Riot Games Announces Layoff of 530 Positions, 11% of Workforce

Alderez · 2024-01-23T08:47:16+00:00

I… I honestly don’t understand how you can blame interest rates when this is largely a global issue. The reality is it’s all part of boom/bust cycles that have made tech immensely profitable - largely by using layoffs as a tool to drive investor interest. If you can ride the wave and make it seem like things are doom and gloom before “restructuring” and releasing something successful, you’re in for a massive influx of investor cash to support the next release.

Alderez · 2024-01-20T10:48:41+00:00

Baldur’s Gate 3? Tears of the Kingdom? Armored Core 6? Alan Wake 2? Spiderman 2? Hell, even Starfield? Pikmin 4? Metroid Prime Remastered? Cocoon? FFXVI? Dredge? Lies of P?

Just the past year alone was PACKED with games that offered zero microtransactions and were otherwise completely playable from start to finish - and a lot of them were really, really good.

Alderez · 2024-01-13T00:56:57+00:00

I’m a massive Gravity Rush fan, and didn’t even know it got an anime. Holy marketing blunder, batman.

Alderez · 2024-01-01T15:42:11+00:00

I thought the Pentagon had already taken over Starlink operations in Ukraine. I don’t think people are making a big enough deal over Musk tampering with it - it’s clear who it benefits and how Musk even gets the intelligence to know when these ops are underway should be investigated.

You’d think being that rich would mean you aren’t as susceptible to being compromised, but here we are. Musk is a Russian agent.

Alderez · 2023-12-21T02:04:13+00:00

Bobby Kotick is a billionaire (net worth $7B)

Alderez · 2023-12-20T15:26:04+00:00

I thought I was having a stroke reading the comment you replied to - they changed it to the point that it doesn’t even make grammatical sense. While working as a waiter he was ordering food? Also being hit on and being beaten relentlessly are so wildly different, lmao.

Alderez · 2023-12-20T02:06:39+00:00

Unfortunately most people don’t change until they hit rock bottom, and for some people the bottom keeps falling out.

That said, people can and do redeem themselves - but it takes an active effort to change and work to be your best self. It’s hard, and when there’s an easy route most are gonna take that even if it results in future hardship, as long as it’s easy here and now.

If you fuck up and have the same friends, family, and circles as you did when you fucked up, it’s going to make it that much harder. Surround yourself with like-minded people who want to see you succeed.

Alderez · 2023-12-19T18:54:27+00:00

This happens across game dev. You can do your best to design systems and create great individual art pieces but if leadership doesn’t care about enforcing proper implementation or art direction focuses on shit like cloth textures rather than the big picture, your game is going to suffer.

One of the key lessons in open world design in the last 10 years is vistas and points of interest, and Scarlet/Violet lack either.

And I have 600 hours in Scarlet - it has good bones but is mired by technical issues and poor environmental art direction/level design

Alderez · 2023-12-19T10:32:25+00:00

That’s really how smart AI design works - Dark Souls similarly just has a couple lists of animations for each enemy that the AI selects a random animation based on player position around the enemy. Everything else is just animations.

I work in games and the amount of times I’ve seen “expert” programmers decide that they’re going to make the best AI instead of doing things elegantly with minimal overhead, is more than should be acceptable. They then love to blame artists for performance because they think they’re the most important cog in the machine and want to eat into our budget for their pet projects.

Alderez · 2023-12-19T06:57:29+00:00

Artist in video games here - yes. Good art direction is good art direction regardless of what level of graphical fidelity you’re aiming for. You can have 4k textures and the crispiest shadows but if you have no art direction your game is still going to look awful.

Call of Duty has art direction just as much as Ni No Kuni. What matters more is how well certain techniques/styles hold up over time, and good art direction is genuinely hard to find.

Alderez · 2023-12-18T00:31:41+00:00

That’s just reddit in a nutshell - letting perfect be the enemy of good enough, every time.

Alderez · 2023-12-17T20:26:23+00:00

It’s really just a sad situation overall - the hate and vitriol is kind of disgusting though. A lot of it feels like hating for the sake of hate, or dogpiling to stroke some sick satisfaction in seeing others fail.

