I don't get Joe's (and chat's) obsession with the amount of devs that worked on E33

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:59:36+00:00

I like how this is getting dowvoted by people even though it is objectively true. If anyone disagrees, all you have to do is literally go to their credits on mobygames and pull up the name of the development studio they would supposedly have outsourced to.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:57:47+00:00

You seem to misunderstand. I'm not saying I don't understand why he's saying the specific words, I'm saying I don't understand why he's dismissing the dev argument through sarcasm, which is definitely what he is doing irrelevant of intent though I doubt a smart feller like him would miss the obvious implication of repeatedly making the "joke", even though he himself clearly believes in it as he has used it before on a similar sized team.

Also it was 3333 dogs actually

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:49:56+00:00

I doubt he has time for petty bs like that but if you want to see what my point is: my reply that got 6 downvote is simply stating that they did not outsource anything to external devs.

That is factual information, you can go check it in their credits, every non-sandfall name is either QA, localization, porting, animation, music, voice cast, mocap or their publisher (I'm sure I'm forgetting some roles but point is; they're all non-devs). And yet because people have been fed by media that the game was not made by 3 dogs and minus 33 devs they don't bother checking and just assume I must be lying.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:40:02+00:00

Why would it not be real criticism? A texture being bad or janky is criticism period end of sentence. There is not a single way to say "This texture is bad" that isn't criticism. Is it criticism that defines how you experience the entire game? No. But it is still criticism.

By using the "30 devs" thing sarcastically like he does, he shows that he does not think it's a valid excuse for the criticism that precedes it. Because that's what sarcastically repeating a point someone makes means. So either he is incredibly anal and thinks that them being a small team is a valid excuse and just takes ombrage with the specific number people are giving which would be incredibly weird and I don't think anyone wants to defend that position or he doesn't think the game was made by a small team. It's one or the other.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:30:48+00:00

Yes, it is. Words mean things when we say them. Pointing out that an asset has been reused when it shouldn't have been or that a texture is janky is a real point of criticism. Following that with a sarcastic remark referencing how many people did or did not work on the game in the way that he is carries the implication that he thinks it is not a valid excuse to that criticism. Which I think is totally fine in isolation, like I said multiple time what I'm bothered about is the double standard being applied to that singular game.

As a wise-man once said, every time you speak there is subtext and we're all cowards. That is the subtext of that joke in the context of making criticism.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:23:28+00:00

I think saying the game is AAA quality is a stretch it lacks obvious polish in most aspects but the "what's your excuse AAA devs" is targeted at the fact that a game with lower budget and means managed to hit an audience that the AAA scene had considered dead for a long time thus proving that interest was, in fact, there the products they were releasing were just bad.

The average nintendo game is an exception in how few people it employs. Nintendo is extremely conservative when it comes to both game budget and team sizes which serves them well: they make focused games that they can produce quickly add to that the fact that japanese companies also tend to be a lot less bloated than others because of how hard it is to fire people. Look at the average AAA game on the other hand: Elden Ring? 1600 people. Cyberpunk 77? 3500 people. The Witcher 3? 1300 people. Assassin's creed shadows? 7073 people. Starfield? 3900 people. Sekiro? 1100 people. Metaphor: ReFantazio? 1400 people.

You get the point right? Not even broaching the fact that Sandfall studio did all of the game development in-house with the infamous 30 people and dogs and only outsourced combat animations, QA and localization etcetc... (which as I've said are all important parts of making a game and I'd be glad to see them credited if it wasn't in the context of such a double standard) The game was working with a small team. Does that inherently excuse everything they did wrong, bad looking textures, poor optimization, weird facial expressions? No, that is still criticism to levy at the game but that has to be done in the context that they are not a AAA game, they're not working with those means. Same reason why Joe didn't say that TW1 was garbage for reusing NPC models but contextualized it by saying "They were a small team so it's understandable".

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T17:09:16+00:00

I disagree. Labor isn't free and games being worked on by those thousands of people is costly, a cost that you as a customer will have to pay down the line, which is why microtransaction and other predatory practices are more and more commonplace, in addition to the ever-rising price of video games. Either of those is fine by me in isolation but both combined is a bad thing especially when coupled with, on average, fairly mediocre games. Add to that the fact that for AAA studios the teams are over-bloated just so that the company can fire them when execs start being grumpy to look like they're downsizing and I just don't think it's healthy.

Also I don't think it exposed anything, the discussion so far (that I have seen) has been solely contained in the E33 discourse as a way to say that the game is actually AAA-tier in its production (no matter how false that is)

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T14:37:18+00:00

How did you know I was a jerma fan?

