Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Feiyun

It may not be bad news for Dan Hauser; it may not be good news for R Star.

Dan Houser slowed down.

As lead screenwriter and executive producer, Dan Hauser took a break from 2019 after putting Wild Dart: redemption 2 ashore. People didn't know what he was doing, and what happened to Rockstar Games, the gaming company he co-founded, until early 2020, when Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of R Star, announced that Dan Hauser had left.

It was in June this year that Dan Hauser officially announced that he would join a new studio, Absurd Ventures (meaning "absurd adventure"). Officially, Absurd Ventures will build a narrative world, create characters and plots for all types of games, and will also dabble in the production of other media other than video games, such as animation, books, visual novels, scripted podcasts and so on.

Dan Hauser's resumption of his business has sparked a lot of discussion. Dan Hauser's departure from R Star in 2020 has shocked the world. Prior to this, he and his brother Sam Hauser and others personally founded R Star and worked in this company for more than 20 years. He was almost the main screenwriter and creative director of the entire series of "three Men and one Dog" and "the Wild Dart: redemption." is the soul of both series.

Leslie Benzies (left), former president of Rockstar North Studios, was inducted into the DICE Game Hall of Fame with Dan Hauser (right). After Dan Hauser left, many people were concerned about where his next stop was, and now the dust has finally settled. On the other hand, R Star without Dan Hauser does not seem to be going well, the online model of "Wild Dart: redemption 2" has not been further expanded, the PS5 version of the game has been shelved, and the sixth generation of "three Men and one Dog" has been difficult to give birth for a long time. Players and observers generally believe that this is inextricably linked to Dan Hauser's departure.

Entrepreneurial brothers Sam Hauser and Dan Hauser are brothers, and Sam is the elder brother. The two were born in London, England in 1971 and 1973 respectively, with a superior family environment, their father is a lawyer and their mother is a film and television actress. Later, Dan Hauser studied geography. Sam Hauser wanted to be a musician, but both were more interested in storytelling.

In 1995, Dan Hauser found a job as a tester at BMG Interactive, a British gaming company, and later became a full-time employee. In the early stages of the game industry, game companies were generally small and flat in management. The two brothers noticed a prototype of a top-down action game, "Race'n'Chase", and thought it had great potential, and urged to introduce the game to the company's agent release. Later, the game was renamed to become the first work of the "three Men and a Dog" series.

It may be hard for today's players to accept this original game. In 1998, BMG was acquired by Take-Two, and the two brothers moved to New York with the company, where they later participated in the formal founding of Rockstar Games and became the co-founder of the company (with five founders).

According to the Hauser brothers' mother, Sam Hauser is like a counselor and Dan Hauser is more like a scholar. Since the founding of R Star, my brother has been acting as CEO to set the direction for the company; my younger brother is mainly responsible for the creative design and screenwriting of the game, and in terms of plot, he has a far-reaching influence on the company's later game development.

Dan Hauser is a good storyteller, exploring social issues in two well-known game series, three Men and one Dog and the Wild Dart: redemption, mocking capitalism, creating the grotesque NPC and writing funny conversations. However, the first two works of the "three Men and one Dog" series are rough, and the third generation is the real epoch-making work, which really defines the 3D open world, even if nothing is done. It's easy to just drive around the free city listening to radio music.

The shaping of the game world by the third generation shocked the world at that time. The third generation had a high degree of interest and freedom in the way of playing. At the same time, if it was separated from the story of Dan Hauser, it would be difficult to seal off the gods.

Claude, the protagonist of the third generation, is far less lively than the protagonist in his later works, and can't even speak, but there have been many NPC characters that Dan Hauser is good at creating. For example, the famous NPC Donald Love is considered to satirize the billionaire Donald Trump who later became president of the United States. Full of truth, benevolence, righteousness and morality, Donald acts confusingly, glorifying all his evil deeds into lofty deeds.

Donald's character left a deep impression on players because of his strange words and deeds. In the following three generations of expansion film "Sin City" and "San Andreas", this kind of NPC can be found everywhere, such as the traitor Lance Vance in "Sin City" and the famous crazy female NPC Katrina in "San Andreas". The latter is foul-mouthed, grumpy, rude, often furious, and never admits to doing anything wrong.

Dan Hauser is extremely good at describing small potatoes and marginal characters, often giving people an idea of the past and plight of the NPC with a few conversations that make what happens in the universe of "three men and one dog" very real.

Katrina-style characters crazy and real Dan Hauser's screenwriting skills are also improving. Claude, the protagonist of three generations, and Tommy, the protagonist of "Sin City," are like mindless killing machines without their own thoughts and thoughts. Nick, the protagonist of the fourth generation, is more charming and has his own struggles and pains. He wants to show the helplessness and helplessness of an outsider living in the United States.

