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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   36783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Some of you may have heard of an almost decade old video game called "Kingdom Come: Deliverence". It is a realistic RPG with no fantasy elements, developed by a Czech studio, and set in middle ages Czechia.

At its release its fidelity to history was widely praised by gamers. But gaming journalists attacked it for this very reason: fidelity to history meant that there was a paucity of Africans in the game. Despite gaming journalists forming united frons to smear the developers as racist, for not altering the racial demographics to please foreigners, the developers stood FIRMLY by their game.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, and a sequel to KC:D is announced. Warhorse Studios says nothing eyebrow raising. Then a shock: screenshots appearing to show an African boasting about his land plenty, equality and knowledge, purporting to be from KC:D2 surfaces. There is widespread disbelief, the developers deny its authenticity, deboonkers find queerities in rendering. Matter is considered to be dubious at best.

Then a shock: a full admission from the man who so unfairly smeared, and who didn't buckle, that the game is in fact alters history to suit the tastes of 2025 American audiences.

Still the wages are low in Czechia, and loyalty of the marginalized and silenced peoples is worthless compared to fame the media can bestow upon you, and fortune gained from hiding the massive backtracks in marketing, so the game is already profitable.

My first thought is that a studio is allowed to pursue any business plan they wish. I don't think this will work out well, but I'm not a gamer. AFAIKT, this game is known for is historical accuracy, and OP is underselling the extent of the about-face towards inaccurate propaganda in the newer version. (according to a new reddit thread, with screenshots and explanations here.

the developers deny its authenticity

By "don't believe everything you read on the internet" they were presumably referring to the false rumors not the true ones. Like the "unskippable gay sex scene" rumor started by Saudi Arabian sites based on it being rejected by the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course in reality the scene is both part of a very optional romance and is (like every cutscene) skippable even if you've chosen that romance route. I'm not sure if the "unskippable" part was from bad machine translation of the Saudi sites or something else.

No fantasy elements? Well, if you studiously ignore that most medieval potions didn't do anything I guess.

The first game was set amongst rural Bohemia, with a handful of villages. It was very much in keeping that the game have no ethnic minorities in such far flung places. The second game is set in Prague, a major city. It is very much in keeping that the game have a few traders from distant countries in the city.

The "chuds" can certainly point to the sudden inclusion of a gay romance as a betrayal from Vavra, but the reactions to this Musa character just look like incoherent rage. As others have pointed out, even his over the top dialogue makes sense for a Muslim character from the wealthy Malian empire

Is it? I thought it was set in Kuttenburg, a minor town, not Prague.

There is plenty of subversion here. Take a look:

• Henry and Hans are gay for each other: https://imgur.com/a/VoNmnq0

• Musa the Malian Scholar, Physician and Explorer (who quickly went from "Al Fake" to "just a Trader" to big plot critical character with over an hour of dialogue that is part of the main story and can't be killed) lectures the player about how much more enlightened his society is than Bohemia over and over, and goes on about how they don't season dey food, you can also get relationship advice from him, or talk about jerking off, also you apparently have to defend him during a trial and if you fail it's game over with Henry getting hanged: https://imgur.com/a/P2dsthI

• Henry apparently has a Jewish step brother, who he can be gay with? and teaches him about the plight of his people: https://imgur.com/a/mooiFgi

• The Jewish quarter and synagogue in the game that wasn't historic, but added by the dev team for story purposes: https://i.imgur.com/5u0o4mG.png plays a major part in the main story and you will have to defend them from “Antisemite” (talk about anachronistic) Christians attacking them in an ahistorical invented pogrom: https://i.imgur.com/YarvjPJ.jpeg

• The main not-gay romance Option is supposedly a single mother who cheats on you with Musa, a black man, and becomes angry with you if you don’t champion him in court in a subsequent quest.

• A gypsy prostitute from a gypsy camp you're to run errands for teaches Henry about hermaphrodites: https://i.imgur.com/ZAn8Ges.png

• Henry gets humiliated or outdone by women several times

• There's a Quest about humanizing and making friends with the Cumans that invaded and pillaged Henry's village and killed his parents and girlfriend

• There's a quest where you have to help make a Golem using Jewish magic, and to do so Henry apparently has to eat dead bodies? The act itself mocked as humiliating (“from Lord’s messenger to taster of cadavers”): https://imgur.com/a/bMPqJIm

The pogrom is interesting - the head developer, who defended the child sodomy (Henry is a minor by canon) he injected, said to players you can make your own choices whether or not to engage in sodomy, but conveniently you have no choice but to slaughter your fellow White Christians beside a Muslim ally to advance the main plot. On a related note about the lead dev from Wikipedia’s early life:

Daniel Vávra was born in Rychnov nad Kneznou, before moving to Prague. He has partial Jewish ancestry.

