I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
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”
Didn’t even know this existed, sounded like another case of “We made a game and didn’t do any marketing for it, made absolutely no effort to let anyone know this even existed. I guess this means this genre and IP are worthless.”
At this point that’s the video game equivalent of “We only opened our movie in like 3 towns for two weekends despite not being an indie studio, and somehow that didn’t sell gangbusters, guess the movie is crap.”
This is one of many reasons “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” is required gaming. One of the stages in the game is a concentration camp, you’re playing as the Nazi doctor who tortures people with unethical experiments. Your goal to win the stage is to realize the horrors of what you’ve done, accept your role in it, try to make amends, and ultimately agree to die as there is no apology for what you’ve done.
And yes, we do see mass graves and one of your first tasks is choosing to either sever a child’s spine or cancel the procedure. There is no gorey gruesome over the top scene, you just choose to do it, you lose “Spiritual Health”, and the child complains he cannot walk or feel his legs later whilst the game comments that the surgery had no purpose outside of mutilating the patient.
You can torture them further and learn nothing, but that’s how you lose… And again, there are no scenes of you gibbing jewish prisoners like they’re doom enemies. Getting to kill people in horrible ways is a reward in games, here, you get none of your “blood porn”, just the horrors of war.
If this doesn’t convince you “Holocaust = Bad”, you’re probably a Nazi.
Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now…...
[alt text: text that says, “When your girlfriend says, ‘it’s either me or runescape’”. Below the text is a stock photo of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a couch and looking away from each other. Between them, there is a floating screenshot from the crafting menu in Runescape, and the cursor is...
People say Rockstar just “Isn’t a rockstar anymore”
No, this is pretty much how I expect from washed up rockstars who’ve sold out and only care about reliving the glory days. Constantly shouting “Don’t you know who I am?” when anyone gives them any grief.
Reminder: Jack Black broke up Tenacious D to try to save this thing
and…
“Oh, no see, you’re mad, but you see this version of the franchise isn’t for you. It’s for a new crowd that was alienated by the previous version and you need to be nice and let them have their…”
Shut the fuck up, if it’s a version of a thing made for people who are defined by not liking the thing, it’s not going to get the other crowd to like the thing, it’s just going to piss off the people who do like it…
He got a lot of money to be Bowser in a movie that made a lot of money, desperate film makers wanting to get in on the “Video Game Movie” trend thinking it’s the next “Super Hero Movie!” trend hire Jack Black thinking he’s the sole reason for Mario’s successful movie and not just a component of it.
…and Jack Black’s just taking the check and not correcting them.
Is a common line the media pulls out when the product is failing or have poor reception. Don’t take responsibiliy for the company fucking up, that implies the company is capable of doing wrong. Just shame fans for liking a property and wanted to see it respected. Call them bigots and say the problem is the thing they like is bigoted!
It’s… absolute bullshit.
Sadly it works, people who aren’t well-informed think of the fans of X are just assholes and the new thing is good actually…
It also doesn’t work because the people who aren’t well informed weren’t fans of X, so they’re not seeing/playing the new X thing…
Meaning I guess the The New X thing wasn’t really for anybody… “Literally no one” is a strange demographic to market it to.
See: Skullgirls censoring their game in order to “appeal to a wider demographic”, outlets claiming Skullgirl fans who hate the changes are “secretly pedophiles”, aaaaand… Now the game has a dwindling player count, the Steam forums are reduced to asking when the game will be fixed, and the original creator who was not involved with the censorship has a defamation lawsuit going because a lot of people called him a diddler…
It also works the other way around, when something the big corporations DON’T want to be popular is, just slander it as bigoted
See Also: That time Cuphead fans shat on a game journalist for not being able to clear an overly easy tutorial, so the oulet he worked for tried to save his street cred by… claiming Cuphead was racist and a front for antisemitism… Which the Cuphead fanbase just kinda laughed at because it’s an asinine claim.
It really sucks because as somewhat of a social justice activist and a gamer, well… “Clowns to the right of me, Jokers to the left of me…”
Sidenote: Can we stop the trend of neutering female characters? Seriously bought a fucking Avengers comic the other day (I mostly read Sonic, but I’ll pick up the occasional Marvel from time to time if I think the story looks interst) and I didn’t realize till after I paid for it that the “Thor” on the cover was actually Captain Marvel… all I saw at first was “Blonde, Masculine Face, Masculine Build. I guess that’s a new Thor costume? I dunno, don’t keep up with it.”
