Although western centrism is definitely a thing, the link you provided states that temple, for example, was started in the 16th century. The article link is about something from 2800BC
Adding to that: 'it was a placeholder' has been used to excuse direct (flagrant) plagiarism from other sources, such as what happened with Bungie and their game Marathon
If someone likes you, trade secrets flow like wine. That's basic humanity. It's not unique to China, though the relationships involved are a little bit different. It's not a bad thing either, we all live in the same society.
Interested to play this but I think the trailer does it a huge disservice. Just a barrage of voice clips and no real structure to it. I think it would help the game a lot if they replace that trailer ASAP
This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).
The actual story wasn’t anything special, but I thought how it told the story through mechanics was really well done. It wasn’t the first to do that but did it a larger scope than anything else at the time.
I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;)
But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.
I agree, a trailer should focus on emotional reaction, not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles,10 years of dev). Besides, the voices and writing are generic and maybe even AI generated. The witness had a really good promotion canpaign beautiful and intriguing.
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Blow falls into a classic engineering mistake of marketing the challenge or effort to make something (audio logs everywhere) and not the end experience.
Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.
Essentially Braid Anniversary edition. Huge effort for someone to just say “oh so just Braid Remastered?”
In general from his streams you learn that so much goes wrong during the slog that is video game development. Hire failures. Contractors billing $$$ and writing 1-2 LOC. Devs rage quitting. Platform optimization. Even a suicide (not just an employee but someone close). They do all this work and dropped the ball on marketing despite betting the future of the company on its reception, but even failing that I think it was clear to a normal person (which can be hard to reach out to and interact with) that there was no appetite for this game.
When I saw the trailer in my YouTube feed I immediately thought it was an ad for those trash mobile games. Watching it didn’t really change my opinion either. I don’t actually want that to come across in a disparaging way - but it was just the vibes it gave off.
He mentioned in a recent interview the trailer ended up getting rushed due to complexities working with the companies who edited it and the conference timeline, and that he is also somewhat unhappy with it.
Leans center-right. Candid. Publicly supported Trump. Other stuff that just makes him a normal person circa 90s but really turns some people off in 2025.
I'm getting "bring your adventure" vibe, similar to The Witness.
Take Thomas Was Alone for example - seemingly simple platform puzzle game with deep and engaging story where you're more interested about characters than new mechanics and puzzles.
In contrast The Witness could be scraped to core puzzles and released as an iPad game for $5.99, but the whimsical island and scattered pseudo intellectual voice clips make it so much more giving you opportunity to pause and think about life.
This seems very similar. A sokoban puzzle game with an entirely optional plot line that leaves a lot for interpretation by the player.
He’s going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over something he cannot control, and then he’s going to die at a normal age (or probably earlier) any way
Pleased this is being discussed somewhere as it’s something that has troubled me for a while.
There are so many third party actions where the docs or example reference the master branch. A quick malicious push and they can presumably exfiltrate data from a ton of repositories
(Even an explicit tag is vulnerable because it can just be moved still, but master branch feels like not even trying)
> That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)
Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it reaches up in the air" still holds.
Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).
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