It seems that he ignored his personal ethnic grievances in the first game, to wide acclaim, but then heavily layered them into the sequel in a way that slanders White Christian European history, while vandalizing the beloved first game.

Much media has followed this path - Joker to Joker 2, The Last of Us to The Last of Us Part 2, Hades and its sequel, etc. Rugpulls and humiliating retcons everywhere.

Crazy how in such a short time one can go from based white central european christian anti-woke pro-gamergate fighter for gamers rights™️ to just another subversive jew identified by a 7 year old tweet about some distant ancestry

I mean, presumably he made that transformation over the ~decade since the first game came out.

Edit: I read further down and apparently the studio was bought out. Propably less personal transformation and more job keeping then.

I do wonder how distant that ancestry is. Ive never seen a european remember pocahontas amounts of jewish ancestry, and people where it was easy to find around 1940 tend to not live here anymore one way or another. So either its after that, or a lot before and hes done family research.

It’s almost certainly very distant. Only a few thousand Czech Jews survived the Holocaust and almost all of them emigrated. The modern community is tiny and relatively devout as in most of Central Europe. The company Warhorse was acquired by is also run by gentile Austrians and Swedes.

It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.

conveniently you have no choice but to slaughter your fellow White Christians beside a Muslim ally to advance the main plot.

What exactly is the context around this?

it's not even that ludicrous - Bohemia actually sent an offer to the Ottomans to become a vassal of theirs (Utraquism of course being closer in spirit to Sunni Islam than Catholicism) just before they got crushed at White Mountain.

You defend a synagogue (which never existed historically) in melee against “antisemites” perpetrating an invented pogrom as part of a quest which the main plot is dependent on for advancement. Musa, the jarring negrolatry insert, is your forced companion.

Oh, another thing, the developer couldn’t bother to introduce interiors of churches and cathedrals that were strongly present in the first game (not enough time he says? But he had enough time, manpower and money for Musa and all the other crap detailed above), but he certainly did for a synagogue.

“ I would love to, but we just didnt have enough time to do it as good as we would like to.”

Majority of the developers are atheists. I wish I had a quote reference, but either Tobi or Vavra stated it.

It was Vavra, and I’m sure it is right that most of them are atheists. But by that same token, it can be said that there is nothing more Jewish than an atheistic Jew.

There was literally an entire monastery in the first game along with a ten hour sequence around it.

So there was a massive decrease in the amount of Church-related content compared to the first game? I'm pretty sure that going 7 days without going inside a church was considered a major sin back then, seems odd to leave out.

Once a year a non-European trader passed by, and from that it follows a Western-African intellectual being a major NPC isn't tendentious and Afrocentric. Goes to show that Warhorse's goal wasn't to create a world representative of the time and place it is set in, but one which minimizes major parts of life and maximizes the tiniest minorities, in service of making the 2025 audiences feel at home.

That, like the proverbial newspaper, it leaves the players misinformed isn't, unlike the first game, a concern for the devs.

I don’t believe this is contrary to what I wrote, please let me know if I’m mistaken.

It makes sense that they might want some variety in terms of interiors, no?

Please. Is that what the developers said? They’ve could have added greater and more compelling cathedrals, or what have you, with all the AAA resources being thrown at it, as the game is literally titled Kingdom Come, and this robustly funded successor could have provided more awe-inspiring Christian architecture to appreciate. Why, they could invent it if they wanted to, out of thin air like the synagogue. Why not? But it doesn’t have that, those aspects are absent and that exclusion is very out of key with the original title. Instead it gets gay sex and black lecturing, yada yada, and all signs point to that not being accidental.

What was "based" about Hades 1?

It was not based, but rather the sequel more heavily catered to woke pieties and aesthetics than the first. It is not the best example, but sequels degrading, if not on an about-face like Kingdom Come, then simply unignorably further downward into wokeism, is a noticeable pattern.

And Baldur's Gate 3 shows us that people, including the white Gamers, love it as long as it's a good game.

Anacdata: the people I know that first played BG1 on launch either didn't buy BG3 or gave up on it.

BG 3 appears to have - successfully - shifted its target audience.

BG3 also did not exactly have the opportunity to plainly slander White Christian Europeans (unless they somehow made their way into Faerûn). It also did not vandalize the prior titles in the series with woke retcons.

