Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has pulled back on the censorship
(steamcommunity.com)
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They fucked themselves doing so already, I honestly don’t see how they’re going to unfuck themselves and not see a dip in sales
They're going to have a dip in sales regardless. I assume a lot of people felt betrayed by going back on the diversity angle.
There is 0 chance that adding a gay option and black character from Mali was done for anything but diversity points.
Daniel Vavra said no one forced him not that no one asked him to do it.
My guess, someone told him he should add them and he agreed to add them as long as it was done faithful to the times.
It wasn’t though. There’s not one single iota of evidence that a Mali entered Europe even hundreds of years after this timeframe. The stretch is so bad the he used one of the most catholic fervent HRE kings to hire a Muslim “doctor” from a sultan that he was at war with in a time period where there was no single bit of evidence a black Mali doctor existed and the only scholars in Timbuktu at the time were not black.
I mean it will not be a modern take where suddenly black people are a common occurrence in Bohemia 1400. It is definitely forced and out of place and done for diversity points but I think my scenario is plausible where Vavra thought he could pull it off.
It’s not though. There’s fact he made a Muslim Mali doctor a retinue of the HRE’s King is so insanely absurd it is the direct equivalent of Asian lady at the Viking village in England for AC Valhalla. It’s entirely a modern take because it’s so not documented that they’re not evidence of ANY Mali entering Europe, let alone someone given a title by THE KING OF THE HRE. This is actually patently historically worse than Yasuke in AC shadows.
That pissed me off as much as black Heimdal (although I DO like Idris Alba as an actor) and nigs & chinks in Asgard, while Wakanda was blacker than the South African town I grew up in.
Honestly, even if Vavra and his crew found triple-authenticated evidence of Musa being in Bohemia, even if they have a Polaroid picture of him hanging out with the king, it wouldn’t invalidate what’s been said above. It was done for the sake of diversity and inclusion, regardless of whether Vavra was threatened (which he says he wasn’t) or bribed (which I personally think is more likely).
Either way, the players don’t want this shit in our games anymore. We don’t care who’s idea it was or what reasons it was done for or “how it’s handled” (as the more spineless YouTube channels keep repeating to avoid bannings). We don’t want it anymore, period.
I hope these idiots lose a lot of money
Obviously, Vavra felt he could pull it off. It was hubris to feel that way, though.
Doubt, haha
They will try to do it. A black doctor from Mali during the time where "doctors and engineers" are flooding Europe was always going to go bad with the audience but I understand he is not made up to be some common occurrence but an unique event. He will probably not be eating people or talk about the Mali slave trade.
They've also mentioned that Henry taking it up the arse will be done with consideration of the times. What that means, I have no idea.
The problem is not "Europe". It's central, "far away from any sea route" Europe, Bohemia.
Here's the question: How many doctors/engineers are in the game? Lets say 100? Was the number of black engineers/doctors above 1% back then? No? Then it's pandering, cause historically (due to how stats work) there would be 0 representation of them in the game.
Regarding Henry: He was established as straight. Pure pandering, I wouldn't mind if there were two other guys fucking in the game (cause the percentage of that was most likely way higher than the amount of blacks in Bohemia).
It's 100% pandering. There is no way a black Mali doctor at court would not have been part of a historical record.
If tackling closet faggotry was a thing they wanted to do, they could have easily made a quest where you discover two nobles were up to that shit and then give you the choice to expose them, cover for them, or blackmail them. That at least would have been interesting for players.
Homosexuality was part of the first game. The main antagonist is a fag and one of the novices in the monastery is.
hey, don't be cynical. we know of at least one refugee thats definitely a doctor. an ophthalmologist, to be specific. somehow, that one got swiped by the Russians.
I bought the first one and have zero intention to buy this one. All it took was honestly just seeing a black male feminist in the setting. I didn't know and honestly don't care about the gay shit after finding out, assuming it is all actually optional.
But the first time they didn't put black people in medieval they got a ton of flack for it and came out with a solid, level-headed answer. Super straightforward considering the setting just as much as that dogshit Zau game not having white people in it's made up Wakanda setting or w/e it was.
