Personally, I’m not a fan of this trend that’s been semi-standard since at least Halo: Reach. The whole silent protagonist thing really takes me out of the game; I would much rather hear any voice for my character.
Contrast this with, say, Cyberpunk 2077 where the main character talks quite a bit. This makes me feel way more like a real person in the game world.
I don’t really want to hear my character talk in an RPG where I am making the character and supposedly have my own background, look and sound in mind and am the one selecting what that character says. Unless if they have tons of different voices, like old Bioware RPGs did, I would prefer to just read it myself and give whatever voice I want. It immerses me in the game much more, where I feel like the character I am playing because I am given opportunity to say the dialogue choices my self.
I think it all depends on what sort of game you have, specifically if it is story driven or immersion/exploration driven.
Halo Reach is story driven and would have absolutely benefitted from a voice. Mass Effect was primarily story driven and the voiced protag worked great.
Fallout 4 is the opposite and a silent protag would have been better as silent, like in Fallout 3 or Elder Scrolls games.
Frankly, YoshiP’s comments have only ever made me feel like he’s some out-of-touch edgelord, so this doesn’t surprise me.
I avoid his stuff like the plague since he feels diversity (apparently slavery as well, lol) is nothing more than window dressing as opposed to a fact of life & history.
Enjoy the disappointing sales Square! I know you lost at least one Final Fantasy fan with this clown at the helm.
I feel like the “disappointing sales” are more on SE than anything else, though. Like, they decided to only release on PS5 despite initially saying it would be PS5 and PC (and I’m just going to be charitable and ignore YoshiP telling someone asking about the PC release to just get a PS5, when PS5s were still damn near impossible to get in Japan), and even though PS5s had a really small install base (especially here in Japan - PS5s have recently become readily available, and even then, stock is limited - the electronics store near me is so completely out of stock of the digital version that they took down the display for that version and only have the disc drive version for sale).
I feel like SE has been making a lot of missteps lately.
And I’m not even going to touch the mess that is YoshiP’s reasoning for why his fantasy Europe was so dang un-melanated. That is a whole other issue. I’m just gonna say that as a non-white American living in Japan, a lot of folks in Japan have a very limited view of what an 欧米人 (European and American) is.
Unlike OP I have played the game and have to say I diaagree completely with the article. You see the deeper implications of the slavery wherever you go. Sure the violence is the biggest factor but so many side quests show the emotional toll the slavery has on the people. Even just walking in those areas is gut wrenching. I dont know how a final fantasy could portray it better. It is hard to handle already.
You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I'm certainly not doing that work.
You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That's a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.
I can personally say this is the second time you've posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven't even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don't even have the ability to evaluate?
I post things I think people can talk about, even if I can’t actively take part in it. That’s it.
And if you don’t like what I post, you are more than welcome to block me - I actively encourage people blocking folks they don’t like. Please, feel free.
I've already said that I appreciate your efforts. I'm not going to block you, your work is valuable. I'm just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn't act surprised. If you really don't care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on "OP" to be the original author of the article, not you.
Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.
Please block me. I’d block you (actually, I will anyway), but blocking on kbin is busted and means you would still see and be able to comment on my posts. Hopefully they’ll fix that.
I admit, not having a PS5 I haven’t played FFXVI yet, but sometimes these things are world building around a more personal story which is what I understand the game to be from other people talking about it, just because something features in a world, doesn’t mean it needs to be further explored if that’s not the story that’s been written. Just because thats am element that interests Kotaku writers more due to there nationality and politics, doesn’t mean it was the story the writers set out to tell.
Thing is, and I haven’t played it either, but I know this from conversations I’ve seen about it, your character is a slave. Or, rather, is from the caste of people that is enslaved because they have magic. That means it’s something that can’t just be background, because it quite literally influences how everyone in the world interacts with Clive.
There was a really good Jimquisition on how being a “bearer” is treated in the world, and how SE just kind of overdid it with a lack of subtlety (jump to about the 4 minute mark to start, because there’s a lot of faff at the beginning before the video starts talking about the game). https://youtu.be/sgjqXTvHaLk?si=9EQqqsA4x2HEOmqc
Yeah, I did see Steph Stirling’s video and I do get the arguments, but personally I don’t agree that just because it’s an element in the world building and the backstory of the main character it has to be a driving element of the plot.
Look at it like X-Men, being feared and hunted by humanity is sort of X-Men lore, but it isn’t the driving force of every story. Sometimes they’re just off having adventures in space or whatever.
See, this is why I wish this game wasn’t currently PS5 exclusive and had come out on PC like they originally planned. I can’t say what story it seems like they wanted to tell just because unless I want to watch someone else play it, I can’t know. I couldn’t even read much of the article because I didn’t want to get too far into spoiler territory. It’s very frustrating because this seems like an interesting discussion to be had.
Then maybe we who haven’t played the game shouldn’t be having opinions on some aspects of it, because context matters and we lack context on the whole plot.
I didn’t say you had a strong opinion either. In any case, having any sort of slavery present in a “medieval-esque” game doesn’t sound too weird to me. From the promotional material it seems like the game is about fights between countries and some eikons/primals/titans and the characters channel the fight of those primals though them?
The whole concept of primals is linked to slavery by the very simple notion that once the character is touched by their mana, it becomes a slave to them. This is how it has worked in all the FF games I have played.
IDK, complaining about the game having aspects of slavery but not addressing them seems a weak complaint to me when probably the game was never about the thing, the thing just being a setting. And I’m not against the thing being just a minor setting, not every game must either make t their focus or make it not exist.