I blindly (nearly zero prior review on social media or otherwise, because I enjoyed BG1/2 very much and decided to dive in blind only if a trusted friend could vouch it wasn’t woke goyslop) played through it on recommendation from a friend who didn’t find it catering directly to modern audiences in his own playthrough (unlike recent Ubisoft titles). I believe now that he was wrong and is not sensitive enough to know he is swimming in woke waters.

It’s mostly fine, but it isn’t real time with pause, the writing is poor but serviceable for the gameplay. The problem is aesthetics - everything is undifferentiated morality choices, spiritually genderless with no alignment system. All races are strictly equivalent, and would-be evil races are turned into sympathetic humans with some devilish window dressing. At some point in the third chapter, the designers’ jarring preference for girl bosses become impossible to not notice, everything has a sterile-feminine bent. It’s not done well. There’s apparently a whole lot of degeneracy that is avoided by not engaging with it - after I beat it I was surprised by some scenes on YouTube I never saw in game.

Much of this could be predetermined by the edicts of the 5th edition D&D rules however, which is why I never use that rule set in any tabletop setting.

It has some good moments, and the tactical gameplay loop is there, so it is worthwhile but it isn’t any sort of Infinity Engine game. There’s no successor to those.

The writing in BG3 is terrible.

The characters are god-awful. Their motivations trite or pathetic, their journeys not worth caring about. However, all that does not matter as the game emulates tabletop well enough to allow you to do some genuinely stupid shit to break it as hard as you possibly can.

Fundamentally as a work of fiction, it kind of fails. However, as a roleplaying experience, it was pretty good. I hear the Dark Path is better written, but I'm in no hurry to get back to it.

I've avoided BG3 myself, despite being a massive fan of BG1 and BG2. The shift from RTwP to pure turn-based is huge, and as far as I can tell BG3 is a 5e game, not an AD&D2e game - and I mean that in terms of atmosphere, themes, and writing style, not just mechanics.

And as far as I can tell, yep, BG3 is pretty woke. I remember when the jokes/memes about sex with a bear were going around, but beyond that, it strikes me as very much a post-Critical-Role type of D&D, focused on misfit characters and with a lot of snark. It just does not look like Baldur's Gate to me, in any way, and to be honest I rather resent the fact that it claims the title.

The shift from RTwP to pure turn-based is huge,

It's a huge improvement and I say that as a massive fan of BG1 and 2. DnD (whether 5e, Basic or ADnD2e) was built for turn based play. Now I would certainly prefer if BG3 was either ADnD2e or 3.5E based (as 5e is definitely not...great) but it is definitely better off as turn based.

As for sex as a bear, well you have to remember Forgotten Realms was created by Ed Greenwood who is the very definition of a horny player. Canonically any NPC who does not have a defined sexuality is pansexual in the Forgotten Realms. And his self insert character basically gallivanted around banging powerful goddesses and avatars and what not including gender swapping. The bear sex part is very true to Forgotten Realms probably about as much as dead gods coming back to life (or Mystra's chosen being in relationships with her). It's part of it's "charm".

That's a very subjective call - I would say that RTwP was the central mechanical pillar of Baldur's Gate, so making a BG game without it feels like missing something essential. At any rate, I massively prefer RTwP to pure turn-based, and I feel RTwP better represents the flow of actual gameplay in tabletop D&D (where you do actually speed up, slow down, skip or rush at times, and then go moment by moment when it matters). It was therefore a design choice that both suggested to me firstly that BGIII isn't very interested in imitating its predecessors, and secondly that it not be to my tastes.

As to sex... certainly Ed Greenwood was a dirty old man, and always has been. (I have no idea what you're referencing with canon, though I would not be surprised if Greenwood has gone on to say free-love things on the internet. For however much you think that's worth.) However, Greenwood was never the only person who worked on Forgotten Realms, and in particular Baldur's Gate comes out of 90s, TSR-era AD&D, which had deliberately put more emphasis on narrative, worldbuilding, and indeed morality. That was the peak of the Paladins & Princesses era of D&D, and it showed.

It’s Divinity: Original Sin III with a Forgotten Realms skin suit.

Overall I think you're basically correct, though in fairness I still enjoyed BG3. One of the gripes I do have, though, is the writing. The worst example is Karlach, a tiefling you can recruit to the party. She talks like she just strolled in from Reddit - casual tone, liberally using modem day profanity, etc. She's also not the only one, though she is one of the worst offenders. It's such a stark contrast from BG1/2 where they went out of their way to not make dialogue sound modern day, with concrete guidelines for writers on how to achieve that. I hate it.

