Fire in the head

Dungeons & Dragons is half-a-dozen different games in a trenchcoat, with relatively little continuity between editions beyond some shared terminology and the presence of a twenty-sided die, so it's tough to make sweeping statements which apply to all versions of the game.

Broadly speaking, however, Dungeons & Dragons in most of its iterations is a genre emulation piece aimed at sword and sorcery fantasy, a specific subgenre of fantasy fiction which had its heyday in American popular culture from roughly the 1930s through the 1980s (and somewhat later elsewhere); Dungeons & Dragons in particular focuses on the 1960s and 1970s strands of sword and sorcery media.

Sometimes described as the creative descendant of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, sword and sorcery revolves around mercenary heroes getting into and out of trouble largely for personal gain, spending most of their time skulking about, breaking and entering, and stabbing people in the back, punctuated by elaborately staged set-piece battles which frequently end with half the party dead. Common features include asshole wizards, whimsically cursed magic items, armour which shows a lot more buttock than is strictly practical, and talkative monsters willing to engage the protagonists in long-winded debates about incredibly stupid shit. It's here that the narrative device of the dungeon crawl – often erroneously characterised as an original invention of tabletop RPGs by folks unversed in the genre – is codified in its modern form.

You don't really see a lot of sword and sorcery fantasy these days, which can be a source of confusion for newcomers to the game, though a surprising amount of modern YA media draws heavy inspiration from the genre. Cartoons like Adventure Time or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have a lot of sword and sorcery DNA in them.

(D&D is sometimes mistaken for emulating Lord of the Rings style epic fantasy, since that's the only genre of fantasy fiction most casual readers are familiar with, but in practice high fantasy tends to clash badly with a lot of the game's baked-in assumptions.)

Concurrently, Dungeons & Dragons is a game about resource management. Most traditional tabletop RPGs are "challenge games" in the sense that they frame each scenario as a series of set-piece obstacles to be overcome; in D&D, the challenge is one of figuring out how to travel from point A to point B while expending as few resources as possible in the process. If you're coming from a video game background, it has much in common with survival horror games, albeit generally without the overriding fatalism of that genre. This resource management focus is both a legacy of D&D's origins as a fantasy roleplaying add-on for a popular wargame, and a reflection of the specific genre of fantasy it's emulating; sword and sorcery has a lot of tropes in common with survival horror if you know where to look.

Namely, the teams that made the heavy hitters in the genre also had a lot of experience outside of the superhero genre. Before Superman and Batman, comic creators did detective stories and pulpy adventure tales - lots of normal people in weird situations, lots of monsters, etc. And before crafting the Marvel superheroes we recognize, people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were working on a bunch of different genres - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and even romance comics.

Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are characters out of a pulp adventure serial. Alfred and Commissioner Gordon are stock detective fiction archetypes. All of Spider-Man's supporting cast would be at home in a romance comic. And the wonderful monster characters like Fin Fang Foom and Devil Dinosaur are descendants of the monster stars of Tales to Astonish and Amazing Fantasy.

But somewhere in the 80s and 90s there was a shift where more and more of the people writing and illustrating superhero comics ONLY had experience with making superhero comics. And, coincidentally, a lot of the non-superhero elements of superhero comics kinda went to shit.

I want to say right here that I do not think this is an inherently bad shift, even if it hurt some characters I love (cough Mary Jane Watson cough). A person writing a superhero story deciding to focus almost exclusively on superhero stuff is making sure their story is streamlined and focused, and that's usually a damn good idea, especially for a young writer. You want to make sure the main thrust of your story works as well as possible - that's what people will primarily judge it for.

The GOATs made non-superhero stuff work in their superhero stories because they had experience with writing that stuff - a romance comic background makes the mundane love interests in Spider-Man work, a detective story background sells all the non-powered crime and mystery in Batman, etc. There's no shame in a writer deciding that they'd be more confident writing a superhero story that sticks to superhero tropes alone than trying to make it five other stories at once. It's more or less what I'm doing with my superhero tales, after all.

Krafton CEO looks at the hype surrounding Subnautica 2, goes over the contract between Krafton and Unknown Worlds, realizes he'll have to pay out bonuses and freaks out because shelling out those bonuses will make him look like a pushover.

CEO goes to his legal department, asks them to come up with a plan to weasel out of paying bonuses. Legal tells him the contract is iron-clad and to accept the loss.

CEO refuses to take the loss, asks ChatGPT for a plan. ChatGPT says the exact same thing the legal department did.

CEO demands a plan from ChatGPT, which dutifully spits out a plan at this point because clearly the CEO is a goddamn idiot.

CEO deletes the chat logs, failing to understand that 'delete' doesn't permanently remove things.

CEO follows plan, and is surprised when Unknown Worlds sues for breach of contract despite being told by both humans and an LLM that is exactly what would happen.

Court does not go well for Krafton's legal department. It comes out that after ignoring the sound legal advice of human beings, the CEO went to ChatGPT and asked for a plan. When asked for the logs by the court, Krafton's legal team states they were deleted, thus that it's simply herersay. Judge goes "Oh, that's okay, we'll have our IT folks recover them." Krafton's legal team is astounded that's even possible.

The chat logs are recovered. It comes out that even ChatGPT was in agreement with Krafton's legal department, and only spat out a plan after being asked a second time.

The judge, now thoroughly done with the stupidity of Krafton's CEO at this point, rules in favor of Unknown Worlds. Her ruling doesn't simply undo the scheme, but effectively leaves all control over Subnautica 2's development in the hands of Unknown Worlds, including the early access release date, reducing Krafton to just publishing out of contractual obligation. Krafton must also return all social media platforms for Unknown Worlds and Subnautica 2 to Unknown Worlds' control. Financial damages will be determined at a later date.

Krafton proceeds to violate the court order in less than 72 hours by trying to set an early access release date before returning Unknown Worlds' social media platforms.