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Digital Foundry - Ion Fury - Every Console Tested - How An Ancient Engine Stresses Current-Gen CPUs
- Thread starter Geobros
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Not to call anyone out specifically, but the uncritical "thanks for the video" posts in the middle of a long discussion come off really tone deaf.
I agree that that would be the right thing to do, but at things stand right now, the video's being up is a tacit endorsment. If there was a disclaimer, at least there would be no confusion about that (although as you point out it would still give visibility to the game)
Yes, thank you.
For all the talk about harassment against df, personally I feel the one being attacked by this sort of passive agressive behaviour. It's just a way of dismissing the discussion withou catching a ban.
One thing I'll say about a disclaimer before a video -- notice how many people ITT have associated DF Retro with John personally, as though he has all control and say over the channel? That goes both ways. I know John, and I know he's been harassed in the past in very ugly ways. I've personally seen it, people doxxing him and commenting on his visual appearance and all that in ways intended solely to cut and hurt. I honestly believe no matter what action they take, John is going to take the full force of the response personally, when he isn't the one who makes the calls. If a disclaimer were to pop up, I'd expect the alt-right crowd to take it out on John personally.
I think ultimately DF should do what's right, but I also know how scary that crowd can be.
I think ultimately DF should do what's right, but I also know how scary that crowd can be.
I wouldn't say as much. This is still a forum, and like it or not people will come in and out to post about what they first see of the OP before how the discussion ended up turning out and be done with it without having to engage in conversation. It doesn't necessarily mean they're being dismissive.
Maybe not dismissive, but certainly tone deaf. General platitudes don't really contribute much to the convo either way, IMO.
Then have a bit of balls and call me out.
What's uncritical in thanking for a video that informed me of the difficulties the port dev team had to go through to port a game to consoles which I found interesting?
In all fairness that's literally like 70% of any discussion in a gaming forum that isn't about console wars. But again, I still wouldn't call it tone deaf either.
You're not the only one doing it, hence why I didn't single you out. But ok, here it goes: you're being tone deaf. "thanks for the video" isn't critical thinking, it's a platitude. Cool that you like tech discussion, but read the room.
If we're being honest, I abhor most of the conversation on this board for that reason, actually.
Ideally, the df and eurogamer crew would get together and decide to release a statement that the team as a whole does not endorse bigotry and hate, taking Dark1x and other individuals out of the spotlight as good as possible. Now there would definitely still be people directly attacking Dark1x, but it may soften the blow.
I mean I'd still say there's room both for this conversation and about the video itself, quite frankly. Not like I'll talk anymore about it though. I've said my piece.
I think a better mea culpa would be a donation to charity, personally. Saying your sorry is easier than acting upon it.
yeah of course. but i'm not saying this is his fault alone, i think it reflects on digital foundry and eurogamer as a whole
It was a simple "thanks" to the author, not different from other in the past threads about DF video I've appreciated.
I repeat: why calling out other people for this?
As for the room, well it's a mess.
Well that's pretty much it: your post is "fuck the room." That's the problem I had with your post. You see why, you just don't care. So... k.
Getting upset when someone tells you that you're being tone deaf, while at the same time acknowledging you don't care about the current discussion (and thus are literally being deaf to the tone of the conversation) shouldn't be at all controversial. Yet here you are.
The way you've come out huffing and puffing at a statement I tried my hardest to soften indicates we're not going to have any fruitful conversation. So whatever.
Is this engine free to use or something?
I can't find an article on this one, but wanted to see why exactly they've chosen to use the engine. If its purely aesthetic surely everything available now can do the same thing?
I can't find an article on this one, but wanted to see why exactly they've chosen to use the engine. If its purely aesthetic surely everything available now can do the same thing?
While I can believe that John missed the shit the Ion Fury devs did, I don't think it's really comparable to finding out someone in the Sonic fangame scene is an asshole. The controversy around Ion Fury was something that was reported on by a lot of major gaming news outlets, and there's even a section on the game's wikipedia page about it. I don't get the idea LakeFeperd being an asshole ever really spread out much beyond the Sonic fangame community. You probably wouldn't find out about how LakeFeperd's known for being an asshole within those communities without being really active within them yourself.
Of course that doesn't mean John is lying about not having known about this. It's very easy for him to have missed this if he didn't actively follow the news around the game post-launch. Searching "Ion Fury" on Google no longer brings up until a few pages in either. But still, this isn't something that's comparable to the LakeFeperd stuff. That was inner community drama that never turned into something bigger, while this is something that was heavily reported on.