It's not even the presence of snark by itself - BG1 and BG2 contain plenty of jokes. There are also plenty of characters who use casual language. This page over-selects for comedy, but even so, there is a lot of casual silliness. Lines like, "For someone who supposedly has her soul tainted by the evil of a dead god, you remind me considerably of a chipmunk with a sugar high and a death wish" easily fit that kind of Reddit or Twitter-informed search for a perfect one-liner.

Even so, I think you can still tell that the writing culture of 1998 or 2000 was very different to that of 2023. I think for me a lot of it is worldbuilding as well? One of BG2's advantages was that it is substantially based on the 1997 boxed set Lands of Intrigue, and that set had quite good writing and a level of detail and verisimilitude that the game could make use of.

I also wonder if it was the intended audience as well? Not to go full GamerGate, but in 1998 and 2000, the hold of progressive ideology over the American video game industry was not yet complete, and I feel like there was at least the aspiration still to make games for a wide audience, and one less politically polarised than today.

It seems that he ignored his personal ethnic grievences in the first game, to wide acclaim, but then heavily layered them into the sequel unfortunately.

Many such cases, but people are becoming aware of the symbolic language and methods used by these people to push their propaganda onto audiences, so it's going to fall flat. I wasn't going to avoid the game just because of the optional gay subplot or the black character talking about how his homeland is superior, but the Jewish Esoteric Moralization is going to be a hard pass for me.

Unless, instead of the main quest objective Infiltrate the antisemites' meeting you had the option of running the antisemites' meeting I'm writing this game off as another victim of subversion. The fact the main quest centers so much around literally defending Jews is much more egregious than the other stuff.

Unless, instead of the main quest objective Infiltrate the antisemites' meeting you had the option of running the antisemites' meeting.

Worked for Mr. H, but this game is set a little earlier than that.

Then a shock: a full admission from the man who so unfairly smeared, and who didn't buckle, that the game is in fact alters history to suit the tastes of 2025 American audiences.

Your link does not lead to such a full admission. It leads to an admission that the character exists, but claims

Everything displayed corresponds to the morals and social norms of 1403 Bohemia and is only there to make an interesting story, and not at all to appeal to a “modern audience".

And you can believe that or not.

After that series of X posts nobody doubted that those screenshots were real. Of course he still put a spin on how he presented the confirmation. But you correct that I perhaps put it too strongly.

And now the prude-right now decided to chastise the game for having an optional sex scene between similarly-aged teenagers because they might be gay(ish)? After the first one was attacked by the left for bawdiness and delighting in masculinity.

The transparently pretextual nature of this stuff is hilarious.

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It establishes a best-bro relationship in the first game and gives you the option to put it in his butt in the second one. I feel like that's a pretty big change in the game's central themes.

Sure, thematically.

Still the 180 spin from praise to scorn because all of a sudden their sacred ox was gored.

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Yes, people praise things they like and scorn things they dislike, and if you switch from doing thing they like to things they dislike, they will stop praising and start scorning. This is not some sort of fickleness on their part.

The problem isn't praise or scorn, it's the constant stream of pretextual galaxy-brain rationalizations. It's not fickleness, it's the dishonorable business of cloaking one's likes and dislikes in bullshit justifications.

What pretextual galaxy-brain rationalizations? It seemed pretty straightforward from both ends.

I mean, on one side you had folks that had precommihted notions that games ought to have ethnic diversity and gender-equality giving half-assed rationalizations about why the first game was wrong in its setting.

On the second side the tables are turned and now it's folks with precommihted notions against the gays giving half-assed rationalizations about how the second game is wrong in its plot.

The problem is putting stuff in the sequel that players of the earlier games clearly do not want. All the rest is your rationalizations for saying the players are somehow wrong to be upset about that.

Except the players of the first game were apparently not too chuffed for opposite-polarity culture war reasons. That was kind of the entire point eh?

and gives you the option to put it in his butt in the second one.

Did they at least give the player a "No homo" dialogue option?

I don’t know, actually. There’s been at least a hint of homoeroticism between Hans and Henry before. Nothing that couldn’t be passed off as “locker room banter”, but it wouldn’t be the first time that young men going to war together and getting up to mischief might do a bit of fooling around.

The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.

Not only is every close relationship tinged with ‘Sam and Frodo must be porking’ style analysis but (innocent) touch is very good for people - it releases oxytocin, it’s how we bond. One gender is now largely deprived of it.

I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.

Agreed. The activity -> lifestyle pipeline has acted in many areas both good and bad as society diverges.

The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.

