So what was this game about again?
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Another game that would have been fine with a neutral character creator. It's amazing how they insist on forcing you to play the equivalent of the female druid in D4 in every game now when the solution is just to give everybody what they want and focus on gameplay, story and mechanics instead of identity politics.
You want to be a bald headed black lesbian? Fine just use the sliders and have at it. You want to look like yourself or your favorite waifu? Go for it. I guess "owning the chuds" is far more important than selling games these days.
I take the position that if you have a story to tell and you feel it needs a specific kind of character—and most stories do—you should go ahead and design that character however you see fit in order to suit your story. But you also should be aware that the character design you choose sends signals to people about you and your story, so make sure you can live with the consequences.
Naughty Dog is sending a signal that this story is yet another anti-white, anti-male, ant-beauty DEI story. They’ll get the audience they’re courting, but it may not be as large as they’d like. On some level, I have to thank them for signaling so blatantly that they haven’t changed and that I should continue to root for their collapse.
Yeah having a default character, even if they are basically a self-insert, is a good way to create a certain story. The only thing is that they need to appeal to a large amount of people for various reasons. These girlboss characters are just ugly, annoying, offputting, etc.
Having character creator is extremely limiting on story writing because you have to pretend that tabula rasa is real or ignore the choices altogether (for example female Shepard). Imagine for example Yakuza Kiwami if they made Kiryu male or female, it would completely change the storyline and make a good portion of it extremely bland. The problem is that the western RPG story writing is so shit anymore that no one cares about a dedicated character anymore unless it’s a JRPG. I can’t think of a single decently written AAA western rpg since what, Witcher 3? Meanwhile in JRPGS there’s been Persona 5, Dragon Quest XI, Nier Automata, Like a Dragon, etc that are all standouts for dedicated characters.
Saints Row 3/4 handled it perfectly, by simply letting you make a funny character and writing the story around it no matter what you picked.
That’s again the tabula rasa impact, you remove all uniqueness of a character and make them referenceless. For example, grandias biggest charm was the personality and uniqueness of the characters, they had personality and a lot of that was dependent on their age, appearance, etc. you can say this about many many dedicated character rpgs.
You mean Saints Row 1 and 2. Saints Row 3 and 4 had horrible nonsensical stories that were just meme-tier, especially Saints Row 4. But Saints Row 1 and 2 were pretty well written for a self-insert character, but it was obviously written to be a self-insert male character given how masculine the stories were for the first two games.
4 was a real shame because the driving was actually better than 3, but you had absolutely no reason to touch a car outside of mandatory sequences after about 10% of the game.
Yeah I forgot about that -- they made flying the go-to system for travel, and they gave you some cool vehicle customisation options that were rendered completely pointless.
I reject this premise entirely. Several very well-written RPGs have character creators, and most of the worst stories in gaming have fixed protagonists. Certainly, it can be more challenging and more work to write a story with custom protagonists in mind, but it’s absolutely possible. It also forces a degree of (near) universality onto your themes and narrative choices, which helps with stuff like “broad appeal”.
“Well written” because they have to jump through hoops to make the side characters relatable because there’s nothing unique about your character. Garrus and Wrex stand out because they are unique characters with an actual story behind them.
Shepard worked because the high restrictions of the Paragon/Renegade system usually led to a consistently written character being made by forcing you to commit, most of the time, to being one or the other to not lose out on points you'd need in it to make bigger decisions.
At least in ME1, its been so long they all blend together and I can't remember if that stayed in 2/3.
Shepard worked because they wrote the story entirely for a guy static character and then made some minor dialogue changes for the female option. The illusion of choice dialogue options has been overdone as is, they never actually make massive impacts or punishments to the story.
I find the gender difference far less egregious in a universe basically dominated by the Asari, who seem to be the ones corralling all other races together. Its still generic "sci-fi egalitarianism" but it at least is inoffensive.
The true failing of the character creator is the background choices, which should lead to considerable differences in both your treatment and your choices but instead if just a handful of "we referenced it 2-3 times randomly with no effect" moments.
The asaris existence is illogical on its front. An all female species that by all lore barely reproduce but somehow still have the numbers to be the “girlboss” alien species. They were put in to satisfy guys who wanted to fuck an alien and lefties demanding space egalitarianism as you said.
They literally do some form of psychic bullshit to always appear as something close to the "perfect" girl for your species, if not you specifically. They literally abused simping to become the top of the food chain.
Its unironically hilarious and legitimately unique, made even more so by the fact that they don't acknowledge it at all so it doesn't get moralized or excused.
'Cept that made Mass Effect a shitty RPG all around. There's no point in deciding what action you think is best on a case by case basis because you get punished for not committing to one side or the other on the morality meter. So you just choose whatever aligns with your current playthrough without needing to think or even read the already truncated dialogue options. Seriously, Mass Effect might as well have started by asking if you wanted to be a Paragon or Renegade and just decided everything from there.
Well his point was that the lack of a canon singular character makes the writing worse. In which case those limitations contribute to making a more dedicated character, instead of a murderhobo that can min/max around quests arbitrarily to pick the best rewards.
If you think JRPGs have better written stories, then a "shitty rpg" is the one that offers you a bunch of choices to begin with. If you prefer having a bunch of options, then JRPGs are the shitty RPGs because you can't really "roleplay" in the slightest.
They are both Role Playing Games, but one the role is assigned and you're playing their story, and the other the role is freeform so there's minimal story.
But if they let you have choices that would mean you could select the choices they don't want you to have. So its best to nudge you towards what they want so it seems "normal" or "accepted".
Eh, depends on the game. I don't think a individualised character works with every game. But then again, it would be better than this gross shit.
it's about neil drukmann female fetish.
"female"
Female or "feminine penis"?
What the heck am I looking at?
The left is Seung-Hui Cho, who went on a mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 killing 32 people, using handguns with standard capacity magazines. I believe he took this picture and posted it himself.
The right is a they/them protagonist from Naughty Dog's latest announced game, "Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet". Studio head Neil Druckmann has previously overseen similarly masculine women in Uncharted and the Last of Us. It is apparently a fetish of his, though it may be a larger strategic plan related to his ethnicity.
Both people are ugly bald asians, hence the side by side.
A school shooter who still holds a bunch of the records for being one of the worst in a lot of ways. Yet because he is an Asian immigrant and not an angry white boy, no one brings him up in the media to the point where most don't even know his name.
Once the "video games made him do it" angle failed, he was literally memoryholed out of the mainstream.
They tried the video game angle with the healthcare ceo shooter. Said he played among us where people play as "assassins" rofl. Im thinking.. didnt aoc play that game on stream to try to look cool and hip?