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Take away the woke stuff and it was still a bad game. Class design was railroaded, itemization reinforced it.
70 years ago you guys were saying that black people were beasts that can't deny their basal impulses.Then after that you couldn't trust women because they were slaves to their hormones. Then after that the gays were gay because they WANTED to be that way. Then after that it was Ozzy Osbourne was mentally ill because "he eats bats" and the people that liked his music were deviants. Then it was the TV or video games making young people violent. Now we're back to the gays being mentally ill even though it hasn't been that uncommon throughout human history and was only looked down upon by people who hate freedom for all; e.g. Christians. Guess what? Humans are a complex amalgamation of cells and meat; they won't all be just like you.
Profitable software developers don't. Until they were bought up, ID didn't, and Blizzard didn't. How do I know? Because I worked with both and know developers and designers in both. They did NOT cut half the staff routinely. You may think it's normal (why I don't know) but when it comes to profitable developers that's rare. It takes time to train people to how you do things and it would cost more money to fire half the staff and then try to hire them back. It's not like they'll be sitting around waiting.
Which is why EA cut their staff to about 70 after Dragon Age: The Veilguard. They were still able to work on Mass Effect: The Universe and it was already pretty far along in development. More Alpha than Beta to be sure so it still had about a year worth of development left. The entire point of these acquisitions was supposedly to share resources to bring down the cost of development when trying to do AAA titles in the first place. However, when you see the same thing happen to studios like ID and they tell you "hey we were profitable" and they still get half their staff cut, I think that's an issue. Software developers can miss expectations, break even, yet survive. It's done quite often.
I listed some of those. I also want my American McGee: Alice Asylum!
BioWare had more than a decade of missed financial and sales targets. It also had a massive game that flopped. BioWare, was not a studio that was making money for EA.
Bullshit. In fantasy, I can create any identity, in any form, in any place, without regard to any experience anchor. If you're making a historical documentary, then yes, you absolutely should abide by what actually happened. Without reading the wall text, I'm only commenting on that sentence. Not to offend.
Again, bullshit. LG+ has always been part of evolution. I don't really appreciate word salads so LG+ includes BTQ. I really fail to understand how we just can't go with LG+. The + includes BTQ.
Making money, breaking even, and losing are different buckets entirely. Plus you have to understand that some of BioWare's unprofitable endeavors came from EA itself.
Not talking about BioWare. You're making a blanket statement that ALL game developers layoff half of their staff between releases...they don't.
Oh I'm aware. Once they sold out to EA, they were on the leash.
Yes, it's a general statement but I understand it doesn't apply to every studio, but many of them do. A lot of the labor in the industry is contract labor. Different studios in different countries may do things differently. So that's fair.
In what possible way is Veilguard based on 5e?
Yeah in those games you get a few I frames, not the entire 2s or so of the animation duration.
And I generally don’t feel the need to comment on gaming in general people are going to like or dislike whatever they want, I usually don’t care as it’s not my business. BioWare is different this one hurts, it’s a tad more personal.
I get that's the reason for it, but it does disturb me when the cool Mage who banged a goddess and got in trouble for it, then wanted to go down on me because I was really cool in that last fight. It's different when the obvious gay vampire wanted to get jiggy with it because he's obviously gay. On the flip side, Dragon Age Inquisition had Sera which I did want to romance her because she was the only decent looking female, and she basically told me that she can't because we're both into the same thing. Iron Bull was kinda funny because he made it clear that he's down to screw anyone within arms reach. Besides Iron Bull, you could also romance Dorian Pavus who was obviously gay but a character I did like. There was only two female characters you could romance and they sucked.
It literally doesn't matter what minority group you demand to be shoehorned into every story, if you do it purely for its own sake, then it is the definition of wokism.
Non sequitur. The only thing you need to understand is that in a pre-technological feudal civilization it doesn't make sense to have any significant number of non-natives at any location. And like it or not, in a temperate climate which is how most fantasy is depicted as black and brown people don't exist natively. So again, you strawman. It's not a white thing it's an immersion thing. If in Assassin's Creed Origins they made the local NPCs white it would be equally jarring, and you'd be lining up in the first row screaming about whitewashing. Of course they didn't feel the need to do that, somehow it is only when in white people's native land when diversity and representation are suddenly a must, how curious! OK, I retract my previous statement, it is a white thing, after all: anti white racism coming from the woke.