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The build engine is open source and free for commercial use these days.
Modern engines work entirely differently, hence why someone might want to use a retro engine. To make a modern engine work exactly like the build engine, you'd be essentially simulating the entire build engine in shader code (which is what modern ports of the engine do anyways). Modern game engines work very, very differently than old raycasted 2D engines underneath, down to the primitives of rasterization. Making a modern engine look like such an engine is a lot of work, when it'd just be easier to use a source port of the build engine in the first place.
The only one who is making a drama out of a simple comment is you.
If you think my comment was derailing the thread then report me to the moderation team without calling out.
I didn't mean to imply they were the same level of scrutiny, more to comment on how someone's nose can be so close to a material yet miss an open secret like this. It was more a comment on my own blind spots, than how loud those controversies were. If Blaze knew about that, I probably should have known too. We talk to the same crowd.
I think it's a sad inevitability that pushing back against bigoted content is always going to incite the troglodytes, especially if you're a public figure as John is. And with the concerns now having been raised, if they do nothing, the alt-right will see this as a victory. Haha the SJWs tried to push their agenda and got BTFO
DF and Eurogamer should, if they're not already, look for ways to support John and the rest of their staff against potential harassment - the kind of harassment you describe, not the criticism some people on this board are describing as harassment. John's content is great, I totally get why he would be excited to discuss a game like this, and he doesn't deserve harassment. But I think we're past the point now where not taking a stand one way or the other is an option.
I think the suggestions above about a charity donation or DF and Eurogamer presenting a united front against bigotry to take and take some of the heat off John personally are pretty good.
I agree with everything you've posted. No matter how they react going forward, they're going to upset someone. At that point, I'd follow my heart and do what's right, personally, but that's easy for me to say when I know one group would harass you personally in dangerous ways while the other wouldn't. For all the talks of "harassment" in this topic, nobody is actually attempting to harm John.
Ultimately, I wish they just had never made this video. And I'm willing to bet 100% John is feeling the same way right now. I hope Eurogamer does right on them all somehow. For all the times I've seen John talk about, really, anything, he's never been afraid to admit he was misinformed or wrong or try to do right, so if he's being quiet right now, I'd have to believe there is a reason why. I truly don't believe he's a hateful person or one who wants to actively promote ugly rhetoric.
If Eurogamer works like any other publications I've written for, it's not up to the editor to decide to insert or not such a disclaimer in their article/video. Contact Eurogamer to make them do something about it.
Right, I did a video for them once, and wanted to make a correction, and never could get it to go through. Usually the people who make the content don't have control of how it's posted or can make changes after it goes up.
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For sure:
Can mention their article on it at the time:
Ion Fury dev U-turns on promise to pull in-game homophobic slur
www.eurogamer.net
I can say this, also: John doesn't get to decide what he makes videos on, either. He can make suggestions about topics he'd like to cover, sure, but he gets video assignments. It's not him who decides what will or won't be a video. When I made a video for them, it wasn't John who got to say yes or no to me. Once he got the word from above him, well, he had to roll with it. It's his career. And it goes even further, he is told what subjects to cover in videos. Like the video I did for them, it was a supplemental video to a topic, because he was told his original video on said topic was only for a specific subject, and, even though my video was related, he wasn't allowed to deviate into other subjects on the same topic.
I get that, being posted on youtube, people might think things like DF are a small outlet like, say, LGR's videos, but they're really not. They're a wing of a major gaming outlet.
I get that, being posted on youtube, people might think things like DF are a small outlet like, say, LGR's videos, but they're really not. They're a wing of a major gaming outlet.
That's a good idea, but it's more effective if you do it via social media. Just do you it in a civil manner, the message can be conveyed without using an inflammatory tone or harassing the staff.For sure:
Can mention their article on it at the time:
Ion Fury dev U-turns on promise to pull in-game homophobic slur
Not sure how we're going from reaching out to Eurogamer for comment to harassing the staff but yes, obviously be civil.
Yeah I had already gone and did this.For sure:
Can mention their article on it at the time:
Ion Fury dev U-turns on promise to pull in-game homophobic slur
The game does exactly what I assume it's supposed to do? take you back to a historic era of PC DOS gaming. Brings back memories of Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Duke Nuke em etc. Very nice job capturing that essence and era of gaming. A simpler time when things just worked. Something to be said about these games and their straight forward nature.
Also duality of thread like this.
