I bought borderlands 2 the other week and it’s been a blast on my SteamDeck. Unfortunately it seems it’s one of those games that loves to connect online all the time, like it’ll kick me out of single player if it detects wifi and make me reload into… singleplayer, but online. with 0 differences.
I probably would’ve been better off pirating it tbh.
I’m mad about Ciri being the main character, however the reason I’m mad is not because of her character or her being a woman. What I’m upset about is that I thought this game would take place in a completely different time period or region. Like maybe during the first witchers? Maybe in the future? But no, CDPR is just force extending existing characters and a story that clearly ended. Zzzzz
Yes. The games already retconned the ending of the books, which was pretty finalized. But whatever, the games were good. But now they’re just force extending an already forced extended storyline rofl. I was hoping for completely new characters in a completely new settings/time period. Such a fucking shame.
They made such a big deal about the witcher 4 not being about Geralt and being it’s own story, and now they’re just extending Ciri’s storyline. Pretty braindead decision in my opinion. It feels like they are just lazy and gave up on making a new character.
It’s the same bullshit that has ruined hollywood. It’s safer to just reboot some bullshit or force a sequel vs. coming up with something new and original.
I’m not saying doing another Witcher game in general is a forced sequel. But using the same damn character is definitely a forced extension.
Quite the opposite for me. Having only random ass characters in the story would kill all my hype. Also I wished for Ciri as MC in the next game ever since I player W3, so for 10 years now.
My dream witcher game is set like 150 years in the future (early industrialized time period of the witcher universe.) And there could be tension as guns are invented and witchers aren’t needed as much. How great would that be?
Wanted to mention - The Season of Storms Witcher book has a short flash forward to around 150 years in the future, and they’re starting to burn fossil fuels. That’s where I got the 150 years.
Why complicate things ? Games are not books. I see Witcher game I expect Geralt. What is wrong with this thinking ? Do I need to think everytime I play Horizon ? No when I play Horizon I expect Aloy.
There is nothing to do with woke. If you expect people to read books before they play a game there is something wrong with you not with people who want to play a game with their favourite character.
Geralt needs retirement. The ending of Blood and Wine expansion, tells you that loud and clear, and agree with that. It was a perfect ending for the Trilogy.
Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now. I dont agree with the decision of Ciri becoming a Witcher (not making her the protagonist, but her taking the Mutagens), but i want to see how they explain that turn of events.
That’s the problem, they want to put Ciri in same gameplay but different story and say that’s new Witcher. I would more likely play as Yenefer sorceress and slay monsters in a Witcher game than play as Ciri that somehow becomes a Witcher just to slay monsters with as sword. We already have character that slays monsters with a sword in Witcher game, he’s called Geralt.
Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now
It’s canon in the books too. She was trained at Ker Moren, then trained by Yennefer but ultimately she gives up her magic entirely after pulling from fire as a source out of desperation. She remains an extremely skilled swordswoman with partial mutation
I dont think its necessarily to complicate things but more that we’ve had Geralt as a main character for 3 games. His time is ending, and if you love him as a main character there are those 3 aforementioned games you can play to get what youre looking for. Switching up the main protagonist to another character that we as gamers have learned to love and accept through the series is probably the best move, both for business and canonically.
The Witcher game series is based on the book series.
The post criticizes not the expectation of players that haven’t read the books, but of the subset of people that think making Ciri the protagonist is a political message, when it’s just staying true to its source.
Your critique has nothing to do with this post.
Expectations differ from person to person. You see the games as a separate thing. They are obviously not. But it’s totally fair to want another witcher game with Gerald with his story continued. If the original creator of the story didn’t write it that way, then CD Project Red would have to come up with their own story. Straying too far from source material can end badly - see Game of Thrones seasons 6-8.
Nah the author of article asume that all people that say that Ciri can’t be a witcher it’s because they claim it’s woke and tries to turn those who disagree to say it’s political. I clearly state it’s not. I don’t want Ciri in Witcher because I want to play Geralt. That’s all. The author puts books to afirmate his claims that only people who read books are worthy to say something about Ciri being a Witcher protagonist and that everyone else says it’s woke. No I disagree. Books are not Games.
