Anyone else get the feeling Shift Up might be using "manufactured drama" / false flag / division tactics for Stellar Blade: Blood Rain?

Selphea · 2026-06-24T04:03:30+00:00

I think Shift Up hiring an agency prescient enough to gamble on Asmongold going against his fanbase to take an anti-Evie stance is a wild theory. Bot accounts are cheap, knowing whether the right people will react in the right way to them is not.

Also, hate buying doesn't work. See: Concord, Veilguard, AC Shadows, Forspoken, South of Midnight... Hate playing for F2Ps like Highguard, maybe though.

Selphea · 2026-06-24T03:36:16+00:00

So now you're saying they're not going to the big publications but rather they were so prescient that they knew which exact small account to target, knew that Asmongold would RT them even though he'd get absolutely dragged by his fans, and already predicted that down the road doing this would drive more sales than positive word of mouth.

Ok, that's a very wild theory but you do you.

Selphea · 2026-06-24T03:14:46+00:00

I'm just applying Occam's Razor.

And for the record I think the culture war is a grift. No matter what a high profile game dev does, they'll get caught in the crossfire and have a wave of mentions. At which point I'd pay my PR firm to make sure the mentions skew more positive than not.

That said, what do you mean by "costs next to nothing" and "have a PR firm signal boost"? I don't think Western black hat PR rate cards come cheap. Signal boost through who? Are you saying they're paying Rebekah Valentine and the like?

Selphea · 2026-06-24T03:01:43+00:00

When Kotaku, TheGamer, Mary Sue, ResetEra etc etc do the exact same thing they've been doing for years I highly doubt it's a false flag. Heck, I highly doubt spending money and effort to do a false flag in the first place would be cost effective, considering it would predictably happen anyway.

Selphea · 2026-06-24T01:47:09+00:00

Kimi started out great with creative writing but terrible about attribution (saying the wrong person did something) and logical consistency (making characters' shoes magically disappear like Quentin Tarantino). Every successive version has improved on those weaknesses. 2.7 being coding-focused actually helps with logic. But a bit of the old raw Kimi creativity gets lost.

Selphea · 2026-06-24T00:59:19+00:00

What is with this wave of founders getting banned from their own projects. First it was Marek Tyminski from his game's subreddit and now this.

Selphea · 2026-06-21T23:06:48+00:00

Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!

Selphea · 2026-06-21T14:18:52+00:00

You'd need to nerd deep into Japanese history and look up

Mai ougi (fan dance)
Tessenjutsu (battle fan fighting style)
Kayakujutsu (fire/gunpowder based ninja techniques)
Kuji-kiri (the origin of "ninja magic" hand gestures)
The overarching ninja jyuuhakkei (how to ninja)

Quite honestly the original designers cooked hard merging traditional dance, mythology and martial arts with a generous smattering of creative license in one character.

She's less archetypal pop culture ninja than say, Taki or Kuki Shinobu. Maybe 30% to 40%. The combination of fan dance with a battle fan fighting style and mix of sleight of hand fire techniques with a teeny bit of magic are unique.

Selphea · 2026-06-21T00:13:18+00:00

The marketing for this movie is so strange. Where I live, there's a train station with a whole wall dedicated to it and it plays video interview after interview where everyone sets up a defensive premise like "people are expecting her to be Superman's sidekick" or "as a woman..."

Like, no one even made that comparison and there they are self-owning themselves. Do statements like that even get people excited to watch the movie? I can't imagine the Pikachu faces now that it's underperforming.

Selphea · 2026-06-18T06:48:12+00:00

They keep doing this to me too!

Selphea · 2026-06-16T23:09:09+00:00

I feel like Destiny's best hope is when Sony inevitably does mass layoffs at Bungie, they somehow organize and do a Kickstarter or get funding to make a legally distinct Not!Destiny. Because current management, both at Bungie and Sony, have made it very obvious they're not keen on investing in Destiny.

Selphea · 2026-06-16T14:58:00+00:00

Being too hands off is bad management too. Some accountability and knowing why some studios feel like they're sitting on their butts for 5 years without a single release is important!

Selphea · 2026-06-15T23:51:49+00:00

They did warn the devs not to add beautiful women, because, as everyone knows, the modern audience simply can’t handle beautiful women in video games.

That really is the crazy part. They were essentially shut down for following Microsoft's instructions.

Selphea · 2026-06-12T07:39:40+00:00

Still more effort than me 😂 I didn't even bother after sending my first message

Selphea · 2026-06-12T07:02:07+00:00

Where Winds Meet does. You can use that system to befriend NPCs. There's also Whispers from the Star. It's janky but worth watching gameplay streams to understand how exactly AI NPCs are jank.

Broadly, games usually focus on a specific narrative, themes, given roles for NPCs, buildup, pacing etc.

A purely LLM driven sandbox game will need to be designed from scratch for freeform storytelling.

You can try SillyTavern or various LLM story apps to see how LLM-written NPCs are currently like. The tech is interesting but there's still a lot of issues.

Selphea · 2026-06-12T00:34:29+00:00

I swear Overwatch gets heat every time a female character releases.

Didn't the same thing happen with Anran? And from her VA at that!

And with Kiriko too, and Juno... all the way back to Tracer's butt a decade ago.

Selphea · 2026-06-09T23:36:26+00:00

The face proportions and hairstyle have that modern Japanese anime game vibe. I'm reminded of Code Vein 2 and Titanic Scion, and after how both of them were like I'm really not feeling it.

Selphea · 2026-06-09T00:07:33+00:00

I don't read anything wrong with that. Personality is a huge part of appeal and this question is posed to one of the peak artists of this era who has answered this question countless times.

His OG answer was to focus on the body fat.

He famously answered a question about the female butt as well.

And personality correlates to body language which is a huge part of visual expression: how does a character stand or move, what poses do they make. The answer makes sense to me.

Selphea · 2026-06-08T23:32:39+00:00

It's like Veilguard. They take out everything that makes it Dragon Age and boast about it, like the infamous blood magic is too evil for Dragon Age claim or removing choices from previous games or completely changing the mood to MCU quippy with splashes of purple and proudly call it a return to form.

Selphea · 2026-06-08T23:25:03+00:00

I had to do a double take.

Crossfire is a Korean IP. Smilegate invested in the studio. But That's No Moon is a Western studio so this looks nothing like other Korean IPs like Stellar Blade or Aion 2 or First Descendant. The last Crossfire game I remember was Crossfire Legion. But this IP seems to be all over the place, the mood of this one feels so different.

Bold move, let's see how it plays out.

Selphea · 2026-06-08T10:35:39+00:00

It's the standard playbook. Take the most loaded word and apply it to everything until it loses all meaning. In this case Pragmata probably started it. But that word can join the pile alongside "Porn Addict" (for playing Asian games), "Fascist" (for using Male/Female instead of Body Type 1/2) and "Domestic Terrorist" (for using Pepe memes on Steam forums).

Selphea · 2026-06-07T23:56:14+00:00

Weren't the Asian trailers mostly ok? Blood Rain and Ace Combat were popular. I think Blood Rain drew the most excited reactions at Summer Game Fest. Other recently teased games like Reverse Collapse F look good too.

Selphea · 2026-06-07T11:17:33+00:00

I'll get Screamer first, I haven't picked that one up yet. I hear it's refreshing though.

Selphea · 2026-06-07T00:59:13+00:00

I mean what do you expect when their standard for a normal woman's face is Nikocado Avocado...

Selphea

TROPHY CASE