Homophobia is just a distraction here. The social embrace of homosexuality has little to do with this other than being a convenient way to deflect blame from those actually responsible. This is the result of the social embrace of feminism. It is the natural consequence of pushing the narrative that unwanted intimacy from a man is harmful in order to give women power over men. Society has been sexualizing ever more forms of male intimacy to allow women to claim to have been victimized by it and thus be entitled to "justice". Men naturally learn to shy away from intimacy because of this.

Sam and Frodo clearly isn’t homoerotic in the books or the Peter Jackson movies by any non-delusional standards. But the KCD example, in my opinion, is more ambiguous.

It’s a strange story that doesn’t make all that much sense. Why do we care? Why can’t we be close friends anyway? I mean, I’m not too worried about :

  • appearing gay even though I’m not

  • turning gay by closeness with a male friend, and

  • even if I could somehow turn gay like a frog, it wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world. It has few costs and some advantages.

Also, you would expect that in a society with open accepted homosexuality, there would be less people in the closet. So the straights are far more likely to actually be straights than they used to be, and there should be less need to prove straightness.

Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:

  • general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult

  • male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society

  • female homophobia

Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:

This is all just bog-standard androphobia though. Though, a lot of this was also sacrificed on the altar of "homosexuality is something you are, not something you do"; what I'm not sure about is which came first.

The entire incentive-based argument against male homosexuality is that you must have a woman: much like diamonds, this drives up demand and keep society working around the drive for resources to afford them.

The concept that you can just say "no", or at least not have to suffer zero close contact outside of what you buy from a woman (and by extension, her father)? Not surprised everyone else would be opposed to that.

For all I might fault the gay/furries for at least they seem to have a healthier attitude towards this- maybe it's easier when you're in a costume. Probably explains the obsession with cute anime girl avatars in VR, too.

I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.

I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.

general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult

male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society

female homophobia

All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.

But you know your friends, you don't have to worry about ambigous signals, like with a girl you like. He knows you're not gay, you know he's not gay, "not that there's anything wrong with that", so what is this fear? It seems paranoid. And somehow, if we recriminalized homosexuality, and then we found ourselves in a situation that resembled homosexuality, so objectively our situation would be more dangerous, that's when we could relax? It's very strange, counter-intuitive reasoning.

Bisexuality/potential homoeroticism gigantically icks most heterosexual women when they sense it in men. Therefore even allowing a bit of potential overtures towards it is generally not a great idea socially.

Also permissible homosexuality creates this weird inverse bell curve matter with physical contact with fellow men in which most guys do not want to communicate any potential homoeroticism. Whilst societies in which homosexuality is just totally outside of the overton window permit a lot more physical affection between men, since there isn't the underlying. I've spent a bunch of time in the Middle East and homosexuality being literally illegal opens the door to a lot more 'queer behavior' between platonic male friends.

Great example of this is the Khabib Nurmagomedov bathtub photo that got bandied around a lot by Conor McGregor before their fight. https://preview.redd.it/g3d6ooc3ml4e1.jpeg?width=640&auto=webp&s=b966fe8b972399f327580b3f35bf60322079e68d

To Western eyes it's staggeringly homoerotic, to Dagestani eyes homosexuality is verboten so it's not 'sus'.

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People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.

I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.

It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.

In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.

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IMO the appalling part is that they made Henry AND Hans bisexual. Both the main characters who so far hadn't shown any gay inclinations suddenly become open to anything? Yeah no.

realistic RPG with no fantasy elements

> Hit points

> Magic potions

> There are no children

> Cutting through plate armor

> Crouching makes you quieter

> Near-fatal wounds heal within minutes

> Horses are motorcycles that don't need fuel

> Everyone sits around on their asses waiting for you to come by and solve their problems

> You are an absolute nobody who can become absurdly skilled and rich and respected in the span of a few days

It's a perfectly conventional fantasy RPG with a few "realism" elements.

Gameplay conceits are not fantasy. Fantasy is thematic.

Historical fiction often changes events to make them translate better in the medium, for instance by creating composite characters or speeding up events, this doesn't make it Fantasy.

Consider Rome, the miniseries. It contains much of what you criticize, up and including the character of Lucius Vorenus who has this same sort of meteoric rise that is meant to allow the show to display the stratification of Roman society and what sort of events could change one's status. Yet is Rome fantastical?

I think most people don't care a great deal about homosexuality but what frequently happens is that male friendship is sacrificed for (the possibility of) gay romance. People do care about the friendship and dont want to be on guard to not signal sexual interest to the player-sexual characters when they're just trying to be friendly. A prime example of this was in the release verison of BG3 when you could just be friendly to Gale and suddenly you had sex.

If some character was clearly gay from the outset and not conditionally gay/bi depending on what the player does, complaints about this would be a non-issue. It would also be a far smaller issue if video game writers were more competent but that's never going to happen.

