Hyenas - The "Overwatch killer" by Creative Assembly

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A Sentient Cloud said:
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Holy shit words words words words words more words. This is some jerkoff FPS, not The Brothers Karamazov. Just tell us what roles and abilities of these discount losers are.
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Because when you think freedom fighters facing an oppressive regime of millionares, the first archetypes that come to mind are e-celebs, trannies, fucking glowies and rich kids

You couldve at least throw a punished John Doe in there, normal guy who used to work his ass off for his family til the evil millionaires billionaires (over half of the fucking cast are stereotypes for people who are often much more wealthy than the average Joe is but let's just ignore that) screwed him out of work or something

I don't think it's impossible to make likeable and/or rootable lefty characters, so why do writers struggle this much writing them?
 
Psyduck said:
Because when you think freedom fighters facing an oppressive regime of millionares, the first archetypes that come to mind are e-celebs, trannies, fucking glowies and rich kids

You couldve at least throw a punished John Doe in there, normal guy who used to work his ass off for his family til the evil millionaires billionaires (over half of the fucking cast are stereotypes for people who are often much more wealthy than the average Joe is but let's just ignore that) screwed him out of work or something

I don't think it's impossible to make likeable and/or rootable lefty characters, so why do writers struggle this much writing them?
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Does people actually care about the plot of some goofy co-op shooter? It just seems like the wrong genre for this sort of thing. I don't think it's impossible for leftists to make a character-driven game that's good, Night in the Woods and Disco Elysium being two recent examples, but you need to have something substantive to say, an actual point of view beyond "lol billionaires amirite folx." And writing talent, of course.
 
According to sources, when film director Neill Blomkamp visited the studio back in 2019 he also provided feedback on the game's overall direction.

"He comes to visit the studio, and he's shown what we're up to," one source told Volound. "He has some ideas of a direction to take it in, basically that you're not stealing to survive, but Netflix/Steam/etc doesn't exist anymore so DVD boxsets, music, games, all that physical media is now super valuable.

"[Blomkamp] also had that idea of inserting a lot of internet humour and stuff. He even made a mood video to show what he was thinking, and to be honest after that period of 'wtf are we doing here' it was a real shot in the arm to have some DIRECTION (the project so often felt utterly rudderless)," the source said.
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:story:

District 9 really was just a fluke
 
Mr.Miyagi said:
Christ, how bad was management/design leads to have fucking "You guys should make the game about stealing DVD boxsets!" be the stirring creative focal point for the project? I know that a lot of these shitty trend-chasing games are soulless, but something like that is even worse.
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I could almost see a way to reflect physical media vs downloads vs cracked pirate copies or something within a game setting, like, the physical media has better durability for the items and cant be arbitrarily taken away per stage rules, the downloads port from character to character but stage hassles, and the pirate versions randomly crap out or put a dong on your head or something sorta like Devil Flippers in Pinball Quest
 
Kill Your Idols said:
How the actual fuck did a studio spend almost $1 billion on this game and it comes out looking like that? They need to audit the project ASAP to check if someone was depositing money into their offshore bank account.
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I still can't wrap my head about why this would cost at most $100 million. It's not breaking any new ground techwise, it's copying a dead/dying trend, the story is retarded woke bullshit and basically ignorable and the art design is bad. How do you spend nearly $1 billion on this and not something more established like Sonic, Yakuza, Persona etc?
 
Geddy Lee's Fee and See said:
I still can't wrap my head about why this would cost at most $100 million. It's not breaking any new ground techwise, it's copying a dead/dying trend, the story is retarded woke bullshit and basically ignorable and the art design is bad. How do you spend nearly $1 billion on this and not something more established like Sonic, Yakuza, Persona etc?
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As others have guessed, it might have been a massive siphon for ESG money with massively overinflated budget that was quietly shuffled to actual products. Either that or everyone in the dev room spent the last 2 years snorting coke off of lowtax's favorite tranny prostitute.
 
