Nobody normal complains about politics in games, what people complain about is poor writing and US cultural idiosyncratic defaultism in games. Perhaps if ESA members hadn’t laid off the lion’s share of adult writers in the room to hire cheap, overwhelmingly ignorant, uneducated and straight out of college dev teams with a superiority complex, we could get good narratives. There’s a reason why everyone and their mothers keeps harping about indie games now, that’s where the laid off talent went, they make independent games now. But it’s cheaper to take “journos” to Disneyland than keeping a roster of devs with 10+ years experience. In the past, there was already a backlash on journos for their habitual prostitution to the companies they cover but that message was quickly erased in favour of “gAmErS aRe MiSoGyNiStIc”. Now, most traditional game news outlets are owned by a handful of holding companies, and most of their articles are AI generated drivel by, you guessed it, people not holding journalism degrees. Gaming journalism has become the off ramp of untalented and incompetent language/social science majors who are too inept to actually find a job in their field. That’s why we get this level of shitty journalism, because technically, they really don’t know what being a journalist is, from the ethics standards to the reporting without inserting personal bias. No self respecting journalist chooses covering hatsune miko’s latest release when there are so many conflicts in the world that need covering, so we get Felicity, Mars and Bruno, English major extraordinaires, who end up on a dead end career with wages capping at below 40k pounds per anum that justify their lack of journalistic ethics by “It’s the perk of the profession since we don’t get well paid”.
There were more articles covering game character sexuality than the mass lay offs of the last two years that left entire families without sustenance. Then people are surprised that orange nazi cheeto gets elected by the dumb yanks? The megaphone holders for social issues have room temp level IQ. When was the last time that a “game journo” or major dev from a AAA outlet seriously addressed relevant issues like social inequality or poverty? Do yourself a favour and compare the google interest in the topics “transgender”, “hunger”, “unionization” and “lay offs” and tell me that it isn’t by design that an issue that affects an infinitesimally small percentage of the population has so much air time in comparison to an ongoing genocide and hunger crisis in the global south. I guess rich white teen problems are more serious than brown people dying. The bourgeois left has set back the class struggle for 100 years. Enjoy the hard right turn of modern western society.
Edit: Jason Schreier is a good example of how to conduct yourself, he mostly keeps his private ideas to his social media but his work focuses on more relevant issues to a majority of the population.
Both GPT4 and Gemini estimate a 3:2 ratio between articles addressing video game character sexuality and those addressing lay offs and unionization in the games industry.
I won’t continue this discussion because “Schreier’s politics come out in his writing as well as social media. The drum he’s been beating for a long time has been about labor and unionizing.” is basically what I wrote on Schreier using more words, which indicates you’re more interested in being a confrontational than engaging in an honest discussion on the topic. Enjoy the Cheeto for 4y.
If you want to talk about an honest discussion, consider the sample set you plugged into your search. You didn’t go through two years of articles on VGC or GameSpot. You plugged indiscriminate search criteria into an AI. We just had a discussion a few days ago about how mainstream media is not covering major gaming news, but if you’re reading gaming news outlets, it’s been layoffs for the past two years dominating the news. Gaming news outlets would have very little reason to ever use the word “hunger”, for instance, and “transgender” would apply to far more articles than those about fictional characters.
Ai, google trends in english, what else does one need? Even after I gave precise google trends inputs so that the observations are reproducible? Your reply proves my point yet again. Peace.
I see you have a 10 days old account. I can’t imagine why you had to create a new one… This one won’t last long, ironically you can go to r/gamergate and feel accepted.
Yes yes, whatever illusion you created in your head to make me some kind of monstrous being because I dared question the ubiquitous distortion of the class message in favour of bourgeoisie invented flags. I’m also the boogey man on my free time. It’s funny, all the replies I got fit just in line with the ones I’d get in r/conservative every time I shared climate change evidence.
But of course you’re DARED question the distortion of the class message… By complaining about diversity in video games…?
The funny thing is how everything you said so far would fit in a conservative forum, reddit or otherwise. It seems that’s where you have you go to find people agreeing with you. Should make you think (but it won’t)
You must be salty, coming back two days after. Did you practice the perfect answer in the mirror?
At least now it’s not ChatGPT! Anyway, I’m sure Bernie is not going to be bitching about too many blacks and gays in videogames (he’s not an incel after all), so I’ll assume this is yet another non argument.
What point have you raised? You bitched that there is too much diversity in games and used an LLM as proof. You mentioned a few games that had failed… So? Concord failed when overwatch was a success, with much more diversity. Hades, Persona, final fantasy rebirth, Hogwarts legacy … Those are the games I played in the past few months with much more diversity than your examples, and successful. The likes of you claimed those games were doooooooooomed and then proceeded to shut up when people played them.
Then started telling that those who disagree with you sound like redditors and conservatives and send a Sanders video. How can you complain about red herrings if everything you do is rant and go on tangents?
