Clockwork Revolution - inXile's steampunk time travel first-person action-RPG led by Chad Moore and Jason Anderson

[Delterius]

I will sublicense the genre to Brazil’s largest generator of culture: Mercado Libre.

its argentinean

Spoiler

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Anyway it's a dumb proposition with a clever looking hat on top, the Victorians actually DID invent a quazi-computer - the aforementioned difference engine, cobbled together from wood and metal cogs - and the reason it never changed their society in any way was because an actual computer needs at least a vacuum tube, or better yet an integrated circuit, to make any difference IRL, and those were only invented a 100 years later. The idea lacks any plausibility, placing a modern-day invention into a technologically incompatible environment, and therefore is stupid and offensive and we should shit on it.

It's like saying "what would happen if Youtube was invented in 1992?" Well nothing would fucking happen coz you can't exactly watch videos over a dial-up can you.

Babbage's difference engine was never actually built in Victorian times, their metalworking technology just wasn't good enough to produce so many gears with the required precision. Babbage's design for an analytical engine, which would have been a general purpose computer, was similarly dead in the water.

The designs are sound, the difference engine has been constructed in recent years and does work. If the Victorians had access to such devices they would have been super useful, but it would have been like computing in the mid 20th century, where regular people would never see an actual computer, only the results.

Mechanical computing machines would be great support for administration, science and mathematic, but would be probably replaced with modern computers when electric was discovered. I think that world would be more different from ours politically than technologically.

 

[MLMarkland]

I will sublicense the genre to Brazil’s largest generator of culture: Mercado Libre.

its argentinean

Spoiler

Thus the Brazilian culture gag. I own stock in $MELI

ML is headquartered in Montevideo, which is basically the same word as my first name.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Ah, game about being drunk macho gaucho who beats others drunk mach gaucho. I would pay for that real money.

Or I need airplane ticket.

 

[cvv]

Anyway it's a dumb proposition with a clever looking hat on top, the Victorians actually DID invent a quazi-computer - the aforementioned difference engine, cobbled together from wood and metal cogs - and the reason it never changed their society in any way was because an actual computer needs at least a vacuum tube, or better yet an integrated circuit, to make any difference IRL, and those were only invented a 100 years later. The idea lacks any plausibility, placing a modern-day invention into a technologically incompatible environment, and therefore is stupid and offensive and we should shit on it.

It's like saying "what would happen if Youtube was invented in 1992?" Well nothing would fucking happen coz you can't exactly watch videos over a dial-up can you.

Babbage's difference engine was never actually built in Victorian times, their metalworking technology just wasn't good enough to produce so many gears with the required precision. Babbage's design for an analytical engine, which would have been a general purpose computer, was similarly dead in the water.

The designs are sound, the difference engine has been constructed in recent years and does work. If the Victorians had access to such devices they would have been super useful, but it would have been like computing in the mid 20th century, where regular people would never see an actual computer, only the results.

Mechanical computing machines would be great support for administration, science and mathematic, but would be probably replaced with modern computers when electric was discovered. I think that world would be more different from ours politically than technologically.

Yea, that was my point.

Even if a wooden computer was built it'd be way too slow to make any earth-shattering difference. You wouldn't see cog-based robots and other krraaazy inventions in this parallel 19th century.

As it turns out, an actually impactful computer needs electricity and integrated circuits.

 

[MLMarkland]

Anyway it's a dumb proposition with a clever looking hat on top, the Victorians actually DID invent a quazi-computer - the aforementioned difference engine, cobbled together from wood and metal cogs - and the reason it never changed their society in any way was because an actual computer needs at least a vacuum tube, or better yet an integrated circuit, to make any difference IRL, and those were only invented a 100 years later. The idea lacks any plausibility, placing a modern-day invention into a technologically incompatible environment, and therefore is stupid and offensive and we should shit on it.

It's like saying "what would happen if Youtube was invented in 1992?" Well nothing would fucking happen coz you can't exactly watch videos over a dial-up can you.

Babbage's difference engine was never actually built in Victorian times, their metalworking technology just wasn't good enough to produce so many gears with the required precision. Babbage's design for an analytical engine, which would have been a general purpose computer, was similarly dead in the water.

The designs are sound, the difference engine has been constructed in recent years and does work. If the Victorians had access to such devices they would have been super useful, but it would have been like computing in the mid 20th century, where regular people would never see an actual computer, only the results.

Mechanical computing machines would be great support for administration, science and mathematic, but would be probably replaced with modern computers when electric was discovered. I think that world would be more different from ours politically than technologically.

Yea, that was my point.

Even if a wooden computer was built it'd be way too slow to make any earth-shattering difference. You wouldn't see cog-based robots and other krraaazy inventions in this parallel 19th century.

As it turns out, an actually impactful computer needs electricity and integrated circuits.

Howard Huges enters the building things out of wood chat

 

[Spectacle]

Even if a wooden computer was built it'd be way too slow to make any earth-shattering difference. You wouldn't see cog-based robots and other krraaazy inventions in this parallel 19th century.

As it turns out, an actually impactful computer needs electricity and integrated circuits.

I think you're underestimating how impactful earlier access to computing machines would have been for science and administration. The indirect effects to society would be huge.

