You have your outside voice and your inside voice. You can clap back at libs like a saucy biatch doing your favorite Game of Thrones impression, but you can't treat people who have encouraged and supported your product like subtards the first time they raise concerns. Or the second time, or third.
The number of "anti-woke"/"centrist" creatives who don't understand this is staggering. When the libs wage war against you and normal people start sending your responses to the moon, they're not signing up for your cult of personality, they're defending the newest breach in the walls of Helm's Deep. If you drop a tactical nuke on the orcs, that's fantastic. If you think that gives you the right to drop a nuke on people inside the gates because they're asking questions, you're an idiot.
Sometimes I wonder if the thought process is that simple. "People loved it when I BTFOed that mentally ill zombie, they like my style. Now watch as I BTFO this youtuber who's been a fan for almost 10 years because he covered a negative rumor. Wait people don't like that?"
"But I'm a force of nature/I built this company with my blood and sweat/the masses will never understand my dedication/haters will come and go" - I'm sure your family and friends believe this. You're the most distinctive person they know. The rest of us have seen like 10 or 20 of you.
That sounds cruel and devaluing of your unique accomplishments and abilities, but no one is bigger than history. The people that appear that way simply respected what you did not. No one is so special that they have the right to selfishly disregard any community. That's a boomer delusion, man as a god. Humble yourself.
Better question, how many so called anti-woke influencers/tubers are defending KCD2?
Grummz and Endymion both went into the “it might be woke” category after pushback from their followers so at least some are being reasonable.
Its because more people are presenting convincing arguments that it is woke. Its not super turbo agregious woke, like avowed, but it is definitely woke.
Shoving a literal token black guy from sub Saharan Africa, who is Muslim, who is a doctor, who is a fucking feminist is just lunacy and so blatantly ahistorical that it is comical. FFS Vavra himself said no black people were in Bohemia. If you really wanted to include a black person, the only group that might have made it that far into Europe would be a Christian Ethiopian, likely a slave or servant. You aren't going to have a Muslim in deep Christian lands like this, and having Sigismund hire one is fucking comical.
Then the gay angle. The cutscene is skippable. FFS stop lying about it guys, there is no need to lie about it and claim its unskippable. Them retconning Henry to be potentially bi is bad enough as is. So you don't need to make shit up as it makes you look like a fool.
Did "unavoidable" get warped into "unskippable"? I don't remember hearing about whether it's a side quest or main quest.
Good comment. Most of the gay shit in BG3 is technically avoidable. Skipping cutscenes is not what people are trying to do in a KCD game.
I think, not confirmed but the amount of focus they put on the fact it is skippable makes me think it's unavoidable.
The unskippable part was related to a rumor that Saudi Arabia banned the game do to a 30 seconds unskippable gay custscene.
The "confirmed" details we have is that the character is important to the main quest so he can't be killed, but you need to deliberately progress his "reputation" up to get to gay sex. Which is how the majority of "relationships" work in most games, so it depends on how easy/hard it is to actually do that if its unavoidable or not.
Because I think we've all had that moment in like a Bioware game where you think you are just being nice to your party member and then you get blindsided by them trying to fuck you.
Changing depending on how the wind blows. Not a lot of respect for them
I give them some grace based on the fact that they’re all probably at least a day behind the news cycle. There’s no helping the people still coping about this though.
I mean KCD 2 is the kind of game I expect it to be like Baldur's Gate 3 where you get options to be degenerate but you can choose not to. Back when I was speaking negatively about BG3 in Kotakuinaction or the gaming community, I was getting thumbed down and saw some people trying desperate to defend it.
Still I thought KCD was supposed to be about accurate medieval simulator, not fantasy what-if. Daniel Vavra should have expected that kind of negative feedbacks or maybe even make entirely new non canon game if he wanted to put the progressive elements. He should've known better after seeing the LOU2 and Star Wars fiasco and the recent Witcher incident but it made me understand game devs, more progressive, more successful they get, the bolder and stupider they seem to get. It makes me thankful I never invested myself into western intellectual properties.
The way Vavra handled this debacle makes it clear he got bought and is gleefully shitting on everyone who wanted accuracy. His sycophants arguments are literally “well does some absurdities ruin the immersion?”
Didn't people complain about how teammates kept flirting with you, and how easy it was to get locked into a gay romance because of a random dialogue choice? All this "choosing" deflection ignores how everyone's a hyper-promiscuous protagsexual that you hesitate to even talk to because you don't know if they'll slobber your cock after two conversations.
Nah, after much advising them to not overrate it too much when there are better, more deserving games out there released in the same year, even that was blasphemy for the average gamers. At this point I'm probably regarded as contrarian there. Gamers really get the industry they deserve.
The truth is most gamers are OK with a dick or two in their face as long as the game is entertaining. Woke is trait-linked with horrific quality so we don't confront these paradoxes often. Call it the Game of Thrones generation.
I expect this is the peak, though, and intolerance will gradually increase.
I wish I had your optimism. What I'm seeing is that so long as the product looks shiny and has some measure of quality, normies will suck down corposlop and defend it with their life.
I'm predicting the other way because the aggressive creators will be predominantly right wing, and the left wing defense of perversion is getting canned and pathetic in a self-evident sense, to the point a normie would notice.
