i dont know much about the series, but i was watching and reading about assassin's creed 3 and the main character is a half red indian who wants revenge because evil white colonialists burned down his tribe's village and the bad guys are racist White colonialists. Also his mother is some grumpy girlboss chick. She's like Pocahontas if Pocahontas had an obnoxious and unpleasent personality and a permanent resting bitch face.
was this series always woke or something?
I never considered it woke but it always had that stupid "we're not racists we believe in diversity" disclaimer at the beginning, and the assassins were portrayed as agents of chaos with secret knowledge fighting against the templar units of order, aka the revolutionaries vs. the patriarchy. (or fascists)
In fairness, the reason for the disclaimer was because it took place in the middle east and was in the early 2000's. "We're not saying Muslims or Christians deserve it or whatever" was the sentiment at the time. It has badly morphed since then.
Pretty much since their main headquarters us in France and people have been attacked for less.
At the time I brushed that off because the game was ostensibly about muslims vs christians and the first game came out in 2007 when the 'war on terror' was still taken seriously and I thought it was just a way to try and disassociate from all that and just tell a story. Oh, how naive I was back then.
3 was not well liked even when it came out and there is a reason why no one talks about it despite being sandwiched between 2 and 4, which are still some of people's favorite games to this day.
But that kind of stuff predates "Woke" as its exists currently. People wanted to play as Indians back then because you never ever got to, same with playing in that time period. It was during the era of "WW2 shooters are boring, generic white dude action stars are boring." And that not being a political statement but a mark of how bland and boring game design was in terms of straight copying itself over and over.
Looking back without actually living through it it'll look completely different, but that was the zeitgeist of the time and its what set the stage for Woke to show up just a few years later.
The actual time when AssCreed went Woke proper was Origins when they openly admitted to throwing away historical accuracy to push politics into it.
No one was saying that "generic white dude" was boring. It was just that brick-shit-house-protagonist-for-3rd-Person-Shooter was getting boring. Also, WW2 basically got fucked to death because no one dared make historical shooters in different wars. It was neigh impossible to find Vietnam shooters. WW1 Shooters didn't exist. Korea shooters still don't exist.
I will still condemn that era for lens flare.
Why would they? World War 2 is the founding myth of the Global American Empire: a holy war where the Good Guys™ defeated the Ultimate Evil™. It was the last war where you could feel like a hero.
Everything since WW2 was a clusterfuck: Korea ended on a stalemate, and Vietnam was a paper victory. They're eyesores to the Big GAE, which is why no one likes to talk about them, much less develop games about them.
Nonsense. You don't have to even win a war to tell a good story of heroism, you don't even have to win a battle.
Heroism occurred in all of these wars, and the stories are incredible. The problem is that game developers are lazy and uninformed.
Greater contexts will undermine the heroism of smaller scale stories.
Getting to do something awesome in a Nam game, even if completely true to history, will be marred by the outside knowledge of the war and losing it.
I don't agree at all. Hell, technically this idea would defeat the concept of the Battle of Reach in Halo. Literally: "Before It Begins, You Know How It Ends". Just because the overall campaign is a loss, or even hopeless, doesn't mean a story can't be cherished.
Here's a ballsy game: play as a Nazi soldier desperately evacuating civilians out of Berlin towards the American lines.
By context you should be repulsed by it, but I think this is one of those tales that could be actually enjoyed and supported if done properly.
There is a difference between fictional greater context and real life in this situation.
Its a lot harder to enjoy evacuating civilians in Nam knowing that the hero you are playing of is going to get spit on by a 23 year old white girl when he lands in the US on his way to find out his wife was cheating on him the entire deployment.
This could be true in a fictional story, but its not a thought most people are going to entertain. But its a well known thing in the real world we live in that will be scratching at the back of your head constantly regarding real events, even if it never gets acknowledged.
Its why political analogues and such also struggle in video game settings. Because once you move beyond very generic overview, the real life comparisons destroy anything you are trying to say with it. You can play with the idea, but the moment you try to play it straight something like "Communism killed hundreds of millions of people using these ideas" will undermine it.
You can still write these stories, but you have to also write it while being aware of the real world contexts at work and work with that too.
Why would you do that as part of the story? That's just demoralization, not context. Just because some people got spit on, and some people got cheated on, it doesn't mean your hero character needs to be spit on and cheated on. Moreover, why wouldn't you ruin every war story with identical "context", in WW2 stories.