You'd never see clockwork robots and such, those won't work without magic. The technology in the Difference Engine actually follows the laws of physics, too bad Inxile didn't take more inspiration from that work. Have they even said anything about what makes the tech in Clockwork Revolution work?

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Even if a wooden computer was built it'd be way too slow to make any earth-shattering difference. You wouldn't see cog-based robots and other krraaazy inventions in this parallel 19th century.

As it turns out, an actually impactful computer needs electricity and integrated circuits.

I think you're underestimating how impactful earlier access to computing machines would have been for science and administration. The indirect effects to society would be huge.

You'd never see clockwork robots and such, those won't work without magic. The technology in the Difference Engine actually follows the laws of physics, too bad Inxile didn't take more inspiration from that work. Have they even said anything about what makes the tech in Clockwork Revolution work?

Meme magic, as you see on trailers.

 

[Alienman]

Isn't the favellas in Brazil already ethanol punk?

 

[Zombra]

So anyway I heard this game will have full stats character generation.

 

[Alex]

Are the Flintstones Dinopunk?

 

[Delterius]

Isn't the favellas in Brazil already ethanol punk?

no, they are in the general area of cyberpunk dystopia.

'Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are the two most cyberpunk cities I've ever been to.' - Mike Pondsmith

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Blade Runner appeared in theaters and, although not itself cyberpunk

uwot

I'd say it's a cyberpunk setting on account of taking place in a highly advanced dystopia, but not a cyberpunk story because Decker works for the establishment until the very end. Mike Pondsmith felt the same way about Deus Ex.

Robots originate in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. from 1920, meaning this concept long predates cyberpunk and isn't specific it. Similarly, a dystopia with advanced technology is an even older concept (e.g. the story "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster from 1909). Blade Runner does not involve either cybernetics modifying the human body or external cybernetics such as the internet (even computer use is quite limited), so isn't "cyber", and relied on a combination of stylish 80s and film noir aesthetics, rather than "punk". Nonetheless, the film had an almost immediate, profound impact on the aesthetics used by cyberpunk writers. Moreover, the protagonist being on the side of the law, even serving corporate authority, was no obstacle either; this is the case for a multitude of cyberpunk stories, and occurs even more frequently in the small amount of cyberpunk representation in film and television.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

What about "low life/high tech"? That is the lowest common denominator for cyberpunk, right? The movie certainly exudes that.

 

[MLMarkland]

Blade Runner appeared in theaters and, although not itself cyberpunk

uwot

I'd say it's a cyberpunk setting on account of taking place in a highly advanced dystopia, but not a cyberpunk story because Decker works for the establishment until the very end. Mike Pondsmith felt the same way about Deus Ex.

Robots originate in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. from 1920, meaning this concept long predates cyberpunk and isn't specific it. Similarly, a dystopia with advanced technology is an even older concept (e.g. the story "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster from 1909). Blade Runner does not involve either cybernetics modifying the human body or external cybernetics such as the internet (even computer use is quite limited), so isn't "cyber", and relied on a combination of stylish 80s and film noir aesthetics, rather than "punk". Nonetheless, the film had an almost immediate, profound impact on the aesthetics used by cyberpunk writers. Moreover, the protagonist being on the side of the law, even serving corporate authority, was no obstacle either; this is the case for a multitude of cyberpunk stories, and occurs even more frequently in the small amount of cyberpunk representation in film and television.

A good summation. Cyberpunk is heavily influenced by film noir.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

I've watched the trailer a bunch of times now, and still I can't get over how underwhelming the game appears to me.

This game by Ukrainian refugees (mostly S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 devs) looks a bit better:

 

[Alienman]

I sense another Insomnia or Encased from that game.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I sense another Insomnia or Encased from that game.

Insomnia was a rough gem.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

I sense another Insomnia or Encased from that game.

Insomnia was a rough gem.

Encased was frontloaded garbage in the end.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

 

[Zombra]

I mean, I saw it before but jesus christ

----------

and now I just realized it's a metagame. Two alternate reality versions of the same game are coexisting in a single distorted timeline - the timeline we're living in right now

 

[Van-d-all]

"Steampunk" originated with Gibson's Difference Engine, exploring the idea of "What if the Victorians had continued on to invent the computer, and how would this affect their society?".

I'd argue it also died with Difference Engine, because alternate history was an established literary concept at that point and it's clear the term was coined as a marketing play on Gibson's fame as the "father of cyberpunk". They needed to put something on the cover, that's about the extent of effort that went into it.

Difference Engine itself felt like very classic spec fiction to me. Not bad, but certainly not a harbinger of a new subgenre.

The entire assumption to trace steampunk to "The Differential Engine" (who was a split work of Gibson & Sterling) is just a blatant ignorance of works pioneered by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The term actually was coined way earlier, by writers like Tim Powers and Kevin Jeter.

• 1987 K. W. Jeter in Locus Apr. 57/2
  Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steam-punks’, perhaps.

That said, mechanical calculations were a thing up till '70, as Curta calculators were mass produced up until then. Gibson mentions them in Pattern Recognition.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Jesus

 

[just]

steampunk or hard pass as it's often called

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

https://www.inxile-entertainment.com/games/clockwork-revolution

Oh look another fps masked as rpg!