During the development of the fourth generation of "three Men and one Dog", the Hauser brothers stayed at home and watched a large number of movies and TV dramas and variety shows every day for more than a year. As a result, the role dialogue of four generations satirizes American society to the point of miraculous. Especially after reading books such as A brief History of American Race, and then looking at NPC of different races and origins in four generations, you will find that four generations have reached an astonishing depth in expressing the details of American social life. This style has also been strengthened in five generations, which can be said to be a game textbook for the study of American social ecology.

Even if he has never been to the United States, he can learn more about the life here through "three Men and one Dog". Dan Hauser created the Wild Dart: redemption 2, which is his most successful screenwriting work. If the series "three Men and one Dog" refers to a lot of modern American culture, "the Wild Dart: redemption 2" draws on many European literary classics.

Britain is a big literary country. Dan Hauser was nurtured by English literary tradition from an early age. In order to add depth to the Wild Dart: redemption 2, he and the R Star screenwriter team read a large number of classics together. Find inspiration in the works of famous writers such as Dickens, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Balzac and so on. This makes Arthur Morgan, the protagonist of the Wild Dart: redemption 2, another famous character in the history of the game, and the atmosphere of the game is full of compassion. Arthur's suffering in the game and helplessness in the face of life, his entanglement with Dutch, including the plot of Arthur seeking redemption from a nun, are reminiscent of the sufferings of the protagonists in Dickens' works.

This is very different from the "three Men and one Dog" series. The three protagonists of the five generations of "three Men and one Dog" are also very successful, but the whole game atmosphere is extremely crazy. The protagonists of the fifth generation do not like to think as much as Arthur, and Trevor has an antisocial personality.

The plot of "the Wild Dart: redemption 2" is so touching that many people cry for it when they play to the scene of Arthur's death. Arthur did a lot of evil, but before his death, he tried his best to do good deeds to remedy and want to complete redemption, which makes people feel that the complexity of real human nature can not be judged by simple good and evil.

"the Wild Dart: redemption 2" brings a unique sense of atmosphere. "three Men and one Dog" made Dan Hauser famous as a screenwriter in the industry. "the Wild Dart: redemption 2" allows Dan Hauser to be among the great game writers, bringing players much more than a story itself.

Parting ways in February 2020, R Star parent company Take-Two suddenly announced that Dan Hauser would officially leave on March 11 of that year. The official announcement highly affirmed Dan Hauser's great achievements in the past. Take-Two 's share price fell nearly 5 per cent after he left.

The departure raised huge concerns about the future of R Star, which was exacerbated by the departure of R Star veterans Leslie Benzies and Jeronimo Barrera, who had left the company.

After Dan Hauser left, R Star did seem to be in some kind of chaos.

The remake of the "three Men and one Dog" trilogy released in 2021 received a flood of bad reviews, with Metacritic users scoring as low as 0.5, and players were infuriated by too many Bug, optimization and modeling problems in the remake. There has never been such a serious situation in R Star's games before.

Although an outsourced work is unlikely to affect the overall situation, it highlights that no one inside R Star seems to care about remaking, and the progress of the sixth generation of "three Men and one Dog" is not going well. Although parent company Take-Two has been optimistic and hinted that it will release "several groundbreaking games" in fiscal year 2025, this does not mean that the sixth generation will be released on time. Now, the sixth generation of "three men and one dog" has not been officially announced, let alone a specific release date.

After Dan Hauser left, R Star seemed to want to get rid of his previous influence on the project and decided to restart development. The storyline and elements had been changed many times, but there was still no definite direction. Some foreign media reported that this is the most chaotic project in the history of R Star, "even worse than" Wild Dart: redemption 2 ".

The sixth generation of "three Men and one Dog" also had a large-scale leak last year, and this is one of the screenshots of R Star, which has not released any new works since the 2018 "Wild Dart: redemption 2". The company also treats "Wild Dart: redemption 2" like an outcast.

In July 2022, a R Star insider revealed that R Star chose to shelve the development of the fourth-generation reproduction of the three Men and one Dog trilogy and the enhanced version of the next generation of the Wild Dart: redemption 2 because of the poor performance of the trilogy. These two projects have actually been running for several years.

The picture of "Wild Dart: redemption 2" is good, and it seems to be fine without a next-generation version, but it is a matter of attitude. In July last year, R Star also announced that the online model "Online" of "Wild Dart: redemption 2" would not have a large update since then, because it wanted to focus on the development of the sixth generation of "three Men and one Dog". This has once again aroused anger and dissatisfaction among players-"Online of the Wild" has not been significantly updated since 2021, and it is hard not to be impressed by the five-generation online model of "three Men and one Dog", which is still running smoothly.