IMO, Playersexuality is an awful idea that should be binned.

A prime example of this was in the release verison of BG3 when you could just be friendly to Gale and suddenly you had sex.

I fell victim to this. And I wasn't even that opposed to the idea, but for all its rampant progressivism, the game is oddly monogamous, and it was interfering with my desired target. Afterward, the second time I played BG3, I made a female character and deliberately went for Gale, and inadvertently roleplayed a stereotypical ☕ moment. At the post-goblin party he said such weird things and was so timid that I went and fucked Astarion, who did neither, out of spite. Being able to get laid at will, even in play pretend, does things to your mind. Anyway, the next day we all died because it was the no-save-scumming difficulty.

The Developers specifically called the main character a white straight Christian male back after KCD1's release. (apologies I couldn't find a cleaner quote source quickly)

They retconned the main characters' heterosexuality because (of the leading theory that) the new owners of Warhorse Studios, Plaion, had DEI priorities that needed to be accommodated in the game.

Definitely possible that’s the reason, but dudes fucking dudes was definitely a thing in the Middle Ages (and viewed in a very dim light), and notably it didn’t usually take the form of an exclusive sexual identity (cf Achilles and Briseis and Patroclus) so calling them “bisexual” is arguably a bit anachronistic. Maybe there was some Plaion DEI influence, but it’s also possible that they just wanted to expand the romantic options open to players.

The middle ages might be the setting for the game, but the context is 2025. It's bisexuality, because it's 2025. It's DEI, because it's 2025.

it’s also possible that they just wanted to expand the romantic options open to players.

I will believe this when I can first have gay sex, and then murder my lover is a fit of rage and shame. After all, that's at least as historically accurate as soldiers sleeping together.

I’m not sure a myth from greek antiquity is a good example of medieval sexual mores.

Among the accusations that got the templars burned, aside from sorcery, and spitting on the cross, was sodomy. The evidence, their sigil: two men on a horse. When not under torture, they maintained it represented poverty, not buttfucking. Alas, that’s recantation, and the penalty, carbonization.

Deep in the forests of central europe, above the village my family hails from, there is a castle on a hill, built by a family whose last scion was burned at the stake for sodomy in the 15th century. The documents of his trial make for interesting reading. He was a minor noble, but still relatively rich and well-connected. He would have sex with a male servant or commoner and pay for it in expensive dresses and money, then they would try to blackmail him for more, and when the demands became too pressing, he would move on to another city. This only worked a few times and didn’t end well. So fucking dudes was a thing, but a very expensive and dangerous thing.

Frederick the Great was a homosexual, and his father executed one of his lovers, ostensibly for desertion but probably to punish his son.

As a huge fan of the first game, I’d flag that in addition to the main antagonist being gay, there’s a very sympathetic novice monk you can meet in Sasau Monastery, and if you dig into his backstory with some snooping, you can learn that he was sent to the monastery after a love affair with another man. You can confront him about this, and either tell him you don’t see what he did as sinful, or that you consider his acts abominable. So gay themes were definitely present in a subdued way in the first game.

I actually appreciate the first game's inclusion of homosexuality in that manner because it was realistic for the setting and you needed to build a relationship with him (platonic) to get that information out of him. By realistic, I mean that in that time to be homosexual meant that escaping to a convent was a way to avoid execution as a sodomite.

What I don't appreciate is the dumpster fire trying to insinuate that sharing a bath (spa) with your friend in the first game is low key homo-eroticism.

There's this theory that men in the past were actually more comfortable being physically close in a fraternal/platonic way because the potential of homosexuality in the act was unthinkable. It makes sense to me that now homosexuality is ever present, modern men must telegraph their heterosexuality and avoid anything that could allude to homosexuality. This has cut off so much of male/male platonic affection that it's a tragedy.

Edit: There's a 'how are you enjoying the game?' post in the Friday Fun Thread if you guys are playing.

I remember thinking all those years ago during the 'controversy' around KCD1 that they could've had a secretive, stigmatised gay option and a fish-out-of-water non-white character actually, and that would've been a means to include diversity and head off the complaints in a way that wouldn't have been obnoxious or out-of-place, although the developers certainly shouldn't be seen as obligated to include diversity or suspicious just for not doing so. So I'm not really against any of this in theory, but I don't like the idea they bowed to pressure and what I've seen of Musa's dialogue does suggest they didn't exactly handle it very carefully. But at the end of the day I guess the truth is I just find the people gloating about it a million times more insufferable than the chuds complaining, whatever disagreements I have with them.

