Easter Eggs & Dev-Team Humor

[elanaiba]

Originally Posted by Beery

Yeah. The game's campaign messages contain some very poor taste comments. The one about Mexico is among the worst. There's a similar one about China (which had been fighting the Japanese for years), another about the Aleutians, another about Elba and one about the RAF.

Then there are some plain weird ones: the Solomon islands are routinely misspelled, apparently a developer thinks Caen is Cannes - I never heard of a film festival in Caen. Then there's the 'liberate Florence' one, the 'Rumanian vampirism' one and the 'Go make a screenshot' one - just odd.

Beery,

The game's messages are supposed to be internal stuff sent from US Navy higher authorities or Comsubpac to other US Navy units. They shouldn't care to be politically correct and respectfull to anyone - since that wouldn't be period.

Also, while some of the messages are perhaps a little weird, I don't think they are as bad as you make them be. Of course, its hard to look at them objectively.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by elanaiba

The game's messages are supposed to be internal stuff sent from US Navy higher authorities or Comsubpac to other US Navy units. They shouldn't care to be politically correct and respectfull to anyone - since that wouldn't be period...

It's not a question of political correctness. They just don't sound like the sort of messages I've seen from ComSubPac or official Navy communications to subs. They sound like the kinds of messages European computer game developers think Americans would send.

As for them being 'period' the following sound distinctly non-period:

"KANGAROOS BREATHE COLLECTIVE SIGH OF RELIEF"

"GERMAN BEER NOW NON GRATA DURING MARDI GRAS CELEBRATIONS"

"MYSTERIOUS OUTBREAK OF VAMPIRISM NOTED AMONG RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS"

And what admiral or Navy staff member would ever admit to not knowing where Elba is? I mean these guys are in the military so they have heard of Napoleon, right?

[elanaiba]

FWIW, it was an American that wrote those messages and his CV includes US Army duty, Korea postings and the such.

Now, surely we could debate each and every message out there, but I took the Elba message more like a tongue in cheek fun of the war in Europe, so far away from the Pacific.

And frankly - I wouldn't expect 90% of the US Navy submarine force or my co-nationals of the period depicted to know where Elba is.

Now I won't claim to be an expert in the American mindset, but I don't find the following message very serious either:

"Another running gun battle today. Destroyer gunning, Wahoo running"

[Beery]

Originally Posted by elanaiba

FWIW, it was an American that wrote those messages and his CV includes US Army duty, Korea postings and the such.

Then he has an awful way of making the messages sound like they were written by someone who had never served at high rank in the WW2 US Navy.

The guys sending those messages were highly educated men who most likely went to Annapolis Navy Academy. They would know geography and military history and they would not (in my opinion) send messages that made them seem like unschooled and xenophobic hicks.

But that's just my opinion. The good thing is, we can mod the file. I wish we could do the same for some other files.

[Calbeck]

Believe me, now that I know that the file can be modded, I'm going to be inserting material that's much worse. -

Also see: Morale, Lifting Spirits of Men Long at Sea, Humor: Arr Arr

[MaxT.dk]

Originally Posted by Calbeck

Also see: Morale, Lifting Spirits of Men Long at Sea, Humor: Arr Arr

Ahahahahahaha great one YAAAAAARRRRRRRRR! :rotfl:

[Elder-Pirate]

I checked in search for this but no reply. Thought this was a good one.

[PolecatEZ]

Wow, lots to go through, its cool to see I have some fans and critics. I'll start with the easy one about Princess Elizabeth and her wartime service. I was asked to do a little humor and write the news items for the game, as well as a lot of other writing tasks in the last month of development (they were pretty short-handed). I just basically pulled up wiki's WW2 timeline and set to work. I made a pass through to grab either headlines relevant to the Pacific theatre, relevant to the war in general, or relevant for some humor. The rest were canned on the first pass (there was like 500 or so news items, reduced to about 200). So...for Liz...if you check out February 25th on the link below. I apologize for the innacuracy there, but I'm only as good as the source. I did this work in less than 2 days so didn't have time to fact check every statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ww2_timeline#1942

Based on a wonking 600-pager that was dropped on my lap to research the subject the weekend before, I found that humor was quite often a part of the radio messages, and most of them were far from politically correct. Sports scores were also bigger news than the real news, and subs would surface (sometimes in less than optimal conditions) just to grab the World Series snippets on the waves.