Of course, people would imagine that if Dan Hauser were still there, everything might be different. Dan Hauser has invested a great deal of enthusiasm in the Wild Dart: redemption 2 project and will do his best to make it better. However, there are many signs that Dan Hauser's departure from R Star is also precisely because of the game. In terms of time, he has been on vacation since the game was released in 2018, and Guan Xuan officially resigned nearly two years later.

The online model was launched in 2018, and there are different reasons for leaving later than the stand-alone model.

A common saying is that the word-of-mouth and sales of "Wild Dart: redemption 2" fell short of R Star and Take-Two expectations. In fact, this statement does not stand up to scrutiny. Because the game generated $750 million in sales on its opening weekend, it sold 1700 million units in the first month, bringing the cumulative sales to 53 million. The work received high praise from many media, and the discussion about the plot and characters lasted for many years.

Another theory is that Dan Hauser's behavior at the company is so "tyrannical" that the screenwriting team is required to work up to 100 hours a week. Under his leadership, the entire development team worked severe overtime, and the employees were miserable. However, it is hardly a secret for gaming companies to work overtime, and even if it is one of the reasons for leaving, it may not be a key factor.

Sam Hauser's real reason for receiving game awards in the UK may be that Dan Hauser's creation is limited.

On the one hand, he is quite persistent in pursuing the authenticity of the game. He believes that in today's American social environment, making games requires too many taboos to accurately restore history in the game. On the other hand, during the development of Wild Dart: redemption 2, Dan Hauser had serious differences with R Star and Take-Two. It is said that Dan Hauser wants the plot of the Wild Dart: redemption 2 to be more coherent and wants to reproduce the original content with second-generation screen specifications and engines, which will cost $200 million for development, but Take-Two did not approve the idea.

This statement has a considerable basis, because "the Wild Dart: redemption 2" actually has the original map scene, but separated by the air wall, players can not directly reach, some people get there through a special way. I saw a lot of unfinished scenes.

Another rumor in "the Wild Dart: redemption," released in 2010, is that Dan Hauser wants to make the plot more diverse, and it is said that he envisioned several endings for the game, including Arthur's surviving ending. but to be long means that the plot has to branch, the game will be much larger, and the development will take longer. It has been eight years since the launch of the project and its release in 2018, and Take-Two has lost patience. There is also a basis for this, because Dan Hauser has been known for overturning and restarting projects. Several dubbing actors of the Wild Dart: redemption 2 have said that they have been involved in the project for a long time, and many of the dubbing lines and plots have been revised many times, indicating that the project may have been repeated many times.

There are also rumors that Dan Hauser tried to add randomly recruited teammates to the game and developed different plot lines because it was so difficult that he was abandoned.

Maybe there really was an ending for Arthur to survive?

For the above rumors, Dan Hauser, R Star, Take-Two have not responded, the truth in the end, may need to speak for themselves in the future.

In the field of games, there are too many cases in which producers leave the company because of restrictions on creative freedom, such as Teiji Matano, Hideo Oshima and Shinji Miami. From the producer's point of view, this is the ultimate benefit of the player, but also can produce great works; from the investor's point of view, maybe the producer is the devil.

The new journey goes back to the beginning of the article, and Dan Hauser's entry into Absurd Ventures has long been traceable. Dan Hauser registered the company in the UK in 2021 with the classified message of "Interactive Leisure and Entertainment Software Development".

At the time, people thought Dan Hauser set up the studio to make his own 3A games, but now that's not the case. Absurd Ventures, which focuses on shaping characters and writing plots for products such as games and animations, is a studio focused on screenwriting and worldview construction.

Judging from the publicity of the new company, it seems that he will not develop his own games-perhaps Dan Hauser realized that the 3A masterpiece requires a lot of money and effort, which is too risky for a start-up studio. Or maybe it's because he doesn't want to develop games so much-in the past, he was mainly in charge of the plot on R Star and was not much involved in the game design. The play and level design of the "three Men and one Dog" series mainly relied on another outgoing veteran, Leslie Benzies.

So it can be said that it is a wise choice for Dan Hauser to return to his old career and focus on the field of screenwriting. What's more, there are too many works in the game world with a dead end and confused logic, which means that Dan Hauser's new studio has a lot of business space.

To this day, I can't forget every minute I spent in the Wild Dart: redemption 2, and the plot of the game has been deeply engraved into my mind. Perhaps without the shackles of a huge game development project, Dan Hauser's story will be purer and more supernatural.

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