Super Crono Caos

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/20/14668330/resident-evil-7-boss-fight-director-koshi-nakanishi-interview

How did the fight change during development? Was the car being used as a weapon part of the original idea, or was that added later?

I think it’s safe to say that all developers will continue to tweak, improve, and modify something as long as they have the time. Unfortunately, time isn’t limitless. In terms of the garage battle [...] we made a conscious decision to only make one large directional change, and move full-speed in that direction.

n the beginning, [the car] was actually just a prop in the background that couldn’t be used. When we play tested, there were comments about wanting to drive the car. However, there was some pushback from the team on trying to implement automobile controls just for this particular scene. At the same time, we figured because of that, it would also elicit a “no way” type of surprise response from the player. I mean, let’s be real now. What gamer doesn’t enjoy running over someone in a video game? I think it’s always important to figure out what the player would want to do in a given situation.

Another thing that was important to us in this fight wasn’t so much, “How do I defeat Jack?” but more so, “How do I survive this situation?” Drawing a line between those two feelings was important in maintaining that feeling of the survival horror genre.

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/editorial-why-we-write-on-game-critique-influence-/1100-5215/

For my money, this is where most of the evaluative writing about games is on the "influence" spectrum. And yes, at least some of us hope that developers will see our critiques and take them into consideration. They’ll say “God, yeah, Destiny really does need more content,” or “Damn, yeah, actually we did fumble the depiction of women in this one.” Or maybe they’ll “decide how to address the white savior trope.” That one is a real quote, from Far Cry 4 narrative director Mark Thompson, who explained what he learned from Far Cry 3 and the critical response to it in a fantastic interview with Game Informer.

(...)

Real talk: I'm never kidding when I say that this stuff is complicated. Trying to unwrap this stuff is fucking brutal. And because issues like racism are systemic and cultural (and more than just some bad, violent men in white hoods), it's difficult to tackle them. The best we can do is address them honestly, actually engage with the tough stuff, and resist the urge to boil things down into simple binaries. Sometimes that means repeating ourselves, again and again: “No, I don’t think CD Projekt Red is racist; Yes, I still wish there were some people of color in the game. Yes, I still like The Witcher 3 a lot. No, those three statements do not contradict each other.”

Those of us who write about things like race, gender, class, and sexuality in games do so because we fucking love games. And you know, most of us actually spend the majority of our time in any given year writing about weapon design, death mechanics, art style, game preservation, "virtual worlds," weird little import gems, explosive and private narrative experiments, rad Japanese robots, and the billion other things that make our favorite medium so great.

http://www.glixel.com/interviews/dishonored-2-director-harvey-smith-the-world-is-a-shtshow-w452616

You wrote a novel, Big Jack Is Dead, that is about a Silicon Valley executive – he seems to work at Yahoo – who goes back to the Gulf Coast after his dad commits suicide. He fantasizes about performing acts of violence on strangers and his family. I was wondering if you got something similar out of games. Are the acts of violence cathartic for me? Facing something scary, staying with it, and then mastering it, is more the point for me than the violence.

The most powerful moment in State of Decayfor me came after I ignored an early fetch quest. The woman you're working for asks you to go get a watch that she gave her father when she was a kid. It's at the very starting point, the little ranger station that you start at. The way the game's systems work, if you ignore an infestation, it becomes really bad, with really intense zombies. I ignored that quest. It just stayed in my journal forever. I was about to finish the game, and I thought, "You know, I should go get that watch, because I want to see what happens."

I took this woman who had just joined my party recently. She became my commando to go get this. It doesn't sound like much, but it was all the way across the map. So I had to go across highways that were sometimes blocked, in a vehicle that was slowly falling apart. And I got all the way back to the ranger station at the beginning of the game, where the worst infestation was, because I had ignored it for, I don't know, 12 hours. And when you get back, there's a ravine separating that ranger station from the rest of the game. I had to get out of the truck, go down into the ravine – there's a horde down there – cross the ravine, climb up, she's badly wounded at this point, and then I had to go to the parking lot of the ranger station, break in where these horrible zombies were, find a vehicle, try to get away, no weapons at this point. She's staggering. The vehicle I'm in is smoking. At one point I was cheesing, running over the zombies back and forth with a car that was about to explode, just to get rid of some of them.

