Laura Fryer gives a fairly scathing review of HR’s encroachment and obvious power grab to be less “day to day” and more to (verbatim) be “at the same level or above the CEO”.
Video goes into how HR makes toxic work environments that demonize ever speaking out or questioning anything, and the toxic positivity that holds games back.
From HR -> “People and Culture” -> “Chief Disruptors”
This has been a personal pet peeve for a while, but man did it hit for Dragon Age: Veilguard.
Dragon Age was always personal choice matters. If you choose something seemingly benign it could cause massive ripples. You could have teammates leave. You could have entire factions turn their backs on you. You could have people who were once friends try to ambush you in a back alley! It had real stakes and made you pay attention.
The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room. No one was ever angry! There were decisions, but they were so low stakes because no one would ever get angry at you. You could literally destroy someone’s home and they’d say “It’s okay, I understand why you had to”. WHAT? They should be threatening me - OR WORSE. No one truly died, no one ever got mad, the game literally has “team meetings” where all you do is talk about how great everyone is.
Then each character was whittled down to one specific trauma that you had to help them through. Multifaceted characters with actual emotions? No, that might make someone feel things. This one has a hard time talking to people. This one had a mean dad. This one is trans and can’t come out to her mom. Each thing individually is fine, but that’s literally their only character trait. Friendship with every person was immediate and permanent. If you talked to them it would only be about their exact trauma, maybe one sentence about the last mission and how we all tried our best. It was so fucking annoying.
Even the antagonists kept repeating how good you were and how you were trying your best! They were gods who thought of mortals as puny ants and you were… a single person, yet they still stopped to mention over and over “You are sure doing a super job at defeating us!”. Absolutely immersion breaking.
You could just tell that HR had the only vote on every single line of dialog. No one ever gets their feelings hurt, no one ever is mad, the player might feel something and that could be bad. By trying to make everything so “positive” they’ve carved out the very humanity from these games.
Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, the video does a great job at summing up my feelings. These people should have no say in the creative process or work culture. They are toxic to anything art related.
Please feel free to share if you have other games like this where you can feel the palpable taint of HR.
Edit: Apparently it needs to be explicitly said that while I do absolutely blame “People and Culture”, that blame is not a one-dimensional thing and that I can also blame executives? There are also some big leaps of saying that me saying that someone is a one-dimensional character means that I must be a gamer gater who hates wokeness? I actually liked the trans storyline, what I didn’t like is that they made trans people seem like all they have is being trans, instead of that there could be a person there too. To me that seems more reductive and even more harmful to the trans community, but again nuance isn’t really a thing on the internet. I said a thing, it must mean I’m a horrible person.
I can basically guarantee you that “HR” had nothing to do with these decisions as you’ve presented them.
You think some random employee that works in resource management has the final say on creative decision-making?
These directives come from C suites that fear controversy and risk. These decisions are made for financial reasons, to eliminate every possible wrinkle that might upset someone and plant a seed of bad publicity and threaten the return on investment in the product being shipped.
The problem isn’t HR, it’s that games are products being sold by corporations that need to show growth next quarter at any cost
Production quality is the death of high-choice RPGs. When a game has two artists pumping out dozens of assets a day and every choice just changes some text and objects around, you can afford to give the player a ton of choice. Even the early DA games were on the tail end of that, with all the dialogue voiced, requiring recording and implementation cost for every line.
These days, big games are expected to have not just voiced dialogue but to have choreographed cutscenes. Making your animators spend a week on a cutscene 5% of players will see is viewed as a waste of money, so you cut the decision branch that leads to it.
There was a period in the late 90s to early 2000s where you could make an RPG that was top-5 in every way. That will never happen again.
For real, Bethferny in HR isn’t killing your games. This person’s whole yt channel is a farce. Of course the exec is gonna say anything but that the exec is at fault. Literally ceo brained take from Fryer, and the gamer gaters eat it up.
The complaint boils down to whining about having to sit in meetings being told they should treat their coworkers with respect. Blaming HR for why games suck now is reminiscent of DEI being blamed for government corruption. Of course gamer gate types are going to gobble this up hook, line, and sinker.
Christ do you need some Bengay for that overreach?
The reason the game makers need to sit in those meetings about safe spaces is because of the incredibly toxic work environments that these companies were fostering.
It was salvaged from an entirely different game design altogether, likely with pieces they could use and pieces they threw away, and I’m sure there were limits on how much they could redo. When it was a multiplayer game, it may have been written so every player was the star, which could create this sort of dynamic. That’s purely conjecture, and I haven’t played the game, but there are a lot of reasons why it could have manifested that way without it being HR’s fault.
I’m not a fan of this lady. Her channel is used as a justification for right-wing channels complaining about “woke”, which makes it no surprise that her first cited video is from Colin Moriarty; or that the recommended next video after this one is “The Woman Who Ruined Videogames - The Story of Anita Sarkeesian”. Meanwhile, last I saw before tuning this lady out, she put more fuel on the fire about games media being told how to review a game by citing phrases that they used in common (that’s not how it works). At best, this video seems like a different perspective on the pitfalls of what happens to all companies as they grow large, and at worst, it comes across as some weird kind of conspiracy for corporate power.