You’re also the one who somehow couldn’t shake this conversation for your brain and had to come back. If that’s not a sad fucking life, I don’t know what is. What a sad, miserable existence you have you have, really.
I can’t say I enjoyed this conversation even though at least I could laugh at you a bit.
The original comment is still available. At no point did I complain about diversity in games, I complained about incompetence in games and lauded indie games. I see you’re having a Quixotic moment and are arguing with a figment of your imagination. In fact, one could argue my point is the exact opposite, clumsy amateurish depictions of diversity do not do the importance of the topic justice. I understand not everyone can be as talented as Naughty Dog (Amy Henning is the GOAT) but at least something passable would be desirable. Keep fighting windmills.
I’d even consider the possibility he’s right, but not for reasons that support his argument.
Games and media present transgender and minority groups in an unobtrusive way, and bigots create 17 articles complaining about their basic inclusion for the sake of “DEI”.
No, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Politics are good in games when done right, but they can also be nothing more than a distraction when the narrative has huge errors or lacks and depth in general.
It’s the concept of pushing real world politics in games that is the problem.
Sometimes they can overlap, but they needn’t to. Some things are just obviously pushing the agendas of developers, instead of making it feel like a legit part of the game universe.
Not just in games, but often times the point of the story’s fake politics is to be a parable for real politics. But that’s also the fun of it, even if you disagree with the story’s intended message.
Elves being racist towards dwarves is acceptable in a game, but white humans being racist towards hispanic humans is “pushing agendas”?
I fault Bioware for a lot of things, but failing to invent a fantasy equivalent of the concept of gender is not one of them. Not everything needs to be moved to an otherworldly analogy just to avoid hurting the feelings of bigots.
This isn’t right either. Inserting politics into anything serves that that up for discourse, and getting people discussing and thinking critically about a topic is a fantastic achievement for any medium that delves into the subject.
It’s when partisan messages about politics are inserted into a game that poses problems. Instead, video games should explore as many takes on an issue as capable in service to the story being told. Wow, it’s terrible that the horned people are aholes to the perfectly normal looking people, but how did that come to be? Is there any historical precedent where the shoe was on the other foot? I think of Jews and how 70 years ago they were facing extermination at the hands of Germans find themselves now in the position of the exterminator. How did that happen? That’s great material for exploring politics in games, to me.
I understand that half of the world is currently healing psychological trauma from the US election results but Atlus has been commenting on politics in their games for much longer.
Ubisoft games have such a weird “design by committee” feel to it. Like they poll the internet every few weeks and make decisions off of that. New hot game has battle pass? WE HAVE BATTLE PASS.
They also seem to follow a checklist of mediocrity. Every game needs a dozen collectable items. Every game needs to have the same l types of quests that GTA3 had. Every game has to have a massive open world. Every game needs a online component and live service. Every game needs a incredible hook, which then they Marvel-safe it to avoid offending online babies.
Their games come off with 7/10 energy. Ubisoft games don’t move the needle. They’re pretty adequate as a game. But when I have thousands of games to choose from every year… Ill pass.
They CAN still be fun. General fact of the matter is that the games we find fun aren’t always necessarily innovating much. Sometimes it’s just a comfortable routine.
Absolutely not going to fault anyone that finds their games boring though.
I played the Division 2, Ac Valhalla and FarCry 6 for 100+ hours. They helped me during the worse times of the pandemic.
But if I was talking to friends or making recommendations, we’d be taking about games that are better than that. The Elden Rings or the Ghost of Tsushima
I think the problem is that they use the same open world formula that they started, but others have taken and improved it and they haven’t kept up with the times. Shadow of Mordor/war scratch the same itsch as assassin’s creed with more interesting mechanics. Those aren’t even new games at this point. Horizon zero dawn and forbidden West offer a more action focused experience with a better open world, again not super modern games.
It’s like Bethesda, they are still putting out games that are straight from 2010.
It seems like to me some of their games simply just need another two months in the oven.
There were lots of little bugs in Star Wars Outlaws, but I found that game to be really fun, and largely pretty solid. But then they dropped updates a month out or so that fixed a lot of those little bugs. I wonder if they had just had that extra month to polish it up if it’d have gotten slammed as hard. People may still have wanted different things storywise or whatever, but on a technical level just one extra month could have helped.
Polish isn’t going to help change the Ubisoft reputation of churning same looking games filled with massive bloaty copy-paste open worlds where you do generic fetch quests, collect hundreds of feathers, and watch watered down PG-13 storytelling that’s tamer than a Marvel movie.
Outlaws looked great, and had you go to interesting locations, and fly in space. There were no towers to open up maps. The outlaw system wasn’t super amazing in the end, but it didn’t detract from anything.
I don’t disagree it has a reputation, but Outlaws was a fun break from the super boring Assassin’s Creed games of late.