Originally Posted by Beery

Yeah. The game's campaign messages contain some very poor taste comments. The one about Mexico is among the worst. There's a similar one about China (which had been fighting the Japanese for years), another about the Aleutians, another about Elba and one about the RAF.

With Mexico, I had other jokes that were in pretty poor taste, but I changed it at the last second and left it in the air. In hindsight I should have just left it a "serious" line only. In no way did I intend to demean Mexico's contribution to the war effort, just that like some other countries, they took their merry time in choosing sides.

As for the others, you need to look at the historical context. China didn't officially declare war (after a government reshuffle) until late in the game, even after a long-standing invasion. If you read the text on the China message it basically says as much. The RAF had launched several air raids previous to the message which did little damage to Berlin, but they finally got it right one day, hence the comment. The Aleutians invasion was taken seriously, but the Americans decided to just let them freeze up there until they could get to them...there were more important things to fight over at the time.

With Elba, you made the comment in another post about well-educated naval officers and what they would know. In the military I was in, it wasn't those officers that wrote the news or even edited it, it was a desk jockey somewhere (I was one of them). That is the point of view I was taking on these news items. And, in sharp contrast to today's military, there was a lot more "personality" showing through the cracks as evidenced by reading some of the more personal accounts of the war.

Originally Posted by Beery

Then there are some plain weird ones: the Solomon islands are routinely misspelled, apparently a developer thinks Caen is Cannes - I never heard of a film festival in Caen. Then there's the 'liberate Florence' one, the 'Rumanian vampirism' one and the 'Go make a screenshot' one - just odd.

Solomon Islands...sorry, no spell check because they made me use Excel. Caen/Cannes reference was a clear joke, we have Google Earth here, we know things! Florence is like Elba, if you check the news list I was working with, there was a long string of island and city names that were liberated in that time frame, like 30 or 40, I made jokes with what I could, kept some others with big names, and canned the rest. Romanian vampirism was a snark at my Romanian colleagues, with the image in my head from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 when he rattles of the "Coalition of the Willing" list and the vampire pops out from the grave when they say "Rooooooo-mania!". The "Go take a screenshot" comment...well, we'll just have to release an "Easter Egg Free" version next time for our "Serious Fan Base".

Part of the humor also came from the fact that I had just finished reading a marathon of Slaughterhouse 5, Catch-22, and Lolita as bathroom reading. All of them written at or near WW2 (early 50's I think). I'm so happy they finally got a good English section at the local mall bookstore here in Bucharest.

As far as priority comments, apparently some formatting didn't survive the merge. They had already written an "orders" type file, then I generated a news file (with the humor stuff) and another file with relevant messages for the campaign. All 3 were supposed to be merged but they had some wierd strings attached to the message to denote the "to and froms" and priority and frequency of broadcast, etc. They told me just hand the stuff in and it would be merged together, but I think some reformatting needed done that wasn't done in the end. I'll get Dan or Tudor to take a look-see about what happened, but no promises, and it was probably my fault somehow anyways.

And nobody has seen the ghost ship in the actual campaign?!?! Ya'll cheated with the editor...

Thanks again, you all made my day really!

Will Taylor,
Snarkmaster General
Ubisoft Romania
(Unofficially posting - Comments to not reflect actual attitudes of Ubisoft Corporation, the SH4 dev team, and most Canadian strippers)

[bruschi sauro]

Hi Will, what is the "EASTERN EGG FREE"?:hmm:
IS THE PATCH 1.03?:p :p :p :p

[MaxT.dk]

Originally Posted by PolecatEZ

And nobody has seen the ghost ship in the actual campaign?!?! Ya'll cheated with the editor...