This thread started on premise of technical analysis of console port. Some people may want to discuss that even now that thread has another and lateral discussion going on.
Kinda what happens when mods allow threads to work like this. If you want this to be only about how outlets like Eurogamer should ethically handle coverage of titles like Ion Fury and its developers I would put in request that mod change thread to be just about it instead of this dual thing that is going on.
I've appreciated your posts in this thread, which are a healthy reminder to express our criticisms at the right people/entities, and to not jump to conclusions as to what one individual can or can't do about the situation. Thanks. What makes it harder to not compare DF, and especially DF Retro to independent YouTubers like LGR is that DF Retro is a sub-brand of a sub-brand of Eurogamer, with only 4 visible faces (John being the most prominent one), and, AFAIK, DF Retro was always John's personal pet project at Eurogamer. It has all the markings of a "lone YouTuber" project (and a great one at that), without actually being one. That said, you're probably right that, even for DF Retro, John isn't completely free to handle things the way he wants.
Reading your posts and his last few messages only strengthened my impressions - and, admittedly, they're just impressions - that John himself shouldn't judged too harshly. As strange as it may sound that a long-time forum member might have been completely unaware of the controversy to this day, John is one of the few people I give the benefit of the doubt to. I believe him, and it seems like the overwhelming majority of people in here, even the harsher critics, believe the same thing. I hope we can somehow reach out to DF/Eurogamer so that they do something, anything, about this.
Well just to further clarify, I don't want to give the impression that John has absolutely no say over DF retro. It is his baby, but his baby belongs to Eurogamer ultimately. I just wanted to make clear that the segment of the gaming world that went to bat for things like Ion Fury, that people have insinuated John is supportive of, have also been vicious to him in the past very frequently.
The truth is probably much more nuanced than any of us know, but given the history of John on this site and NeoGAF prior, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Again, this is his full time job, so it's probably much more complex than just "put up a disclaimer" on his part.
Oh man. I know I've run into stuff like this in the past (with this same forum no less), and I went ahead and made changes to my article to reflect the reality of the situation — but, that was a tiny website.
DF is pretty big now, and adding the disclaimer will surely bring fire on John's head.
Tough decision.
DF is pretty big now, and adding the disclaimer will surely bring fire on John's head.
Tough decision.
Can you invert the Y-Axis on all platforms? Its a big deal-breaker for me if I can't invert Y.
Thanks for this. Like another poster, I knew there was something negative that made me lose all interest in this game.
I don't thin you can invert anything ATM, that's coming in the next patch.
Thank you for the analysis on the frame rate issue, John.
I wrapped up the game on PS4 Pro despite all of the frame timing issues.
My biggest concern with performance was elsewhere. One was with corrupted data throughout an entire level that errored out any time I loaded up a save generated in the level. The other was with phantom inputs that would occasionally press R2 and fire my weapon on those timing calls (although not consistently occurring).
I wrapped up the game on PS4 Pro despite all of the frame timing issues.
My biggest concern with performance was elsewhere. One was with corrupted data throughout an entire level that errored out any time I loaded up a save generated in the level. The other was with phantom inputs that would occasionally press R2 and fire my weapon on those timing calls (although not consistently occurring).
Is this the first case we've seen on Switch of a 1080p image downsampled to 720p in handheld mode?
That is what can be so crazy about this place sometimes. Most people click on something interesting, view it or play it, leave it, and thats it. Not everyone does extensive background checks on everything they are interested in. IDK how Era doesn't understand that.
No. Jedi outcast and Jedi Academy are also in 1080p in handled on Switch
I'm assuming these old engines cannot switch resolution so easily without a loading screen so they stick to 1080p.
User banned (1 month): inflammatory whataboutism and concern trolling over bigotry
No, forcing people to discuss any one point of a discussion is wrong and doesn't mean that at all.
I said all my 2 cents on the patched out transphobic stuff when it happened. Personally I don't see a lot more to say about it. My opinion is do not destroy what is probably 90% decent people (especially the porters, but surely the entire company doesn't know about specific assets and hidden comments in a game!) for the bad seeds, and the bad company heads. It all eventually comes down to no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I think it's worse to punish a lot of people just to maybe hit a few that are actually bad.
So I think praise of Ion Fury is most ethical when not burdened with caveats.
additional point of perspective - at my company, the CEO is an unabashed Republican, and he says horrible stuff (Anti workers rights stuff) and expects people to laugh at it. I know one of my coworkers is a Republican and I know the majority are not. But if one of them did something horrible in secret, why should I be punished for that?
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