I finally got her back. And when I took my headphones off, I was breathing heavy. My wife was like, "What is going on?" My mousepad was covered in sweat.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/we-were-all-miserable-inside-bioshock-video-game-franchise-w439921

Do you ever get tired of talking about BioShock? You have to remind yourself how fortunate you are that anybody cares at all what you do. Part of you feels a bit fraudulent.

On one of the interviews on BioShock: The Collection, you describe watching a focus group play the first game without understanding it or even liking it. The focus test guy sort of patted me on the back and said, "Sorry, this game is going to be a failure." That was one of those moments where you either accept the fact that somebody tells you you're a loser, or you double down and say, "The fight's not over yet."

Have you played BioShock since then? I played Burial at Sea, the DLC for BioShock Infinite, the other day, mostly to see what it looked like on my new 4K television. I don't really enjoy playing my own games. If I could still get paid, I would make games and never ship them. I don't enjoy shipping games. I think it's kind of dreadful.

Why? You're exposing yourself in a very real way. You're saying, "This is what I worked on, now go make a judgment about me and my work." That's not always fun. The real, warm experience is being with the team and making it.

Is there anything you regret about either of these games? I'm not a happy person. I have crushing anxiety all the time. Which is crazy, because I wake up and I look at my beautiful wife and my beautiful dog and my beautiful home and the beautiful people I work with and these things I've created and these fans, and I say, "How the fuck can you be unhappy?"

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/battlefield-1-review

This breathtaking opening sequence is trying to say something about war that’s anathema to video games and first-person shooters like Battlefield specifically: Wars are won not by video game protagonists with infinite lives, but the willingness to sacrifice thousands of young people who don’t get a second chance.

Battlefield 1 struggles with the moral paradox at the heart of every shooter. Big budget, mass market video games need to be fun and engaging in order to recoup millions of dollars publishers invested in their development. But war is not fun. How does a developer use war as an aesthetic while at the same time not making light of the horrors of war?

The short answer is that it can’t. It’s not possible. Battlefield 1 tries with that opening sequence, which, at the very least, is a novel, interesting thing you haven’t done in a shooter before. Rather than following one protagonist through the whole game, it also bounces from character to character in different theaters of the war, each of which opens with somber, white on black text that underlines the futility and horrors of some of the worst stalemates in history. Since it quickly reverts from the futility of the opening sequence to traditional shooter heroics for the rest of the game, it toys with the idea that the action sequences I’m playing through didn’t really take place, but are the embellished memories of the soldiers who were there. It even makes clever use of the Overview Effect, showing the globe far high up in space before zooming into the battle in order to highlight how pointless and wasteful these battles are in the grand scheme of things.

(...)

The problem is that Battlefield 1 is still too good, too fun, to preach about war. If you like shooters, I highly recommend you play it for the single-player campaign alone, not to mention the 64-player multiplayer chaos, which is easily one of the best in the industry.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/chuck-wendig-no-mans-sky-game-is-boring-but-thats-not-bad-w434543

Most games throw you into action. They put a sword or a gun in your hand. They give you targets. Kill or be killed. Survive and dominate. Things explode. Ships crash into other ships. Horde! Swarm! Lasers! Run! Gun! Holy crap! This is true in a lot of science-fiction narrative, too. Certainly I've written my share of it: begin with action! Explodey pyoo-pyoo! Warring factions! Weapons of mass destruction! Life. Death. Apocalypse for one world or all the worlds.

Not here.

In No Man's Sky, you start with little. You enter into a quiet planet on which you are the only person. You’re Tom Hanks in a galactic version of Castaway, except you don't even get a volleyball to talk to. (I guess you could paint a smiley face on your crashed ship and name it Wilson?) You collect. You fix. You leave. You do this at your leisure. Outside the tick-tock of your exosuit's life support (easily replenished), you're married to no one’s timeline but your own.

