If you haven't been paying attention to one Ken Levine, he's undergone a quiet chuddening over the years as he became an enlightened centrist type and started liking the tweets of Quillette writers on twitter, joining Razib Khan rooms on Clubhouse, and going on Colin Moriarty's vidya podcast. We saw a trailer for his new game at last night's PlayStation State of Play:
The keen investigators at ResetEra suspect something is up:
Look forward to more seethe should this game ever actually release
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Fun Fact: Ken Levine hosted an open discussion at my small liberal arts college
Everyone's questions fell into either two categories -- "Why No Women/BIPOC Video Games" or "WTF happened to infinite, man?"
After a few years of that, the chuddening was inevitable
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Infinite had so much raw writing and interlocking concepts that it had to be a somewhat coherent idea at some point.
No idea what the frick that coherent idea was, but it had to be something.
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Why were people confused with infinite it made perfect sense
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Nothing was confusing it was just r-slurred.
In order for it to make sense within itself you had to abandon the central "time is a flat circle" jacking off point it was trying to make.
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It felt like the writers got bored of the story they were writing and made it something else 4 times. The story makes sense but it has no idea what it wants to be
It also just wasnt very fun
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I remember when the Twins were introduced 10 minutes in I was like “oh Booker is Comstock obvi wow.”
And then the game spends like 30% of its metanarrative spouting off about how there are infinite possibilities and it's too fractal for anything to overlap, and the Twins only overlapped because they wanted to. So Booker/Commie couldn't be the same person statistically because they're opposed to each other.
And then they just did it anyways.
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The TL:DR answer he gave was essentially suffering from success
BioShocks success afforded him huge resources and a team size, but he had too many ideas to coherently organize between different departments
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The Duke Nukem Forever effect
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