During a game’s development, narrative consultants will be hired by studios to help with fleshing out or tweaking narrative elements, Kenney said. “Narrative consultants do not get final say,” Kenney reiterated. "It doesn’t get into the game if we [as the developer] don’t approve it.
“They consult. They do research, pitch ideas, give feedback, and maybe even write scripts. But none of that gets into the game unless the core dev team agrees with it. I’m going to keep saying that, because it’s key. Sweet Baby is not, nor is any consulting group, coming in to wreck games. They’re helping smooth out plots and deepen characters. They ease the burden on the core narrative team. They’re additive in every way.”
I don’t get hate towards Sweet Baby Inc. Sure they consulted on some bad games but that is on the developers, not on them. They also consulted on Miles Morales and I loved the story in that game, even more than the story of 2018 game. Sweet Baby don’t deserve the hate.
You don’t get it, they’re responsible for anything woke in all of these games, and clearly are responsible for the failure of Suicide Squad, due to all the wokeness that they orchestrated into every game they work on, because obviously they are a tool of the VCs that fund these games and therefore despite being a company with only double digits employees they control the entire games industry!
I wish I was being sarcastic, this is literally the conspiracy theory that has all this hate swirling around this absolutely tiny dev company that specialises in subcontract writing tasks, dictated by the main dev…
I’ll edit this comment when I find the article that goes over all the finer points.
Edit: Found the article I was looking for, looked at a few others, but this one was the first one I read and I found it to be the most clear.
Edit 2: Just wanted to be clear, this is not my personal opinion of Sweet Baby, I’m trying to explain the current conspiracy theory that has everyone up in arms against this tiny studio.
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Yeah, sweet baby worked on like background speech of NPCs in Suicide Squad from what I understand.
The games what? I’m dying here!
Edit: I think you misunderstood what I was saying in my previous reply.
Look at their ceo’s tweets. The project may be fine but the person that leads it and the way they deal with “anti-woke” crowds is essential. They could’ve easily ignored a few weirdos making a group but they decided to make a post promoting some report and continued it with racist and sexist comments. They 100% deserve the hate. The consultancy part isn’t the problem but the management is.
It’s just gamer gate 2, same bullshit, just more people pulled into the stupid side than previously.
As far as why I might want to preemptively know what games they’ve been involved in, looking at games they’ve been involved with there are a lot with…not great writing. So either involving them has a negative effect on quality or they mostly get hired for games that are doing badly enough that their involvement brings them up to bad. Either way, it seems like something that might be a red flag, at least a conditional one.
That’s without invoking “diversity” or “woke” at all, though sometimes the two overlap like with Lex Luthor’s files in Suicide Squad, especially the one on Wonder Woman. If you asked most DC fans what Lex Luthor might mention when writings his musings about Wonder Woman, fawning over how Amazon society defeated toxic masculinity wouldn’t be in the top thousand ideas of most. His views of the other JL members are generally pretty dark (and arguably insightful), but the worst he says about Wonder Woman is that she might perhaps be the worst of her people, after writing a couple of paragraphs about how great the Amazons are.
I’m not sure invoking “diversity” or “woke” is unfair though, since diversity and inclusivity are things they explicitly advertise themselves for.
Miles Morales was probably the best thing they’ve been involved with, to date.
Even then, let’s look at what the hate entails - people noticing they keep popping up related to games they looked forward to but were disappointing to them for various reasons. So one Brazilian PoC makes a curator list on Steam listing games they were involved with and tagging them Not Recommended, which anyone can see if they opt-in to the list. This is apparently a harassment campaign against minorities.
In response, their CEO calls out the curator and it’s creator’s personal Steam account and calls for people to mass flag it and calls for Steam to ban them both. This is apparently not in any way a harassment campaign against minorities, despite targeting a Brazilian PoC for making a list of products they were involved with and labeling them Not Recommended.
Frankly, I’m all for the curator existing, for precisely the same reason I’m happy the curators that identify Denuvo and Easy Anti-Cheat exist, and why I’d love to see a curator pop up identifying works involving any other well known and/or controversial companies or figures that aren’t the listed developer or publisher. More information for the end consumer is always better, even if you have different preferences than they do.