A recent 2K job listing has seemingly confirmed everyone’s worse fear: They’re making another Bioshock game and it will be a GaaS title! As nothing appears to be sacred anymore, the corpse of Andrew Ryan, firmly housed in Novato California is in need of an “end game design lead” with experience in making live service experiences.
A legitimate debate could and probably should be had about what is more off putting about the description of the company. How much of an absolute red flag of the cultural climate that promotes “diversity” and “inclusion” is — and will likely mean you will be surrounded by the social justice oriented — or the description of your job guaranteeing you will never see promotion!
Instead you get to work forever as a good little worker bee in the same position.
That’s not the worse some will say. A culture that doesn’t use “negative reinforcement or creating a culture of fear,” is vastly worse. Who in their right minds would want to work in an environment where you can’t say that someone has messed up or openly boasts that it is a hug box.
A strong focus of the job will be creating systems that keep the world alive and players engaged past the end of the main narrative. All part of retention systems for a games as a service that aims to retain its “fangirls and boys,” engagement and money spending.
Despite the core audience for this kind of game being male the listing purposefully puts a strong emphasis on “fangirls.” Given these are some of the same developers that made Mafia 3, their real concern should be on keeping players engaged period. For if this job posting is any indication of the game they’re developing it’s going to be a trainwreck developed by the SJW cult.
“You care about being a member of a harmonious, yet critically minded and quality-driven team of game design experts.”
Oh my gods! They even sound like a cult recruiting members.
The listing further asks applicants to have experience with live service games, but the more important qualifier will be a sophisticated understanding of current trends in first-person action game design. As the job is intended for the development of the end game requiring such knowledge makes little sense as the end game will be built upon the systems already developed in the game.
An end game specialist should have experience and knowledge in maintaining player engagement. Only a game in development hell would need further expertise on the current trends in first person design. Meaning whoever enters this position will likely be required to work on far more than the game’s end systems, but from the job listing alone we cannot derive how much issues the game is facing.
Given again it has been developed by many former Mafia 3 developers the experience is likely as buggy, grindy, and unfun as Mafia 3 was criticized for being. Some could argue that design flaws might not carry over, but when the same woke agenda pushing is so prevalent it seeps into the very job listing that presumption is hard to believe.
Never has a job posting managed to achieve a passive cringe factor before. Nor has any company dared combine wokeness with Live Service to such a nauseating extent before. Yet clown world keeps offering up ever newer and ever more horrifying sights.