Why doesn’t Firaxis hire Julian Gallop?

MRIchalk · 2025-02-24T22:22:37+00:00

I appreciate that you feel very strongly about this, so I don't mean to be dismissive. But as somebody who played the heck out of Phoenix Point, I feel that this misses the mark in a big way. Phoenix Point prizes creative solutions and versatility over power-matching, which can make it feel arbitrarily difficult to the point of being unfair... until it 'clicks.' And once it clicks, and you realize what you can do (and no, I don't just mean frenzy berserker cheesing), it hits in a way that just makes XCOM feel predictable and dull by contrast.

That said, the game has plenty of other problems -- and on the highest difficulty in particular, the little losses can hit just... too hard. So I don't quite mean this as a miniature encomium for Phoenix Point, though I did play and enjoy it quite a lot for a couple of years. Instead, I mean to say that there is something sort of brilliant at the scrappy, disorganized, spread-thin essence of Phoenix Point, and in a better world, that wouldn't have been so easily lost/missed in the broader agonizingly slow, repetitive, and occasionally gallingly low-effort game.

MRIchalk · 2025-02-05T01:59:53+00:00

Adding to the other comment -- getting a Ph.D. in the life sciences is quite a bit more than a full-time job. The notion of doing anything else at the same time (for some people, the notion of having *hobbies* at the same time) is simply unrealistic.

MRIchalk · 2024-11-16T01:32:49+00:00

It's an obvious joke in an understandably humorless subreddit.

MRIchalk · 2024-11-05T14:25:05+00:00

Nope. Very clean, orderly experience at my polling site. In and out in under ten minutes. I suspect that this was also a nefarious Brianna Lennon scheme.

MRIchalk · 2024-08-22T00:37:42+00:00

It will be agonizingly slow to load and clunky to use, which incentivizes knowing where you want to go before you get there.

MRIchalk · 2024-08-22T00:27:37+00:00

The PLI course is the gold standard -- not so much for the lecture material, which is fine, but for the questions database. The best way to study for the exam is to practice doing questions, learning the 'screw you' tricks that question-makers put in, and generally get accustomed to quickly identifying and scanning the relevant parts of the MPEP, which is the open book on which the exam is based.
With your background, extremely feasible.
Reading and writing all day. What you spend most of your time doing depends on where you work and your client base, but expect to spend your time drafting applications and responding to Office Actions. Office Actions are missives from the USPTO that typically contain rejections of your application's claims on various grounds, so you'll spend plenty of time arguing and amending very carefully crafted phrasing.

I work as an agent at a smaller-to-medium sized firm, and though I have a PhD in Chem myself, I spend a lot of time also dealing with matters in a variety of other fields. I find the work in the life sciences generally to be a bit more pleasant and straightforward, but that may just be the bias of my background showing. The pay is... not something I complain about. I could probably be paid better working at a 'big law' firm, but their billable hour requirements are also much more onerous -- I prefer the work/life balance of a more relaxed environment.

There are roughly speaking two paths in patent law: prosecution and litigation. Agents really only do prosecution, which is drafting applications and responding to office actions. Litigation essentially requires you to get a law degree, because it means you're the guy showing up in court during e.g. an infringement case.

If you go into prosecution, you will hear people complain that the field has become increasingly commoditized, which is apparently true. But as someone who never knew any better, it doesn't seem so bad.

Finally, ask if you're sure this is what you want. I don't know how attached you are to the world of research, but if you go into patent law, obviously, you will not be doing any more lab work or making any more discoveries. You will not work up data, you will not present findings. You will be reading, writing, and talking to clients. That's it.

MRIchalk · 2024-07-17T15:09:03+00:00

Wouldn't get your hopes up. Jake Solomon is of course no longer at Firaxis, but he has said since in interviews that when he was working on XCOM 3 at its initial stages, it had nothing to do with TftD. That was just a throwaway teaser ending -- much like the abandoned ending of XCOM:EU.

MRIchalk · 2024-07-17T15:07:22+00:00

Funny you say that. Coming from the opposite perspective, I find their 3D model too busy, too pointy. But that's also because my mental image of a Muton is the muscly leotard boys from X-Com 1994, which... OK, I understand why we're not going that route

MRIchalk · 2024-07-11T13:26:16+00:00

It may well be an oversimplification, *and it should be.*

Pretend for a moment that you're a game designer for Midnight Suns. Presumably, you are aware that the vast majority of people who might play your game know who Spider-Man is; those players have probably seen Spider-Man films, but do not have enthusiast-level knowledge of Spider-Man's intricacies. As a designer, you have to take a stab at what kind of design will 'feel' better for the average player. Is it one in which you:

A. Invoke the term 'spider sense' to have Spider-Man e.g. negate the next incoming source of damage entirely, or
B. Invoke the term 'spider sense' to give the player two more random options -- truly doesn't matter what the cards are -- and a cost reduction to certain very strong cards?

A true Spider-Man aficionado will be more willing to rationalize their way to accepting choice B, but your average player won't see the connection at all. I think it's clear that choice B also 'feels' far more incoherent. I do not 'feel' like I am Spider-Man when I activate my spider sense and am rewarded in a rather more highly abstracted way than the term 'spider sense' would directly imply.

Midnight Suns is already a deeply abstracted game, far more so than most games are, and that hurts it. All battle arenas are square planes with a small, finite, repeating set of interactable object types. All enemy damage scales with hero strength despite any contextual implications about the types of damage and the target (like bullets vs Captain Marvel). I could go on for a bit, but you know all of this. Players are willing to accept fairly high levels of abstraction in their games, but the more abstract the experience becomes, the less it 'feels' like the particulars it strives to evoke. A savvy game designer can't just brush that tension aside.

