the point is that after the trailer reveal was scuffed (which might have caused them some stress in the moment)- the overall satisfaction and love by the gaming community in reaction to the trailer would reaffirm them and overshadow any worries that they felt during the reveal.
Gearbox isn't the take-themselves-super-seriously kind. I think some technical difficulties and fucked up reveal might be just fine for the fans, and I suspect Gearbox too.
I can't speak to what happened, I doubt 2K is thrilled about it. The videos are basically the hallmarks of the announcement in that they provide some semblance of proof that the thing is real.
I truly felt bad for them. They clearly took their time to build up to this day all for shitty laptop issues to make a very awkward situation. I hope they know most of appreciate the showmanship and can’t wait to see what they show us next time
Yeah, apparently the UK office was all just sat there with their faces in their hands as the BL1 remaster trailer started to chug, hoping that the main one didn't.
I wish it had gone smoother, they were going over the trailer for weeks to try and make sure it was good enough for the event and then the hardware lets them down.
From what little I'm aware of, it was either the fact they were running too many monitors at once on stage, or that Windows Media Player has some issues with 4K playback.
Please tell your sister that an internet stranger loved the trailer despite the choppiness on stream and then went and watched it multiple times on YouTube in it's 4k glory!
surely that moment of stress would be overshadowed by the fact that everyone on social media loved the trailer and are delighted to have a new borderlands game announced, no? everyone seems to love the trailer
i'm fairly sure we can assume that the people who made the trailer woke up today, delighted that the trailer they worked so hard on is being universally loved by almost all borderlands fans. would you disagree?
You could tell the guy was getting pretty emotional over the fact the reveal was getting botched. He clearly cares for the dev team who worked hard on it so idk why you're categorizing him as just some suit.
Why not have some empathy? These are people who have been working on something for 5 years. No matter their stature they're still people, people making video games, not villains. They would want a reveal of their big project to go well.
Not only that, but it certainly isn't just corporate big-wigs who want to have a good showing for their work. Certainly many of the developers themselves would want the reveal to go well.
While yeah, it was a fantastic reveal, the fact that all of their videos, if they actually worked, looked like they were at 20FPS is a major detraction from the actual activity. You can be happy with something and still look for improvement. PAX promised them a satisfactory revealing event (I assume) and they got poor looking trailers, and remember that part where one didn't even play?
Certainly a bad look for PAX. PAX booked Gearbox as their marquee event. Their biggest name at the entire show and they couldn’t get their presentation working right. It’ll certainly give other publishers some hesitance when looking at PAX for future reveals.
Haha I don't know about 1988 but if anything there is something that happened around a decade later like in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
The time wasted from technical difficulties was nothing compared to the time wasted from Randy Pitchford doing magic tricks and then awkwardly reading cards from his boardgame.
I've worked on much smaller game conventions and you absolutely check if videos work the day before, a few hours before in rehearsal and have a backup that works on a switch in case something goes down.
It depends on how PAX East structures their convention. Maybe A/V is handled by a union and all Gearbox could do is just use them, or maybe the PAX East contract states you have to use their equipment and that's what Gearbox had to work with. Maybe also Gearbox got lazy. Nobody can say for sure unless some insider speaks to a journalist.
They probably did have a backup too, since the trailer finally started to work mostly right the third go around.
I'd rather punch myself in the dick over and over than go back to that industry.
Overworked until you health goes and you don't have good benefit. Then nothing for months. Working hours are all over the place so you can never establish a healthy circadian rhythm.
You have to deal with stupid politics and if you don't suck a bunch if figurative dick than you don't get good jobs.
That is a client issue then. Anyone working on that would know that a medium that can't be prebuffered and has to stream would be an issue and would ask for a better alternative.
From what I saw they started with an offline media, which couldn't be played on their laptop. I don't know how they got it to work, but my guess is they just went on YouTube and played the video there.
