What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.
There are plenty of jokes that look bad if you strip away the intention and context. They aren’t bad or offensive jokes they just seem offensive if you take them out of context and present them in a different way.
Yes, and as humans we are quite able to understand that we should not immediately suspect anybody who says something without any context, assuming in the situation we know we are lacking the content.
Tell me, what makes you look more suspect to a federal agency:
The odd (frankly pretty bad, but then it’s by Shane Gills so that was expected) joke that lacking context could in theory be interpreted as a racial diss?
I no longer play this game and in fact I think it became significantly worse over time and in particularly with the conceptually good but utterly mishandled switch to OW2, but damn that’s a well-done trailer. Big props to the team who did that.
Personally I thought What Remains Of Edith Finch was boring as hell as none of the emotional points hit and the super-low-fi sequences made the game feel almost buggy and as a result ruined a lot of the atmosphere.
OTOH, I loved Firewatch, a great short interactive story about someone working in isolation and trying to get away from their life.
I would also put Subnautica here - and personally say it is worlds superior to Stranded Deep but of course personal preference can give either hte advantage.
The “article” is very clearly just a call to forther hate on SGI. It’s crazy to what lengths people go to justify their bad purchases, desperately clinging to whatever explanation they can cook up for why there is no self-blame to apply for having bought into the shit that is Suicide Squad. No no, you see, the game would have been awesome if not for that WOKE consulting company! If not for them this would have been a 10/10, I could not have known it’d be bad!
I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have “destroyed” by “forcing” a narrative or token characters.
That is to say, I don’t think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they’re consistent 😅), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They’d give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.
The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.
(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it’s the devs doing that, not the consulting company.