It’s sad. But hopefully, a chance for Nintendo take advantage of this to modernise things a bit. Wonder looks to have a bit more VO in it, and people have been speculating it’s a new actor.
tbh he has to retire sometime, and considering the reaction to the movie casting this seems a sensible way to do it.
I posted this last time the trailer was posted. I am in the UK indie dev scene, and heard about this stuff before it went public ( at least some of it.)
Essentially an employee of Failbetter Olivia Wood, came out and admitted they’d been in a relationship with Kennedy that had been kept secret when hired. You can argue that this was a bad arrangement, but the trouble here is Kennedy held all the power and used this to his advantage. Kennedy then dumped Wood for another employee Lottie Bevan and lied about it to Failbetter; he was Lottie’s Manager. He started becoming increasingly abusive to Wood. Threatening people in the studio who picked up on it while keeping others ( some people are fully remote) in the dark.
Other women in the industry spoke out about it including Emily Short, who at the time was a freelancer for Failbetter. Stopped working with them for a long while ( you can see why in her tweets) and then joined them more recently. https://twitter.com/emshort/status/1166807338336051208?lang=en
A FB employee linking receipts disputing AK’s claims.: https://medium.com/@wastebooks/alexis-kennedy-71044efc0ecf
There’s also the weirdass PC GamesN article Kennedy and Lottie Bevan the other FB employee ( and other Weather Factory employee) did about their relationship before this stuff came out. Even if you don’t want to look through various rebuttals, I think it’s really odd. https://www.pcgamesn.com/cultist-simulator/sunless-sea-lottie-bevan-alexis-kennedy-working-relationships
As has been said none of AK’s legal threats went anywhere, and with current social media disintegrating it’s a hard thing to follow. Obviously, make up your own mind with this. But it’s more than a he/she said situation.
Just for reference, the developer of this game has an alleged history of abusive and creepy behaviour toward women. This was talked about in UK game dev circles before these articles. Do with that information what you want. https://www.eurogamer.net/two-women-accuse-cultist-simulator-developer-alexis-kennedy-of-exploitative-behaviour It’s worth noting despite him saying he’d sue anyone spreading these allegations, no lawsuits have actually happened. With 110k views on the trailer, he can’t really winge about being cancelled either.
Make your purchasing decisions with all the info etc.
Xalavier’s post is correct here. This kind of game doesn’t come out of nowhere. Larian has been built expressly to do this one thing well . It certainly helps that the CEO Sven has a personal passion for the genre. There’s obviously been a great deal of long term planning to help the studio grow to this point. Developing tools, pipelines, staffing, and experience with your dev teams should be how this works.
I’ve heard cases of studios with no RPG experience think about making an RPG, and then look to Larian as a baseline…and it’s like where do you start with that? I can see some execs look at the game, and not the pipeline/long term business goal here. I’d put Supergiant in a similar category tbh. Each game they do is solid within a rough area, building on the tech of the last.
As for players, I certainly think you can see this as a high mark; but not a baseline. As always I think we should cut indies some slack. But it does kind of prove out the terrible way a lot of big studios run. Really building a studio up, treating the devs right, and supporting positive well run teams. Not kicking stuff out of the door as soon as a game is shipped, ignoring abuse etc.
I don’t know really if it’s specifically crowd funding here ( it can be risky), but rather a solid studio growth plan tbh.
There are some really decent ones that have just come out, are are on sale with the current Visual Novel fest on steam. Videoverse - VN set in a Miiverse style social network that is about to be shut down Hypnospace Outlaw - Another one set in a computer, this time it’s an alt reality internet based around old Geocities pages. Very fun/weird Analogue: A hate story ( on sale)- You’re investigating what happened to a Korean generation ship found abandoned in space by talking to its AI Long Live the Queen ( on sale) - On of those VNs where you pick activities etc to raise stats, but parodied/put on its head because you’ll die various horrible deaths until you get it right.
Good luck hope you heal fast!
How are people finding this? I sense the siren call of Baldur’s Gate, but I think Larian might not really notice if I partake later and play this first.