spent the afternoon trying to get the Aerobat repository off of bitbucket and failed so now I'm gonna play Deviantart Souls

dunno if I'm like actually gonna bother making a thread of design/rendering insights or whatever here I mostly just want to hit things with swords tbh

I didn't start the game yet

also is that title font literally Bleeding Cowboys because wow it really doesn't get much more Deviantart Two Thousand Sevencore than that huh

Code Vein more like I Can't Play Code Vein Because it Crashes Approximately Every 15 Minutes Vein

Refunded it and got it on PS4 lol. I need bad deviantart OCs with swords

don't have a good capture setup for PS4 though :(

Veins already have blood in them my dude that's literally what veins are

"the creatures have bone-like reinforcement structures inside their bodies. We call them boneskeletons"

lmao of course there's a pole-dancer demon lady boss

In the post apocalyptic nightmare future, humanity has forgotten how to put their arms through the sleeves of their cool jackets

hard to get a properly representative screenshot but seriously this just the way that people wear jackets in code vein

almost all of this game's mechanics are exactly like dark souls' and it never explains any of them so like.... hope you've played dark souls lol

(admittedly dark souls doesn't explain itself either, but it's much more explicitly designed around a sense of mystery and slow revelation, and secretly teaching the player how to play it. code vein just... assumes you possess domain knowledge lol)

At what point is is accurate to describe an entire videogame as fanart of a different videogame

It's honestly like... endearing? This isn't "we wanted to experiment and iterate on the souls genre" it's literally "we love dark souls so much we wanted to make our own dark souls, with anime OCs"

it rules lol; like a 2000s Cave Story Clone got a grownup budget. It's so pure

and/or londo

an orlando

look at this skill

videogames are so good

I like this game a lot but boy they sure did decide to present virtually the *entire* plot via Walk Extremely Slowly Through Corridors While Audio Logs Play sequences

Blatantly ripping off Dark Souls by including a fire level that isn't very good

There's a mysterious powerful warrior dude who fights you a bunch and then becomes an ally

his name is JACK and every time it comes up my brain goes instantly to this:

every character has spent this entire game angst-monologuing about how much it sucks that they're both immortal and incredibly badass

they have not made a remotely compelling argument that being immortal and incredibly badass would not, in fact, rule

There's an extremely funny writing trope that's like omnipresent in fantasy games, where the authors spend an ENORMOUS effort setting up incredibly elaborate rules for how the world works, and then make MIND BLOWING REVELATIONS that don't land at all bc the rules are silly

like you spend twelve hours loredumping Capitalized Nouns, and then expect the player to be awed when you reveal that THIS Noun was secretly a LIE the WHOLE TIME

it never works bc the player never had enough time with the status-quo rules to care at all about their integrity lol

Kingdom Hearts is prob the most notorious example but it's everywhere

I love Xenoblade Chronicles 2 but it spends half the plot on the intricacies of how Blades/Drivers work and then the other half revealing how every main character is actually a world-altering exception lmao

Anyway all this to say, Code Vein is one of the most overt examples of this that I've ever seen. The complexity of Lore for everything leading up to the start of the game is so utterly batshit that there's absolutely nothing they could reveal that would carry emotional weight

Like it's a post-apocalypse, but it's actually post like 3+ apocalypses happening at once for a dozen intertwined reasons, and like 90% of the writing is concerned with making sure you're clear on every single detail

it's extremely silly, thankfully in an entertaining manner

I wrote down a summary of Code Vein's premise, for your edification. Note that this is SETTING, not PLOT. This is all of the context it is constantly explaining, in order for you to care about all of the mind-blowing plot twists that occur in the actual story lmao

anyway code vein is enormously silly and I am very much enjoying it

Game: this waifish anime girl with gigantic boobs is basically a robot who slowly learns self-determination and empathy through friendship with the protagonist

Me, at four months' quarantine brain: HELLO YES I WOULD DIE FOR KUUDERE EXISTENTIALIST CLICHE WAIF

I finished Deviantart Souls it rules

The credits are actually super interesting? Lead dev was apparently split between Bandai Namco's internal team and a smaller studio named Shift, with significant work done by domain-specific outsourcing studios

Not particularly unusual, but the credits are REALLY specific about different studios' roles, in a way that I've never seen before. They literally include the logos for all the third party studios, along with header for whatever task they were on:

like instead of just a big boring list of studios/names it's:
- All the leads across all studios
- Audio+music
- Bamco and Shift core teams
- Every other studio broken out by role, with logos (these folks did character models! These folks did cutscene animation! etc)

I dunno; it's a small thing but it feels neat to see AAA game credits that feel like they're CREDITING people. Like a big round of high-fives to everyone who made this cool art project together