Have any of you heard of Unknown 9?
If you haven't- I don't blame you. I haven't either. Apparently it's a 4-month old game developed by Reflector Entertainment who also made... uhh this game and it's DLCs.
This screenshot gives a lot away but fear not, it was published by Bandai Namco, the guys who made the Dark SoulsTM of videogames These guys know a good investment when they see it, and at 50 eurobucks (USD to EUR is almost 1:1 at the time of writing !eurochads), a price comparable to that of God of War 2022 (50 EUR, 95% rating), HOI 4 (50 EUR, 90% rating) and Mount & Blade: Bannerlord II *editor's note: why are there so many MLP emojis when querying 'horse' (50 EUR, 87% rating(should be 100)), it is sure to deliver the same experience, right?
Well, from the screenshot you might have noticed that the ratings are mediocre: 49%. But that does not tell the whole story.
Unknown 9 currently has 7 concurrent players , 11 player 24-hour peak and a 285-player all-time peak [1]. This means it is mogged by the likes of Gollum 2023 at 758 all-time high [2], 6 year old rockstar game Red Dead: Redemption 2 at almost double the rating [3], a 2023 unity slavshit game Contraband Police at almost double the rating and half the price [4] and absolutely mogged by LEWDAPOCALYPSE, which has double the concurrent players, double the rating, and 1/50th of the price [5].
IGN gave Unknown 9 a 9(-4) rating [6], so is it really that bad?
Looks pretty bad, but is this the lowest we can go? Just some failed garbage from an upcoming studio, but is that it? Can't we do worse?
Heck no! It was in the works for at least 4 years, and was supposed to be a tans-media project, "including video games , film , and books (!bookworms), for example. Unknown 9 was conceptualized as an ongoing series, spanning podcasts , comics , and even a web series , many of which have already been released." [7]. So you've been laughing at Concord for having an Amazon episode despite being a dead game- well, you've seen nothing yet kid. This shit was supposed to be massive, at least according to the cited source (I didn't check further (yes how could you tell, I work in academia )). It was supposed to be the next fricking star wars by the looks of things, expecting to bank on their notoriety to create the equivalent to Netflix's Witcher [7] (which is not something to be proud of tbh). While we have no numbers on the project costs, one might imagine that a AAA game with massive marketing like that would've cost a lot. While we do not know how much exactly the project did cost, it is hardly believable that some unknown studio with 0 releases might have funded it. Indeed, the studio is owned by the publishers- Bandai Namco, who can probably afford to throw money around [8]. Looking at their website and LinkedIn is pretty funny as well, considering that they have announced that they will cease support for the game [8].
But you don't have to trust me, you can view the official gameplay trailer posted on Playstation's account and come to your own conclusions:
The lore/narrative trailer, which is just as stupid, can be found at
TL;DR?
Well, it's about a brown woman with supernatural abilities . Kind of like Forespoken from 1 2 years ago if anyone remembers that.
"Unfortunately, part of Hoerdt's statement confirmed several staff members would be made redundant, including back-office employees, and given severance packages, further health benefits, access to counseling services, and "proactive" career planning support." [7]. Lmao imagine getting free counselling from a company that fired you. I would probably take that as an insult, equivalent to one of those "reddit cares" messages . One might accuse me of using a chuddy source, but the same website compliments Unknown 9's use of "stepping powers", which states that "Stepping is the ability to project one's mind into the consciousness of another, by way of the Fold. While Stepping, one has access to the weaponry, strength, and intellect of a given vessel, and may fully control their actions." [9]. A totally true statement which has never been done before.
Here's Cr1tikal AKA Charlie AKA penguinz0 explaining it probably better than I do (it's the weekend and I've had several drinks already ):
He quotes the investment value into the IP at 100 million $ [citation needed]
In conclusion: 1) gaming in 2025 is dead, do not bother. 2) Nominative Determinism is true- the game was titled Unknown 9, and it remained unknown. For anyone running any sort of business- watch what you name your product.
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This game is legitimately bizarre. It's been in development for years, with a huge budget. There were even several books released (I think the books came first, I'm not sure). They picked Anya Chalotra to be the model for some reason, and basically made her less attractive in game.
This reeks of one determined man's autism project to me. How the creator managed to get AAA funding for it, I have no clue. But it's genuinely one of the strangest developments in recent gaming history. It's not even that it's bad, it's that it's so unknown and undermarketed. Makes me think there might be some money laundering shenanigans going on...
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Link them and I'll pin you
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https://www.bandainamcoent.com/games/unknown9/en/products/novels/genesis/
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!bookworms lmao, all 3 books have >4, almost 5/5 rating on amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DP1YLTFN?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1732638738&sr=8-1&ref=dbs_dp_awt_sb_pc_tkin
They're astroturfing this shit to unreal degrees. 150 reviews my butt, nobody read this shit
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Most of the reviewes only reviewed one book too: his!
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Is that rare?
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For a legitimate book? Yes.
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The goodreads is 4/5 with 195 reviews. Nothing about it looks botted, just normal foid book nonsense
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idk
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This looks like it was self published
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Evangelical Protestant Canon be like:
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Downdooted
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Updooted
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you gotta release the supplementary material when your work is already popular, execs mix up the chicken and egg here
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This is why they failed.
STOP MAKING THE ACTRESSES UGGO YOU'VE GOT THEIR FACE SCANS
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The model
The character
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gyatt
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Just say ugly
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I want her to be in more movies so I can look at her
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i want her to be on my face
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are you sure, lad?
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i can take it
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mfw the currycooch descends
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Thats the same picture
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!foidmoment
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prime bug eyed bbc fodder
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Looks like generic UEslop to me
ie the kind of shit AAA would invest in
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This sounds consistent with all the Concordshit that's been coming out tbh. It feels like somewhere around 2017 some consulting company ran around doing a song and dance about how ugly brown people games are the future and persuaded every AAA company to invest majorly into a huge IP with franchise potential. We're only just now seeing the fruits of these ugly brown shits that have been digesting since then, and the companies are only now realizing that their "market research" was completely wrong.
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Lead dev has a lot of AAA titles in their reportoire so it's likely his project was gonna get greenlight no matter what. Throw a few buzzwords in and you got yourself millions of $$$.
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I wonder how much of this is just technical or artistic incompetence. We can't make people in video games look realistic yet, they always turn out weird and uncanny. So you have to make it kind of cartoonlike but still realistic enough to be considered 'good graphics' and that's all easy to frick up
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There's a comparison floating round where male celebrities look exactly like their ingame models, but women get uglified. Ties in with the LEGO study (men want ideals, women want realistic self-inserts).
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the thing is all the dude characters usually look fine, they know how to do it they're making them ugly on purpose
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Possibly, but Miranda in mass effect was literally a 1:1 of Yvonne Strahovski and she didn't look weird at all.
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yeah i don't think it's technical. but i do think a lot of it is just artistic incompetence and shit taste
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Used to be they would cover up for it by making them uncannily bangable. Which I think is still possible
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They did and their concept is loosely based on some novel that I think is public domain at this point. An entire multimedia franchise with in-character podcasts and shit around a thing whose market hadn't even been proven to exist yet.
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Not uncommon thing to be fair.
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I saw one of the trailers and thought it looked interesting. I don't know if it's one you posted, and I'm not going to watch it to check.
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