With KCD2 and AC Shadows both promoting wildly inappropriate gay romance options, I’m wondering if we’ve reached a point where the gay is essentially mandatory in modern AAA western game dev? Are we going to see any strictly heterosexual player romances in any of these games going forward?
I didn’t buy AC Shadows because I don’t have brain damage. Asscreed games have been complete slop for like a decade, so no big loss when they decided to pozz the shit out of the latest entry. But KCD2 is a game I absolutely would have supported if not for the gay pozz. I’m never buying that shit regardless of discount, and that’s fine by me. Fuck ‘em.
I guess I’m curious to find out whether or not virtually all AAA western (story-based) games will be non-starters at conception going forward. If the gay is mandatory from here on out, I’m literally never buying another AAA western story-based game ever again. That’s probably not a bad thing anyways, but it still feels strange after decades of supporting this industry.
Unfortunately yes. In fact, these days, it feels like the only thing for a game to qualify as an RPG are romances, and that game had better include as much faggotry as possible and give it equal if not greater billing than heterosexuality so no player ever gets left out (and to get those ESG Funbux). Dragon Age: The Failguard gives you little to no direction on where you want to take the story, determine the protagonist's personality, take sides in interpersonal conflicts, or even act like a jerk if you want, but you can choose to fuck every companion to your heart's content regardless of what your race and sex is, so it's all good. Ditto for Assassins Creed: Shadows and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. I don't think even Ubisoft has ever claimed AC was an RPG, but gamers and urinalists alike are calling it one anyway.
It's the natural evolution of this kind of shit. Baldur's Gate 2 got it rolling when it gave 3 girls for male PCs to woo, and one guy for the (miniscule number of) women playing. Naturally, the latter are going to demand more options, so future games start trying to appeal to them, and in doing so, give romance even greater attention than it warranted in the past. Then gays and fujoshi start demanding gay romances, so games start including a gay character or make a couple options bisexual to seemingly save space (like Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins). Then they start demanding more options because they weren't satisfied with their limited numbers, which leads to either turning everyone into a fag (Dragon Age 2), or adding more and more romance options to appeal to every taste (every Bioware game from Dragon Age: Inquisition forward). Or both. Before you know it, RPGs are focusing more on romance to the detriment of all else, to the point where every important character is written more as a flavor of fuckability rather than an actual character.
This is really the most apparent thing about it all -- if everyone has to be written to be a potential fag, it means they all have to have the same level of open promiscuity as a character trait, meaning no one can have any kind of religious convictions, meaning they also cannot have any serious political beliefs either; everyone has to be liberally progressive to fit into the faggotry mold.
It's why every character in a western game feels like a safe, cookie-cutter variation of a smarmy Left-wing Twitter profile. Actually having a personality, standards, or belief would mean some characters would actually abhor promiscuity and faggotry, and they absolutely cannot allow that because it's wrongthink.
I regrettably purchased BG3 in early access because I greatly enjoyed DOS2. I gave BG3 a few tries before they expanded the game into the full-on degen nightmare it became. What I noticed almost immediately is that all of the prebaked companions fell into two categories: cunty female brute or sassy male fop. There were no feminine females or masculine males. If you wanted either of those classic archetypes in your party, you had to create them yourself. And given the dearth of options available, you literally could not form a full party without including at least two insufferable “modern audience” characters.
Even worse, if you decide to forsake the story companions altogether and opt for “generic hirelings”, you still have to accept comically diverse prebaked options. You can’t just assemble a realistic and tolerable party of war bros. It’s just not allowed anymore.
I mean compare this enforced progressive leftist “reality” to our own. How many real life organic friend groups feature a perfect ratio of perfectly diverse people? Almost none. The last time I played multiplayer with a decent sized group, we were literally just half a dozen straight white guys. That’s the reality for most people in the world. That’s still a reality for most non-western media. But now our media must be an alien representation of social units that literally don’t exist without fierce curation. I spend my real life with like 90% straight white people, and then I’m supposed to spend my free time consuming media aimed at gays and people from competing cultures?
Exactly.
I didn't even bother with BG3 after seeing what was going on with it -- even the character creator was extremely disappointing.
