled a race's endgame: random trash mobs will spawn at the front of the fastest players, as if to punish you for playing well, which I would almost always consider terrible design. Because of the trash's presence, you are more often than not forced to take suboptimal driving routes because the placement is just enough to be obnoxious and in the way.

I do understand why they have this mechanic since they don't want you to stomp on people too badly, but I would honestly rather be lapped by a better player than have to deal with the volatility this mechanic offers. Though, I do admit, it does offer a very intense race to first scenario in a lot of situations, but I just wish there was a more sophisticated way of doing this. I think I understand the spawn patterns now sort of (it seems like they spawn in a new wave every time you pass the furthest red car in front), but I would rather something else be here in place of this (not that I know what this "something else" is since I'm not a game designer).

(this clearly isn't enough to deter me from playing, however, since I mash the queue button anyway and will probably begrudgingly just learn how to play around it like the game wants me to)

That said, I am pleased to discover, now having actually played with a lot of people simultaneously, that the game is as deep as I always thought it was. I was in a race I won recently and I feel like I was able to do so because I actually outplayed the other people: the leaders were both driving the Pico/Green car on Mute City. Because I was experimenting a bunch in time trial mode to see what the differences between the cars was, I was aware that they were probably out of boost during the 4th lap since the health recovery for the character is awful since he's built to be durable. So I ended up conserving my boost until the right moment as opposed to spamming it right away in a desperate grab at a higher placement since I knew they were not going to be able to boost into and out of the last corner too much without getting killed.

Stuff like this I find to be very cool and why I like games.

That said, F-Zero 99 now establishes a baseline I feel that the series needs to meet. Assuming they are making a new game, it has to have 99 player races or I won't be satisfied now. I do hope they can make it work somehow, so fingers crossed.

But yes, this is a comeback I'm very happy with.
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Stelman257



Joined: 26 Jul 2013
Posts: 272
PostPosted: Sat Sep 16, 2023 12:36 am Reply with quote
light turner wrote:
As for the localization: watching the new English trailer I noticed that there are script changes between the same scenes in the original version, so it's not just using the original TTYD localization. I did notice a couple of odd mistakes/changes though. Christine/Goombella introduces herself as a third-year student in Japan, but in the localization she says she's a Junior, which is inaccurate as third-year high school students would be seniors since Japanese schools only have 3 years rather than 4, so I can see where they made the mistake from. In the original localization she does not specify the year or her age so it's interesting and maybe means they're being more faithful to the Japanese version?

She introduces herself as a "Junior" at University, not high school. They actually aged her up a year from the Japanese version hahaha.
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