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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)