The creative director also needs to be actually good at their job or you will end up with garbage.
While it's not an rpg, Scorn is a perfect example. It had one creative lead who oversaw the whole project for eight years. Had a lore bible laying things out and everything. After six years of development, during which over 50% of the game was completed, he decided to scrap their work so far and rebuild it from scratch to take advantage of new video cards. He cut out 90% of the originally planned content. He released a rushed, unfinished product that didn't accomplish any of the artistic goals or communicate the social commentary that he intended.
Indeed.
It could've been a great game.
But I digress...
All your typical lead directors these days are woke corpo types with zero creativity.
Peklar wasn't woke. He wanted to communicate a theme that we're losing ourselves to technology. This was a key aspect of the worldbuilding in
Scorn. As the artbook explained, Squishworld fell apart because the ruling class was obsessed with achieving higher states of consciousness by getting high. First they tried sex, then they tried drugs made from bodily fluids, then they extracted their souls from their bodies into flying squids that could inhabit "shells" willy-nilly, then they did something that broke reality and created a reality-warping rift in the middle of their capital. There were no survivors. Meanwhile, the technocrat class were originally bred so they could be put into juicing machines and turned into recreational drugs, but were so smart they were put in charge of maintaining the tech. They fought a civil war that ended up poisoning the skies with mustard gas and presumably killing what biosphere existed. Aside from a few survivors sealed in stasis pods, they all died too. Also, there's various giant creatures leftover that spawn meat monsters: the player character is birthed by giant wall of flesh whose origins is unexplained. The first area you come across is a factory where the livestock caste was bred and packaged so their body parts could be harvested for use elsewhere. All the buildings in this civilization are made of still-living body parts, which may or may not still be sentient.
Since most of the planned content was removed, it's impossible for this commentary to come across in the final product. You have to read the artbook and the interview in
[lock.on] #5 to know what the devs were thinking, none of which are accessible to the general public via commonly used ebook stores... because of course not! Why expect convenience from these artsy fartsy asshats?! Anyway, all the youtube commentators focus on the surface level details and come up with completely incorrect theories about how the game is about aliens crossbreeding with humans or something similarly cliche and uninteresting. But the actual underlying message was supposed to be "technology and industrialization is destroying our humanity."
This message is especially timely since tech bros are currently trying to replace creatives with AIs while snorting crack off hookers' butts, invent VR and mind uploading to satisfy their increasingly deranged and violent sexual fantasies, force the "useless eaters" to toil away at the menial jobs AI cannot replace, etc. The social commentary is about as subtle as a brick to the face, and all it would take would be to show this Squishworld civilization at its height. Without dialogue, since Squishworld people don't have mouths aside from the homunculi technocrats who have lipless toothy mouths.
It's based on the art of Beksinski and Giger, so yeah it's a horrific hellscape.
The creative director also needs to be actually good at their job or you will end up with garbage.
While it's not an rpg, Scorn is a perfect example. It had one creative lead who oversaw the whole project for eight years. Had a lore bible laying things out and everything. After six years of development, during which over 50% of the game was completed, he decided to scrap their work so far and rebuild it from scratch to take advantage of new video cards. He cut out 90% of the originally planned content. He released a rushed, unfinished product that didn't accomplish any of the artistic goals or communicate the social commentary that he intended.
That's what happened? I just thought it was rushed. This is way worse.
Yeah. So few people care about this game that the only way to know about its development history is by watching the youtube videos made by a particularly obsessive fan who read and watches all the obscure promos and interviews for the last six years:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_RLU92At-4RZpY7rk_gC-5TYO-BkiAHw
Since this information isn't widely available, most of the people on the Scorn reddit and other discussion venues (other than the discord that TranshumanistGamer is a member of) don't know any of it and thus are incredibly annoying to talk to. I backed the kickstarter because I love Giger and Beksinski (I'm one of those artsy fartsy types who like to read their armchair psych profiles to puzzle out what makes someone draw these nightmarish hellscapes), so you can imagine how annoyed I am at wasting money and six years on this insulting disaster. The interviews with Peklar suggested he actually understood Beksinki and Giger psychology and incorporated that into his game world, but his subsequent dropping of the ball was surprising and a huge betrayal of trust.
Words cannot express how much I now hate Ebb Software. But by this point I'm used to disappointment so it doesn't live in my head rent free. There's so many things I'm angry about that they just blend together into an incoherent mass of existential angst now.
The creative director also needs to be actually good at their job or you will end up with garbage.
While it's not an rpg, Scorn is a perfect example. It had one creative lead who oversaw the whole project for eight years. Had a lore bible laying things out and everything. After six years of development, during which over 50% of the game was completed, he decided to scrap their work so far and rebuild it from scratch to take advantage of new video cards. He cut out 90% of the originally planned content. He released a rushed, unfinished product (...)
(...) didn't (...) communicate the social commentary that he intended.
It wasn't woke commentary. It was intelligent commentary about how technology, industrialization and rampant hedonism among the upper classes is currently eating our souls and will cause the apocalypse. This isn't a new or uncommon sentiment, but damn does the Beksinki Giger aesthetic make it look beautifully gruesome.
It's too bad Peklar fucked it up though. Extracting your soul, turning it into a flying squid and riding robot bodies across tramlines across a beksinki giger cityscape sounds really interesting.