The complaints about the gloating seem strange. Witness Europeans in the US lecturing Americans about how everything is so much better in Denmark or whatever, a rich and arrogant foreign merchant saying the Islamic world is more civilized than Bohemia (which is a core part of Islamic identity anyway, that it represents a more structured, more fair, more hygienic etc civilization) is believable.

It's fine for a character to gloat and talk out of his ass. In an RPG, can I call him out in dialogue?

I can tell arrogant Mr Euro that nobody gives a shit about his country and USA #1 if he wants to talk that way on my turf (no offense to Europeans, just making a point). Can I do the same with Musa? All I've read indicates that you're kind of saddled with this guy for much of the game with no real way to push back or drop him.

It's like when an RPG has a self-announced trans character who clearly functions as a mouthpiece for normalizing transness or to extract sympathy, and my only responses consist of "That's so great and brave for you, m'lady!" or choosing another topic. Being gagged like that is frustrating.

If I can't talk back to these people because the dev is squeamish about writing 'problematic' dialogue or risking the gaze of game journos, then at least give me the option to kill them for whatever reason I feel like.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. While I haven’t reached that part of the game yet, my immediate thought when I heard about this NPC was that his dialogue likely reflects the arrogance or self-assurance of the 15th century Islamic world, and his dialogue shouldn’t be taken as “Word of God.”

In general, KCD does a good job of making its NPCs believably medieval and non-cartoonish, with my favourite example being an Inquisitor in the first game who is literally trying one of your childhood friends for heresy. If you respectfully question him about the need for this kind of policing of the faith, he gives a very good answer — in short, “listen kid, look around, open your eyes, Christendom is in crisis. We have an antipope in Avignon, we’re still recovering from the plague, we’ve lost Jerusalem, and everyone is scared and lost, the last thing we need is more addled fools proclaiming that they’ve got a direct hotline to God.”

I checked, for the first time in years, the gamergate subreddit (still going strong), and they were particularly upset that the game gives the player the option to make the protagonist bisexual.

As regards some arrogant African merchant side character, stories often seem to center people who are ‘unusual’ or out of place in a setting. The world’s only cyborg, the last representative of a dying race, a jew in turn of the century dublin, etc.

There is a strange tendency for the queer character to be Subharan African, through. Pentiment, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, and now this game all inserted a person of this ethnicity, rather than an Asiatic, a European, and an Asiatic, respectively. In games of old Asiatic elements would be inserted hapharzadiously, but now only Africanization is seemingly acceptable in products by Europeans and Americans.

I think the first game had some Turks, so perhaps they just wanted to switch it up.

Turks

Cumans, strictly speaking, but those are kinda turkic so yeah I guess.

And they needed to be killed in the main story.

There was a perk for killing enough of them that it gave you a fear bonus and some would run away.

Oh please, how many years of media trying to culturally enrich us do we have to live through, until these sorts of explanations are put to rest? If that's what the devs were doing, why were they lying about not doing it at all?

When were they lying? I don’t think developers should be forced to disclose instances of homosexuality or non-white characters in their games before publication.

There is widespread disbelief, the developers deny its authenticity

I don't think that Pentiment's African NPC (a briefly present visiting monk from Ethiopia) was supposed to be queer, and Pentiment also had a similar bit player Roma NPC. Pentiment had a couple of gay NPC monks and a female NPC peasant pair who were strongly suggested to be lesbians, but the only romance option for the player character is heterosexual.

He doesnt mean that kind of queer, he means the "unusual" people rafa talked about.

a strange tendency

Artificial/forced representation inevitably converges on tokenism.

Still the wages are low in Czechia, and loyalty of the marginalized and silenced peoples is worthless compared to fame the media can bestow upon you, and fortune gained from hiding the massive backtracks in marketing, so the game is already profitable.

Good tactics for a viking raider, but I'm not sure it will work out so great for a game studio. Given his past experience, the experience of all woke media in the past decade, and recent development in world politics, I thought Vavra of all people wouldn't swing this way, but here we are. I can only pitty the fools that still do preorders, can someone explain to me what consumers get out of them?

Indie-dev promotion in general, or a Paradox yearly update pass for a committed series.

I buy relatively few games anymore, and when I do more of them are Indie than not. Given the value of assured dollars today to such small companies, I shrug and view it as both a bit of charity and a bit of gambling. If I find I don't enjoy a game, it's a shame but I probably got more out of it than I would out of dinner and a movie out. But even if it fall through, I usually pre-bought because I enjoyed the premise, and even if that specific game didn't keep me hooked, I want the indie sphere in general to exist and keep considering such things. It's a bit like trying food at a small non-chain resteraunt: it may not end up good, but I want there to be a society that promotes such things, and I live in a society and all that.