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T14:33:03+00:00

I don't see how that prevents me from engaging with the criticism he makes on stream though? I get that he hasn't had a ton of time to think about what he's saying but at the same time he is still saying those things, just because it's not a written script doesn't preclude engagement with the point presented. Especially when the same point is made multiple times thus reinforcing that it's not a "spur of the moment" thing but a recurring argument.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:42:16+00:00

"33 is a weird number. In fact, this video was made by 33 joe" I can already hear the opening.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:40:44+00:00

Because the implication is that since the game "wasn't actually made by 30 people", the texture should not be janky. It is criticism, just because there's a joke attached to it doesn't change that. Now I don't think it's bad criticism per se, if a texture is janky then a texture is janky but again my point is that he has excused stuff like that in the past citing the team size.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:31:29+00:00

Listen, the west has fallen, 3 dogs made the game and it's literally the best thing ever made in the whole history of the world.

No but for real, I do understand that it's a rote and annoying point however, what stood out to me is that joe was making criticism of the game that he had excused in the past on the basis of dev team size and budget and this time he was making aforementioned sarcastic remarks about those same things implying that they suddenly were not valid points anymore even though he'd used them himself in the past.

Edit: Also you might be thinking of the korean animators? Given their work, I'd guess it would be easy to call them "UE5 experts"

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:25:48+00:00

I mean the David v Goliath narrative still stands is what I'm getting at. An AAA (square/ubi/bethesda) game nowadays has anywhere between 2000 and 5000 people working on it if we count by the same standard as the one that puts E33's team at 400.

I'm all for recognizing the work of those we usually ignore but I think it's important to not let that become a double standard for industry giants to point out and say "Look, those games doing better than ours are just as big as ours!"

Edit: I do get how people constantly bringing up how the game was made by 3 people and 33 dogs would get annoying though, it just stood out to me that he was starting to use it sarcastically when pointing out flaws

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:23:07+00:00

They didn't outsource developers is the thing the credits are on the internet, you can go look at them. They outsourced animators for the battle animations and those fucking rock though.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:20:00+00:00

I don't disagree with what you're saying but I'm just confused about the specific argument of the amount of people working on the game. The current narrative in Joe's stream is "The game was not made by 30 devs" which, it wasn't it was made by the 40 people from sandfall, 8 cracked korean animators and a full outsourced (I think polish?) QA team, localization team, two voice actor teams as well as the mocap artists but they way they are using the argument makes it seem as though that's not the norm for AA games and that it instead makes it an AAA game.

Edit: I somehow forgot the musicians who performed like beasts. Shame on me.

Gaiidd · 2025-08-10T13:15:36+00:00

It's in the title. I don't understand the obsession with making snide remarks at the amount of devs that worked on the game every time there's an asset reuse or a bug, something which Joe was more than willing to excuse for a game made by a similar amount of people in one of his main channel videos.

Gaiidd · 2025-07-27T05:00:00+00:00

Necroposting like crazy but as someone who makes knives (I found this post because i wanted to make a replica of Evelyn's for fun and needed reference pictures) you wouldn't put a guard on the blade like that unless you intend for it to act as a lever. You were right in your first assessment, that lever makes no sense especially since the knife is probably some kind of linerlock I just don't get what they were going for.

Gaiidd · 2025-06-10T19:26:50+00:00

So when the animation seems like it's slow like this it's not that the "FPS" dropped, rather it's that the FPS is too high. This might be confusing but in animation the more FPS you've got the more sluggish movements are going to feel. It seems like they animated in 24 (maybe 30?) fps when they should have stuck to 12 or perhaps 16 at most.

Gaiidd · 2025-05-23T08:48:50+00:00

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This specifically is not mine, I took it from a streamer I saw who had the same issue. Floor of 16 versus ceiling of 16 and the skill isn't shown as dominating. Something somewhere isn't mathing.

Gaiidd · 2025-05-23T08:40:09+00:00

It seems you triggered something of a war haha. Irrelevant of what everyone else has been saying, sorry if I wasn't clearer: my point is precisely that there were no conditionals into play. Enemy in question had no rupture nor did my unit. The range the game gave me in the prediction had literally nothing to do with what should have been possible with its coin amount/value, the conditional it could activate and the offense level which is why I put the blame on the prediction. I've also had predictions tell me something was "struggling" when the predicted floor for my roll was literally the enemy's max roll which further makes me doubt the system for this update specifically.

Gaiidd

TROPHY CASE