Hard disagree. Alpha Centauri and Tropico are actually great for political & philosophical examination. The point is that you can apply the ideologies to the game environment and see how they respond. What you can't do is make a political lecture, which is why the Left's propaganda is failing.
Plenty were, because it was a short way to describe the problem that took you triple the word count to describe the Markus Fenix version without addressing the Nathan Drakes.
Its also the reason why WW2 could be the only war covered. Because it was white dude on white dude with no controversy and semi-modern technology. Think of how rare you even get to see the Pacific Front covered, and how little it feels representative of the savagery the Japs were documented using.
There was a dearth of creativity at the time, and the talk about it criticized the stale copying of each other to death. While the "boring white guy" talking point was a weak one in retrospect, it was symptomatic of that greater issue of them putting little effort into making something fun or original.
World At War was the only one to even try it, but that's not because of whites or asians, or even generic good or bad. But simply because a true display of the horror is wildly inappropriate for a game. You don't want to make a COD game where the CO yells over the radio, "Rodreguiez! Push over the pile of Jap bodies to clear a field of fire for the machine guns!"
I agree that there's clear cowardice on the developers, but I also think there was clear ignorance too. They could have done better, but I don't think it was about the concept being boring, just inoffensive to corporate sponsors.
This I agree.
Medal of Honor had two games years prior trying, and having played both I can tell you it feels basically indistinguishable from a European front game other than using more boats/planes as set pieces. Its very apparent playing them how scared they are to portray anything.
You say its inappropriate, and you might be right, but I think war itself is horrific and inappropriate to begin with and we only consider something like "stab him in the gut and dome shot him with a shotgun" funny little mechanics of fun because devs were willing to treat them that way.
I've murdered Nazis begging for their life brutally across multiple decades, franchises, and games in a way that would be horror in any other game if it wasn't Nazis, as The Last of Us 2 used the same mechanic to try and guilt people. There is a clear decision made where it isn't the actions and content that is offensive, its that its happening to anyone who isn't completely dehumanized to us. And these games were part of that dehumanization process themselves.
And I think Nazis get that treatment because they are the unquestioned "bad white guys" in our culture. If they weren't White they wouldn't get away with being as dehumanizing to them, as Ghost of Tsushima got shit on for treating the fucking Mongolians badly despite them being even more horrible than the game shows.
Hey, I have repeatedly argued about a proper war-as-horror game. I've actually said the same thing for police games. The issue was that Activision and Infinity Ward were trying to sell games that would be purchased by teenagers.
I don't think you have. This reminds me a lot of Carl Benjamin's video essay regarding Vaush & Destiny's debate over Kyle Rittenhouse. The reason games have no moral issue with killing "bad guys", whatever costume they may be wearing, is critical to the fact that they never stop attacking. It's a critical moral component. The demons in Doom, the Nazis in COD, the terrorists in Rainbow Six, the Russians in Battlefield, the Elites in Halo... once triggered they will never surrender, never retreat, and never stop attacking. Hence the phrase: "If they don't stop attacking: reload." If 100 million communists attempt to stab you, you can shoot 100 million communists for their aggression. That makes it permanently morally clear.
The only games where I've seen different are games where you are allowed to be the Bad Guy morally (like GTA, RDR, and Postal); or games that are tactical sims that use surrender as a dilemma (like SWAT 4).
World At War was probably one of the few ones where the intentionally showed the player character committing war crimes, but as a stark reminder that "Even the 'good war' is bad m'kay?"
Recent games, particularly woke infested games, may differ, but that is because the moral framework of the SJWs is extremely different from all other normal human moral frameworks: like where Concord tried to use a mechanic where you shame people into killing themselves as the hero.
I don't think so. It's just the Boomer Truth Regime that they are permanently the irredeemable bad guys.
I recently did a binge of a lot of the Wolfenstein games, so I can confidently say that I have and am only somewhat playing it up for the sake of argument. Because these are games so deep in their dehumanization game they consider "Nazi begging for life" to be where you stomp the boot harder to mass applause. Or when you brutally "stealth kill" one and you get to watch him gurgle on the ground while BJ quips.