Otherwise, my main gaming expense is the annual pass for whatever Paradox game I enjoy, with the pre-purchase being for all the DLC of the coming year. Paradox games are often both distinctive enough and long-term enough that I fully expect to play 100+ more hours regardless over the next year (even if 'just' 10 hours a month), and so the actual quality of specific DLC is less important than the general increase in refreshed novelty. In these cases, though, while I could buy each DLC separately upon review... the annual pass is a functional discount compared to buying each individually. Eventually a bigger sale discount would occur, but I'd generally need to wait a year for one year's DLC to go on sale the next year after the pass. At which point, I'd really rather not wait a year to play the mechanics that are being talked about in the hobby space.

But even if it fall through, I usually pre-bought because I enjoyed the premise, and even if that specific game didn't keep me hooked, I want the indie sphere in general to exist and keep considering such things. It's a bit like trying food at a small non-chain resteraunt: it may not end up good, but I want there to be a society that promotes such things, and I live in a society and all that.

Sure, that's a nice sentiment, and I threw my money at people in a similar manner a few times, but usually it's for "early access" or crowdfunding campaigns. Preorders seem like a weird medium for that, and it's even weirder when people do it for AAA games (not the case here, but I've seen many such cases).

And for AAA games, I'd generally agree. Unless the pre-order comes with something nice that I'd enjoy (and I'd consider 'free' cosmetic as valid as anything else), I'd usually not. If the pre-order bonus comes with, say, a bundled season pass for the first X DLC, then I'd consider it, based on my expectation of the developer in question. Some studios, sure- I expect to play that DLC. In others, not.

I'll give an example of the one of the last times I did it, which was... two years ago now?

Anyway- Book of Hours, which is a same-setting spinoff/sequel of Cultist Simulator. Cultist Simulator is a very esoteric game- it's very hard to even describe the game without spoiling some of the (occult) magic of the experience. But it was weird, I liked it as a great experience in world building from a very 'I don't know what's going on and have to piece it together' sense, and I was willing to engage the sequel.

I pre-bought the sequel at full price (~$25) solely because doing so might get any future DLC for free. It wasn't a guarantee there would be DLC, just that if you pre-bought the game, you'd get the free upgrade and get any future DLC for free.

Turns out, that did happen. There's a $15 dollar expansion. I also haven't played it (yet- maybe later this year). I also don't regret it, because I greatly enjoyed the quirky little game of being a librarian who opens rooms in a ruined occult library and [insert gibberish of explaining how the sun died and may yet be reborn because the new king of england is-].

On the flip side- once upon a time, I was big Bioware fan. I bought the third games of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series because they were big culminating events. I didn't even mind that they were controversial- I just wanted to know how they ended, and learn it from myself, without the vibes from other people. No regrets. But of the recent Dragon Age 4 Veilguard, I had no hopes and was not disappointed that my non-preorder saved me several dozen gameplay hours. By the sounds of it, Bioware is an all-but-dead studio, and I'll just give it a little toast and move on while waiting for another Indie strategy game later.

(Menace, by the creators of Battle Brothers. An almost-indie studio that has put some solid strategy games that are rough and unreasonably fair. I probably will pre-buy, because a sci-fi positioning strategy game is my jam and I want to encourage.)

I can only pitty the fools that still do preorders, can someone explain to me what consumers get out of them?

My guess is the bulk of gamers have limited means and a "better spend my money on things I like while I have it now" mentality. They might not have the money on or after release day. The option to pay for it in advance is the perk, a wise investment in future happiness.

I can only pitty the fools that still do preorders, can someone explain to me what consumers get out of them?

I've been too afraid to ask lest I out myself as completely out of touch. I remember preordering at Gamestop so I could get a copy of $LATEST_THING before it sold out, and then later because it has exclusives posters or trinkets. But these days, the Nintendo Switch store pressures me to digitally(!) preorder the latest Mario slop, and I have no idea why they expect I would do that rather than waiting until three days past the release date when I've read reviews.

This is one of the reasons why you are seeing more preorder exclusive DLC.

I have no idea why they expect I would do that rather than waiting until three days past the release date when I've read reviews.

I'm guessing that you aren't a child or the kind of person who gets massively invested in franchises. Having been both once upon a time, it's because if you've been obsessed over whatever it is for months, even waiting long enough to buy the game online is too long.

I had a school trip the week that Halo 3 came out, it was absolute torture :)

The thing I don't get is that paying now doesn't actually get you the game any faster.

In some cases I think it does, but that's the exception, not the rule.

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