Devs are admitting their ‘sins’ on Twitter, and there sure are a lot who hid Loss in games
Also, now we know who nerfed the boob jiggle in The Witcher 3.
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While Twitter users joke about the social media platform being on the brink of death and deletion thanks to Elon Musk’s mismanagement, game developers have used this opportunity to stage a final confession, an absolution of all their design sins. It began with asenior character artist working on Overwatchadmitting he hid “abstracted versions of Loss in older projects”, and continued from there.
Other developers confessed to similar Loss-related crimes against videogames. For anyone who has remained blessedly ignorant of the Loss meme until now, it began when middling videogame-themed webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del took an unexpected turn for the dramatic with a strip depicting miscarriage. The attempt to add emotional heft to a gamers-on-a-couch gag strip was so mockable that chronically online people torment each other withminimalist-yet-recognizable interpretations of its four panelsto this day.
And that is why there is aLoss edit on an alligator in Maneater, an entirelevel in Super Meat Boy Forever that references Loss, and aLoss meme “the size of a cruise ship” somewhere in A Hat in Time. Hiding Loss edits in textures andtilesetsis a recurring theme of the thread, as well as hiding other images and animations whetherbananasor theNaruto run.
Like an image in a texture no one will ever notice, many of the “sins” aren’t really that sinful. For instance, agreeing to reduce the reload and run speed buffs in Far Cry 6 thennever doing itwould make you a hero in the eyes of many. Likewise, the champion tester who noticed that in The Witcher 3 when Triss turned 180 degrees “her boobs would keep on jiggling for solid 15 seconds” andsubmitted a ticket to nerf that boob jiggle. Or thewriter on Guardians of the Galaxyresponsible for characters mentioning an alternate name suggested for their team was Stardust Crusaders, in reference to an arc of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Other admissions are the kind of delightful dev hacks reminiscent ofFallout 3’s metro car actually being an item of clothing equipped on the player’s hand. Here’s a perfect example:in Outer Wilds the player doesn’t move, the entire rest of the universe does, as it makes movement and aiming smoother. And in Outriders, there’s a forest fire scene but no system for fire propagation, so some poor designer had to script"about 600 plants to individually catch fire".
Not all are without sin, however. May the Lord find it in his heart to forgive the monster who admitted,“I worked on Bubsy 3D.”
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Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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