It’s a game series (and later media series) literally based on a series of books. The short stories tell Garalt’s story, but the longform books are far more about Ciri than they are Geralt. Go read them they’re brilliant books but more important to the point you’ll understand why Ciri is so important to the story that’s being told
I didn’t even buy Borderlands 3 for $60 and there’s no way in hell I’d pay $80 for something similar. I spent the full price of Baldur’s Gate 3 for myself and two of my friends for a total of $180. Make the game worth it and you have my money. If the development cost of games has gone up then prove it and make better games.
It and it’s DLC sold just fine because BL3 is miles above BL2 in gameplay (though yes it’s story and voice acting are painful, 2 hasn’t aged as well as many of us might remember it did in that regard, either)
Tbh I expect the same thing for this one: better gameplay, worse writing
Having seen the tonal shift in the gameplay preview I’d actually expect better writing, or at least more bearable writing. Gameplay looked more fine tuned but mostly the same as 3.
I won’t. Nobody is able to define what “wokeness” really means to them because it’s mostly code for “subset of people I don’t want to exist around me”.
Surprisingly, that doesn’t sound very good when said out loud.
“Woke” has had a consistent meaning since its introduction into the English language almost a hundred years ago. It means “Aware of systemic racism.”
When blues legend Lead Belly ended a show in 1938 by saying, “Stay woke,” he meant: “Stay aware of systemic racism.”
When some chud on YouTube in 2025 says “‘Woke’ is ruining gaming,” he means that awareness of systemic racism is ruining gaming. For him.
And when an American politician calls himself “anti-woke”, he’s saying that he opposes the awareness of systemic racism. Not that he denies the existence of it, but that he’d prefer no one talk about it, so that it can continue.
When some chud on YouTube in 2025 says “‘Woke’ is ruining gaming,” he means that awareness of systemic racism is ruining gaming. For him.
I don’t think it even goes that far tbh. Especially for less political, more gamer-type “conservatives”, it just means “the other side”, forcing so many girls (1) into their game. Maybe it’s just to deflect having to admit to being a misogynist.
And when an American politician calls himself “anti-woke”, he’s saying that he opposes the awareness of systemic racism. Not that he denies the existence of it, but that he’d prefer no one talk about it, so that it can continue.
Yes, exactly. No sane person would call themselves “anti-woke”. Unless they’re successful in subverting its meaning to be “those we’ll put in concentration camps”. Oh wait, that still wouldn’t make you sane.
Yes I agree with your interpretation of what woke currently means. I’m saying that this is actually using woke ironically an insult. An unironic usage has no negative connotations.
The author James Lindsay has defined it in similar terms, as “a victimhood-based identity politics” whose “victim groups are whites, Christians, men, and straight people”. He argues that the movement is “roughly intersectional” insofar as it is obsessed with identity politics and a grievance relating to anti-white racism. “Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,” Lindsay writes, “the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading”. In these terms, the “woke right” is a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.
Pierce Morgan uses it more and more often against right wingers to great effect.
Right. The right wingers are arguing (usually without knowing it because they don’t understand words) for people to stay asleep and not think or question
Woke means being aware that an interaction with a cop is a life or death situation. Cops aren’t your friends, they’re not here to protect you. They’re a threat, motivated by cruelty and love of power. When dealing with a cop, you have to speak gently, keep your hands visible at all times, and declare your intentions for every action. Or you could die. You could still die even if you do all that.
I think that ship has sailed. That word is at the moment a clear sign the person using it is an asshole. It can be reclaimed, but right now I don’t see that happening.
I would love to not let the nazis dictate how the swastika is used, but their perversion of the original meaning has permanently altered how it’s seen by the rest of the world. Claiming the moral high ground by trying to force something to mean what it no longer does is a pointless exercise.