This time they can just have 70 less dollars or whatever they intend to charge. I don't think there is anything that would get me to change my mind on that, historic realism or otherwise - but I would just simply doubt the history they based it on.
It might be totally optional like the player-sexual romances in BG3.
Andrew: "Hail Henry God be praised! I thought we'd never see you again."
"Hello friend."
Andrew: "Would you care to come my cottage to enjoy a beer or two? Old times sake eh."
"Sure. I do love a good beer."
*fade to romantic buttfucking scene* (don't worry it's skippable)
Alright so I will admit I got baited by Gale offering to teach magic and he tried to be all gay about it so I kicked him from the party...so what you are saying is totally possible as well.
Not sure about costs in this case but a dip of 10% can be catastrophic depending what the investors expect on return value. 10% can mean more then a third of all their projected profits.
Took it off my wish-list.
The current raged out retard boycott will go about as well as boycotting the latest Modern Warfare game.
Tell that to Ubisoft and assassins creed
To be fair. Ubisoft has been on decline and fucked up multiple games in a row. Ass creed shadows, starwars outlaws, skull & bones.
Valhalla was the one that started the massive collapse of stock, KCD2 is equal levels of historical absurdity as an Asian shop keep in a Viking village in Britain.
Yeah. Ubisoft is fucked. They have nothing in the pipeline that can pull them out lol. They arent gonna do splinter cell because the main char is a grizzled white dude. And even if they did, itll take them 3 to 5 years at best to make and release. Seems a lot of games like concord and dragon age now taking almost 10 years to release.. lawl.
If you're retarded enough to think there's any reasonable comparison between a single minor NPC + one set of entirely optional side quest dialogue and We Wuz Assassins, presented by a company that's made like ten shitty games in a row, then there's nothing else to say.
There’s literally more historical evidence of gay black Japanese slave “samurai” than there is of a single Mali doctor, let alone one in Europe, let alone one being in the retinue of the king of the HRE.
Maybe, but think about the scale of the companies being compared. Ubisoft, as a previously ~$16 bil company, has been able to absorb a lot more failures than Warhorse Studios ever could. At the most extreme end, how much would Warhorse Studios be worth today? $80 mil USD?
It will not be at Concord or Dustborn levels but it will most likely underperform. It is all about how much it costs and what return on investment the backers expect.
Even if this cost them 10% of sales it is probably a large chunk of their expected net profit.
It did not cost them anywhere near 10% of sales. It will make an enormous amount of money.
Lets say the cost is 200 milion. The investors expect at least 300 milion back so they need to sell about 6 million copies. If they lost 10% of sales that is 30 million out of the 100 million the investors expect as return on investment.
This is why a scandal like this can ruin a company.
Because Dustborn, Da: Vielguard, Suicide Squad, and that Overwatch killer that was so insignificant I've forgotten it's name already didn't suffer AT ALL over these boycotts.
If you think really, really, really hard you may one day understand why you just posted something incredibly retarded.
Wait. You actually believe Concord was a smashing success? Suicide Squad went free to play and announced end of life in less than a year total. Dustborn never even whimpered before it died. All of these are the direct result of the same boycotts.
You are making up a guy in your head and arguing with him instead of anything I posted.
Umm. No. That is you saying it was retarded to say these games failed. Which means you believe those games were the opposite, which would be successful.
There is only one retard in this thread. And it's the person claiming Concord was a super popular and successful game.
Fuck off.
They can see the situation is spiraling out of control badly, the Vavra's statements only made it worse, and that they are genuinely in a place of losing a considerable amount of sales through their choices.
This is just a pathetic attempt to throw a bone to try and save some face, but anything short of a post saying "we heard you, the negro is gone, you were right" won't assuage the people that made up a huge chunk of their game's fans.
There is 0 chance they will drastically change the main game 2 weeks before launch.
I think they just now realized how badly they fucked up.
Indeed, They thought they had the opsec in the bag, shame when that goes fubar
Since they said they are using denuvo new feature of tagging in order to track down who breaks contracts :D
Still, I don't know the full extent of the root, if the homo is as optional as they try to represent it that could be easy to cut, in regards to the negro, some creativity is needed in order to move to be a arab, slightly trickier but not impossible for a determine dev unleas Musa char is such large part of the plot and is truly fully DIE infested, in which case, HAHA
They are probably using spy pixels in the UI to identify who is leaking. If that is the case you can simply change the hue of the image and save it a couple of times as jpeg.