Complete a task, the game lets you know that you completed a milestone. No, wait, not just a milestone—a journey milestone.

That word is key, here. Journey.

http://kotaku.com/what-makes-shigeru-miyamoto-tick-1783220930

Kotaku: What do you mean by uniqueness? What do you think sets a great Nintendo game apart from other games?

Miyamoto: It could be how to play the game or some of the techniques or technology being used. There’s always a limited amount of things that we can use, so it’s how we use that and in what combination. So it’s really–instead of creating–a little more like editing, in a sense.

This becomes a little bit of a conceptual talk, but I think what’s really important is that there is a core [to the game]. And, based on that core, we use technology ... to develop the game. I think what a lot of people see as unique is using different technology or different techniques [to make games], but I feel like, as long as you have a core that’s unlike others, that’s what ‘unique’ is. So we can be using the same kind of technology, the same kind of techniques, but when we use it, we get something different.

Kotaku: What is that core of a game? Is that, for you, something you actually feel with your hands, because it is about interactivity?

Miyamoto: I think it comes down to the experience of the customer or people playing the game. It’s something we do with the Wii U. You can only experience playing a game with two screens on the Wii U, and it’s really about using the past techniques and technology that we’ve used before. We keep at it, and at the end of that we discover something new.

(...)

Kotaku: When I’m thinking about what sets a Nintendo game apart, often it’s the feel of it. It’s the controls. It’s how Mario jumps in Super Mario 64, which just feels so good. I can’t explain in words why that is. And I feel that in the better Nintendo games. I assume you feel it, too. How important are controls, and how hard is it to get them to feel as good as they feel?

Miyamoto: So you know programming is all about numbers. The challenge is getting this kind of feeling into numbers. So there’s a lot of back and forth between the programmer and myself and the director. We really go in deep about how to create this feeling. We do a lot of back and forth.

Bill Trinen: It actually goes back to the way they designed the originalSuper Mario Bros., where when they tested it, originally, there was no Mario and there was no person. It was just a block. And you would press the button and see the block move. There’s actually a word in Japanese that describes what you’re talking about–the feeling–which there is no word for in English. In Japanese it’s called tegotae...

Miyamoto: ... tegotae...

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/03/battlefield-hardline-reviewcop-out.html

I spent nearly all of my time playing Hardline committed to the ideal of using “less-lethal force.” In the first four levels, I fired Mendoza’s pistol only in the times that the game absolutely required. Otherwise, I played Hardline as a sort of inverted Hotline Miami. I stalked carefully from room to room, scanned for my optimal route, and went for it. When things exploded into violence I carefully “zoned” my enemies, drawing them into the short range of my Taser so that I could knock them out instead of killing them. (Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that knocking someone out inside of a burning building is basically murder. Hey, I got Expert Points for it, so it must be good!)

At the climax of Episode 4—the open air mall, the neon signs, the hurricane force wind and rain— I noticed something. With my experience bar nearly full, I slammed a “Warranted” suspect to the ground and collected my Expert Points. But I didn’t level up. Less than halfway through the game, I’d capped out at Expert Level 15. Only then did I realize how empty this incentivization was. What do you get for unlocking expert levels? New, more lethal weapons. New scopes. A laser sight. Special, more deadly slugs for your shotgun. I couldn’t add a scope to my Taser. I couldn’t unlock new ways of safely apprehending suspects. Being “Good Police” only offered me new ways to be the worst sort of police. And that wasn’t the end of it.

I realized that time and again, the game had acted as if I’d been gunning folks down when I wasn’t. Even when I carefully and cautiously arrested every single enemy in a level, Mendoza would sprint into a cut-scene, out of breath and covered in sweat from a gunfight that never happened. “Jesus Nick,” one character said, “Nice shooting. I’m officially scared of you.”

(...)

