EpicSteve

I like all those topics, except for getting fired.

Been in Chicago for a bit now, Steve. You liking it here? It gets colder!

Completely agree.

It was borderline infuriating to watch self-satisfied pricks run it down in the quick look because 'having an art style and puzzle gameplay elements is offensive to WW1 vets'. Meanwhile the developers are taking time to explain things like facial disfigurement and the awful effects of chlorine gas. They talk about the small aspects that go in to living in a warzone, the tools that soldiers used to survive, the tools they created to solve problems that no one in high command could have imagined, they talk about the carnage, the suffering, and what it took to go on. When I read the little blurb on facial disfigurement, I was overcome with thinking of the post-war, and this sudden influx of scars, missing appendages, missing limbs, facial disfigurements in regular society. An entire generation of boys (and girls) who would grow up physically ravaged by this event, to such a degree that seeing a young man missing an eye would be almost common in comparison to today.

I'm a Canadian and no historically recorded wars have been waged on the plains outside of my city. I don't get to have a first hand look at the effects of World Wars when I go for a drive out of town. As much as empathy and research is non-national, I don't think you might find a game as artfully crafted as Valiant Hearts from a developer who is not based in France or Germany.

Congrats! Can you be our inside man for the campaign to get a Windjammers game made?

So what does a Production Coordinator do exactly?

Still confused after reading this as to if it's a game Producer position or a video Producer position (like Vinny/Drew). But either way: congratulations, man! Working with Lang seems like it would be fun, and I'm sure he's cultivated a great environment at that studio. Keep on living the dream!

Digging through trashcans is a necessary mechanic for a game that requires you to collect ammo/resources. Shooters especially need to continuously feed you ammunition somehow and games with an economy need to give you a way to collect currency. I'm not saying that a game without those things can't exist, just that there's a very valid reason that they do.

The type of experience you seem to be asking for sounds like the types of games Gone Home and The Novelist are. More Gone Home than The Novelist because in the latter, you're doing some gamey ass game shit jumping from point to point and hitting button prompts to see basically audio logs. I also feel like button prompts to do actions is just something we're always going to have to deal with since we're interacting with the game worlds using a controller with buttons. The only way around that shit is to play D&D and just say what you want to do =P

Like MB stated, realism doesn't always equal fun. I think I remember you writing about that very thing a while back. It had to do with shooters and maybe ARMA =P

I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I never really found the searching through trashcans in BioShock Infinite to be weird until I saw tons of people complaining about it online. I do agree with you, however. Like in The Last of Us, it wasn't so much the flamethrower as it was the fact that Joel had could carry tiny amounts of ammo, but also EVERY GUN he found. If the game couldn't have a totally realistic inventory, I would rather carry a couple guns and a ton of ammo. You know what I mean?

And looking forward, I'm still kinda bummed that stuff like the cardboard box is returning to MGSV. Ground Zeroes had a pretty realistic inventory (though the amount of ammo carried was a bit too large, I think). At the very least, you saw all the stuff either on Snake, or it was small enough to fit into one of his ammo bags. But not so with the damn cardboard box, and stuff like that breaks the immersion.

But you can steal sheep via balloons in that game, which is the right kind of stupid, so I don't really mind that much.