Warner Bros. is also canceling the Wonder Woman game.
This is maybe the biggest bloodbath we’ve seen in this industry? What a damn shame.
29 years later, after working with Monolith on one of the worst projects in history… I can finally piss on their grave. Fuck you Matt, fuck Monolith. Yeah this is fucking personal.
What happened?
They were contracted to design the (edit: low-level coin op hardware, etc) API for our new Internet-enabled touchscreen gaming network kiosks (world first at the time) and they were fucking useless. And then had the gall to present the piece of shit at the CGDG 1997, as a half-finished completely non-functional, but presented it like it was their own product and not a massive NDA violation. Presented like their own product which could be generically extended to other platforms. Fuck you Matt. Fuck you Monolith you fucking cunts.
I’m still not getting why the level of hate here?
You pay someone to do X with a contract; they
- take your money
- not do X
- instead show the idea of X, which is yours, as THEIR product, which doesn’t even work
-
- voliating non-disclosure agreements in your contract
-
- doing untold damage to your business plans
Yeah, I don’t know about anything else, but fuck Matt with a cactus.
Stories like these sound wild to most people but sadly they happen all the time. It‘s literally how Google got this big. Still makes me mad how they robbed and trolled Terravision out of their code now known as Google Earth. Not like it‘s a flagship for Google or money maker but they still literally stole the code via hard drive like they stole from so many others. The tech world is full of absolute asshats leeching off of the most talented. It‘s very evident in today‘s tech culture full of crypto, AI and whatnot.
I’ll tell you a secret. And this is coming from somebody that was at the top-top Top of the gaming world for 2 decades… 95% of tech people are complete frauds and charlatans. Its a miracle anything ever gets made. Look at today’s coders… they don’t even know what a computer does, they just download other people’s modules, cobble them together and pray. The vast majority of people who self-identify as being in “comp sci” don’t even understand the very basics.
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Sure is great that they patented the Nemesis system just to do nothing with it for the better part of a decade then shut down the studio that invented it. Brilliant use of talent and the US patent system there.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I really didn’t like the nemesis system at all. Just like roguelikes, the infinite repeatability of it was a turn off for me and made it feel pointless. I’d much rather play a hand-crafted, limited, curated experience that actually feels meaningful. These generative systems just feel lifeless and pointless to me.
Also, fuck warner bros.
I didn’t like it because it seemed pointless if you don’t really care about getting vengeance on specific thing. So the name of a mob that kills you fills in an empty space? Which is the same thing that happens any time you hit a story beat anyways? What’s the point? It’s all just randomly generated grunts that try and kill you.
It brought very little in the way of innovative gameplay and roleplaying, yet people seem to treat it as the greatest revolution of game design in the last several decades.
Right on the money
But the story beat is static, it always gives you the same enemy in the same situation. The nemesis system turns that story beat dynamic. Every time you hit that story beat you get a different enemy in a different situation. It doesn’t give everyone the same story, it gives everyone their story. It’s innovation is how the system sets up stories and ties them into the gameplay. The system is designed to draw you into an encounter with a nemesis, there are multiple outcomes to that encounter. Those encounters become callbacks in the next encounter and so on and on until you’ve create a storyarc against that enemy.
For example I remember having a nemesis I couldn’t kill with a sneak attack (which was very much my preferred way of getting rid of nemesis I wanted to get rid of). So I had to fight him head on and I set him on fire. He managed to escape while I was being overrun by grunts. One of the grunts slayed me and became a new nemesis. Meanwhile the one that got away gained a new weaknesses to fire. One storyline branched into two storylines. Not only did my individual story born from the nemesis system branch out, the gameplay encounters with those nemesis also changed from the previous encounter. The next time I fought my old nemesis I had a new trick up my sleeve, I could use fire against them. As for the new nemesis, well get to him.
That’s the innovation of the nemesis system. It’s a story generator that gives you your story and each encounter alters the gameplay for the next encounter. But that’s only the foundation of the nemesis system. The Nemesis hierarchy and relations between them is an extra layer of storytelling. For example that grunt who killed me turned out to become a really annoying nemesis, I really struggled killing him and every encounter only made him stronger. So I devised a different strategy. I ended up turning other orks that surrounded him in the hierarchy and started using them to do my dirty work. In the end I wasn’t the one to slay my new nemesis, it was a different ork (under my control) who challenged him and killed him.
And final note on what really makes all of it work is the presentation. The orks aren’t just a randomized collection of traits, they’re voiced and somewhat visually unique and whatever randomized outcome they get to at the end of the encounter gets properly presented in the next encounter. The presentation is the glue that ties all those encounters together into one story. You’re presented with an actual nemesis and not just some generic mute and they “remember” the things you did to them before. They feel like a nemesis and not just some randomly generated grunt.
If you tried it and didn’t see the appeal I’m guessing the game was too easy. I wasn’t impressed by the nemesis system until the orks had a chance to escape or I was forced to retreat or I got killed. The system really opens up and gets interesting when the game gets so challenging that you’re no longer certain what will happen in any encounter.