I went to town. I danced around the level as lightning cracked and the wind lifted signage off the walls. I ducked behind one of those SUVs that malls raffle off sometimes, and a suspect lit it up with an incendiary grenade. It glowed so bright, little strings of white and purple and orange in the rain. It was beautiful and it was dynamic and it was fun—it was so much more fun than the stealth game I’d been playing.

As it turns out, you can’t simply layer a set of new systems over old ones and expect something meaningful or consistent to emerge. No amount of external incentivization (not least of all thissort of incentivization) could counter the fact that Battlefield Hardline is a game built for lethal violence. At one point, a character in the second half of the game jokes about the benefits of leaving law enforcement behind: “Well at least we won’t have to fill out a bunch of paperwork later.” But you never had to. There’s never been any disincentivization for violence in Hardline. There’s only been the most limited encouragement imaginable to keep your weapon holstered. Only bonus points.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-09-20-superhot-it-was-about-an-adventure-not-just-rational-choices

When Iwanicki and I meet, however, it's clear that the secret of that success remains mysterious - even to him. "Luck is always part of it," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "It's not like you could have planned Minecraft, right?"

The importance of luck in such a crowded marketplace is both undeniably true and - from the perspective of the developers at the BIG Festival - more than a little discouraging. Iwanicki understands that much, but he also understands the role that Superhot Team played in creating its own luck; nurturing the conditions from which good fortune might arise through "classic values" like hard work and perseverance, but also the outright rejection of conservative choices.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/its-remembered-for-its-action-but-resident-evil-4-is-also-superbly-scripted-capcom

With that established, Resident Evil 4 turns its attention on your enemies. In a few, short lines of dialogue, the opening cutscene has killed off Umbrella. Thus, players are expecting a new antagonist and new monsters. RE4 responds by having its first enemy do two patently un-zombie like things: stand in a house, tending his fireplace, and talk to you. Roughly translated, Resident Evil 4's first enemy calls you "bastard" and tells you to get out; with his raised voice and harsh language, clearly he is a creature of emotion, the opposite to a brainless, shambling undead. It's final, but you almost don't need the single line of text that appears after checking his body: "He's not a zombie..." By now, less than five minutes into Resident Evil 4, you understand the enemies are thinking, feeling, almost humans. And if the peppy music, Secret Service combat gear and Leon's chiselled good looks and perfect hair had you convinced you were a badass, it was only to prepare you for the monsters to come.

In this style, Resident Evil 4 continues for its entire duration. Obviously, the game has an electric pace. Inside 20 minutes, between the end of level 1-3 and the start of 2-1, you have a boating section across a lake, fight a huge monster residing in said lake, pass out, wake up in the middle of a storm, see the standard enemies evolve into the more dangerous, mutant-headed ones, rappel down a cliff, solve a lever puzzle, walk through a waterfall, take another boat trip and finally – with the help of a wolf you rescued at the beginning of the game – fight and kill a gigantic troll.

It sounds dizzying, but Resident Evil 4, more than visuals, sound or even variety, is a fantastic example of video game writing. Those opening minutes set a standard. Myriad, sometimes abstract concepts are contextualised and explained in Resident Evil 4 using just a few words or pictures. Why do you have to fight the monster? Because a rope from your boat has got caught on its neck. How do you know the mutant-headed enemies are more dangerous? Because you get a three-second cutscene, shot from a foreboding low angle, showing the mutant head appearing, and after you kill one for the first time, you're given a reward. It's not always graceful, but the writing in RE4 is economical. When in the first village section Leon examines a portrait of a then-unknown man in a cloak, he remarks, "Definitely the type I don't get on with." An hour or so later, when the cloaked Saddler first appears on on-screen, you know right away he's the main villain.

