Hate necromancying a dead thread here, but I'm gonna go into some design decisions regarding gear in
Revolution 60 - specifically, the firearms. I'm doing so because it's an almost-perfect microcosm of Wu's intellectual sterility and laziness. Enjoy.
The weapon design in
Revolution 60 is just unimpeachably
shit. None of them show any real thought for their design or production, and no thought given to why they're the way they are. Rev60's guns are marked by bizarre design aesthetics, and more that just hint that there's no real pattern to any weapon in the
Revolution 60 universe. The basic rifles used by Fifth Column (aka
the worst-named Terrorist Group in history) use ridiculously obvious base assets - they're Israeli Galil-series rifles with big blades attached to look menacing. This is something mimicked by the other weapons in the game - Holiday's pistol is essentially based on a Glock-series pistol (with blades and a forward brace) whilst the minigun in the game is pretty clearly an M134 without any alterations (nor an ammo source, because that's how
that works).
You may ask the relevance of this. It's pretty simple:
Weaponry, like all technology in a setting, has the ability to tell its own story, not only in terms of gameplay, but in terms of the greater whole. It portrays the design ethos and thought processes of its creators. It explains a lot about the operator of a given weapon. Even a comedic game like
Far Cry: Blood Dragon or a game whose weapons essentially take the piss, like
Iron Brigade, the weapons can help explain certain parts of the world (hilariously, in these cases; I dare anyone to tell me the description of the
Blastasaurus Rex or the
Hole Puncher are anything but some of the best descriptions in video games). This is true IRL, where almost every gun you can imagine has an extensive story behind its development, and why it was crafted the way it was. This story is told both in crunch and fluff formats. You can tell a shitload about a gun just from the way it looks, and the way it operates.
Which brings us to Rev60 again.
Revolution 60 is a far future setting. Everything in it is designed to be the sort of dark future common to Sci-Fi, but nothing takes one out of such a scenario quicker than a readily-recognizable weapon with no modifications whatsoever. If I had a dollar for every time I watched an episode of
Dr. Who, wherein
in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only the G36C with no changes to its exterior whatsoever, I'd be able to afford a new car. It's a complete immersion-breaker, and it's one so obvious that even someone with a passing level of observation skills notices immediately. "Hey, there's that gun from
Counter-Strike," someone less-knowledgable about guns but who still recognizes it might say.
It doesn't have to be this way. Let me elaborate here. Let's harken back to
Aliens:
This is a Pulse Rifle. In the
Aliens universe, it's the iconic weapon of marines and planetary defense forces. You'd never know it by looking at it, but under that hardware, this amazing little prop weapon is, in fact, another gun entirely:
At its core, every Pulse Rifle prop in
Aliens is essentially an M1A1 Thompson SMG with some modifications. The stock is removed, the furniture as well. The sighting is removed and the barrel cut short. It's then fitted with a series of case mods, and bam, functioning Aliens Pulse Rifle prop. The digital ammo counter even works on some modern models (including airsoft versions). By doing so many changes, they made a gun which looks futuristic without costing a fortune. Only someone who's a complete gunfag is going to notice that the Pulse Rifle is a Thompson, and even that's debatable when you see what the Pulse rifle looks like. It adds to the immersion. Even the fucking
Doom movie did this by using a wide-variety of guns
intended to look like future versions of the G36.
So I've gone over that there's a right way and a wrong way to do what Wu wanted to do with the firearms in the universe of
Revolution 60. Wu's way is just openly lazy, and one of countless ways to string up her game for a lack of quality, but it gets even weirder: At no point do we even have any idea how any of the guns in the game
work. Are they conventional firearms? Doubtful, we never see shell casings. Are they energy weapons? The codex docco suggests that, but tells us jack shit. If they're energy weapons, why do they have cartridge ejection ports? These are all basic questions, and the game doesn't even try to stay internally consistent with them. Other works of sci-fi go out of their way to establish the unique traits of the weapons of their universe, from the blaster rifles in
Star Wars to the myriad weapons in
Mass Effect.
An even better example of how weapons between different factions can be done is in
Warframe:
That's three guns used by three main factions of the game, and the differences in design ethos is visible miles away. The Corpus Dera, at the top, is an energy weapon. Corpus weapons are designed via computer, with a profusion of hard angles, poor ergonomics, but solid performance through technological savvy. The Grineer Gorgon, at center, is an LMG, one that's manufactured and produced in the millions. It's cast from ferrite, assembled via production line with as many loose tolerances as production will allow, and assembled en masse. The bottom one, the Vectis, is as Tenno-made sniper weapon, with an elegant, streamlined, even
predatory look, clearly as much designed to be a work of elegance as it is a weapon of war. This is a very simple thing to pull off, and it's been done in games since
forever. In
Haze, the mercs and the Red Hand used different weapons, with one side's being technologically-advanced and elegant, and the other being rugged and industrial from the previous century. You can see this in games that
aren't futuristic -
Bioshock Infinite is a good example, with the difference between weapons from the Vox Populi and Columbia.
All of this brings me to my final point: The weapons in Wu's game are ridiculously simple, and show a "fill-in-the-blanks" style of design that's simply endemic throughout the entire game. She didn't give a shit, despite them being such a major component of gameplay, and just stuck some props onto existing guns with no grace or skill and called it a day.
This is the sort of shit we mock games over. At its core,
Revolution 60's guns may as well be the guns in the 1980s
G.I. Joe cartoons: They're pewpew lasers that shoot sciency bits, shut up, we don't need to explain them, we're obviously not trying very hard in something for little kids. This is an issue because the Wu-niverse of
Revolution 60 is trying
desperately to be taken seriously, but has essentially no substance under it all. In this regard, the firearms of
Revolution 60 are an almost perfect microcosm of Brianna Wu's design ethos: Throw everything into shitting the game out, irrespective of quality, and focus instead on the story, and how amazing it is, since that's about all Wu's got.
...Except, as we know already, the story is cliche, poorly-told, poorly-contextualized, and generally put together in a haphazard, immature fashion. The plot twists are visible miles off, and the game just doesn't try, reveling in mediocrity, meaning the story fails as hard as the rest of the game does. Fucking
Destiny puts more effort in to explain its shit.
When Smutley refers to it as Brianna's
Sonichu, he's not remotely inaccurate. The common threads between
Sonichu and
Revolution 60 are pretty up-front. They're works that exist solely to glorify their creators, but which blatantly show their creators' limitations. You see the same effort given for the universe of
Revolution 60 and the technology in it (I.E.
none) that you do everywhere else: Flat environments with no shading. Unspectacular effects in general and fucking
infinitely re-used assets in every area. The fluff is the same way - a skin stretched over a framework with nothing underneath.