Got to reading it in the car and realized “Oh shit, that’s actually Captain Marvel. Sorry about that Carol.”, this didn’t impede my enjoyment of the book mind you. I like Captain Marvel and Thor, so it’s all good…
Look she doesn’t need to pull a Power Girl and have tits the size of her head hanging out of her costume, but I feel like the de-sexualization of female characters has gone far beyond combatting the male gaze and is now reaching the “Dear God, can’t let people see her ankles!” stage, which is actually more sexist than keeping the ridiculous chain mail bikinis in the first place, as it implies that traits we consider feminine are inherently sinful and should be hidden from view.
I mean, I know the example I used was a comic, but this shit is happening in games too. I’m a woman and a gamer, games are my power fantasy, me being highly attractive is PART of my power fantasy. Stop making me not hot damn it!
Sorry it’s just… Kotaku’s complacent for creating the environment this happened in, and we’re talking about Kotaku so I felt like airing a grievance of mine.
So, people who would have no interest in seeing the world of Borederlands adapted to a new medium?
“Hey guys, wanna buy my new Indiana Jones game? It’s meant for people who don’t like Indiana Jones, or games for that matter… What no? Why not”
(Note: The new Jones game actually looks good, it was just the first IP to come to mind)
These people do realize that the Mario movie had an entire segment dedicated to Mario Kart, which is like… the most popular Switch Game right? And the Sonic movies stayed true to the characters and had tons of little easter eggs for Sonic fans, even had some comic book tie-ins for the movie?
Just saying, when you cater to fans, fans will buy a product and show it to their friends and family saying “Oh hey, you know I’m a big fan of X. Well this is a good entry point for it if you wanna see what it’s like.”
Seriously I got a friend of mine who “Was too old for video games when Sonic came out” but had “Seen some fanart here and there he enjoyed” (I’m a furry, inter-generational friendships are kinda normal in that fanbase), but he saw the Sonic movie on my recommendation and it had him asking me for recommendations… Before I knew it he had purchased Sonic Adventure DX on Steam to learn more about Tails and Knuckles’ characters to get ready for the second movie, and Sonic Generations as well to get a quick run through of the hedgehog’s history in general.
This man is a Catholic dad who’s always busy with work, his kid, and his faith, but he found the time to love that Hedgehog, because they made a good movie that catered to fans. (Yes, Christians can be furries, the Christian Fur demographic is actually pretty big. Fun story, the fanart he’d been talking about was a comic about Tails becoming a Priest and later trying to help Sonic stave off Chili Dogs for Lent)
What I’m saying is, if you’re good to your fans, they’ll be good to you, and if people see a happy crowd they’ll want to join that happy crowd. Love makes the world go rounder than money does, and as a chubby chaser I do like round things… I forgot the point I was making as now I just have the Queen song “Fat-Bottomed Girls” stuck in my head.
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
Or worse… you bought the DLC and had no idea what was going on because you’re a newer player and they deleted the story that this DLC is a follow up.too…
How about you re-release your older games on platforms I’m willing to pay for, ones that aren’t tied to an arbitrary subscription service or apart of a digital storefront that can go down at any time?
There really needs to be “Use it or lose it” system when it comes to intellectual property.
Not selling Manhunt 2 anywhere? Can’t bitch when I find a cracked copy…
I’m just kidding, Rockstar doesn’t because they realize they’re not losing money on a product they literally don’t sell or even acknowledge that often.
Piracy is not a crime, it is the preservation of art.
I’m not saying keep it cis-only, I apologize if that’s implied, pronoun selection is fine and I don’t have a problem with that. My issue is if we’re not going to offer more options than simply two body types, both based on super idealized and gender stereotyped versions of the male and female form… Can we have a less awkward thing to call it than “Body Type A/Body Type B”?
I definitely have to say, Body Type A/Body Type B definitely feels like a groan-worthy growing pain that will be ironed out sooner or later. It’s just disappointing that we have to resort to such awkward terms that mislead players about how much variety across the gender spectrum is actually being offered. It almost feels like a vegan menu that still heavily uses animal byprdouct.
