Game Devs Are Sharing Their Favorite Easter Eggs
In honor of the springtime holiday, game developers are pointing out some of the secrets they ve tucked away in games.
In honor of this weekend s springtime holiday, game developers are sharing some of their favorite Easter eggs in games they ve worked on. A Twitter thread asked devs to respond with the best Easter eggs you ever hid in a game, and developers were happy to oblige.
The request from Vlambeer lead Jan Willem Nijman was followed by a treasure trove of Easter eggs in everything from big AAA releases to smaller indie games. The homages range from film references to hat-tips to other games to small in-jokes.
The Game Had the Least Amount of Crunch in the Trilogy
The problem of crunch time is well known in the gaming industry and unfortunately, extremely prevalent with recent titles like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us II, and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 severally struggling with the issue. Thankfully, this isn’t always the case as games like Mass Effect 2 are sometimes able to find the perfect work-life balance.
In a recent interview with The Gamer, Mass Effect 2 development staff spoke on the matter, acknowledging that there were some crunch problems with Mass Effect, and Mass Effect 3, but not with Mass Effect 2.
Critically-acclaimed game franchise
Mass Effect had two same-sex romances cut because of criticism from Fox News, according to two designers who worked on the series’ second entry.
Action role-playing game
Mass Effect 2 originally included additional same-sex love interests for main character Shepard, who can be either male or female depending on the player’s choices.
Jack, a female character, was intended to be romanceable by a female Shepard, while Jacob, a male character, could be romanced by a male Shepard.
Both romance options were ultimately cut before the game released, leaving only female-female same-sex romances with other characters and no male-male romance options.
Geoff Keighley Addresses The Last of Us: Part 2 Controversy
Walking Into the Valley
The Last of Us: Part 2 was undoubtedly one of the biggest – and most critically acclaimed – releases of 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t controversial. Apart from the review bombing campaign led by people upset that it was an “SJW Game” there were complaints that the game killed off The Last of Us’s protagonist, Joel, people complaining about the overall tone and storyline, and criticism towards the game’s artists – some of whom reportedly developed PTSD – using photographs of actual violence as reference.
The reason I left is because I only want to work with the best. That is no longer Naughty Dog. Their reputation for crunch within LA is so bad it was near impossible to hire seasoned contract game animators to close out the project. As such we loaded up on film animators.