You keep saying gotcha, but when you look down at your hands you always clutch nothing. Yes, there are plenty of self depracating white women (and some men), of course it is an act of virtue signaling, they don't actually hate themselves, in fact it is quite the opposite they think they are better than everyone else. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were living under a rock until yesterday, because you wouldn't lie about never encountering such a person now would you?
Is white supremacy woke then?
Who needs me when you can debunk yourself so thoroughly. Just after you rightly argue that depicting non-white characters as white is bad, you turn around and give the
to depicting a white character as non-white.
It literally doesn't matter what minority group you demand to be shoehorned into every story, if you do it purely for its own sake, then it is the definition of wokism.
How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance, that some LGBT characters are accepted while others aren't? If it was bigotry or homophobia, why do some characters slip through the cracks? That's a rhetorical question, the answer is because they are well written, and make sense in the context of the story / setting.
The argument that everyone complaining about poorly conceived LGBT characters is just bigoted falls flat on its face.
Non sequitur. The only thing you need to understand is that in a pre-technological feudal civilization it doesn't make sense to have any significant number of non-natives at any location. And like it or not, in a temperate climate which is how most fantasy is depicted as black and brown people don't exist natively. So again, you strawman. It's not a white thing it's an immersion thing. If in Assassin's Creed Origins they made the local NPCs white it would be equally jarring, and you'd be lining up in the first row screaming about whitewashing. Of course they didn't feel the need to do that, somehow it is only when in white people's native land when diversity and representation are suddenly a must, how curious! OK, I retract my previous statement, it is a white thing, after all: anti white racism coming from the woke.
You keep saying gotcha, but when you look down at your hands you always clutch nothing. Yes, there are plenty of self depracating white women (and some men), of course it is an act of virtue signaling, they don't actually hate themselves, in fact it is quite the opposite they think they are better than everyone else. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were living under a rock until yesterday, because you wouldn't lie about never encountering such a person now would you?
If we are talking about games, no it didn't suddenly happen in 2015, it was slowly creeping in for a while, around 2015 was just when game quality started to noticeably suffer as a result.
Is white supremacy woke then?
Who needs me when you can debunk yourself so thoroughly. Just after you rightly argue that depicting non-white characters as white is bad, you turn around and give the
Letting modern day BioWare run the studio themselves is like letting the inmates run the asylum.
The "asylum" is already being run by inmates, what's a few more?
This time the inmates have to worry about their future where before they were betting on EA funding. I'm not sure how we went from developers who made Dragon's Age Origins to Veilguard but whoever is left running the studio will need to do some restructuring. Gary McKay was the president of BioWare from 2020 forward so I would replace him first. Casey Hudson ran the studio twice from 1998 to 2014 and for a short time in 2017 to 2020. His reasoning for leaving was "Desire for Creative Freedom". Casey Hudson needs to be behind BioWare if this corpse of a studio is to ever come back. Problem is he's managing Arcanaut Studios which is unsurprisingly Canadian and working on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic which is the successor to Knights of the Old Republic. No way he's going to leave Arcanaunt Studios to manage the inmates in BioWare. Maybe if Arcanaunt Studios takes over BioWare's IP then we have some serious potential here?
BioWare is never coming back, and hopefully the talentless people that rotted it out will never work in the industry again. (Some people have a way of failing upwards.)
Whether you use the word "woke" or not, I have yet to see a rational discussion about these topics from anyone who virtue signals for the kind of crap we see being shoehorned into modern entertainment media coming from Hollywood or western game studios. You need only look at this thread and the others like it to see that. I think its pretty clear that most people understand what the term means on both sides of the argument. Yes, the term has shifted from its original meaning to a more pejorative one, but that doesn't negate the fact that people on both sides know what's being talked about here. The underlying problem is less about what it is and more about why one side pushes back against it. It is this that proponents of what we consider woke ideology can't seem to understand. Not the term. I think there are very few people who don't understand the term and most of the people who say they don't, do so out of convenience when their argument falls apart because it lacks merit. You often see this discussion about what woke is or isn't right before the name calling starts.
