What a surprise, Expedition 33 isn't as indie or double AA as I thought
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I'm insanely suspicious of any game that explodes suddenly on social media.
Yea, I have noticed a lot of shills hyping the shit out of it as well. That doesnt happen with organic word of mouth
Even without any clear tells, just the fact that they've put so much effort into capturing social media space makes everything which achieves widespread popularity on social media, suddenly, instantly suspect.
I first saw an ad for it on the launcher of a gacha I play (not even a big game), so I immediately dismissed all other instances of it as some kind of eastern junk. However, the sheer number of people all talking about it at once set off my alarm bells, too.
I never called it indie. And "AA" is rather hard to judge considering how ridiculous the giant budgets of the big corpo games got.
TLDW: I'm assuming this is all about budget sources. Why does it matter? Did they or did they not make a game that pretty much shits on the corpo-slop? Is everyone that is raving about it (including me) lying?
The TLDW is about how many banking, gov and finance guys, particularly of the globalist and tencent alumni variety, quietly put their clout behind the game from it's inception, whilst playing the "independent art" game with their PR campaign.
The game didn't blow up because it was good, it blew up because it was always going to be made to blow up, it was just a happy coincidence that it also turned out way more decent than the other junk those same financiers have foisted on the market lately.
It's my subjective presumption of the game rather than being irritated by other people calling it indie. You might assume judging by my first comment, that I'm a bit annoyed at the game's success, that isn't quite it. If you watch the video to the end, it becomes obvious there are a lots of hidden supports and suspicious groups trying to bank on this game being successful. They are the reason I was motivated to make the thread in the first place.
I find this tiresome, this kind of cynical maneuver these parasites get into indie game industry. This makes me only vindicated that I don't really buy too many western games especially if they are suspiciously getting a lot of attention. And I don't really hold Singaporean publisher in high regard either.
It stopped having real meaning a long time ago, in gaming it mostly means "not made by one of the major dev companies." Which is a useful metric on its own, but doesn't differentiate anything else.
Indie used to just mean self published. Which means Fortnite is an indie game. The label has been useless for a long time.
In my opinion the indie label despite being manufactured doesn't quite hit the success and get a lot of similar attention as mainstream label in the music industry. Like what would you call indie label?
I took a very uncharacteristic chance on E33 after pirating it and playing for a few hours. Regardless of its 'A status,' E33 is a good game with zero woke shit (as of 15 hours in). I heartily recommend it to anyone.
Finished it the other day and there is definitely some woke shit in there with how some characters are treated and 'diversity' placements, otherwise the game is overall solid but 'zero woke shit' is just a flat out lie no matter how good the game may be.
I mean I don't consider a bunch of niggers in fantasy not-France dying in the first 15 minutes to be a big deal, but it is I suppose a check mark you can check. The only other complaint I have so far is that Lune is a somewhat obnoxious girlboss, but she isn't that excusively. Gustave is more passive and Maelle is more of a wunderkid than I'd like, but the experience so far has been pretty normal and completely within the realm of "this is fine." It even has anti-antinatalist messaging with Gustave/Sophie's relationship.
Contrasting this to something like Starfield, or shows like Andor/Fallout/etc, and it becomes abundantly clear that this game isn't anything close to delivering The Message.
Casually accepting the presence of non-Europeans in European/Euro-derived societies is absolutely core to The Message. This and bog-standard 1980s era Feminism (e.g. falsely presenting women as equally capable as men) are like 90% of the real problem.
Sure, there's a degree of difference between an African person in the background of a cinematic and a full-on African Transformer in a Wheelchair. One is insidious and subversive, the other is a clown show that's laughable.
I had the same eyeroll reaction when I watched someone play it. But it stops being an issue rather quickly. And even that much is vaguely defensible on technicality.
It looked like they shoved them all in at the start to check boxes and then got on with it. To the degree where I wondered if it was being imposed by some French regulation.
If there were blacks all throughout the game you'd have a point, but there are in fact zero after the intro. I know you guys love picking nits, but the simple fact remains that, unless things become radically different in the later acts, this seems to be a genuine example of a game not ramming The Message down our throats when it very easily could have done so.
For the record, I consider Type 1 to be much more egregious than 1 nig with voice acting and 10 more standing in a crowd (who then all immediately die).
I think the problem here is it isn't all that easy to shove the message down many consumers throats anymore. They'd sooner bite a company's fingers off than let them do that anymore. Attributing them toning it down to some kind of favor to us, rather than as a natural consequence of losing hundreds of millions repeatedly is going to make you complacent.
That video covers that a lot of the same people behind the scenes profiting from this are the same ones pushing a black Anne Boleyn and female amputees as the real heroes of WW2 a few years back. Keppler still had an arm with millions dedicated to only publishing "black lead and developed games". There's nothing to say the less intense message is truly a change of heart or just trying to refill the war chests with your money, because their other bullshit was getting too expensive.
You haven't played the game and it shows. Black NPCs are in the background and you only notice them if you go out of your way to look for them. The only one that is even remotely in your face dies shortly after. After that the only thing closest to minorities is maybe Sciel and that's only if you insist she is a hapa and not just a tanned country-side girl she actually is.
The setting isn't historical and France had an african slave population that still lived there after it was abolished, so they have africans living there at the estimated time of this game (late 19th, earth 20th century). The big plot twist at end of act 2 kinda makes sense for what is in this setting and you only see them in the prologue.
It's not like it's 12th century france or something. And not as bad as the nonsense in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
Outside that, really nothing else woke I can think of. I'd rather have more games like this than the slop they've been putting out or the shit on TV.
The game is an excellent game and game of the year.
The only thing people can argue as "woke" is the first half hour.
I really dislike that they copy pasted their "NPC Negro" so much in the prologue, because that's basically the only major woke element to it. But it stands out a lot with how much they pasted it around and its the first thing people will see in the game.
You wanna sum up this hour long video? The youtube comments being full of schizo-posters is not selling it to me
Another person in the gaming posted the good summary.
It being partially funded by the French government actually literally explains the diversity and perhaps also why they all die in 15 minutes.
The game isn't bad. I think the only woke element was one waifu had a gay backstory for like 3 sentences. I teared up when the brother sister story came to an end.
What? Of the two adult ladies in the cast, only one had romantic history, and it was straight. The other was just plain tunnel-vision/autism/research.
I was enjoying a drink during that cutscene. It was when her and the scythe woman were in camp right? I totally could have misinterpreted it so ill defer to your statement.
If it's the scene I think it is, I can't talk about it in the thread, because it's specifically about the biggest spoiler of the game. That wasn't romance. Hell, if you've finished the game, then you absolutely know what the overarching emotional theme in it is.