There was some community where people were suggesting games with a good character creator and they mentioned BG3, and I asked them if you could make a masculine barbarian like Conan? They said, "Yes!", and linked a video, and when I watched the video it was the most feminine looking barbarian I had ever seen. Completely androgynous.
I linked the person a video of Conan: The Hyborian Age's character creator to show them how a REAL barbarian was supposed to look and they just slithered away.
But it's a testament to how bad things are when this generation believes that enforced effeminate men and masculine females in the character creator is considered a "good" character creator.
Even further to your point about replacing the diversity-hire party members with your own characters, I remember doing that in BG1 and BG2, but mostly BG2 because at least there were some decent characters in the first game like Ajantis and outright badasses like Kivan and Xan. But BG2 was already moving toward more progressive designs.
Worse yet, it makes the game feel hollow when you have silent hand-made characters filling out the party, but it's obviously just as bad having to listen to insufferable, smarmy feminists and gay men prattle on and on (like in Avowed).
I wish more eastern European devs (who aren't sellouts like Warhorse) made party-based RPGs with proper characters.
Jagged Alliance 3 was definitely a good entry and a proper follow-up to Jagged Alliance 2 -- which makes sense given that the devs hail from Bulgaria.
I’m so sick of the subversion. When was the last time D&D media featured a male martial character? Every fighter, barbarian, and paladin is a woman now. Because all the front liners should be women. Every rogue and wizard is an effeminate “charmer”. I guess the only class option masculine straight white dudes in D&D is “BBEG”.
Dealbreaker for me.
In a game like The Last Spell, at least you can costumize your characters to make an all-White team.
I'm sure it's possible to change the game files to remove the black and brown options so you don't even have to costumize the characters manually ( like pasting the over with renamed duplicates of White skin colors ). I'm not good enough with games code to do that.
“From competing cultures” very well put.
We should just start calling newer western CRPGs dating sims.
Yeah, we pretty much should. It's all Bioware's audience cares about anymore. And even a lot of more generalist RPG "fans" prioritize romances too much.
How about just electronic grooming. If this continues we'll have Elsagate levels of vile shit masquerading as "entertainment" by the end of the decade.
So you're saying that the entire genre has basically turned into trashy romance novels. Shit, that's uncomfortably on point.
Minus the straight part.
This is what happens when you allow women and faggots to take over.
Indeed, it has.
Good point regarding the narrowing of role play elements to basically just optional fetishes. Most of these games give the player very little agency over the actual major story beats , but you better believe there are romance options for every conceivable “lifestyle”. And the degens eat it up because 1) their whole lives are structured around orgasms and 2) they get off on forcing their sexual preferences into every space.
Completely goes against the point of AC too. You're supposed to be reliving a simulation of your ancestors memories. Mild deviation and choices are allowed but going totally against their character causes desync. How the f can you choose to act straight OR like a secret faggot without being desynchronized? If there's one story based game that doesn't need to be a choose your own adventure it's Assassin's Creed.
They mostly threw away the entire "reliving memories" thing quite a few games ago and its much closer to just "another page of history" instead, which would grant them that freedom of deviation within a certain amount of parameters.
Unfortunately for them, that modern day foundation is what made them so unique in the first place so people still remember and hold to it even after it was made throwaway.
To be honest, I thought the whole future animus story framing device was super retarded from the jump. But it’s not like they’ve gone a better direction with this ahistorical horseshit either.
I think it worked really well in the first game, because it had a real purpose.
Its been like 20 years so I might be off on details, but the "evil corporation" was using his genetic memories to go back and find out where a super magic artifact was their organization wanted. Both modern guy and Altair were generic means to an end to set up this huge overarching conspiracy throughout history, and were being used as pawns in the "bad guy's" scheme.
That's not a bad foundation to set up something and I think worked pretty well in that game even as just a self contained story.
But by the time of the second game already they had made a lot of money and immediately started treating the historical character as the MC, meaning the giant myth arc was taking a backseat and was already on the way to being annoying filler content nobody wanted to play, and something that never got any payoff for all its set up because it never had time to develop.
So, like all things Ubisoft, there was a good idea there at some point that they rushed, underbaked, and fucked up in their greed.