At first I get annoyed at people confusing the two, but I remember there’s a lot of non native English speakers. And it’s words like this that make it such a hard language to figure out.
Even if they win the lawsuit the message has been sent. Any double A or triple A company can make a descent quality ripoff and get lots of money. Bonus points if they’re somewhere safe from Big N’s lawyers
The only way there is emulation. Sure, you won’t get to use the cool features of their hardware, and you might get to play a buggy game a year after release, but you are not supporting a shifty company - and that counts.
What “cool features” does Nintendo do anymore? The big draw of the switch was that it’s portable, and there’s dozens of handheld PC’s to compete there. Then there’s the motion control, which wasn’t great in the long run and can also be done by emulators with a variety of controllers supporting it
Especially detachable controllers and their games supporting them. You can have two per player in a 4 player game, or 8 where each holds one. I quite liked the feature and found it novel. I am not sure if you can do the same using emulators - or at least do it as seamlessly.
Heey, I have been doing the same. Sick of all of the manufacurers to be fair. I mostly buy the games seocnd hand too because publishers suck, last ones I supported were IOI and if they push always on internet connection in the 007 game I will pirate it.
I wish critics wouldn’t even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I’m finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself “Who doesn’t like talking about dragons?” or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven’t seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody’s really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.
My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don’t do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.
Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don’t address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It’s well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there’s no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don’t get fixed on the technical backend.
On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine’s performance, this is the best release of the year by far.
I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.
I mean despite how I feel the linked article’s author uses a type of language that makes me wary of them, I kinda agree. The utterly Marvel way the game talks about things combined with the inane inability to ever have any conflict, negatives or issues combines to essentially make a mockery of very real issues.
And I’m sorry, it’s one thing to want to use art to showcase real issues and poke at them and shine a spotlight onto them. That’s good, personally I want art to do that. But when you essentially use it as a joke piece due to the inherently non-serious nature of all your scenes, it just becomes even worse than not doing it. 😔 Please don’t shine a light onto serious topics if the only thing you use the light for is to point and laugh and mock.
Whether it has terrible dialogue, too many bugs, lacking in technical prowess, cost way too much to make or is simply too preachy. It all boils down to a single problem: corporate suits sucking the soul out of the project, devoiding it of any passion one could possibly have. It looks, feels and smells like an empty shell of a game because that is exactly what it is. Nothing stands out because every decision was calculated with the goal to moderately please everyone in the room, resulting in compromises stacked on compromises all the way down.
The often sloppily implemented progressiveness in these products quickly starts to look like an afterthought. Perhaps to shield themselves from criticism after they realized what they’ve created or maybe they slapped it on when they realized their story has literally nothing to say about anything and is a hollow shell of a product.
Whatever the case, soulless slob does more harm than good to anything their creators associate it with, so I totally get why someone wouldn’t even want to read about that aspect of the game in a review. It’s just one more of several symptomps of a bad product.
In my piece, I noted that—so far at least—I hadn’t encountered anything overtly preachy or that one might describe as garishly political or “overly woke”.
Aaand done with the article! Good, that didn’t take too long.
What’s wrong with acknowledging a term a lot of people use? It’s also implying it as it’s only acknowledging the word and not endorsing it, the “…” for that I think.
And the article is well written, explains what’s lacking, gives an alternative way of doing it better.
It’s a term lot of kids use and it’s a real IP now whether you like it or not. The author did not use it unironially, it’s very clearly ironic. I would also remind you that you are doing what those “anti-woke” people do, making a firm assumption over a term/word without looking at the material/substance.
This article stinks of ignorance and bellendness. Complaining about “modern” or “new” terms is always a huge red flag to me, so now I have to wonder, for example, whether the The Bright Sword character referenced does in fact use she/her. Oh noes, the setting wouldn’t have this one word! It does, of course, have the entirety of any English dictionary other than that word, though. Just the one is icky, like all of those pronouns the woke crowd keep _shoving down our throats! But the woke crowd don’t exist in that world! The whole damn world is drastically different but this one conveniently common language is almost identical! Couldn’t have been that they say “are with” instead of “have,” noooo, it’s one coincidentally “political” word that’s gotta go. That’s the one critical difference in “a fantasy setting divorced entirely from the real world” where they’d suddenly not say things the same way we would!