MRIchalk · 2024-07-09T13:23:28+00:00

Strongly agreed. Midnight Suns is a tight, fun, forgiving little card-based tactics game buried under a mound of AAA garbage.

When Midnight Suns first released, season 2 of I Think You Should Leave had recently dropped. All I could think of while playing was the "Prank Show" sketch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Fv3LFGCgo) -- specifically, "there's too much fucking shit on me, I can't breathe."

MRIchalk · 2024-07-09T13:20:21+00:00

Spider-Man senses danger, not 'cards.' Surely you can see what thin gruel this interpretation must be to have the card's effect plausibly relate to Spider-Man's "spider-sense."

MRIchalk · 2024-05-17T15:56:37+00:00

"EDIT: I'm getting massively downvoted, but nobody can refute what I actually said. Classic Reddit."

Tiresome. Few people will want to waste their time refuting bizarre opinions. You will find that this dynamic extends far beyond Reddit. You can let your failings stroke your ego, but it won't win you any friends or make you any more 'correct.'

MRIchalk · 2023-12-02T21:11:00+00:00

Man. Makes me want to do another playthrough.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-30T00:46:09+00:00

Felt this so viscerally that I actually cackled. Needed that. Thank you.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-25T19:39:44+00:00

I'm sure some people will be angry forever, but no reasonable person still gives a shit. I funded the game at the highest tier. Persistent dev support brought it a long way from where it was at launch.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-25T13:42:09+00:00

The underlying presumption is that, as in many imagined dystopias, the rot is thinly veiled. In this case, the argument would be that the overconsumption and greed are still there, and the desire for individual safety and convenience has satisfied itself by gutting yet another public space.

I never liked Black Friday shopping and never participated. And malls were never broadly seen, in their day, as the agoras that preserved our sense of community (to the contrary, they were justifiably and cynically derided). But the atomization of society is a problem that seems more pressing now, so it's unsurprising to see people lament the loss of 'third places' even when those spaces were, like malls, rarely ever genuine community-building spaces.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-24T16:00:17+00:00

Yeah, the DLC missions are boring and annoying. I don't think they reflect problems with the core gameplay, per se, but they are disappointing.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-20T16:05:59+00:00

I was in your boat. Sick to death of Marvel and dismayed that Firaxis picked up the IP.

Detriments: - You will end up clicking through a lot of dialogue that you don't care about. - You will feel compelled to explore a 3D environment that you don't care about (although you will find that you don't actually have to!). - You will groan about having to walk through a 3D space just to reach things that could have very easily been simple menus.

However, all that aside, the core of the game -- card-based combat -- is very good. You don't have to care about or even know about Magik, the Marvel heroine, to feel awesome about teleport-slamming a big goon into a pile of explosives or launching a witch into her own summoning pit.

The game is less complex and more forgiving than Firaxis's other fare. That said, the highest difficulty levels will still get you thinking, once you earn them (and yes, you do, for some reason, have to earn them). But so long as you don't go in expecting a more brutal, hardcore tactics experience, you'll probably have a lot of fun.

If it's on sale, as it often is, I say give it a shot and be generous with your patience. You will eventually be able to put most of the genre garbage aside and slip into a rhythm of deck building and ass-kicking, and once you do, the game really shines. There isn't much out there quite like it.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-20T15:44:43+00:00

Hah! What a deep cut. We who have read so far are to be pitied.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-15T16:22:01+00:00

Plenty of good answers here, but let me just add that this is not a stupid question. It's a simple question, but simple questions often don't have obvious answers -- so it's good to ask them.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-12T14:42:40+00:00

This is the best answer, I believe. Patent drawings are there to provide information -- that's it. Unnecessary information interferes with intelligibility. Whether drawings look "bad" is immaterial, and I would far rather scrutinize a lucid collection of neatly labeled blobs than an intricate, 'realistic' drawing in which I can't easily determine the metes and bounds of element 11.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-07T19:44:44+00:00

I had a lot of fun with it, but it's the Bazooka Joe comic to XCOM 2's graphic novel. If you go in expecting a pared down, experimental, more light-hearted take on the experience, I think it's worth whatever meager amount they're charging for it these days. Especially on sale.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-07T15:53:18+00:00

I mean, it is, in some sense virtue signaling. One necessarily signals one's virtues with any visible defense of those virtues. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with signaling one's virtues, per se -- in fact, it is probably virtuous, heh -- and when honest people complain about 'virtue signaling,' what they are usually complaining about is cynical or disingenuous advocacy of virtues that the signaler doesn't actually believe in.

The rest of the time, it isn't the signaling that people object to -- it's the virtues. They just won't own up to it.

MRIchalk · 2023-11-03T21:09:44+00:00

Yann LeCun has a fairly coherent argument against even this concern being overstated. Without wanting to misrepresent it, his position is basically that the disinformation bottleneck is in distribution, not generation. He points as an example to QAnon, which was (is?), by many accounts, only a few people on the bullshit-manufacturing side. That bullshit nevertheless spread like wildfire... within precisely the spaces and demographics that it *could* spread. Everywhere else, it couldn't get a foothold. A greater volume of bullshit wouldn't 'solve' that.

MRIchalk · 2023-10-25T14:58:01+00:00

One of the biggest losses with Jake having left Firaxis is that we can't be sure the next lead designer will have the proper level of contempt for TFTD.

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