I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.
I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.
Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.
I mean it is a diverse portfolio, but only on the very shallow surface level. Like COD or FIFA, AC games are the same every year / 2 years with a different skin.
I remember when it was actually different 10+ years ago, like when we got AC Unity, Black Flag close by, with some Far Cry 3 on the side. Their open worlds had similar elements, but it was still very different at the core.
what do you mean by diverse IP? Ubisoft has notoriously done the exact opposite by eliminating every distinguishing characteristic of their games and converging all of their designs into assassin’s creed with another name. Ubisoft has one of the least diverse portfolio of any AAA company, and that’s saying something.
the only good (and diverse) things that come out of Ubisoft have been from a small team inside that somehow missed all the rituals to sell their souls to Asmodeus so they keep making bangers like Rayman and the recent Prince metroidvania.
Sadly, I think this person is railing against “having more than just white guys featured” (as if that’s forced, when you start making games in new locations around the world) rather than the bland Ubi-style open-world map checklist that you might expect to be the sane complaint.
oh. going through their profile certainly suggests that way. it’s weird to call that “diverse IP”… but weird is pretty on brand for that crowd i guess.
I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.
Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.
Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.
It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.
I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.
If it’s that they’re gonna change something in the game, I doubt it’s gonna be related to the (black) main character. I can’t imagine it would be an easy fix to fully replace him with a different character at this point.
If people really find it such a big deal I think best they could do is to let people choose their own main male character, like Odyssey and Valhalla.
Ya. What I have seen is mainly related to Ubisoft saying the game is history accurate but it is not at all that. Also they used some stolen / AI generated assets when promoting the game. Also it is disrespectful to have a foreigner going around killing Japanese.
Inaccuracies, both historical and caused by a general lack of research. Stolen assets that they have no right to use, some of which could be considered culturally insensitive. Differences in the English and Japanese “apology” letter which make it seem like they’re disregarding the Japanese, or attempting to turn the rest of the world against them. General lack of polish.
From what I understand he is not THE main character he is one of the two main characters.
It would be impossible to replace him at this point in the development and other than the super hard-core racists I don’t think anyone wants that at all.
Same here. Loved the setting and style, and the story and characters were admirably close to (the good) 3rd-person bioware stuff.
I don’t usually pay full price for games, but I was thinking of buying Greedfall 2 near release to support what they do. This puts a real taint on things.
I quite enjoy the amount of details going into games like this, same with Baldur’s Gate 3 being so insanely detailed. It really shows the passion of the developers for the games they’re working on.
There are so many more alternative and simpler role-playing games out there that are more straight to the point, like Elder Scrolls.
I like detail but I’m not the play fallout on survival mode kind and this game was very much a survival mode type. I like medieval games but that one was a bit much for me. Baldur’s Gate I skipped just cause I can’t with turn based fighting in. 2024
Well like I said, there are a lot of alternative games out there that are suited to a more casual crowd. It’s good that developers still make games like Kingdom Come and Baldur’s Gate to provide for players looking for more depth, immersive and engaging content.
Also, turn-based games are timeless, just like many other genres that have been around for 30+ years. I know a bunch of people that would never touched these kind of games and got completely hooked on BG3 anyway. Even myself that was never really into these kind of RPGs and tried Divinity games before, BG3 was absolutely stellar. It’s one of those games that set a new standard many others could learn from these days.
I believe it is accurate to say rtwp gameplay came before turn based and that turn based RPGs aren’t even that old in the grand scheme of video games. I know it’s not for everyone but for me personally if it isn’t turn based im way less interested. I’m too old for twitch based gameplay and rtwp feels tedious
Thai article reminded me to buy (and hopefully beat) KCD before KCDII comes out in Feb 2025.
On the Xbox store, the DLC bundle (no game) was normally $20, but 75% off so it was only $5. The game+DLC bundle was normally $40, but it was 90% off so it was only $4. Easy choice, even if I already had the game and no DLC
It’s such a great game. I will say though, the woman’s lot DLC that gets started when you ask Theresa about the story is a bit of a slog… it’s an alright story but I’d definitely make a save before starting it if you’re not a fan of its flow and tediousness lol
I wonder what will happen with Choice. Without it I’ll be down to a VPN and one other subscription (Peacock for wrestling for the curious). My VPN (PIA, you curious people) was bought out by a Chinese company if I remember correctly, and just recently announced a price increase. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it’s not a direction I enjoy, so I’m already rethinking that.
I digress, I know Humble of old already died, but it will be a sad day to see it gone for good.
Yeah, doesn't bode well. Turned into your typical greedy company with the IGN buyout, as much as they could within the limits of keeping old charirty values.
If you know your way around a Linux terminal, or can follow simple terminal instructions, I always recommend folks host their own OpenVPN server. $5/month for a digital ocean instance and now I never have to worry about some provider hiking my VPN prices or snooping on my traffic.
I was already planning on moving over to Linux, and can get around enough. This is amazing info, as I’ve moved more into self hosting and didn’t even realize that was an option. Definitely something to look into once I find a permanent residence. Thank you!
You are awesome friend! It won’t be anytime soon. We lost our place to a fire and are getting by in motels for now. Everyone survived and a lot more than expected was salvageable, so we keep moving forward.
At some point I’ll throw my old parts together into a Linux server. I was just hosting everything on my main rig, which obviously is not ideal. I’ve seen a bit of discussion on both sides of docker, do you have any input one way or the other?
Ah, I’ve generally run my VPN primary exit node in a public cloud infrastructure host like Digital Ocean or AWS in order to provide a separate public IP from the rest of my stuff, and not give out my home IP to public Wi-Fi and such.
I like docker, as long as you use a good orchestration tool it’s a good way to declaratively define what should be running on your server, using a compose file or similar. There are a lot of benefits to the overhead of learning it, including running multiple instances of the same service on one machine without conflicts, and the ability to force your hosted apps to store all of their data in nice neat packages you can easily back up with something like Duplicity or Volumerize.
I actually run my containers on a small kubernetes cluster using VMs running k3s atop Proxmox, with persistence handled by a hyperconverged ceph cluster. All probably very overkill but it’s fun to play with and performs incredibly. Most folks can get away with a single server running containers with simple docker compose.
Humble used to be an event that celebrated and showcased indie developers while at the same time raising many millions for charities. Then IGN bought it and rapidly enshittified it into a bog-standard, for-profit corporate enterprise like any other, and I’ll never forgive them for it.
Do they even give any of the profits to charity any more? If they do, I bet they only keep it around to take advantage of the tax writeoffs.
Humble bundle does still give to charity. The default they give is usually extremely low but on bundles you can adjust the sliders though they’ve now hidden it underneath the purchase button.
That’s more than keeping the lights on money, as the old humble was doing that just fine without any mandatory amount. Even taking into account taht they want to pay off their fresh purchase, IGN is gouging.
It doesnt help either that the charity slider is always set to a minimum now. It used to be evenly weighted, but now it’s weighted about 45%/45% IGN and the vendor, with maybe 10% to the charity by defualt. You have to click through a hidden menu to fix it.
And they made it such a pain in the ass when you adjust the sliders to maximize the charitable donation and then the cut for the content provider. Like, let me just put in amounts so I can max out the charity donation, minimize the payment to Humble, and give the rest to the content provider.
humble games is a game publisher, only connected to humble bundle through corporate ownership. most games in humble bundles aren’t published by humble games, and most games published by humble games don’t end up in humble bundles
insider-gaming.com
Aktywne