Always has been. Seriously you can find "journalists" and "scholars" pissing all over lotr from the time of its release and 95% of it boils down to Commie and/or globalist kvetching about how it doesn't push "the message."
MMORPGS are what killed Blizzard, too. Once they got that sweet sweet subscription cash for "games as a service" to people who wanted their games to be Zoom-meeting job simulators they had to bring in thousands of different workers, top to bottom, and the company transformed into the bullshit we see today. They used to be in the business of creating art and pushing the imaginative and narrative boundaries of the medium (see Starcraft and Diablo 1/2 and to some extent Warcraft II and III), now they make tripe for 12 year olds or Millenial Norms without a scintilla of taste.
see: The Closing of the American Mind
This was old news even at the time of its publishing in the 80's. But it documents the root cause -- the 1960's takeover of ivy's by marxist radicals and the foolish public who decided it didn't matter because "it's only college, it's not the real world"
The intentional confusion is suuuuper obvious once you recall the decades of education around "gender roles." They already had a term for "socially constructed gender" but they jettisoned it because it prevented them from playing these power games via linguistic obfuscation.
all the items I pick up are for my class instead of for a random one
I feel like this is a negative.... One of the bright spots of D2 was picking up interesting and/or powerful items for another class and wondering about how to make it work on that other toon. Then you'd start that character up, and they'd find some things for themselves, but also for other classes, and pretty soon you'd have a stable full of different characters. Some would be stronger and further along than others, but you'd be exploring the game much more and challenging yourself to build and play in different ways successfully.
Removing this aspect feels like putting the game on rails even more than it already is. If everything you get is tied only to your class, not only is that immersion-breaking, but it actively keeps you in the rut of your current character....
This is both accurate and inaccurate. Travel was possible, and even common, in certain contexts. Pilgrimages, for instance, involved people from as far away as England making the trek to Jerusalem (though, much more common, was simply to Canterbury). BUT the difficulty and expense were astronomically high. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a life-long goal and/or luxury, and someone would have to plan for decades and arrange their entire lives around an absence of a year or longer to make the journey.
Without some huge incentive driven by religious fervor, the likelihood that someone would make such a sacrifice is very very low. Black Africans, as a whole, had almost no reason to even imagine traveling to Northern Europe for most of history, with the only exceptions being hard-core travelers like pirates or sea-traders, and they did not migrate but simply pass through. So it's fine to depict the unicorns of blacks in, say, London or other port cities, but in the context of visitors and ocean nomads, not permanent settlers.
With many fantasy settings and stories this wouldn't be an issue. But Tolkien was explicit, and his work is crystal clear. LOTR is a mythology of the Britons+Anglo-Saxons meant to stand in for that which was erased by the Norman invasion of 1066-. To change it in this way, then, whether out of ignorance or malice, is repeating the very same thing he was attempting to remedy: an erasure of British culture and ethnic identity. Disgusting and vile.
The irony is doubled because they also rely on the reverse examples for a different set of narratives they call "colonialism."
When whites expand, its evil. When non-whites expand, it's good.
When nonwhites die out, its genocide and tragedy. When whites die out, its to be celebrated.
The only consistent principle they hold to is anti-whiteness.
If for no other reason than the proportion of those who deserve some kind of scorn is far lower on the one hand than the other, I see little problem with this