Does this person give a damn at all and have a crappy take, or just feel like spewing another “omfg woke newspeak agenda” wall of whinge onto… er, Forbes. Not the place I’d look first for sensible discussion of social matters. I guess a click is a click.
“Aqun-athlok” means one who was born one gender and is now living as another. So yeah that means trans. But there’s also a conversation in the trans community about if Non-Binary is technically trans. I would argue it is but some disagree and others say that while Non-binary is trans it is not a “normal” type of trans. That Non-Binary is not either gender. Sometimes Non-Binary is literally no gender. Non-Binary is it’s own umbrella term. So it’s not necessarily living as “another” gender, it can be living in between genders, without gender, or as both genders.
So i would say that “Aqun-athlok” is probably more applicable as binary trans as it was used to refer to krem who was a trans man. Now they could have just thought up a new word for Non-binary trans but Non-Binary is just kinda the perfect word for it. I’m Non-Binary and I actually think saying this is immersion breaking is just kinda bs. Plenty of words in our world also exist in Dragon Age. Not everything has to have a different word. For instance, Dwarves are a thing in our world. Sure they’re not the same, it’s a medical term, but they still exist. But the Dwarves in Dragon Age are still called Dwarves. Why are they not a different name? It’s a fantasy world, shouldn’t they have made up a new word instead of using a word from our world to describe these people? No, because Dwarves is just the word that fits best. Non-Binary here is the same.
Now whether or not it is written well is a better approach to this discussion but also, every trans person has experienced the exact thing that this writer describes, except it’s not always pushups. I’ve had people feel incredibly guilty over misgendering me and done some stupid stuff. When I hear this being described I don’t think it’s awkwardly written, I think it’s an accurate representation of what it can be like being trans and how some people will just be like that when they misgender you.
I also think calling it “preachy” is 100% playing into the narrative it’s Woke because people don’t call CoD preachy even though it’s filled with pro military propaganda. Why is this preachy just because it accurately shows an experience that trans people have all experienced in our own lives?
I haven’t gotten to this place yet in the game and I might end up finding it awkward, but I more likely expect to actually relate to Taash more because of it.
Anyway, just my thoughts from a trans dragon age fan.
interesting points, especially about the evolution in language / perceptions re: dwarves. I’ve heard dragon age being described as ‘fantasy, but more mature’; I played the first game and it didn’t click.
I watched some videos for the game and I’m genuinely baffled by how bad the writing in this game is. The rest of the game looks fine but most of the dialogue really is Forespoken territory. I think SkillUp put it best when he said “It’s written like the HR is in the room”
This article perfectly sums up the issues with this way of writing. Unfortunately people often don’t acknowledge the nuance there, and will jump down this reviewer’s throat for the take I imagine.
It’s icing on the cake that apparently there was even an in-lore term for something like a trans character of this species that they didn’t use. That makes it seem like they didn’t even study their own lore well enough. Never what you want to be thinking about a writing team. 🫤
Oh yeah, didn’t they pull the Stranger Things rights from DBD in order to use them for this… and then gave them back after releasing two Stranger Things games known only as “Jack” and “Shit”
Just got this for free with my new GPU. This game runs like (and looks like) shit. The 2012 Tomb Raider reboot literally looks better with very similar mechanics and runs at a higher frame rate all while using 1/10th as much hardware.
Whenever I turn a corner, my whole system freezes for a few seconds, and this is a near top of the line system. Characters look super robotic, and the special superpowers look like they’re running at 144p resolution.
Sorry, folks. We’re still working on the browser plugin that automatically hides/downvotes all social media content that raises the topic of Sweet Baby Inc. You’ll just have to do it manually for now.
I would be careful with such generalizations - not because I’d be downvoted into a hole (I’ve turned the scores off and just DGAF), but it’s epistemologically a bad habit. However, whatever I’ve seen so far that SBI had their fingers in does have a certain fellow-kids, safe-edgy, corporate-approved, plushie-anarchist tone, the dialogues are atrociously bad and disjointed from their theme (Sable’s postapocalypse, for instance). They can do a less funny version of Joss Whedon’s relaxed banter and they tend to stick it everywhere. But what I really dislike about SBI is that it’s obviously a grift, making developers cough protection money to add pronouns and hair colors to characters.
I think it’s pretty clear what the game is from the trailers, and it looks awesome. Hopefully the temple puzzles are actual puzzles, as opposed to something like Uncharted where Drake always has the answers in his deus ex machina book.
forbes.com
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