My favorite example of an otherwise good game being unnecessarily dragged down by a deliberately unappealing protagonist is Returnal. AAA production values, intense shooter gameplay, roguelite difficulty - everything screams target audience of 15-35yo males. So why is the main character a scowling, homely, middle-aged woman?
Well the studio behind Returnal has a new game coming soon. Same genre, same production values, a sequel in all but name. And the protagonist is a gruff masculine dude?
Another modern girl boss game was Control (from Remedy, the makers of the supremely retarded Alan Wake 2, a game that replaced the literal title character with a black female diversity hire). Famously, Remedy deliberately uglified the female protagonist of Control with a manjaw. She looks way worse than real life model.
The direct sequel to Control features a white male protagonist.
Now maybe these characters are gay. I'm sure they'll be thoroughly soy and leftist. But it's interesting to see big new sequel games from obviously woke developers begrudgingly turning to male main characters. As a rule, these swaps generally only go one way.
The question becomes, should we be buying games from developers that hate us?
It depends, if the game is good in story, mechanics and characters, with enough to justify cost AND they come at us grovelling for us to forgive them, we can talk.
I appreciate scorched earth but No Man's Sky and ironically, BF LA studios during BF4 that you can come back so long as you make the EFFORT to come back. Something leftists can't do.
Only message that gives is that they can go as far left as possible and if it does not work they can always return with no consequence.
Oh I only meant in making a shit/broken game. As you can come back from that as look at the reception of BF 2042 to BF6 or on the flip side COD...whatever was previous to the latest Black Ops. The leftism made them bad but there was a path back.
FULL on leftism drinking the kool Aid, that DEMOLISHES studios, just look at HighGuard and Relooted, there will be no funds left TO come back from, they're dead. Coming back after being infested by people that hate their audience requires purges and a lot of money to survive long enough to produce a product worthy of the audiences attention.
If you really want to play it, just yar harr the damn thing instead of giving them a cent.
If it's not worth your money, it's not worth your time.
Alternatively, the best things in life are free.
A life of luxury with a mansion and no material wants or concerns is the opposite of free, mate.
The larger the dev studio the less reason there is to believe any of the actual people doing the work are the same from one game to the next anyway. The mass hiring and firing between projects as well the huge general churn rate makes most AAA dev studios just marketing skinsuits.
But then the question becomes are you willing to give 79c on the dollar to publishers and investors who hate you just to reward a few potentially good devs.
I'm inclined to agree, but there's another angle here: how funny is it to imagine all of these feminists being forced to re-adopt the masculine male protagonist in order to keep the lights on? You're basically slapping these retarded queers in the face with the stark reality of their own failure. Every day they go to work. Every minute they spend on these projects.
They will make the protagonist male but also make sure he gets emasculated once or twice for good measure. Uncharted 4 and the Mario movie comes to mind.
Normies and kids will not notice.
Even if they don't consciously notice, I do think all the emasculation in media is having the unintentional effect of making real life masculine men look even better to them. The peaks used to be "He's almost like an action hero", now "he's better than an action hero" is easily attainable.
I think it just lowers the standard for guys. If it's better or worse, I'm not sure.
i wouldn't even pirate those games tbh
the only two games who weren't inherently pozzed are the following:
Darksiders Doom-esque slasher https://store.steampowered.com/app/4317690/Crimson_Moon/
Steller blade-like game https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001760/Beast_of_Reincarnation/
and MGS IV
again Sony games usually come without DRM so you're free to "test" the game before buying, which i highly recommend.
I'm not surprised by this. It's an extension of the "White men in the military recruitment ads again" situation. They need White men to believe in America again so we fight for ZOG.
https://scored.co/c/KotakuInAction2/p/17rlrHwzch/this-army-recruitment-ad-is-very/c
Eh, it's similar, but there's a difference between "soliciting white men so that they can die for you" and "being forced to cater to white men so you can stay financially afloat". The latter is much more demoralizing for these people.
I dont know how much making men want to sit at home playing video games again is gonna work for military recruitment.
That's part of ZOG's conundrum. Compelling consumer entertaining products are about the only thing it has a chance of doing well for White men. At least games can passivate people for them.
