More slamming the brakes on the industry's hot takes, from Scrivonaut and Norayla on Splash Damage:
The developer of Lost Ark has added less-revealing outfits to the game after complaints the female outfits are too sexy, but this hasn’t stopped GameDevelopment.com from demanding the game go farther and cater Lost Ark only to Western audiences. We discuss this puritanical argument along with GameSpot’s old article about bra sizes, Elden Ring’s tendency to not hold players’ hands, awful takes on race in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series, and more.
Find the episode here or your favorite podcasting app, and thanks for your support!
Standard disclaimer - I'm not Scrivonaut and I'm not associated with the podcast, I'm just reposting from Reddit as a signal boost.
The notion that a producer of a global game should grab their ankles and bend over for the West's neo-puritan takes on what graphics should and shouldn't be displayed in a video game is utterly laughable. We need developers to say "fuck this noise" and stand up to the mouthpieces that think they can push devs around.
As far as Elden RIng not holding players' hands - that's the way it's been in Souls-likes for years. Anyone bitching about it needs to pay attention to the game and the clues that it does give you - if there's a save point and a summon point right before you enter an area, you know there's going to be some shit going down. If you whack a boss with your meatiest attack and it barely does tick damage to them, you back the fuck out and go level some more. No quest log? Keep a pen and paper with you when you're playing and drop markers on the map when you find someone who asks you for an item or you find a place where a rare item drops. They give you the tools to play the game, you just need to Git Gud and learn how to use them.
I'm not even going to get too deep on how stupid it is to have race-lifted dwarfs, hobbits, elves, et cetera in a Tolkien-based work, because it should be evident to any fan of his work. Middle-Earth is a friggin clone of the whitest part of Europe. If you take this Amazon crap as canon, you're going to have to accept that at some point between this and The Hobbit the entirety of the shire went through a race purge. Moronic wokies don't even think about the implications of their actions in relation to current continuity, they just do whatever they want and then scream about how everyone is -ist/-ism/-phobic.
The people responsible for this are very much not part of Western Civilization, as they themselves are so fond of telling us.
Hmm, there's an idea... maybe they should have the good costumes only on the harder modes (and not in the very beginning). Journalists will never find them.
I've long been a fan of Journalist Bait in games - stuff like the music getting better in relation to your play style, or having the ending of the game be different in Easy Mode playthroughs. That way we know immediately that they're full of shit and didn't actually play the game if they call it out in their review.