Geddy Lee's Fee and See said:
I still can't wrap my head about why this would cost at most $100 million. It's not breaking any new ground techwise, it's copying a dead/dying trend, the story is retarded woke bullshit and basically ignorable and the art design is bad. How do you spend nearly $1 billion on this and not something more established like Sonic, Yakuza, Persona etc?
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I think others in the thread have pointed out, this isn't really Sega going to CA and saying "Here's $1bn, make us a game," and instead part of their "SuperGame" project, that's been going on for a few years. This whole idea of using a combination of IPs they own (like the ones you mentioned), buying dev studios, using whatever new tech like NFTs or cloud gaming with their Microsoft partnership, all to (presumably) develop some kind of their own Fortnite or Call of Duty, an online game where they can milk it like an infinite money press.

The Sega VP talked about it being multiple AAA games last year, so Hyenas isn't likely to be the only thing that comes out of this project. Well, "comes out." Given how they couldn't attract enough attention or get a definitive monetization strategy, it's hard to say what might happen to the other games being made under this banner.
 
I am not much into shooters (I have only played Sierra's AvP to completion) but I remember at high school every now and then, there were classmates playing the pirated copy of Unreal Tournament or Counter Strike at the school computers via local lan, and I loved to watch how much fun they had by just playing the game with friends.

Nowadays, I consider a red flag if their way to sell a game comes from using a lot of references to pop culture and lol so random! stuff in both the trailer and the game, because only that makes the experience™ fun and relatable, right?
 
think said:
I remember making fun of this title around a year ago. I believe it was archived because it was under NDA at the time and some sperg uploaded gameplay of an alpha test. Jump to a minute in to skip the intro.

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Wtf, they enlisted this teenage kid in his shitty room to be an alpha tester? The environment design and typography actually look decent, it's like a gonzo Remember Me with all the AR text. I think the "breaching device" is supposed to be modeled after a Mk. 1 Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. The "attitude" is super cringe and tryhard and the combat is utterly unremarkable. The zero-G mode looks kind of neat with the grappling hook, it appears that the mag-boots only work with designated hotspots though. The playable characters are all hideous, I'd rather play characters with the generic merc models with them, the enemies are merely bland instead of being flagrantly ugly. They must have had to pay tons of money to license all the IPs for the merch, aside from the Sega stuff of course.
Asian tech support said:
I figure this is how ESG and whatever ESG gets rebranded to dies; abused by scheisters who squirrel away the money while delivering the lowest effort whatever possible.
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It's strange; Larry Fink et al. want to promote progressive politics but is it not becoming clear to them that the effect they're having is to associate progressive ideas with awful products and entertainment? For any given media franchise, the moment it became super-progressive is generally the same moment at which it turned to shit. What people remember, even subconsciously, is how the sequel to that game they liked came out and this time it had all these xe/xirs in it and it was a garbage fire of bugs and the devs were posting on Twitter about how much they hated the fans.
Mr.Miyagi said:
Christ, how bad was management/design leads to have fucking "You guys should make the game about stealing DVD boxsets!" be the stirring creative focal point for the project? I know that a lot of these shitty trend-chasing games are soulless, but something like that is even worse.
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It's the epitome of woke marketing. "Rebel against the system by collecting plastic consumer junk." But there is a bit of genuine subversion there, encouraging players to think about why they think about stuff from the past more fondly than things coming out today.
 
Mr.Miyagi said:
Christ, how bad was management/design leads to have fucking "You guys should make the game about stealing DVD boxsets!" be the stirring creative focal point for the project? I know that a lot of these shitty trend-chasing games are soulless, but something like that is even worse.
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The vague premise of "stealing ancient Earth artifacts that are actually cheap consumer junk" could make for a fun title if handled with an appropriately light touch, but getting the balance between embracing its retardedness without going overboard in its silliness is a hard task. The safe-for-boardroom, unironic "stick it to the system my fellow kids" corporate edge and sass coated with Marvel quips that ended up coming out of the pipeline was an unspeakable horror that expertly avoided ticking any of the right boxes and went all in on the wrong ones.
 
Vaclav said:
It's strange; Larry Fink et al. want to promote progressive politics but is it not becoming clear to them that the effect they're having is to associate progressive ideas with awful products and entertainment?
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I think it is becoming clear which is why the higher-ups like Fink are quietly leaving, with the appropriate fall guy(s) holding the bag. They know what a sinking ship is even before the water starts flooding the components.
 