Thanks again, you all made my day really!

Never Maybe I'm using time compress feature too much :p
Thanks for the explanations tho', it's great to read stuff like that (behind the scenes)

[PolecatEZ]

Originally Posted by MaxT.dk

Never Maybe I'm using time compress feature too much :p
Thanks for the explanations tho', it's great to read stuff like that (behind the scenes)

My only regret is that they didn't put me on the project sooner. They were a great bunch of guys to work with and are really dedicated to the game and the fan base that supports them. The compressed production schedule was unfortunate, but to paraphrase Rumsfeld, "You make a game with the time you have, not the time you wish you had..."

It was a great task though they gave me, "Here, fix every piece of text in the game...and we need it in a week so we can get it to the translators. And generate some news headlines while you're at it..." And I was like, "Dude." And they were like, "Dude?" And so I said, "Dude!" And they said, "Marfa!", which I think means "Cool!" in Romanian, but it could also have something to do with grandmothers and dead goats. I never was too sure.

Its still amazing to me after 2 years in the business (after that 9 years in the Army previously mentioned) just how normal and human game production is. As a hard core gamer (all kinds of games from The Sims to X3) I always thought of devs as some kind of super humans. But now, now I've seen the light! My eyes are open! The truth is that we are actually gods, not just super humans. Now, mere mortals, bow down before us and...oops, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, as I was saying...normally this is just your everyday normal 9 to 6 job. Occaisionally we get to cut loose and we grab that 1% chance every time we get, so the fans get a little humor thrown in with their serious sims once in a while. Apologies for offending anyone, at least it wasn't the constant "American Pig Dog" commentary stuck in a sound loop from Blazing Angels 1...(Blazing Angels 2 will kick ass though, so pre-order it...you know you want to. )

If anyone wants some more trivia, I'm also the "passing thermal layer" voice. They added the thermal layer feature but had no way of adding a graphical element for it that late in production and no voicework after they had already done their order with the outside sound studio. I think I'm also the "sound general quarters" guy, even though I encouraged them to use an actual sample from the National Archives (amazing what you can find on-line).

Anyways, thanks again. Normally we don't have enough time for our 30 or so smoke breaks as required by Romanian labor laws, let alone enough time to post long commentaries, but as I said when we get that 1% chance we take it.

Godspeed and all that,

Will

[MaxT.dk]

Originally Posted by PolecatEZ

If anyone wants some more trivia, I'm also the "passing thermal layer" voice. They added the thermal layer feature but had no way of adding a graphical element for it that late in production and no voicework after they had already done their order with the outside sound studio.

Now I know whom to curse each time my sub goes to the bottom of the ocean! :rotfl:

PASSING THERMAL LAYER my ass! BLOW THE F*CKING BALLAST!

Once again, great read Inside information like this is gold worth for us, fans

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by PolecatEZ

(Unofficially posting - Comments to not reflect actual attitudes of Ubisoft Corporation, the SH4 dev team, and most Canadian strippers)

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
But you know those Canadian strippers have the most important attitudes of all!

Or did I mean atributes?


It's good to hear from someone who's actually involved, especially talking about what they actually did. Thanks for replying.

And welcome to our nuthouse.

[elanaiba]

William ?! WTF?!?!? Guards! Guards!

Note to myself - good thing I didn't badmouth this guy too much around here, I heard he just got promoted.

[danlisa]

I'll reiterate Steve's welcome. It's good to have you aboard.

However, damn you, I was going to buy Blazing Angels this weekend for the PS3 but your comment made me read up on the reviews, which I nearly never do as I think it taints perspective.

Anyhow, welcome and it's good you have you guys providing input on Subsim.

May you find more time in your busy schedule to visit us.

Neal? Do you think these fine fellows deserve better avatars?