Atomic Heart Leaked. No, Not the Gameplay, Maybe the Entire Game | Hacker News Reader

Atomic Heart Leaked. No, Not the Gameplay, Maybe the Entire Game

thecyberexpress.com

12 pointscisomag2k218 comments

It's "leaked" these days, not pirated?

Is the game any good or it just made HN because it generated buzz about the current events?

It looks like an asset flip and all the gameplay footage so far has seemed exceptionally boring. Probably the only entertaining part of any of this was the terminally online people catastrophizing about purchasing the game LITERALLY killing Ukrainians.

Is there any evidence about it being an asset flip or pointing towards it being one? In my career as a game developer, I haven't seen any particularly large AAA-scoped Soviet 50s Atompunk style asset packs out there on the markets. So it would be good to have any reasoning to support such a big assumption.

Boringness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. However, there is a lot of hype for Atomic Heart, it is rare in practice that new studios build up so much hype.

> purchasing the game LITERALLY killing Ukrainians

I think a lot has already been said about this "scandal". I am skeptical of it. Luke Stephens explores the situation more here - https://youtu.be/d8gKPjBk3Ks?t=705.

You may be confusing this game with the other recent controversial game, The Day Before, which is a tonal clone of The Last of Us down to the title font. It has obviously bought assets everywhere.

Many people are expecting it to be like BioShock, Wolfenstein, or even Half-Life - an FPS game with solid mechanics and great alt-history world building that features a strong social/political ideology. This combo has been very successful in games. So I think expectations for Atomic Heart are high.

As with games like Wolfenstein, I think the mainstream media has confused glorifying a regime with exploring it. And Mundfish (the developer) hasn't handled it well. I think there may inherintly be some ambiguity between glorifying and richly exploring certain themes in a game, but games like Wolfenstein have made it abundantly clear that they do not glorify their political themes (Nazism). On the other hand, Mundfish have strongly leaned into glorifying the USSR and Russia in their marketing, particularly distastefully choosing the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine for their release date. I still think that mainstream media has jumped to the conclusion that Atomic Heart glorifies USSR and communism far too quickly. We should not make that judgement before we play the game and see its actual story.

So overall, there's a lot of hype for the game, it might be pretty good. But also MSM is generating negative buzz, and Mundfish don't seem to have the expertise to handle the exploration-glorification confusion that so many games handled better in the past.

Also, it's "leaked" and not "pirated" because it hasn't been released yet. And the process for leaking a game vs cracking it to make a pirated release is very different.

Mundfish actually faces two problems:

A large part of its development studio is located in Russia, they also plan to sell their game in Russia, so they can't afford to anger Russian authorities (and also some of its Russian staff and some of its Russian audience) by posting anything in support of Ukraine.

The whole glorification/exploration is the other problem. It's easy to vilify Nazism in a setting where Nazism delivered everything it had promised, because the vast supermajority agrees it promised vile things. A game about fully automated luxury space communism has to work harder. Or imagine a game where the Caliphate managed to convert the whole world. You'll get claims that the game is both Islamophobic and a glorification of Islamism.

An unidentified user stated that the debug build of the Atomic Heart has been leaked. However, it is still uncertain whether the leak is authentic.

My friend is still downloading it. I think he'll be able to check it this evening.

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