Right--it's not, contrary to the dishonest person I blocked, "hur dur, you guys think inserting minorities is woke", said. For example, while I initially had reservations, Doctor Who's flirtation with gender-bending The Master was excellent, because Michelle Gomez clearly respected the show's history and the character. Gomez was, hands down, the best Master the new version of the show had, although, to be honest, the actors who bracketed her sucked.
The point is that some people, on this very thread, define it narrowly and some define it broadly. In past discussions we've had the same problem. How do you debate when the word being debated changes depending on who responds to you? Some people have literally said that bad graphics is a result of "woke ideology". Anything they don't like about a game is "woke". Then other people narrowly focus it on bad storytelling. If they just dropped the word woke and complained about bad storytelling and bad graphics it would be a far different discussion but the insistence on using the word "woke" leaves it to the interpretation of the reader what the hell is even being talked about.
This is why understanding context is crucial.
Most of these discussions have been had a hundred times on the forum here. You are missing crucial context around what is being said and WHY its being said. I can get into all of that, but wokeness is a big reason why all these games lately are turning out like shit. It's partly why they cost so much and take so long to build. It's why the identity politics are the core of everything they do. Companies like Blackrock, admit to trying to conduct social engineering to "change behavior". They were known to force things like ESG scores and what not to secure financing. So when someone says "woke" is the cause of bad graphics, bad story telling and gameplay, its absolutely true. But, at the same time it isn't that simple. There is more to it than that. You just weren't paying attention when those conversations were had.
When your game has to have a menu setting to silence your protagonist to reasonable levels so that the player doesn't go insane, you have designed the game.... poorly.
Either someone reads the post or posts and tries to understand or they shouldn't bother posting since they don't want a discussion. It's a slang usage of the word so it's to be expected.
But these are assumptions based off small quantities. The thought process runs along the lines that if there's identity politics in the story then it must infect the whole team, not just the storytelling, therefore you can blame everything on identity politics. But that fails a simple test because there have ALWAYS been games with bad graphics and ALWAYS been games with bad storytelling and nobody was blaming it on identity politics. It was blamed on .. yes .. bad graphical work and bad writing, not politics. But, because "woke" is the new thing certain groups of people want to blame it for everything wrong with the industry, even if those things have existed for the entire life of the industry.
They really aren't. It's been a rampant problem in the AAA gaming space for a decade now. You simply aren't paying attention to the game industry itself.
We've seen plenty of decent looking games that have good graphics, but include woke narratives and other bullshit. So no, that doesn't necessarily track. This is where pattern recognition is key. When you see purposely hideous female characters, cucked male characters and certain other components of the pattern, it's a good bet that a studio is probably infested with woketards from top to bottom. Not every studio is, but its a pretty well circulated statistic that about a third of game developers are women and alphabet mafia types.
Again, you are not looking at the patterns or the context of the arguments being made. You just discount them because you can have bad graphics, writing, etc. without wokeness. However, manifests in very specific ways in these games. It's clear in the story lines and even in certain game design decisions. Yes, you can have bad graphics, bad writing etc, without woke, but its not hard to tell the difference between games that are just badly made and games that are bad because of DEI hires and woke messaging infesting the narrative.
This isn't bias so much as plain logic. The reality is that poor game mechanics or top-level franchise decisions (recycling a formula every year, chasing me-too trends) matter far more than the demographics of the characters or a game's intended message. BioWare not only had problems that had been going on for a while, it was succeeding while supposedly pushing a "woke" agenda (remember, Mass Effect was always about uniting diverse cultural groups, and was clearly inclusive of LGBT).
The game was about making your own choices and having those choices matter in the game. One of those choices was to screw every other race and let the council burn making humanity the ruler of the universe. But it sure united all the cultures (under Shepard's boot).