Again, I have not played through it so I’m not gonna say if their implementation is correct or not. All I’m gonna say is that Americans really focus so god damn much in the slavery topic, it’s like unless it’s properly addressed it’s some kind of taboo in media.
You sat there and said I shouldn’t have an opinion because I haven’t played, when you haven’t played either but get to have a strong opinion on it plus eye roll at Americans. My only opinion is, “eh, seems like they whiffed it instead of going into what they introduced,” and that’s based on a review I saw by a Brit. 🤨
While I personally have no opinions on FFXVI, I find that such a consumeristic stance, that the only valid way to form an opinion is by (buying and) playing/watching/using it themselves. Because if so, how can anyone be meaningfully opposed to a product or a piece of media? Seems a little strange if even people who are critical of something are supposed to buy it.
Sure they may have no firsthand impressions, but they might make their minds from a variety of reviews, critiques and discussions around it.
Your character is not a slave. (Spoilers limited to promotional materials) Player character is the oldest son of the ruler of one of the major countries in the game world, so a prince. Ability to wield (very specific) magic is quickly explained that some of the nobles of that family can do. He somewhat is a slave at some point, but this is a very brief story moment (tbf at the very beginning, you meet your character as a slave before he goes into childhood memory where he is a prince). When relevant, NPCs do interact with character as with slave, but its rarely relevant. So it is very much a background theme, even if a major one.
That’s why the phrasing was “from the caste of people” in the clarification. It was just a cultural difference: his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t.
When he is briefly enslaved, it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to, it’s because he was that kind of person and simply hadn’t been treated that way before.
his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t
Not the point of the story, when NPCs get to know who the character is theirs opinion changes
it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to
That is actually almost what happened. If he was not a mage, that story point would change little.
The “mages are slaves” thing is more akin to FF6’s “there is no magic in this world”, like it is a somewhat big deal that Terra is mage, but game doesn’t spend much time there since it is not a point.
Art is “political.” It’s not being “made political” if the game brings up a heavy topic and then blinks. The game made itself “political” by making slavery an element of the world.
If you don’t want to engage with political issues, don’t bring up political topics. Using oppression for flavor text instead of confronting it as a major issue in your story is tacky. Star Wars suffers from the same problem.
I don't know how a Final Fantasy game of all things is not going to be political. I don't think I have played a single one that wasn't profoundly political. They are always dealing with war, oppression, exploitation, power struggles and often use metaphors for other issues.
The beloved Final Fantasy 7 is blatant with its environmentalist and anti-corporate themes. All the Ivalice games (FF12, FFT and Vagrant Story) pretty much breathe politics, and while I didn't go too far into Final Fantasy 14, that also seemed pretty political.
I’ve not played enough of the other FF games since 7 to say with certainty, but FF7,12,14, and 15 were extremely explicit political dramas. That was their entire plots
“…and a mouse and keyboard and an android phone to access cloud services, along with an entourage of fellow hackers that are mostly still at large all over the world” doesn’t have the same ring to it, I guess.
Should be an alt-evo for sinistea imo. The convergent pokemon evolution idea works for some pokécological niches, but for a spirit inhabiting tea vessels, it seems oddly specific for two distinct species.
My issue with all of this is thus, and the article touched on it a bit:
Gamers don’t give a shit if games are buggy. Actually, we only really want it to be a baseline level of playable. And even then, we’ll probably suffer through a lot. What we want is a fun game.
In fact, I don’t actually think most of us give a particular shit about micro transactions or battle passes other than that they tend to be accompanied by games that are abjectly less fun without them. I wouldn’t have batter an eye if baldurs gate has a cosmetic store because what I want has nothing to do with that.
I want to play games that are fun. That’s the bottom line. Baldurs gate is incredible because it’s good. I would have paid more for it than I did. I would have suffered through micro transactions and battle passes if I had to. Because I don’t give a shit about that.
I’m just tired of games releasing and not being fun.
I mean one studio makes a great game and a bunch of other studios make shitty games… then gamers like the game which is better and want more games to be like that. Traditionally that’s called market forces, not a weapon.
Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.
What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.
Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.
That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.
Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.
It’s the same bullshit as return2office, management has its interests which include armies of fungible resources they can track effectively via closure velocity.
It’s why big organizations are less efficient but they’re what we have because of marketing inertia (people assume big companies produce better product).
Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.
As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.
I personally like the early access model. You get the choice to play the game now, as-is, or wait for the developers to call it finished. Last Epoch is a great example. In its current state, it is absolutely not finished. It still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment, though, and I expect I’ll get hundreds more when I revisit it again when it’s officially launched.
The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.
it’s good enough so when I encounter glitches I simply laugh and move on.
some of the glitches I’ve encountered so far:
animated door(or wall) loop back to closed “frame” but the collision is already moved away so you can walk through the door(or wall)
ranged attack/spell sometimes doesn’t calculate the path correctly when you hover over the target, so you have to manually move yourself and try again. Some times the path blocked calculation is wrong and you could waste spells.(especially for big enough creatures)
animation glitches during conversation. or right after loading.(mostly on NPCs.)
some stuff looks reachable but due to path finding for char to “get it” it becomes unreachable. (sometimes can use mage hand to get around this if said stuff is light and not fragile.)
The only bug I’ve encountered which bothers me is the one where a PC (normally Laezel for me) gets stuck in cinematic mode and their controls get locked out until I reload.
There’s one huge bug in Act 2 where enemies in one really hard battle can shoot you through the floor. They know about it and working on it, but that one damn near killed two of my party members. There was no where you could position yourself where they couldn’t shoot to at you through the floor.
Today there is a update drop so hopefully it got fixed. I probably still have a couple region to clean up before Act2. (judging from the revealed map area. )
kotaku.com
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