There are small details – as if removing it in preparation for a fight, after the opening level, Leon is stripped of his jacket – and also big conceits. From, basically, the start of the game, both Leon and Ashley have been infected with the Las Plagas parasite: if they don't remove it from their bodies in time, they'll both turn into monsters. Above simply "rescue the President's daughter" or "escape", this narrative set-up lends Resident Evil 4massive dramatic stakes. It's not always in your conscious mind, but the game's aforementioned breakneck pace is aided by an implicit awareness that the characters are against the clock.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-09-09-evolving-the-ps4-and-the-console-business

PS4 Pro, though, is a curious beast. It'll run you $100 more than the slim PS4, it plays the same games and connects to the same online services. Sony has bent over backwards to avoid fragmenting their playerbase, and in theory, PS4 Pro is really designed only for the small minority of consumers with 4K displays in their living rooms. Yet the company must know the psychology of its consumers; it must know that for a large proportion of them, playing a game on a regular PS4 in the knowledge that an upgrade would make it that little bit sharper, that little bit smoother, is like Chinese water torture. That will only be exacerbated by the "Pro" moniker; so much of the market will feel an involuntary twitch of consumer desire at the very notion of their existing hardware being "amateur" or, god help us all, "noob".

Ultimately, though, Sony's cautious approach seems to be pitched just right. Those who will find themselves discombobulated by the notion of a needlessly dropped frame or a disappointingly undetailed hair strand, or quietly fuming at being branded a non-Pro, are precisely the audience expected to upgrade anyway. The benefits of PS4 Pro will be sufficient to keep them satisfied; while for pretty much everyone else, for the enormous audience of more casual consumers that Sony must access in the coming years in order to maintain the PS4's sales trajectory, the benefits of the Pro seem minor enough not to bother with. The stroke of genius, perhaps, is that every upgrading gamer will release a second-hand PS4 into the market - handed off to a younger sibling or cousin, perhaps, or sold to a late upgrader from the last generation. That ought to do wonders to kick-start the PS4's demographic expansion.

That's not an easy balance to strike, and while it feels like it's been skilfully done, only time and market data will tell. Sony enters Winter 2016 in a position of almost unprecedented strength; Nintendo's NX won't launch until next spring (and nobody really knows what it is), while Microsoft's lovely Xbox One S is overshadowed by the plan to entirely outclass it with Scorpio next year. Both PS4 and PS4 Pro will do great guns this year (while PSVR, about which more in a moment, will undoubtedly be supply constrained). That's not the real test; the test is how this line-up can fare against 2017's launches, NX and Scorpio. Sony's cards are now on the table for the next couple of years of the console war.

(...)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-05-25-uncharted-4-was-inspired-by-the-industrys-struggle-against-crunch

Naughty Dog's commitment to exploring the idea is admirable. Compromises are often made when chasing a large audience, leading to a certain homogeneity in the finished products. With Uncharted 4, Naughty Dog actually ignored negative feedback on the game's more deliberately paced sections, most of which was made on the assumption that creating "fun" is the ultimate goal of game development.

“We took [the word "fun"] off our focus tests," Druckmann explained. "It was just a weird word that people were getting hung up on. How do you rate the dive sequence at the beginning of Uncharted 4? Is that fun? There's no real challenge. There is a perceived threat, where they talk about oxygen, but that's just weird narrative fluff. You can't really run out of oxygen.

"But that level is important, to set up how mundane Nate's life is. Just rating it on its own, one through five, that was constantly the lowest-rated level. But it kind of had to be. We're not going to change that."

Simply changing the question from "How fun did you find this level?" to "Overall, how would you rate this level?" led to an immediate improvement in the test scores. Nathan Drake no longer wanted a life spent only in the pursuit of high adventure and chaotic action, so Naughty Dog needed to create an experience that mirrored his personal struggle.

(...)

However, as Nathan Drake learns over the course of the game, maturity demands a measure of sacrifice. Druckmann is clear-eyed about the fact that, for certain players, the creative direction Naughty Dog has explored in The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 will be too much - or too little, depending on your point of view.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/15/11438346/destiny-beats-the-division-where-it-counts-the-magnificent-plumage

But I can't help but notice that for all its variations on a theme, everything in The Divisionjust kinda looks ... the same. Take, for instance the latest matched sets of elite gear, which has to be meticulously crafted or earned through hours and hours of in-game grind.