Works great for videos, not so much screenshots.
Yea that sounds the plausible method, which would explain why we got leaked images and not so much videos.
It's going to be tricky going forward for any game to contain queer content in even an offhand or joking fashion if the DIE cancer is truly too deep to prevent recurrence that most industries need all new employees that aren't pozzed.
Musa is probably an important character and him being black is important for the character so just changing him to an arab will not be possible. They need to change to much.
For the gay part, is probably just a flag to change and is gone but there is also a 30 second gay scene that you can skip.
Blizzard was caught doing that over a decade ago.
About 1/3 of the overwatch cast is some kinda gay.
I'm not sure which exact situation you are talking about?
That's not enough for anyone like me. I don't want them to censor their work, they just did bad, compromised work. In any case, Henry being a faggot now is just as bad. The damage is done, the cat is out of the bag and my sale is lost regardless. Until KCD3 and some kind of reassurance of an ideological switch, they're honestly better off chasing the Modern Audience by giving Henry some Saints Row 3 style sliders than looking for my sale back.
Nah, remove the black man. Fuck it. This was never an artistic decision.
I don't really care what prompted it. All I know is I don't trust the creators to have limited the propaganda to just one smug negro so I don't care about any performative reverts they might make (which they won't do anyway, lets face it). Let their compromised work stand on its meagre merits, propaganda inserts on full display for posterity, and benefit from no bullied improvements.
Before it was specifically allowing to be anti-Christian but not anti-Islam and allowed being anti-white.
Does this mean that they're starting to be a bit scared of their prospective sales numbers?
This whole thing has made me seriously wonder if Vavra's been huffing gas. He sounds like coy progs did in 2014 when they were trying to find cracks to slip the "Europe was never white" wedge in, except it's 2025 now and we've already been down this slippery slope. Nobody's fooled by it at this point. You've either long since learned to detect prog signaling and reject it immediately, or you're a normie consumer zombie and can't be "fooled" anymore than a houseplant can.
Vavra's software probably hasn't been updated since Gamergate v1.5 in 2016 when #NotYourShield was still considered a significant talking point
Option 3: "You're a fucking sellout who will say anything for a new sports car".
If you get bought out by a publisher you have exactly two choices when they force you to do something you don't agree with. Leave or publicly make up excuses for it. So the question is was Vavra forced or did he do it willingly? Although in the end it doesn't matter as he has betrayed his customers either way.
They made the rules vague, but the way it was presented before tipped their hand on what their biases are and how they'll enforce their rules.
There is no deliverance of salvation for that kingdom.
I expect it to do better then Failguard. It may even turn a decent profit but it will probably underperform.
It was pretty cute when @Grummz did a 180 and started shilling for them. Wonder how much it paid?
https://x.com/Grummz/status/1881085012952695111
It's far too late. Maybe it's "creative licence" to suddenly make a previously straight MC bi or to introduce a black feminist NPC in medieval Europe. It's is definitely woke feminist trash to then immediately introduce "code of conduct" to suppress discussion and promote feminist talking points
Didnt black muslims raid and take tens of thousands of european girls as sex slaves back then?
It was barbers and they are northern Africans and no black.
You are right. Black africans dont have the capability, knowledge or iq to advance in such a way to even do such a thing.
Still a big nope until it hits $5 on a steam sale and there's a patch or mod to fix the ESG nonsense.
If they make a mod for it I will pirate it but honestly will probably not because if I like it I will just get angry on what it could have been.
Some update, a dev has started posting on the steam forums and the post deletions are in full force.
They should have just stfu until the release date after seeing all the mistakes other game devs make but nah.
It was the leaks that cause all of this. The black dude and the gay options have never been mentioned.
Clearly they knew this would create an issue and hid them from players.
It was so ridiculous that people thought it was leftists trying to kill the game because the devs are based.
Turns out that the devs are woke.