Psyduck said:
I don't think it's impossible to make likeable and/or rootable lefty characters, so why do writers struggle this much writing them?
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It might not be impossible but it would be extremely difficult for a modern lefty to write a generally likable lefty in my opinion, and hyper-lefties are basically all that's left in mainstream media/content production. A good character has to have flaws and it would be sacrilege to depict anyone who ascribes to their ideology as anything but perfect, and if they try to get feedback from any of their coworkers on how to make the character more interesting they're stuck in an echo chamber of people who will tear apart and ostracize anyone who says leftism is anything but the be-all end-all goal that humanity should tirelessly toil towards.

I think in order to write a good lefty you'd need someone closer to center, whether they be right or left of it, who has some people further to the left that they have criticisms of but otherwise hold in high regard, and their character development would need to be realizing that some part of their thinking is flawed which, as I mentioned, is something the modern left is either incapable of or just afraid to do.
 
Snekposter said:
Now you're just making me wish we had the politicians Japan thinks we do.
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Senator Armstrong unironically would have been a great president instead of the geriatric ghouls being paraded around by other geriatric ghouls.
Tor Lugosi said:

:story:

District 9 really was just a fluke
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It really feels like it.

I still remember trying to sit through Chappie and my fucking god, Die Antwood just cannot act worth a damn and were non-stop annoying, and the only reason they were in the film is because Blokamp weirdly just wanted them to be. Also, Hugh Jackman's character was just so weird - randomly pulling out a gun at his own co-workers and being obsessed over a stripped down Metal Gear REX that kinda didn't do a whole lot except prove how useless it was against actual military ordinance.

Mr.Miyagi said:
Christ, how bad was management/design leads to have fucking "You guys should make the game about stealing DVD boxsets!" be the stirring creative focal point for the project? I know that a lot of these shitty trend-chasing games are soulless, but something like that is even worse.
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You mean like Volition and how the Saints Row reboot was centered around paying back student loans?
 
Optimus Prime said:
Senator Armstrong
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I am not even American and I would have voted for him

Optimus Prime said:
You mean like Volition and how the Saints Row reboot was centered around paying back student loans?
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That concept could work in another setting, and it has been tried already.

There is this indie game called Recettear, that basically consisted of paying out the debt your father inherited you because he took a lot of loans so he could become an adventurer, and he basically abandoned his only daughter.

You have the help of a fairy that serves as the bank representative, and she helps you administrate an items shop inside your own house so you could earn the money for each weekly payment. It is also is a dungeon crawler where you hire adventurers to get the items for your shop, you can also buy them at a higher price at the market. It is a good time killer, is fun, does not takes itself too seriously and FUCK THAT GIRL THAT IS ALWAYS TOO BROKE TO AFFORD ANYTHING!!

In short, that concept could work but I do not think Saints Row was the best place to do it
 
Doppelmonger said:
I am not much into shooters (I have only played Sierra's AvP to completion) but I remember at high school every now and then, there were classmates playing the pirated copy of Unreal Tournament or Counter Strike at the school computers via local lan, and I loved to watch how much fun they had by just playing the game with friends.

Nowadays, I consider a red flag if their way to sell a game comes from using a lot of references to pop culture and lol so random! stuff in both the trailer and the game, because only that makes the experience™ fun and relatable, right?
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Teh Penguin of DOOOM! springs to mind whenever I see this kinda "quirky" humour.

I think I echo most people here in the whole "why?" question for this game. Just make historical TW games again, they always did well.
 
Vaclav said:
It's strange; Larry Fink et al. want to promote progressive politics but is it not becoming clear to them that the effect they're having is to associate progressive ideas with awful products and entertainment?
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They don't care about the entertainment factor at all, and they pretty much know that these pushes will tank companies, which is what they WANT to happen, so they can be purchased at fire sale prices. It's a sort-of version of socialist countries nationalizing companies, except it's Fink et al. that's doing it, knowing that the US will bail them out, if the money does run out.
 
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