Naughty Dog’s new IP is a retro sci-fi space game starring a butch, shaved-headed black lesbian girl boss.
The Witcher 4 stars a female lead, an uglified middle-aged Ciri who is also a sassy girl boss.
The new co-op game from Hazelight, (developer of It Takes Two) stars a pair of insufferable millennial female writers.
Outside of what was shown last night, we have the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima with another new girl boss protagonist.
Grand Theft Auto 6? Another new female protagonist.
Is there a literal prohibition on white male leads in western game dev?
Virtually every western advertisement put sassy girl bosses - both real and virtual - front and center. You’d think the majority of competitive online players are female, the way the industry panders to the demo.
Meanwhile, Eastern game devs are cranking out the only media with masculine males and feminine females. The Last Berzerker and Crimson Desert feature white male leads even, a clear indicator that Asian devs are targeting what they correctly perceive to be a gap in the western market.
And the countless female characters in Eastern games? Just as present and powerful, but they aren’t insufferable cunts or masculine abominations. No, eastern female characters are unapologetically attractive and feminine.
The awards also focused on women nonstop. Women in the crowd. Women on stage with the award winners. Female presenters. Meanwhile, almost every winner was a white or Asian dude. Because they are still the ones who put in the hard work to make the fucking games.
Watching the live chats was great, though. The moment you saw purple, people were calling woke. And the best part is knowing that all of the defenders and shills are definitely seething leftists who are terrified of the current cultural realignment.
For existing IPs, bad games hit one game in the future. In example, I have zero hype for Civ7, but I did buy Civ6 before realizing it was inferior to earlier games. Not a damning indictment, so I'll still look at Civ7 maybe eventually, but zero hype, it could release and I wouldn't notice. The kind of badwill these people are cultivating is a lot worse than disappointed apathy, but it is still in the cultivation stage.
They will buy GTA 6. Maybe even a DLC or two that totally promises to fix the experience, but GTA 7 will be dead on arrival.
Based on what we know already about Civ VII I have literally negative interest, which likely wouldn't have been any different if I hadn't found my ~20 hours in CIv VI extremely lacking.
IMO, the series peaked with Civ IV, Civ V (with expansions) was a competent sequel that just went in a direction I didn't always like, and Civ VI isn't worth playing over either of those (or Civ III, BE, or even II.)
Civ 4 was the platonic ideal of square tile TBS games and nobody has ever made a good hex tile TBS.