when i was a regular SomethingAwful poster and involved in the let's play crowd, i was enamored with the few let's plays that were able to get actual developers or actors involved with the project and even in the commentary. the Time Warriors group did a let's play a long, long time ago of a game called
Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, an incredibly novel game where you are king but all you do is focus on providing infrastructure and incentive to heroes who go out and get shit done for you. anyone familiar with Majesty knows that the backbone of the game is the Royal Advisor, Venn Fairweather, who is voiced by
George Ledoux imitating Sean Connery. well, they got George to
join them for multiple episodes and he was incredibly fucking cool and affable, sharing gossip from the development and being a
lovable gabber.
but for the relevant talking point, another let's play had a developer join the SA forum and talk about his experiences. the let's play was
Amulets & Armor by Mzbundifund & Bacter, a "first-person action RPG made in the Doom engine" that only a hundred or so people ever actually bought. the
forum thread is long archived so you can't see it without paying that faggot jeffrey a fee, but Lysle Shields, one of the programmers, joined the forum, posted in the thread, and helped release a version of the game that was more compatible with modern software, and even put together a basic wikia.
so what does this have to do with "what the fuck is wrong with the old thing?"
well, Lysle explained something about a particular talking point that gets brought up early in the A&A let's play. that is, what the deal with the weird sign wave in the player UI is, which ebbs and flows depending on the player's remaining MP and acts as part of the spellcasting feature.
it created some confusion about how spellcasting worked in the game, but as Lysle explained it: they were all but
forced into having something on the UI be a
moving element before they could ship the game because... reasons. because "it's just what you do now!"
he might have mentioned some other things about marketing but they were a very small team and this was their first real 'thing'. the sign wave that goes up and down or flattens out is literally just useless UI bloat that serves no mechanical function other than being an animated element.
the answer to "what the fuck is wrong with the old thing" is simply that it's not new enough for the fuckwit who has too much control over your endeavor.