It wasn't black girls but Wolfenstein turned their protagonists into twin psychopathic twin girls and the inevitable Debra Wilson
The Wolfenstein sequels are a classic case study in feminist subversion. Dudes rebooted the franchise with a great game, injecting the property with newfound relevance and profitability. Cue the feminist parasites, who had zero interest in Wolfenstein when it was a dead IP. Suddenly they wanted control of this violent first person shooter - a genre completely dominated by young men - so that it could be transformed into yet another sassy yass queen girl boss feminist power fantasy. The lesson is always the same: leftists only target established, already-successful IP. Because the goal is to withdraw money and influence for political and cultural movements, not to continue or grow success of the brand.
It's really just communism, when you think about it. When your company or project becomes sufficiently successful, it must then pay out to the leftist mafia in the form of diversity hirings and propaganda. Your prosperous endeavor must become a jobs program and a platform for women and minorities, or else they will use media and government to destroy you.
IIRC Control's publishers only gave early copies to female streamers.
“Focus, Dylan.”
As for new "Dead Cells" Castlevania-
Sonia Belmont (whom it looks to be) has been around longer than most gamers have been alive. Please, for the love of God, do not start screeching "dEi BeLmOnT" unless there is actual evidence of them giving her a lame lesbian girlboss personality.... or that Adi Shankar is anywhere near it.
Or you know, Trevor was reincarnated and now on HRTs.
It can also be that chick from the Netflix series.
Either way, I hate it and don't care
It's not like Castlevania is a stranger to heroines either, with major playable characters like Maria, Charlotte, Shanoa and Sypha (The original Sypha, not whatever Netflix turned her into.)
Returnal was the EXACT kind of game I've always wanted... except you played as a middle-aged, saggy hag. Instant no-buy here.
I'm sure there are some soy-boy lefties out there saying, "Hurr durr, I'd rather look at a saggy, wrinkly old woman's arse if I'm playing a third-person shooter", but those retards are part of what's ruining gaming.
As for a pseudo-sequel starring a gruff male? I would say "Count me in!" but we all know there is going to be some kind of subversion. We've been seeing that a lot lately.
As you noted, maybe he's gay, like what they did in Avowed and Starfield.
The main thing is that a lot of these games that attempt to "win" back over gamers oftentimes are extremely uninspired in their gameplay when they finally do make males the leads again. The games are just these boring, lame, completely uninteresting games with boring art, samey gameplay loops, and throwaway stories.
Long gone are the days where we play as a gruff, masculine character and have an actual evil antagonist to topple with uncompromising enemies in unique environments. Everything is safe and samey.
I would like to be proven wrong, and I'm not at all familiar with how these games have been promoted, but I wouldn't be surprised that they put the male leads in some of these sequels, make them super boring and lame, and when they fail to sell they say, "See, we tried male protags but 50% of our female audience didn't like it, so we need to go back to adding in female protagonists who are lame and gay!"
You reminded me of the number one reason I played Duke Nukem 3D: and that is Duke Nukem.
I enjoyed his VO's. I enjoyed how he could give money to pole dancers. I enjoyed kicking aliens in the face to finish them off. I enjoyed the cutscenes. I enjoyed when he said "Ready for action!" after finishing a level.
If the game were called "Alien Invasion" and it starred a no-name protagonist who did none of what I listed above, I might have played it (since there weren't 10,000 other games to play at the time) but it certainly wouldn't have been memorable.
The DEI hero shooters have a similar trend. There are still fatties and troon adjacent characters but they almost always have a slim hottie in the roster now.
Yeah they've been doing that now as a way to lure back in the gamers -- a mix of goonbait and DEIversity.
To sate the normies, this method seems to be working, and it's the kind of subversion that's dangerous to get the masses away from or to wake them up to, because it placates their basest desires while still hitting the right kind of dopamine receptors.
The media threw a hissy fit when the idea of a Ken movie spinoff to barbie was jokingly pitched about, if they even attempted this it would be blood in the water.
surprise ZUN hasnt tried to make a 3d third person version of touhou project.. bet it would blow this returnal thing out of the water.
First time I've ever heard of this trend. I will follow it with great interest
And tbh, that's fine. If they want to make some portion of the roster aesthetically unappealing, then they can have fun looking at the ensuing usage statistics. The problem has always been total deprivation of choice. By depriving us of conventionally attractive choices, leftists convinced themselves and others that we accepted their "redefined" standards. That's why they work so hard to eliminate unapproved options. Queers know that regular people presented with legitimate options will always choose beauty.