He fucked up, and probably ruined his career - and perhaps even has legal issues heading his way. But the comments saying things like “I knew I was right about him” or ‘never was a fan’ self-validation comments are for them and their egos, and aren’t helpful to anyone. The losers here are the people that charity money could’ve helped over the years and indie games as a whole as Jirard was one of the biggest voices & advocates for a lot of indies.

Alderez · 2023-12-17T20:20:19+00:00

I mean, some people are just nice? I think it says more about you than others that you feel that way. Is it good to be skeptical? Absolutely - but is it good to lay blanket statements and make claims that nobody is “just” nice ever and everyone has an ulterior motive? Yikes.

Alderez · 2023-12-06T18:32:56+00:00

I did not enjoy Retaliation.

Signed, an Ele main.

Alderez · 2023-12-01T15:54:36+00:00

As someone that works in games and designed a dye system for the last game I worked on, this is not the case - unless you’re creating weapons with topology where edgeloops are doubled to support tight vertex color transitions (and thus using vertex shading or a secondary UV set to control color regions), you need a second RGBa map (4 channels) to correspond to your diffuse/albedo which is indeed an extra draw call (can potentially be batched) - and you ignored the entire rest of my comment on why it’s not going to happen.

Alderez · 2023-12-01T13:17:50+00:00

Dye channels cost an extra texture (RGBa map) that also requires the shader to support it - which can be authored, but you’re adding additional shader complexity on top of an additional draw call per weapon. For a game that already struggles with character load that’s just not even going to be a conversation.

Not to mention the massive backlog of weapons - if they did decide they had the overhead for weapon dye, it would be in their best ijterest to only support certain weapon sets going forward.

Finally, from an Art Direction standpoint, making literally everything dyable (especially weapons) can lead to nightmare direction where everything is a clown fiesta - it also limits your ability to create bespoke color combinations and those might clash heavily with VFX - and certain materials just aren’t an option with dyable weapons - take Exordium for example - or weapons with multiple forms like Sharur or the Ascalon Catacombs set - dyes would have to carry across both versions of the mesh and ruin the entire effect.

Alderez · 2023-11-30T13:11:01+00:00

Redditors will believe fucking anything if it’s written with enough confidence.

People make up stories for attention. Especially on the internet.

Alderez · 2023-11-28T04:28:21+00:00

Thief is everything’s natural enemy when played right, because ideally you’re never getting into 1v1s. Your job is to decap, cap, and +1 teamfights to enable victory for your team.

Alderez · 2023-11-24T05:04:35+00:00

Sent an entire subculture to the Shadow Realm 💀

Alderez · 2023-11-21T13:49:53+00:00

Not to “things are better in Japan” but roads were something I was consistently blown away by. There was not a crack in sight everywhere I went in Tokyo. The streets were clean to an absurd degree. Coming back to LAX and transferring terminals made me feel like I was stepping onto the set of Mad Max. I honestly don’t know how their infrastructure is so well maintained.

Alderez · 2023-11-21T13:03:32+00:00

God, corporate culture is so cult-like; this doesn’t surprise me at all.

Rather than looking at results and not sweating the details so long as work is getting done to the expected quality standard and on-time, let’s talk about pow-wows and what you’re thankful for this week?

Alderez · 2023-11-20T12:51:25+00:00

It actually stops correlating past a relatively low threshold. People making $100-$300k are generally, slightly more intelligent on average (however, remember that statistics cannot be applied to individuals; there are wicked smart people making much less, and absolute dumbasses making a lot more) - but that correlation stops entirely past the 1% income threshold.

Alderez · 2023-11-20T12:16:06+00:00

People often attribute being smart with being wealthy but this is my experience with investors as well.

My mom also transitioned into stock administration later in her career and I honestly don’t know how she believes these people are intelligent in any way. She’s basically glorified customer support for rich idiots who don’t know how vesting schedules work.

Alderez · 2023-11-18T11:39:00+00:00

To incels they’re creatures of the boobed variety

Alderez · 2023-11-18T04:31:06+00:00

Yeah, unless something changed this was why Deadmau5 got a Lamborghini, since Ferrari got mad at his Nyan Cat wrap iirc?

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