It’s not about claiming the moral high ground, it’s just that you can’t have a word that can be used to mean its opposite, even if “sarcastically”. The word woke is just the past tense of wake, nothing else. It can be used to represent someone “waking up” from the hide-your-head-in-the-sand routine, or becomes able to see things from a new perspective. For the right, it doesn’t really mean anything, but they are pretty much using it as the new “sheeple”. Which doesn’t make any sense.
But the important thing is this: if someone is ridiculing people for wanting to be informed, involved in society, or generally just themselves, the only thing they’re actually insulting is their own intelligence and heart. If we let them have their use of woke as a generic mean insult, we lose sight of that.
More than swastikas, I think this case is closer to saying “you can use literally to mean figuratively because it’s common use” to which I also say no, fuck that.
But yes, swastikas forever symbolise Nazism. That doesn’t negate their original, positive meaning previously found in history, religion and culture. This is not an “achtually it’s ok to draw swastikas because they are actually good”. I’m just saying that context, and intent, matters. If you tattoo one on yourself as a westerner, you’re a Nazi - and it’s ok that everyone treats you like one. But should those original uses be stopped because it’s now “forever bad”?
Hey, anybody remember when MGS 2 came out, and the mass of NA gamers were raging about having to play as Raiden, because he was a … well in modern parlance, a beta cuck soyboy?
Kinda flew over all their heads that Raiden was basically a more realistic reflection of the NA target demo for MGS games, and oh he also goes through legitimate character development, gains maturity and confidence, oh well now, more lately, he’s basically a badass fucking cyberninja.
… Passing the torch off to Ciri fucking entirely makes sense within the world and lore of the Witcher series… and I thought we liked having an attractive gal booty to ogle at in third person?
Passing the torch off to Ciri fucking entirely makes sense within the world and lore of the Witcher serie
It’s also literally what happens in the books. Ciri grows as a person and becomes a badass swordswoman while Geralt eventually swears off taking monster contracts and later actually stops killing monsters. He even goes to donate his sword before getting pulled into one last battle to protect his friends and chosen family
Well I have had dreams of reading books. They’re weird. Like, I know it’s a dream and the sentences don’t make any sense. But I keep reading it anyways.
I’m sorry, but I still can’t help but laugh about the anti-woke Asterion flat-butt mod, and now in my head I just see all anti-woke gamers as jealous flat-butters.
If pre-orders ever made sense, it was when you still needed a physical cartridge or disc and the game wouldn’t get patches anyways. But those days are long gone.
I don’t believe there are people who seriously throw the “woke” argument out there. I think it’s a sort of rage baiting by the journalists. Ffs there were 3 games with Geralt as lead. Enough is enough.
it must be out there enough to be brought to his attention. if thats the case i feel like ive started to distance myself from being online enough to not notice this shit anymore.
Maybe not here in the fediverse, but there are dozens of youtube channels that are all about whining about “the woke” ruining the gaming industry, “explaining” how every spectacular failure we’ve seen in the last few years (Starfield, Concord) are because of DEI wokeness, etc.
Just open YouTube in incognito mode and search a game title probably works. YouTube’s algorithm loves serving up manosphere style content like that like my dog loves eating my other dog’s poop. It’s disturbing on both fronts
Very true. I have its history tracking disabled, but it still suggests those videos or creators even when I’m watching something that has no relation to outrage, like a movie trailer or a GDC talk like one on Unreal Engine.
Yeah and they’re all fucking losers, it really feels like the vast majority of people don’t care about whatever these online people say ‘woke’ is. It’s the same as complaining about “political correctness gone mad”, affirmative action, etc, the same complaints they’ve had about social progress for decades. Nothing about these youtubers is new or worth dignifying with a response.
I don’t know if I have met anyone complaining about Ciri being the protagonist of Witcher 4. Even the most conservative people I know who are fans of the series are pumped about her being the main character because they love the story and it’s the only logical way forward. The only complaints I have heard are that in universe she’s kind of overpowered for a video game protagonist. I think people whining about this are fake fans or just agitators who don’t even play these games.
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