This almost makes me want to buy Starfield to support a proper way to revamp gender selection, but it’s going to need the same amount of work that FO76 getting it from how it was at launch to the awesome experience it is now for me to dip my toes in that…
I’m actually all for this as well, unless the game is some open-ended roleplaying experience just give me a character to play as and design the game around who this person is (I think the original Dead Rising did a good job of this with Frank West, the remake… well unless previews are from an earlier build than what we’re getting in September not so much)
And I mean a REAL open-ended roleplaying experience, not something like Fallout 4 that was blatantly designed for me to play as Nate, a lawful good heterosexual cisgender male military vet with predefined goals… with gay romance options and the ability to play as his wife Nora existing solely to give the illusion of choice… An Illusion I still appreciate because when I play I always wind up being Nora with Curie as my wifey.
(I feel like FO4 would be far less divisive if it was a spinoff about Nate’s journey rather than a sequel to a series that is known for player agency, and even then the Brotherhood of Steel suddenly being a bunch of Nazis is still stupid as hell)
Again, I feel like it would be if this wasn’t just “Gender Binary with feel-good buzzwords to fake inclusivity where little is present”
I just believe that you need more than “If we just don’t say the M-Word/F-Word then we’ve solved transphobia forever” for this to be a proper step in the right direction, as it stands it just feels like “Don’t say Latina/Latino! Say Latinx!” all over again, and we now how well THAT went.
You simply need more than a couple of rainbow pins on your jacket to make meaningful change.
See, I don’t really care that the player is referred to as “They/Them” in Deltarune, because it’s established that you are playing as Kris and those are their pronouns.
(and in Undertale, the monsters simply had no idea what Frisk’s gender was due to an unfamiliarity with humans so it’s kept intentionally vague… with they/them simply being the most gender neutral thing to call them and the fanbase having their own headcanons on what Frisk actually is. Personally my head canon is Frisk is male and Chara is female, which seemed to be the most common interpretation in the fanbase back then… my headcanon for Kris is that they’re intersex with they/them pronouns as I see them as being representative of both Frisk and Chara, but however you see the situation is just as valid unless the creator comes out and says “No it’s this specific way, everything else is wrong!” and to my knowledge Toby Fox has not done that)
Sidenote: First non-binary person I ever met used ey/eir pronouns, this was so long ago that ey called eirself “Genderless” instead of Non-Binary as the latter wasn’t a word. Ey was femme presenting, but very much not female. Sadly we’ve drifted apart and wherever ey is I wish eir well.
I always wished ey/eir had caught on instead of “singular they”, because personally I thought “ey” sounded cooler and was more straightforward than “singular they”. But hey I’m not non-binary myself so it’s not really any of my business.
On a similar note, I used to see shi/hir pronouns more often than I do now as well, though that was more for intersex individuals than non-binary. I still see some usage of shi/hir, though the people I see with those pronouns tend to self-identify as “hermaphrodite”, a phrase that is considered highly insulting by most. I guess what I’m saying here is that there are all kinds and it’s probably best not to make assumptions or assume gender to be a one-size fits all phenomenon.
I’ve heard that for Monster Hunter Rise “Type A/Type B” was decided upon by the localization and that in Japan (the country of origin for MHR) they just use Male/Female. Meaning it’s not the dev being lazy, it’s localization earning themselves a “You Tried” ribbon.
I’m not saying that women are inferior or that anyone with tits is a woman… I’m saying that by labeling the feminine option as the “B-Grade” option instead of just the “Feminine” option there is an uncomfortably misogynistic implication that needs addressing.
“Dude and Chick” aren’t terms I’m saying they should use instead, I’m saying Body Type A and B come across as disingenuous and better terminology could be used. “Masculine” and “Feminine” would work, as you can be masculine without being male. I’m a short-haired tomboy who strongly prefers she/her pronouns, I’d be considered “Masculine, but not male” even if I was cis!
Heck I myself am in a relationship with a cisgender male who presents feminine with many of his behaviors, but that doesn’t make him less of a man aynmore than being masculine makes me less of a woman. We’re all adults here we know that pink can be for boys and blue can be for girls, this isn’t kindgergarten in the 80’s anymore.
In fact let’s take a look at how Old School Runescape handles it. This image is… not great…
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
That’s not the only problem with the UI as we’re still seeing rigid reinforcement of the gender binary.