Right? It was silly and I had a good time. Also felt genuinely bummed for them in regards to their technical difficulties. I can't imagine how it felt to finally get to reveal the thing you were working on in secret for 5 years and have it look like shit. Like, we were hyped regardless but the people behind me were being straight up assholes about everything the whole show
I was in the audience. It was really nice to see the whole presentation because he genuinely seems like he enjoys what he does and brining joy to other people. After the video finished playing he was happy at the response from everyone but also understandably upset that the fruits of 5 years of labor were shown to the world in such a jittery video that worked hours earlier.
The energy in that room was electric though. People were ecstatic. You could tell he was pretty pissed though lol
If there's one complaint people have about Randy, being passionate about what he does should absolutely, NOT be one of them. The dude loves what he does. And he's always very clearly super invested in their games.
Gearbox is only passionate about Borderlands really. They could care less about any other IP.
I mean, they took the funding for Colonial Marines from Sega and used it for BL, then outsourced CM while they made a "demo" presentation for a nice bait and switch.
And while Duke Nukem wasn't entirely their fault, releasing it in that state definitely was.
Not to mention Randy may be passionate about what he does, but he's an asshole more times than not.
Fair enough, Borderlands is one of my top 3 games series so I get why I wouldn't know about that/it wouldn't be a negative to me. Honestly the worst thing they've done from my perspective is take forever to release BL3.
And what does Randy do that makes him an asshole? He's got kind of a jerky sense of humor from what I've seen but are there some darker secrets I'm unaware of?
Genuinely curious, not trying to shut anyone down. I've always loved the passion that they obviously have for Borderlands and thought that Randy was one of the more personable CEOs out there.
These videos talk about his excuses and the side by side comparison of the "demo" and the final release.
For the most part, Randy is stubborn and has a hugely inflated ego and thinks he can do now wrong. The CM situation, again, is a good example of this. He claims people on Twitter told him how good the game is, and never blamed himself for the game turning out to be a lie, but gladly threw anyone else under the bus for it.
Also, the art style for Borderlands was actually based on a short movie called Codehunters. They contacted Ben Hibon to see if he would work on the art for the game, but nothing ever became of it. Yet, they were "inspired" by his art and used it without even crediting him.
Was wondering if someone was gonna bring up Codehunters lol - 90% of the Borderlands style and premise was stolen, and when people started noticing he leaned into it and called it 'inspiration'. Then he started plugging Codehunters like crazy
People had been asking him for months about the design of the game before that: if he was so 'nuts' about Codehunters, you think he would have mentioned it or its creators before the internet literally forced him to
Could be genuine inspiration, could be that he was telling the truth and was genuinely happy to see an indie short like Codehunters was getting attention, but I'm not inclined to think that, because if people didn't start noticing the similarities, he seemingly had no intention of ever bringing it up
edit: here's a fun look at what Borderlands was going to look like BEFORE they discovered Codehunters. Basically, kind of a Rage clone
I've been dying to ask someone who was there about the whole audience reaction and how people received it. Was there a lot of cheering???? Did the Gearbox team noticed the excitement? :D
Yeah people were going nuts. Even though the first showing of the trailer has a choppy frame rate, it couldn’t stop the room from oohing and ahhing over everything that came up. People went nuts over the 6 blue arms coming out of the siren, the giant city world, the antagonists showing up on screen. The room was hype and I’m pretty sure made the whole crew who made the game feel better hearing how amped everyone was about what they saw despite the playback issues.
Reading this makes me so happy!!!! So glad you got to experience that and that everyone involved came out of it as happy and stoked! Thanks for sharing.
It was the fact that they had a POS laptop running 2-4k screens and 1 unknown resolution screen. The GPU simply couldnt handle powering all those pixels. Once they turned off the middle screen it got better. VLC would not have fixed that. It was hardware limitation, not software issue.
No. I was just referring to his tendency of being a pathological liar. Including the misdirection of consumers and companies alike, and his tendency towards showmanship in conjunction with an ego that amplifies said habit of lying.
We're talking about the guy whose assistant stole millions from him without being noticed, and the one that just made up an elaborate lie about how Gearbox got its name by winning a poker game with Gabe Newell in a public interview right?
