The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that never was | Hacker News Reader

The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that never was

polygon.com

45 pointsadrian_mrd23 comments

There's something remarkably tone-deaf about ret-conning real murders of actual women (even to the extent of using their actual fucking names) as Pretty Awesome because they are actually vampires. I'm surprised that this concept got as far as it did.

"Many didn’t see an issue with using the real names of the murder victims, however. The agreement within the team was that if they could not develop an experience that was respectful of the history and the victims involved, then they wouldn’t do it."

Yes, I'm sure that turning a sexually-oriented thrill killing spree of powerless women into an interactive entertainment product was right on the verge of being "respectful". Maybe the scenes where you rip out the uteruses (uterii?) of the victims could be done in tasteful period-appropriate sepia?

I think it could have been interesting if it was somehow based around the contrast of what Jack thinks he's doing and what's actually going on. But from skimming the article it seems that they wanted their canon to be that he's actually a vampire hunter, which I agree is a bit distasteful.

The real name stuff got dropped. There is no way the project was 95% done.

Many instances of media are giving a spin on horrible historical events for the sake of entertainment. These are never meant to be "tasteful". Does Wolfenstein condone the holocaust? All the Dracula books and movies make Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, a charismatic character, even though he murdered so many innocent people in such a cruel way just to secure his position.

They do put a tasteless twist on a horrible event - that makes this thought experiment so intriguing as a setting to explore. What if the Nazis won? What if Vlad The Impaler was an interesting and charismatic person, what if JackTheRipper was a hero under cover. It's all stupid, but interesting at the same time. That does not mean they disrespect history.

If Wolfenstein had you playing as a prison guard gassing people but it's OK because they're actually vampires then yes, that would be extremely distasteful. AFAIK that's absolutely nothing at all like what Wolfenstein is, so I'm not sure why you would bring that up.

That's just stupid. The Nazis, and Dracula, in case you haven't noticed, are the villains of their respective pieces.

Deciding that people who cut up women are in fact pretty fascinating and charismatic dudes "who had their reasons" is not exactly a new, intriguing setting to explore, unless you're a sophomoric ghoul.

In the media we are drowning in handsome genius-level IQ serial killers, as opposed to the sordid idiots that they are in real life. Thanks, no. There are a lot of thought experiments we could do; strangely, we seem to constantly come back to this one.

It's a genre that keeps fascinating people who like that genre - what possibly twisted mind could do such horrible things? It's indeed an often taken and explored trope of fiction, certainly not for everyone. Also all of the Mafia themes: So many of the media on that hides the gruesome reality of recruiting people out of poverty to push them into a never ending circle of violence, with notorious killers that tortured their victims in much fashion like jack the ripper. (Think Richard Kuklinski, whose death count is without a doubt much higher than Jack The Ripper) And yet many of the fictional books, series and games portrait the Mafia as being about honour, family and pride. It's a fictional world that if made well enough is interesting to explore.

Probably that game wouldn't have been for me either as I despise torture porn akin to saw. But that doesn't mean, that this sort of fiction is inherently bad. Tasteless for sure, yet in a genre of a grotesque deep dive into a parallel universe where the gruesome and grotesque is justified by a mysterious, higher cause.

Eponysterical.

I worked on this title for the last year of its existence. I’m not at liberty to discuss much. The project definitely changed in Frostbite 2 era. IIRC the behavior tree GOAP stuff made it into the 3rd Army of Two game, which was also done in Frostbite 2.0. I left the project about 4 months after a major change in senior project leadership. I’ll answer what I can.

I always wondered why there are no serial killer type of games or with realistic gore simulation. It's bad PR for giants like EA yet they've repeatedly opted for pay to play models which resulted in huge backlash.

Pay to play gets backlash from gamers with enough sophistication and experience to notice and care, which if sales figures are to be believed, until recently represented a small minority. Something like Manhunt or a serial killer sim outrages all sorts of people, fed by the media and congressional hearings, and game publishers would like to avoid that. It’s a different type and magnitude of backlash, and for what? You’re never going to make CoD or GTA money from a serial killer sim, so why take the heat? A serial killer sim also runs into the issue of just what a serial killer is, and why they do what they do. Serial killings unlike spree killings and mass killings are typically sexually motivated, and that’s pretty dark territory for a mainstream company to wade into. “Click X to masturbate on the corpse” is something that is probably a moral line for a lot of people, as would, “Rotate right stick to remove nipple, try to max scream meter!”

Games like GTA and Mortal Kombat have done edgy stuff, but they’re also really great games and technical achievements. Manhunt for example, was just boring and technically mediocre, which made it harder to defend and easier to hate. It’s the difference between a masterpiece of the horror genre or something like Nabokov’s Lolita, and a movie like Hostel or cp fanfics. How many developers and publishers will have great ideas that require shocking subjects, and then execute it so well that it’s defensible? Most publishers aren’t even taking risks with things aren’t divisive, they just want money and sequels and DLC. Serial killer or gore sims?... nah.

Well, there was the Manhunt games, which always represented the worst side of Rockstar North to me.

Does "Hatred" count? It goes more in the "mass murder" direction than "serial killer", but I feel like it would fit.

SimEarth was a realistic Gore simulation!

http://www.paulloeb.org/articles/InconvenientVideo.html

Serial killing is a drop in the ocean of blood you can spill by parallel killing in SimEarth, wiping out all life on Earth with meteors and floods!

You can't officially license an Adults Only game on most (all?) consoles, and even allowing that finding a publisher or a place to sell your X rated games would be difficult. Major retailers don't want to be known for selling those kinds of games.

> You can't officially license an Adults Only game on most (all?) consoles

There are a bunch of PEGI 18 games on consoles. Call of Duty World War II, Farcry 5, Fallout 4, GTA5, etc etc - all of these are PEGI 18 and licensed for consoles.

Those are all M in the ESRB rating though (not AO). Despite the parallel in AO and PEGI18, they aren't really the perceived the same in the respective markets.

Best case study for this difference is the "Hot Coffee" mod for GTA: San Andreas. There was originally a very adult minigame in it but it was disabled; the "mod" simply enabled it. This caused so much controversy the game was re-rated AO by the ESRB and consequently pulled from store shelves until they re-released a patched version with the minigame removed completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod

Funny, in the first illustration in the article the Ripper looks like a Bloodborne character... top hat and sword cane.

Now this was an EA project, so it would have been design-by-commitee visceral horror with in app purchases. I don't think we're missing anything here.

During the time period in the article EA advocated design via the rule of three: 1/3 proven, 1/3 improved, 1/3 new. They were just getting their feet wet in the f2p space with some Facebook and mobile game acquisitions and wouldn't readily apply those techniques to console games for a few more years.

Did you read the article at all?

Until I figured out it's talking about an EA project. Sorry, it stopped being worth my attention after that. No matter how old the project is.

If you actually bothered to read it you would see that it was about the time BEFORE all that was there. The article went into the fact that during the games development is windy company had decided that all games must have multiplayer to prevent people from immediately selling the game after beating it.

Basically nothing you complained about applied to this game.

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