The example picture of the more masculine build has a beard and the example picture of the more feminine build has a skirt, as if to reinforce gendered stereotypes while trying to avoid using the word gender, which is a mixed message at best… And to really draw the point, she/her is located just under the feminine option, and he/him is under the masculine option as if to imply these are the “correct” options.
The message this gives off is “Look, we call these A and B, but you and I know what’s really going on here eh fellow cisheteronormative? Gotta check off that box for corporate”
When the message they should be giving off is “He, she, they… whatever, it’s all good. All we have is that you have fun playing our game and try not to let anyone else tell you who you’re supposed to be!”
I agree we should be more inclusive, but we should do so in a way that feels less insulting and backhanded.
If they were labeled something like masculine or feminine, buff or curvy, or anything that doesn’t imply a hierarchy that would have been an improvement.
No, but we still see models that largely either have bulges or camel toes.
Seeing a buff, hairy, bulge-having individual labeled “she/her” is typically only done in transphobic alt-right political cartoons and it feels a little tone deaf that game companies actually expect transpeople to unironically go with that…
Actually if you read what I said, I’d say part of my problem is that having two character models one that is “Unambiguously Male” and one that is “Unambiguously Female” while claiming “Oh you can just choose your pronouns, and we didn’t actually say Male or Female! So it’s fine” is a lazy solution that does more to annoy than to assist.
And that if they were actually serious about being more respectful to the wider gender spectrum that exists in real life, they’d have more than just those two options. But the concern dev studios have is not in helping gender non-conforming individuals be more immersed in games, it’s to say “I’m with the current trendy thing, upvotes to the left.”
We need to be critical of what’s called “Rainbow Capitalism/Pink Capitalism” or we’ll be stuck without any real meaningful change.
So max femme makes you look overly and cartoonishly feminine? I’m sorry I’m not understanding the problem. I’d imagine any slider pushed to one extreme end would give you an extreme result.
I basically mean, who intentionally picks an overly masculine character unambigiously male character with female pronouns? Because that’s really only a thing in transphobic far right political cartoons.
I could see people picking the “female” character with he/him pronouns if they wanted to play a femboy and there wasn’t really an option to make the male character look “pretty”, but the “male” character with she/her, I dunno about that one chief.
To be fair he didn’t know Samus was a woman, Kid Icarus’ name was actually Pit, or that Metroid was the name of the alien not the planet, so yes… he was definitely a joke to me.
World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store (lemmy.world) angielski
I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
Netflix Closes Its All-Star AAA Video Game Studio, Which Made Zero Games (www.forbes.com) angielski
Netflix formed an internal studio (codename Blue) that was meant to make a AAA multiplatform game based on an original IP. It is now dead.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Disbanded After Critically Lauded Platformer Fails to Meet Expectations - Report (www.ign.com) angielski
deleted_by_moderator
The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Now with achievement hunting! (lemmy.world) angielski
Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase (www.cgmagonline.com) angielski
Unrelated, but we ran out of time and the campaign is only 7hrs (lemmy.world) angielski
PS5 Homescreen Now Replaces Unique Video Game Art With Annoying Ads You Can’t Turn Off (www.ign.com) angielski
Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now…...
The mod who bypass' the PSN login for God of War Ragnarök got removed on Nexus Mods (ghostarchive.org) angielski
Nexus Mods link
Choose Option (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: text that says, “When your girlfriend says, ‘it’s either me or runescape’”. Below the text is a stock photo of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a couch and looking away from each other. Between them, there is a floating screenshot from the crafting menu in Runescape, and the cursor is...
Heaven 17 claims it turned down GTA 6 soundtrack offer over pay offer: ‘Go f*** yourself’ [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Kotaku being Kotaku (lemmy.today) angielski
At this point I’m going to Ladbrokes and betting against everything Kotaku promotes. They are like Jim Cramer of the gaming industry.
I've never seen a company squander as much goodwill as Blizzard. (lemmy.world) angielski
Someone has to keep the retro spark alive (lemmy.world) angielski
‘Albion can’t be copyrighted’ - Peter Molyneux explains how his new game is set in the same world as Fable [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness angielski
This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing...
All five of you will get a free buggy when you next boot up Starfield (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Amazon reportedly working on animated anthology TV series featuring Spelunky and other video game worlds (www.eurogamer.net)