And unfortunately, The New Colussus game made it painfully obvious that the people behind these games see Nazis as a perfect analog for me as just a Right-winger of any sort, which is why something as simple as "kill Nazis" can't just be a simple and fun thing anymore.
You say the SJW moral framework is different than normal people, but I think its the same in many ways. Its just turned up to 12 beyond what people can stomach. Like, most "normal" people cheer happily at people being raped horrifically if its in prison, so its a degree of how/who you paint instead of the action itself being the separation.
See, this is one of the games that is a particular problem because the 2nd modern Wolfenstein game was very clearly a Leftist project, so it's precisely the game I'm talking about that is so infested with SJW ideology that it doesn't match with a moral frame work. We can't go to pre-SJW games and explain that the animosity we see in modern SJW games can be transposed there. It's not a moral framework that normal humans use.
They say what they think is conscionable within an abstract framework. Make them watch or participate and they'll have a different opinion. The further you are from the issue requiring moral judgement, the more you get to spout off nonsense (which is why the Left promotes abstraction, and then deference to "objective authority" in the case of who should decide the outcomes of specific incidents). I've seen people who through they were tough think that killing someone would be easy, and then actually justifiably doing it gives them permanent trauma. People talk shit, but walk differently. Normies just typically don't have the experience to assert the morality they would actually follow, while they would just spout what they think is right. The SJWs and Leftists genuinely dehumanized the rest of the planet into an abstraction within their ideology, so when they say they'd be glad to see you dead, they mean it. They're literally just cowards who are too afraid to carry it out.
Specifically "occluded blue cover with orange breakthrough detail" was getting old.
I was going older than that, but that was a pretty annoying fad.
didn't see this was a link at first.
FORTUNATE SON INTENSIFIES
Battlefield Vietnam, Men of Honor, Commandos, and that's about it for Vietnam. And it wasn't really even about the war with anything else, as far as game developers were concerned, The entirety of the Vietnam War was exclusively Platoon and Apocalypse Now!, which were perfect representations of everything that happened.
Contrast this with the near limitless number of WW2 shooters and then Modern Warfare shooters.
OHHH. Fuck, it's Men of Valor, not Men of Honor. I know the Commandos series were not shooters, but I think there was one in Vietnam (though look at my memory).
Yeah, but it should have been more.
Honestly, I would say Syndicate was the first proper woke one.
They were bragging about how 50% of the gang members were women (and boy do you notice that). Plus Evie was always treated like a proper lady by everybody, even though her Assassin outfit (that she wore everywhere) made her look more risque than a common whore. Even Liberation was less retarded in that regard. They had that whole costume switch mechanic, because a woman in pants would stick out like a sore thumb in polite society.
Never mind that everything Evie did was great and perfect, while her brother was constantly fucking shit up for everybody and she had to clean up his messes.
And oh how proud they were of their historically accurate tranny. (Although the historical records sound more like it was simply a woman crossdressing, because she wouldn't have been able to pursue that career (I forgot what she did.) as a woman.)
Haytham Kenway was the real hero of Assassin’s Creed 3
Depends on definition, I suppose. Also, AC3 was generally regarded as a bit weird, as I recall. 1 and 2 were good, 3 was weird, 4 was good...but still weird. And then everything after got more and more weird.
As to it always being woke...I personally wouldn't say so. If anything, it used woke as a shield, against the woke forces of the time. The only woke element from AC1/AC2, as far as I remember, was the intro message...which essentially said 'this game was made by diverse faiths and genders...so please don't hate our game even if it's a little un-woke at times.' At least that's my interpretation.
ac3 feels weird probably because it had no oomph, main character seemed like just an emotionally detached bystander of history with no personal or ideological stakes, wasting time hunting animals/ grinding for materials so he can upgrade his pouches
Yeah the main character was a personality black hole.
Didn't help that a series heavily involving climbing tall buildings and jumping off them took place in forests and small towns.
I wouldn't say woke, at least to begin with, I'd say it directly correlates to writing and character quality.
Like the first and Ezio trilogy wasn't woke, 3 I'd argue wasn't just their main character was bland as fuck, Black Flag despite having Black and Women pirates wasn't that woke as in history pirates were kinda like that hell they had better democracies than we do.
This is the point I jumped off the franchise so don't have first hand knowledge but it seems like a change in present day main character got the woke seeping in as writing quality declined and that's what led to our current situation.