Probably won't even notice it exists, Japanese are very insular and only a tiny niche audience there even plays western games.
I guess vtubers like Korone playing AC helps the exposure, but overall it isn't a big deal in the market.
The story would be better if written by ChatGPT, without exaggeration. The games live on because of the huge open worlds and gameplay and nothing else. Very soulless but it has its market. They are definite slave labor shops though, the amount of people who work on these games to churn them out over the dozen studios that do contract work is insane if you look at the credits.
I actually like the worlds they build. Odyssey & Valhalla are probably some of the prettiest art we'll ever see of Greco-Roman stuff in a modern AAA space, no one else does anything close, it's just a shame they're wasted on such shallow & horribly written games.
Yeah honestly people who expect historical accuracy from AC games at this point are decades late to the party. It's been too long to remember the details, but I know AC3 shit all over American history. Valhalla had them unironically trying to justify killing one of the greatest roman emperors who is loved by practically everyone for promoting peace as being an evil guy who had to die because... uh... anarchy good?
Diversity is more of a side hustle or symptom of corruption and greed. It's an explicit representation of it, I suppose. Pure greed itself where a purely value-less enterprise exists only to sop money off the public and companies, as a sort of protection racket; but not the cause of corruption, for sure.
A related but wild story:
If you shop at Fred Meyer on 85th…. Say hi and be extra friendly to the checker ’Eddy’. 😃 Yesterday while checking out with my groceries, eddy was my cashier and he was incredibly friendly and shared some of his story with me.
He’s 73 years old and was retired from the military on the east coast before… but after taking care of his wife with Alzheimer’s for 13 years, she passed away. Then when the war in Ukraine started he sold his house, car and every possession he owned to donate to Ukrainian charity’s. With his little money he had left, he bought himself a one way ticket to help Ukraine during the war. While there he said his age hindered him a lot and many of his friends there suggested he find a way to come back to the US. His in- laws pooled together enough money for a one way ticket to WA state and helped set him up in a studio apt. He got the job at Fred Meyer to pay his family back and in his words, with a laugh “can you believe I pay $1750 for a tiny shoebox?! ”
He kept referencing Fred Meyers probation period of 90 days and how he hopes they keep him after it’s up , he says he’s slower then other cashiers but wants to give the “customer a wonderful experience so they keep coming back”. Anyway… if you see him- give a smile, a hello or if you aren’t in a hurry - maybe let a manager know how awesome he is. I keep thinking about his story and wanted others to be aware so they can maybe brighten his day with some friendliness if they ever cross paths with him.
Propaganda is far from harmless. It gets the impressionable and vulnerable to mutilate their lives just for a whiff of that feel-good righteousness. I don't believe in Hell, but sometimes I wish it was real so all the people who propagate these narratives could burn forever.
The public discourse on "AI" is so fucking awful, coming from someone who was playing around with them before most people even knew it existed. Everyone is simultaneously clueless, hysterical, and ignorant. And of course the press dials it up to 11 for profit, while themselves having no idea.
I don't think that's possible. The press pressure helps, but the reason companies go this way is they hire people who genuinely ARE activists and think this way. These people push their ideas, and everyone around them doesn't want to be rude to them, so it just escalates from there. The call is always coming from inside the building to some extent. You have to really scourge these people out and make them unfeel unwelcome, or they take over. By the time it reaches the point that it is visible in character creation and "male/female" sliders being unacceptable, the fight is already over.
Lmao if you think politicians doing drugs is going to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
If anything, that would be BAD. People should be upset over their own government tyrannically oppressing them and labeling them terrorists just for existing; not over politicians burying their noses in snow.
It's a trend with Larian. They used to be completely free of this nonsense. DOS1's genesis was, in Swen's own words, because he wanted to play a game with his girlfriend. Canonically that's what the MC in DOS1 was supposed to be: you and your girlfriend, or vice versa you and your boyfriend. The female character famously had high heels and bikini armor in some outfits, and they got lambasted for that and got rid of it in DOS2, which is also when they were pressured into hiring a lot of writing staff (it used to be just 1 guy), all of whom were either dangerhairs or former gaming journos (no really, look it up).
So yeah, it's a mixed bag. Larian does make pretty cool gameplay; when DOS1 came out being an unapologetic grognard turn-based game like that was still a pretty bold decision. If you like turnbased RPGs, it's hard to beat them in this regard. But... the creative side, the storytelling, is getting so absurdly woke it becomes a question of whether you can stomach it. I know it's at the point now where I am very much on the fence, despite being a fan of them since the early 2000s with the first Divdiv. I expect the writing/creative direction to only get worse in future titles.
Larian are basically your average woke-adjacent normies. They want to conform to the progressive world view, but also aren't actual activists. They prefer "fun" and being non-political. But they will allow the infiltration of all the activist ideas, because they don't want to have uncomfortable discussions with the press/institutions and all their lackey followers.
I just want to point out that the whole Abdel/died-in-Baldur's-Gate thing is not really canon to the games.
Yeah I guess you could say it represents one permutation of the Bhaalspawn protagonist, but that canon FR protag is clearly designed to be minimally important to the FR setting and take a path that almost no actual player of the games would take.
Most people would assume the mantel of god-hood in their playthrough of ToB; or if they didn't, be so fantastically powerful that no upstart would ever, ever present a challenge to them personally. Good luck killing me asshole, I'm behind Timestop and 20 layers of contingency.
It's a classical "we wrote a cool story involving the most powerful stuff in the setting... then ret-conned it all into being a perfect loop that ends up back at square 1" canon setting solution. If your canon story completely negates the whole point of the storyline in the first place (i.e Bhaal is back to what/who he was before the Time of Troubles) then you just retconned your whole story in effect.
As someone who works an unskilled labor job in logistics, I fully expect the "AI" rollout for physical labor stuff to be disastrous. I've already seen their attempted replacement of front-end labor (i.e cashiers) be a horrible failure that customers hate, doesn't work properly, yet the corp still tries to force as a thing, because it's an industry mandate.
Ironically AI DOES replace a lot of makework white collar jobs fairly well. It wouldn't surprise me if it ends up displacing more professionals than blue collar workers--but since those professionals have all the pull with politicians and upper crust, they might end up banning it and saving their jobs, whereas coal miners were told to fuck themselves. We already see the beginnings of this with the political moves to "regulate" AI.
Looking far into the future, it actually seems more reasonable to me that we'd have AI overlords managing everything while human labor does everything cheaply, than the reverse. It turns out that the human capabilities when it comes to physical labor are hard to replicate, robots often fuck shit up and cause lots of damage. Imagine a robot trying to do fine detail work of organizing a shelf without knocking down $10,000 worth of merchandise.
The Matrix in reality probably wouldn't be humans hooked up as batteries; it'd be humans serving as slave labor. From an efficiency perspective, the least efficient part of society is the upper crust. The lower rung has already been mercilessly squeezed to be as efficient as possible, with the profits from that efficiency going to the lazy upper rungs of society. If you were an AI looking at the whole of society, what you'd be looking to "trim" as inefficient would be the office workers, upper management, politicians, etc.