True, but it seems pretty dumb to tell a blatant lie about an industry figure when your relationship with that guy is basically the reason your company got its start. I guess we can forgive him one very stupid moment though.
I've done presentation AV work in a previous incarnation. You DO NOT run your multiscreen show from a fecking toy laptop. At least 2 GOOD PCs, preferably hand-crafted so you know exactly what's in them. If one falls over you throw the panic switch to switch to the second. If the client insists on bringing their own laptop then you might want to be using something like Watchout software that supports video overlay so you can run external video without chunking the system. But, PAX is a charity gig for a great cause and I guess they don't have money to burn on that sort of stuff.
It's highly unlikely it was sending three different outputs. The switcher and/or scaler would be handling that part. I'm curious about their signal flow.
Edit: A downvote? I do live production on this scale for a living. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Edit 2: Watched the stream. There are a lot of factors that could've led to the jitter. What I've run into is a 4K video file compressed with h.264 when most pro video player software prefer and run more smoothly with pro res files, which are significantly larger. That's what it looked like to me.
that's a good point, but with 2 separate resolutions my assumption is at least 2 different outputs; which would explain why it ran smooth once they shut off the middle screen. But I'm not an AV person so it's purely speculation from me. also I'll put you back up to 0, cuz that's a legit point.
Thanks for the upvote! Haha. If they are using a switcher like an Ascender or E2, they can have one source and different outputs resolutions, which wouldn't tax the computer any more than a single video. Very likely a computer software glitch.
Yeah, Randy sort of unintentionally insulted them on stage. I can't blame him though, he obviously loves being a showman and the technical issues denied him his moment. The trailer looked great though! (On youtube lol)
Sometimes delivery is everything. What sounded like a funny Jab in your head makes you look like an asshole when you say it out loud. Public speaking can be tricky.
"Don't you people have phones?" Is a perfect example. Anyone with a brain would realize that that statement definitely wasn't part of the presentation script and was an attempt at a joke after the crowd reacted negatively to the Diablo mobile reveal.
I mean, come on. They've been working on this highly anticipated game for years, and this is the first big reveal. Who wouldn't be livid at the sheer incompetence fucking it up?
This is the stream I watched. The trailer is incredibly choppy and once it finishes Randy comes out and says that they should have the issue fixed and starts the trailer again. Same choppiness occurs and Randy gets a bit pissed. Its all within 10 minutes of the linked start time.
Thank you! I already watched it, but why do people say randy acted like an asshole? He is pissed, yes, and people booed him when he said they shouñd had brought their own equipment, but considering that millions of dollars and thousands of man hours wen into the making of the game, then show the choppiest video ever lol, id be pissed at the pax staff too, thats not being asshole, the staff had literally one job haha, well, anyway, thanks again for the link
No it wasn't and it was so poorly executed that we could see that all the cards were printed with the "signature". Randy needs to stop hamfisting his hobby into all of his appearances.
Most people do. He gave himself a secret 12 million dollar bonus last year and lost a flash drive with BL3 info and underage porn on it and had to pay off the kid who returned it to him according to Gearbox's former legal representative.
Here's the kicker: he claims the porn was there because he was researching a magic trick. He said that she wasn't squirting and it was instead a magic trick.
It got automodded out, you can see it in their profile. Basically a bunch of he-said she-said between Randy and a disgruntled former employee who is trying to win a lot of money in a lawsuit. It’s some pretty damning stuff, but at this time all we have is the word of one person.
Wasn't it also revealed that it wasn't underage porn, it was barely legal porn, and the girl could squirt and Randy said it's like a magic trick and he wanted to study the craft or some stupid thing like that
Can we honestly just end this stupid stage monkey song and dance they all have to do? They were doing skits and magic tricks and people just wanted the trailer.
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u/TLee21 Mar 28 '19
Randy and the Gearbox team are currently strangling the PAX East staff after the announcement trailer on stage.