It will over time. They will notice that sales are going downhill so (hopefully) they will start to listen to community complains, maybe also firing some staff until that point because of “financial struggle”.
If sales will stay the same (or be even better) then they will not try to change anything because “if it works, don’t fix it”
And I’ll say it again, dumb “quotation” because it only referred to convincing people to try Ubisoft+; which is very explicitly a game rental system.
(Setting aside the change going in through California law where ALL retailers must stop referring to sales as ownership. That affects Assassin’s Creed just as much as your next indie Roguelike)
You don’t even need to go sailing, you can just stop at not buying their games. Ubisoft has not put out any game I’d really consider a must-play in over a decade. The last interesting Ubisoft open-world game was Black Flag in 2013. Even if you’re an absolute glutton for open-world designed by committee slop, Sony basically ate Ubisoft’s lunch with Ghosts of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spiderman. Pirate those instead.
Assassins creed has been consistently disappointing me since Black Flag.
AC2 used to be my favourite game and the modern titles are unrecognisable. They’re all just a bunch of generic, drawn out, mass appeal, play it safe bollocks.
Which is not a really good criticism in my opnion. It still had a lot of the core elements of AC, they just tried some new things. And a lot of it worked out.
I enjoyed Origins, Odyssey just felt so… empty. I couldn’t bring myself to do the post-game content I was so bored with it. I got to the Medusa and juat… stopped. Have no desire to go back to it.
I enjoyed Origins as well. To me Odyssey was a more refined version of Origins. Better exploration, combat, etc. Odyssey focused more on exploration which is maybe why you felt it was more empty? I enjoyed it personally but it’s definitely a preference thing.
There was definitely more exploration but all the “dungeons” were just cookie cutter copy/paste sections from what I remember, Origins at least had some unique puzzles
As in you didn’t like Black Flag, or that was the last one you did? I’m currently replaying it for the first time since it came out and it’s alright so far. I completely forgot everything from the story
The most upsetting thing is that they threw out anything resembling a decent narrative to draw out the series with diminishing returns. We never got closure on the templars and modern storylines are ignored now. We could have had closure and then just had everything in animus after.
It kinda bothers me that they didn’t at least go all in with switching up the story.
At this point the whole “assassin’s creed” part kinda holds the narrative and story back, I think they should just drop it entirely and have each game be its own thing.
I loved the assassin thing when I was 12, but it’s kinda cringe now.
OK, I personally think 1404 with the interesting and challenging campaign including the Venice dlc was the top, afterwards I think 1800 is the next best. My most controversial opinion is that both 2070 and 2205 where good and well made games, with some flaws of course but that doesn’t mean its bad. Shure some disliked the setting and I was septic as well.
Yeah a setting change like that was very risky, but the next is also going to be very interesting going into the opposid direction.
I quite like SciFi so the setting itself wasn’t a problem for me. 1800 goes into the steampunk direction, would appreciate a full on Steampunk Anno. And a Dieselpunk version would be cool as well.
Yea, I mean Watchdogs 2, The Division, Steep, I know some friends loved For Honor and R6: Siege is amazing (idk how the game looks today tho with all the updates they made).
Seems people tend to see ubisoft as AC and FarCry only.
All of those games you just picked are quite old, watchdogs 2 came out in 2016, these games no longer are the ubishit standard, they are far above it. Plus Ubispft doesn’t make sequels to those games anymore, for whatever reason.
I’ve watched huge vtubers play it multiple times and every single time the game ends early from a crash. Or the game accidentally bankrupts a player. It’s bad publicity
And the letters you would get from “me” would be talking about how horrible life is outside of China, how much I love the CCP and how I enjoy spending my time reciting the “Ten affirmations, Fourteen commitments and Thirteen achievements”.
Origins was such a boring game. Hackneyed, utterly predictible plot, graphics that looked like the previous generation. There wasn’t really much there to like, and then the next games were worse.
I gotta agree, I tried 4 or 5 times and just never got into it. Doesn’t help that I’m not great at party RPGs, but yeah the story was slow and I remember being unimpressed with the dialogue options… It always felt like you were kinda pushed towards and inevitable outcome rather than really influencing things.
I might be biased as Origins was my first cRPG other than KotOR, but I still love playing through it. Just a real solid high fantasy story thats a touch grittier than you’d expect.
she is canonically one of the most bratty, self serving characters in the series.
she acts like she’s hot shit until her plans go wrong, then she cowers and freaks out. she’s absolutely obsessed with getting her way. she tries to play like emotions are weakness, then instantly caves to her own because if its her emotions its different somehow. “Oh no the consequences of my actions?!”
Morrigan isn’t even as cool as Flemeth was. She’s a shitty power-grabbing dick who stomps her feet when she doesn’t get what she wants and behaves like everyone should worship the ground she walks on.
how tf is she the greatest RPG companion of all time, exactly? she’s not even a great companion in Origins.
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