I think BG3 is throwing off your sense of the trendline because it's a massive outlier, but it is indeed an outlier. The normie embrace of shiny overproduced crap was stronger in the mid 2010s when Star Wars and COD were at their heyday.
Concord, as awful as the character designs looked, had nothing egregiously wrong with it gameplay or feature-wise, and it didn't even get off the ground.
There are a lot of people in this sub right now who defended it with all the same arguments that aren't being allowed to work on KCD2.
It would be ironic, if it wasn't so sad.
Just like institutions that are not explicitly right-wing inevitably becoming corrupted, so too will people.
This isn't even a "You can accept dragons, elves and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating. Why are you so bigoted" this is straight up trashing your work to promote new work, which seems like a slap in the face to people that enjoyed the first one and a self admitted spit in the face. I hope the buyout money was worth it.
What I don't get is, why dance around the subject.
If this is how they wanted it, just tell us so.
Instead they spit in the face of the things they did in the first game, using the lamest excuse I've ever seen. Which made the things they said previously into lip service.
It only tells me they'll change their opinion based on the way the wind blows, and they don't really have any idea why this would bother people.
We weren't following your work ... I shouldn't say we, it's not like I did a consensus before I lumped people in with me...
I didn't follow your work because I liked your attitude or anything like that. You made it seem like this is exactly how you wanted the game, as uncompromised as it could be. So you went to bat for it several thousand times on social media against journalists in 2018 who were dicking you around for a gotcha comment.
Now it seems like you only did that because you thought it would get you popularity points.
I think this makes it worse. Not only do I no longer care about your work, I'm not buying the upcoming game out of principal. I don't give money to people that will only tell me what I want to hear because it means money for them.
The left still hates you for the things you did a decade ago because you cannot atone for anything, and now the right doesn't want to deal with you because 'lol who cares artistic choice'
The buyout money must have been really really good, or he never really cared in the first place. Maybe you can get yourself a BMW 530i.
Either way, I'm out.
I think people who experience major success on a product can often make the mistake of confusing "they like what I *made*" with "they like what *I make.*" The former is acknowledgment that you made a great product, and that future products may not be as popular if they don't have at least some of the same merits that made you successful. The latter is the belief that whatever you make is a great product, and will be popular regardless of what people want.
Some of Vavra and his team's responses, especially the one about how Henry would have been gay in the first game if they had the budget, a claim which completely contradicts the way they previously presented Henry as a deliberately designed character who had certain immutable traits, really call into question how much he's compromised his vision, or, alternatively, how much he was simply being shrewd and saying what people wanted to hear to build a controversy and pursue a market niche for game one. It's a real case of "were you lying then, or are you lying now?" and either answer reflects poorly on him and Warhorse games.
A lot of people have to wrestle with the "same but different" paradox, or how to make something the same as what people like but different enough that it's not cliche, but a select few people just seem to catch lightning in a bottle and never realistically grapple with the "same" that people actually liked about the product.
If Vavra made and promoted a rainbow sequel entirely of his own volition, that would be a pretty shocking display of shapeshifting, but either way it seems like he thinks people overly value Bohemian farmhouses and swinging swords around instead of the reassurance of authenticity. He doesn't seem to get the experience of his product.
I was blown away that the CM outright stated that zero Christians worked on the game. That ain't the badge of relatability it was in 2014.
Zoomers are entering the discourse. Even if they aren't religious, they're at least curious, unlike Millennials/Gen X and their daddy-issues Atheism™.
Wait what?
There's a thread on the KCD2 Steam community forums where a developer/CM joined to defend the game. One of his defenses was that nobody should have expected Christian themes because none of the devs was Christian, and Vavra's country is apparently one of the most atheist places in the world
Vavra set his reputation on fire, as when he published KC:D, and people who don't hate Whites came to his defense, happy he stood his ground for historical acuracy, he said :
''There were no black people in Medieval Bohemia, period.''
And how he put blacks in Medieval Bohemia because his studio got bought and subverted by a woke company, and arrogantly gaslight the very people who defended him and made his previous game a commercial success.
Well shit, I haven't really been paying attention to this because these games really aren't my thing. So there's a literal gaynigger muslim feminist, huh. Fascinating.
I'm also Czech like Vávra and I occsionally go read his takes on facebook, I've even had beers with him IRL once. My impression is that he has some decent takes, but he's ultimately a total normie. Czech normies here aren't brainrotted from decades of "progressive" communist propaganda, as strange as it might seem for a literal post-commie country; these things were a weapon aimed at the West and suppressed in the eastern bloc, and then in the 90s and early 2000s it temporarily subsided in the West too, so it hasn't got here since then too much. Czech normies also don't really understand how fucking bad it is in the West, even someone like Vávra who is generally pretty plugged in and posts about stuff like the UK stabbing and subsequent jailing of people for years for waving a flag of their own country, trooning out children, that sort of shit. He knows about all that but he doesn't truly understand, at least not yet.
So Vávra is like a walking embodiment of "BUT I'M NOT RACIST, YOU ARE!" because to him, le racism is le heckin' bad, and he's trying to convince everyone of that he's not a racist, Nazi, or whatever - because he hasn't yet learned the lesson that yes he is, always was and always will be, because he's a white devil so he's guilty of liberal Original Sin.
It reminds me of Larry Correia who keeps putting girlboss characters into his books that sometimes border on Mary Sues. They both think they can prove they're not whatever-ist, they don't understand that noone actually gives a shit either way.