When it comes down to it, Tactician's Authority doesn't look all that much different than Path of the Nomad. It would take a player weeks to get both gear sets, including serious teamwork and farming, and for that investment you look pretty much like everyone else in the game.

(...)

But maybe there's a middle ground in the art direction somewhere. I don't necessarily want to roll up on someone in Stuyvesant who's rocking a set of burnished golden plate and a full-faced greathelm. But maybe, after I grind out a dozen hours of super hard missions you guys could hand over something better than another shade of red pom-pom on my knit beanie cap?

https://killscreen.com/articles/the-perverse-ideology-of-the-division/

The Division has a serious representation problem. Despite the complexity of its world, and its bleak sophistication, it fails miserably to represent the culture within it. Its crude depiction of a society divided entirely into “us and them” feels like the ugliest of conceits. “Citizens” are classified as those friendly-looking, passive idiots that wander up and down streets looking for a hand-out. “Enemies” include anyone who might take their own survival into their own hands. Within the first five minutes of the game you’ll gun down some guys rooting around in the bins, presumably for “looting” or carrying a firearm. Later you’ll kill some more who are occupying an electronics store and then proceed to loot the place yourself, an act made legal by the badge on your shoulder. Even the game’s “echoes,” 3D visualizations of previous events, seem designed to criminalize the populace, usually annotating them with their name and the crimes they have committed. This totalitarian atmosphere pervades everything—even down to a mission where you harvest a refugee camp for samples of virus variation, treating victims like petri dishes. Developer Ubisoft Massive runs merrily through any complexity and shades of grey in these acts, in what seems like a vain attempt to mask the fact that you are shooting citizens because they are “looters,” constantly prioritizing property and assets over human life.

When discussing these aspects of The Division it’s tempting to start linking to articles on social behavior in disasters, on the myth of widespread looting or the psychology behind it. But as interesting as these debates might be, in this case they don’t apply. While I wonder where these factors were in the developer’s supposedly painstaking research, it’s important not to confuse real-world ethics with those of a game, where a closed system functions in highly defined ways. The gang members you kill and the civilians you save in the game are not citizens, or even equals, they are simply actors within a limited simulation. What they are, though, is a representation, an image of the world we live in, reflected back to us. For this reason, like any system of representation, the game has specific politics. It doesn’t matter that the game’s associate creative director Julian Gerighty claimed “there’s no particularly political message” in an interview with Kill Screen’s Michelle Ehrhardt. What matters is that by its very nature The Division is political, and, more importantly, that those politics paint a paranoid and misanthropic image of society.

(...)

This is the paranoid fantasy of the right-wing brought into disturbing actualization by The Division. Look at the three gangs that form the main antagonists of the game: The “Rikers” are the prisoners of Rikers island prison that lies off the coast of The Bronx. They are the most obvious member of what The Division presents as societies’ dangerous underclass—known criminals. The “Cleaners” are former sanitation workers, who have decided that the solution to the virus is to burn it out of the city. A gang of blue-collar garbage men and janitors equipped with flamethrowers, they represent the lowest rung of the working class. The third gang are the “Rioters,” a majority black, generic street gang, decked in hoodies and caps that spend their time looting electronics stores and dead bodies. Perhaps the laziest and most repugnant of all the game’s representations, the Rioters might have been clipped from the one-sided and inaccuratemedia coverage of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Their collective name even seeks to mark anybody who resists the dominant regime for execution. Together, these gangs present a trinity of soft political targets, those that can be killed with little social guilt or questioning. The Divisionmercilessly uses these skewed representations to justify its political violence.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/12/11212474/nba-2k16-steph-curry-patch-badge-perk

Speaking to Bryan Wiedey in the latest Press Row Podcast, Visual Concepts' Scott O'Gallagher and Mike Wang tried to resolve Curry's once-in-a-generation talent without destroying the thing they and so many others have worked so hard to create. Curry is hitting a mind-boggling two-thirds of his shots from 28 to 50 feet — that's three feet behind the midcourt stripe — including this dazzler against Oklahoma City two weeks ago to cap a game that will be talked about for decades.

