Gorf's latest...
"...definitely been challenges going through this, SHOPKEEPERS has been... you know... that's generally our first usage of the SUBSUMPTION engine in general, so getting to know that has been a challenge, the shopkeepers... although... what you're going to see is fairly simple compared to the overall AI you're gonna see, ah... in the LONG RUN is... still just a good learning experience just for us... ahm... getting... getting... some of the other bugs worked out of the system, you know, INTERACTIONS with objects, getting the camera to sit right on the thing you're trying to focus on and trying on... things like that, it's kinda dialing in the knobs so to speak... it's taken its toll and taken its time"
- Robert Reininger - senior tech designer Texas since aug 2016
That quote had me groaning aloud and I’m glad you transcribed it, S.J. “Shopkeeper talk” is second only in annoyance to CIG babble about female player characters on the “Grating Bullcrap They’ve Been Talking About Ineffectually for Years” list.
I mean,
dayemn — they’ve been futzing around with Shopkeepers unsuccessfully
forever, and to no productive end.
What happened to all the
exciting work we heard about in early 2016? The highly detailed animations of ship hawking, TV monitor gawking and champagne dreams? The showfloor buzz, the meta-spectacle of in-game ship fetishizing by NPC hucksters in AstroArmada?
Oh, that’s right... All that work that came out of the Great CIG Management Brain Trust Gathering of early 2016 didn’t go into the
game... Not that it was wasted, though.
At the time it seemed pretty alarming to hear them openly admitting they didn’t really know what their development priorities for the year were — because they didn’t have a master plan stretching across years, they pretty much reset their development priorities at the start of each new year and at the time of filming, the big wigs hadn’t decided yet.
Then it seemed even more damning after the
Brain Trust Get Together in California that Priority One was “let’s get our shopkeeper NPCs in the game loaded up with some highly detailed ship hawking movements so the ship showroom in game at least feels abuzz with excitement...” In a space sim without Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI...
But as we now know, it was even worse than that. At this point it’s more plausible that the CIG Brain Trust got together to set their priorities for the year and most of it was about the sort of sizzle reel material they needed to start working on for Q4’s big sales push. And the only things that look
remotely like what Jake Ross described in that January of 2016 we’re animations and assets later
redeployed for a ship sale commercial in a series of year-end commercials to sell yet more ships in a space sim Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI...
And now
it’s over a year and a half later, and the AI we’ve heard about for years yet hardly encountered in game is proving a big challenge to implement for Shopkeepers — the benign, passive, generally stationary non-entities that are the absolute flotsam and jetsam of MMO-dom...
—
Just give up, Chris. You lost the plot and with more money than you deserved in a dozen lifetimes you’re fighting for your life to salvage something, anything playable amidst the debris field of the once soaring opportunity fortune granted you. You’ve saturated your potential niche market, milked the hell out of the most gullible, and the deflation of the hope bubble is so violent now it sounds like a 130 decibel whoopy cushion eruption under the ass of the god of folly.
The spectacle of you and Sandi trying to be cutesy in your lead-in to Burndown every week is absolutely nauseating. The very need to have a weekly show dedicated to ongoing excuse-making as to why you STILL can’t deliver on a nearly year-overdue update on your Year 5 pre-Alpha is bad enough without the glib, chatty wink-winks that kick it off. Each new installment only adds another chapter to the epic tome “Why Chris Roberts is a terrible game developer, project manager and company leader.” If you lack the awareness to not be embarrassed with each new delay and lack the humility to not be ashamed, plant two other people in that chair who might and use you and Sandi’s time in ways more likely to help the project. Like year long vacations or joint resignations.
—
(And now an elliptical, stimperial message for Chris from L.A. space rockers Autolux...)
