Be Excellent To Each Other

I hope they give them all a few days off this week then force them to make GTA6 before Christmas.

buuuuuuuuuuuuuuull shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

As someone who writes for a living, I can't imagine turning in anything than utter tosh by hour 65. The state of the writing at hour 100 would be something to behold.

Here’s a report with the clarification.

https://kotaku.com/we-were-working-100- ... 1829758281

And you don’t think that normalises a culture of overwork? That consciously or subconsciously, it pressures lower ranking members of staff to work the same hours as their leaders? Horseshit.

Look at the quote. “Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because they're passionate about a project, or their particular work, and we believe that passion shows in the games we release.” So the clear implication is that people who don’t do this aren’t passionate and aren’t hard working.

Read the tweets Eurogamer quoted, too.

I’ve no idea how big Rockstar is, where they’re based, how the teams are laid out or what the management structure is.

Honestly though, I’d expect those involved in creating the main story that the entire game hangs on to work more hours than someone on the team who designs the barrels.

WHAT???!!! Pictures take longer than words, man.

Wow!

Every single change made to dialogue or animation or code by some 'very senior person' working long hours is one that has to be tested three ways until Christmas by testing teams who are probably paid a shit ton less. But I'm sure they all can knock off at 5 no problem.

Jim Sterling did a decent video about crunch and overwork in the games industry a couple of weeks ago.

I thought he was dead!?

He seems pretty alive to me, but I'm no scientist.

Who died then?

Burt Reynolds.

Do you want the full list?

I know you’re joking now cause I just watched him in Tombstone live in my telly.

Michael Jackson.

Died December 1996.

This is a fun game!

George Best

This will take too long, it's quicker to name people who haven't died.

I'll start.

Elvis Presley

Sorry to mess up the game :



I think you mean totalbiscuit (and shame on you for getting 'thank god for Jim' mixed up with him)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TotalBiscuit

No, he was thinking of Hitler.

Last trailer before release!

Choo choo!

This really does put me off the game somewhat.

Why because he says “[bad working practices] isn’t just a Rockstar issue; it’s not just a game industry issue; it’s believed most US employees [are subjected similar working pressures]?” Let’s be fair, if we’re being honest we wouldn’t buy most products if we knew what happens behind the curtains. And a ome of them we are all too readily aware and close our eyes to them. We buy inter alia clothes, mobile phones and food products from companies that exploit their workers. We use service industries that exploit their staff and subject them to low wages. Every day we buy something that is probably hurting someone else without questioning it.

And I’ll probably just buy it, rave about it and not think twice about the poor sods making those 3D barrels. I’m just not sure there’s an answer here.

I completely agree with you, we know full well that exploitation of other human beings is behind an awful lot of the things we take for granted and enjoy on a daily basis, and yet we're basically all complicit in it (myself included) because we continue to hand over our money to get the things we want.

It's just ugly when it bubbles to the surface like this, but it's easier to ignore it and carry on than actually propose or commit to a course of action that would change anything.

The wholesale collective unionisation of workers across the globe would be an interesting proposition, but then we'd probably moan about how all our shit just got more expensive, even if it means people in China stop throwing themselves off high buildings to escape another month of making our fucking mobile phones.

I doubt I'll buy the game, tbh. Not particularly excited about it, can't really afford it and this just makes me feel uneasy about it anyway.

It's pretty much a universal, though.

You'll have to sign a waiver to worktime rules in order to even get to the interview.

There's a big difference in games devs having crunch periods and the directors boasting about how long everyone is working.

I have a contact at Ubisoft and he says it's never anywhere near as bad as this.

An interesting argument for those who like to read words on pages:

https://ineeddiversegames.org/2018/10/2 ... practices/

Did you even read the rest or are you doing an ironic peak internet response?

One good thing to come out of that flippant remark from Houser is that it seems like they've actually made some changes.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/23/1801 ... lic-letter

Yes, stuff has to change. Start with the testers, devs are treated like gods compared to them. The way to do that isn't by giving something a bad review score - that's likely to lose people their jobs.

Also: does he think the Macbook he wrote that article on was put together by who skipped to work?

No one said give it a bad score, but it's certainly worth looking at the product as a whole, rather than in a vacuum. Companies shouldn't base employee bonuses on review scores either, but who has the power to change that? Not the employees.

MacBook is whataboutery but I would agree that working conditions should be improved for everyone, obviously. No one is saying you shouldn't buy the thing, btw. It's just something to think about.

How does he plan marking down the score? “This game is a 10/10 but I heard a rumour in the internet that one person was sexually harassed at work so 2/10”

Obviously not like that.

Also their own creative director boasting about crunch working conditions is slightly different to your example, don't you think?

So sexual harassment isn’t as bad as working overtime then? Jesus Christ.

This doesn't work on me, sorry.

In come the reviews:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018 ... n-2-review

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2018/10 ... n-2-review

https://kotaku.com/red-dead-redemption- ... 1829984369

Spoiler: It looks all right

I dunno, The Guardian's review basically says straight out it's 60% horse riding and it'd get boring if it weren't all so pretty. (Before giving it 5 stars, natch.)

Reading through the other reviews I'm minded to think I'd have the same basic issues with this game as I did its predecessor.

I will wait and see what BEEXers think of it.

Massively polarized 50/50 split, probs.

Tbf you played it almost ten years after the rest of us did. It was incredible at the time.

Bloody hell Hearty only played it for the first time six months ago!

I'm not sure that's the reason though, there's a certain sort of game in the open world genre I tend not to get on with, I've finally learned to stop buying Bethesda games (after Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3) after getting a certain distant into all of them and completely losing the motivation to play. I was the same with RDR.

(And for the Bethesda games, I played them all when they were shiny and new on a PC powerful enough to do them justice.)

I played it at the time and I got bored by Mexico.

I'm kind of getting the same vibe from all the reviews (that I've flicked through). They seem to spend 90% of their time waffling on about what a great world they've built and the actual gameplay comments are secondary. That's doing nothing to make me want to actually play the thing. Indeed, the few times the EG review actually mentions gameplay explicitly it just puts me off further.

Digital Foundry has done a comparison of the main versions:

Xbox 1 X - native 4K, super sharp/locked 30FPS
PS4 Pro - chequerboard rendering 2160p bit blurry presentation/dips below 30FPS in stress points but otherwise ok
Xbox 1 - 840p/dips to 25FPS and is a bit shonky
PS4 - 1080p/worst performance of the lot at key stress points like busy cities and such.

So yeah, Xbox 1X is the best way to play if you’ve got one.

I've only got an OG PS4 so I'll avoid in that case.