They are, but five of them? It seems like they’re ready and willing to kill current goodwill in respect to their games by stepping on the gas instead of realizing why people suddenly liked the games again.
When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.
A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.
Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.
And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.
…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.
I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you’re actually trying to learn something from what you’re looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you’re willing to learn from them, that’s great, but here’s the thing.
Not everybody is taking away the same things.
What you take away from it isn’t what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there’s a lot of people who are.
My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.
However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren’t learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.
And that’s where I begin to worry, because while like, I’m in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, like… It’s hard to feel real “glee” at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go “awwww” inside, but I tell myself “I can’t get caught up in that if it’s an evil playthrough.” And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.
But the reality also is that a lot of people don’t care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.
while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.
You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn’t inspire confidence that you see that.
But something like the first 2 Fallouts on the other hand can really use a controls overhaul.
Those were literally on my mind! I know Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II got some updated control schemes more recently, including gamepad support, but it seems my favorite Fallouts are still stuck in the past.
God damn it what I would give for a modern Fallout in the style of Baldur’s Gate 3. It breaks me how Bethesda has ruined that series.
Some games are so old that the technology needs to be sorely updated for modern gamers to be able to understand the controls, and “upating (the controls) for modern audiences” can be good.
Further, older games often have some pretty awful stereotypes in them that don’t need to be preserved so we can remember them.
I know Disney’s Bambi isn’t a video game, but I’ll use it as an example that’s being re-made. Bambi was made in 1942, and a massive amount of cultural references and ideas just don’t make as much sense in the modern era. There are literally things young people today would be like “what now?” in films that old. Sometimes “updating for modern audiences” is removing stuff that just doesn’t make sense anymore, or people don’t recognize or understand.
Even further, it used to be that “getting updated for modern audiences” was the norm. Anyone remember that hokey fucking Romeo & Juliet with Leonoard DiCaprio in the 90’s? Yeah, that was “updated for modern audiences” and it was a smash fucking hit. Back then, updating for modern audiences meant setting it in Verona instead of Venice and swapping swords for guns.
Like if you’re dealing with games that were always meant to frustrate and offend like Postal 2 or Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Redneck Rampage, you’re probably not gonna have a lot of people happy to “update for modern audiences” but there’s not much to update about campy schlock humor anyway.
So yeah, sometimes its not great, but I think the worries about it are overblown.
In movies there used to be a joke about how “the black guy always dies first” in action/horror movies because it held true for a long time. Black characters were given bit-roles that were quickly written out of movies. That is no longer the case, but you don’t see movies that don’t kill off black characters right away as being advertised as “updated for modern audiences” because that’s just silly.
When your culture of sexism results in a class action lawsuit from former and current employees, and you pay out to the tune of 100 million and keep all the same executives who were accused of harassment and discrimination, and you have to have a third party watch over your company for years to make sure you’re not still doing this stuff: you’re a trash company.
so it’s good pr at least .
I couldn’t roll my eyes any harder. That’s literally all it is.