To extend NBA 2K16's shooting accuracy to account for Curry, but condition it to defender proximity, would give ordinary players a godlike Curry status they don't deserve. That could have a devastating effect on the video game, because NBA 2K16's diehard core knows how to play a drive-and-kick game — particularly against inexperienced multiplayer opponents — to create that kind of space.

The answer seems to be not in improving an attribute that applies to the overall player population. Instead it's to give Curry a special "badge," a perk available only to a specific player — but theoretically one also available for created players who earn it within NBA 2K16's vast career suite.

"If 99 percent of the league is going to shoot worse when they're contested, and shoot better when they're open, if that's the rule, then you obviously don't have to make a rating to support that rule," reasoned Wang. "So it's more, let's create something to break that rule. ... That's what the badges are designed to do. They're designed to say 'Here's an exception, or a special context in the game for someone who excels at something and can do it better than anyone else,' and that's what we're looking to do with Steph."

"It's a tough balance. Because it's like, where is that breaking point? He's taking a 37-foot jumper," marveled O'Gallagher, himself a college player and overseas professional before joining 2K Sports. "It's literally a jumper. ... If that happened, if you lost a game that way, it's no different than losing on a hail mary in football, you want to throw your controller, but he's doing this stuff at an absurd rate, and we're reacting like everyone else."

Curry, paradoxically, saw his overall rating slip by one point in NBA 2K16's latest roster update (to 97 from 98) but he remains the game's deadliest shooter. If what Wang and O'Gallagher are contemplating comes to pass, it's remarkable on a couple of levels.

The first is that Visual Concepts and 2K Sports would deliver such a significant change, addressing an individual performer in a team sports title, this far from launch (NBA 2K16released in late September). Sports video games have the most watchful post-release support, especially among console genres, mainly because they're obligated to follow real world action and re-rate their performers to reflect it. Rarely does an entire title get modified for one player in the way Wang and O'Gallagher proposed.

===

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMG5lFRf5Y)

https://killscreen.com/articles/the-division-doesnt-want-you-to-think-about-911/

“So when you have a disaster scenario set in New York, the obvious comparison is to 9/11,” I mentioned to Julian Gerighty, the associate creative director for the game. I wanted some basis for why the game was set in such a touchy area given its subject matter. “I know you spoke to survival experts about the realism of the game’s scenario. Did you talk to first responders or other people who were there during 9/11?”

“I didn’t,” he responded. “I don’t think even the parallel between this game scenario and 9/11 exists.”

I was a bit surprised. Surely, I couldn’t have been the first person to draw this comparison, right? “So you didn’t take September 11th into consideration when making the game?” I asked.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked about it, and it hasn’t really crossed any of the meetings that I’ve done on it before.”

When I pressed further on the game’s themes, whether it was the inherent anti-capitalist message in centering the game around a virus spread through money, or the draconian justice of armed peacekeepers indiscriminately shooting down looters and escaped Riker’s Island inmates (another class of enemy in the game), he told me, “At the end of the day, it’s a videogame, it’s an entertainment product… There’s no particularly political message with it.”

But works of art aren’t made in a vacuum. They can never be entirely free from their creators’ assumptions. In its premise, The Division brings up a number of fruitful topics that could be entire games of their own: Dealing with the fallout of a terror attack in New York. A virus spread through cash on the biggest shopping day of the year. Turning Times Square into a player-vs-player meat grinder called “The Dark Zone.” Insisting on a cynical version of a New York under siege where people in need roam the streets murdering each other instead of helping. And then there’s the Division itself, a group of autonomous sleeper agents living normal lives who activate in times of great need and have the authority to restore order with no restrictions, Constitution be damned. This is based on NSDP 51, a real-life continuity-of-government plan set forth by George W. Bush, the majority of which is classified. The Division speculates it might look something like the eponymous organization within the game. The civilian hero aspect at play here is almost like a twisted take on a first responder, like a volunteer fireman who puts out fires less by blasting them with water and more by waging war against arsonists.