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Notes -
Finally got around to playing through The Last of Us pt1 and pt2. It's really good. Even the slight gay/trans plot points weren't too obtrusive. Anyone got anymore recommendations for single player RPG's that aren't woke/gay?
I am thinking of playing through Assassin's Creed, The Witcher 3, and Red Dead Redemption. Anything else I should add to my list?
I’m going to push back on other posters recommending Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It’s definitely woke. Copying from a previous comment:
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.
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My frustrations with TLOU 2 weren't so much the gay/trans/wokeness (those were relatively minor annoyances), as the way the game spends 40 hours beating you over the head with REVENGE IS BAD as if it's some sort of revelatory message. Like, yeah Naughty Dog, I got it. Do you have anything else to say here? Also the way the sequel (and even the first game's remaster) completely retcons the ending of the first game to eliminate any of the moral ambiguity that made the first game so amazing to begin with.
If you're looking for a non-woke/gay single-player RPG, go for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (the first one is less woke--there's no anachronistic black man lecturing you about medieval hygiene--but much less refined since it was a low-budget kickstarter game). There is a (completely optional) gay romance option and the single aforementioned DEI hire, but there are no female soldiers, no medieval atheists, strict social hierarchies that are completely immune to your main character energy, and the protagonist is mostly portrayed as an unashamed good old boy who likes to drink with the lads and fuck some wenches. The game isn't antiwoke, per se, but it's incredibly dedicated to historical authenticity in a way that doesn't leave any room for woke insertions. And the developers are so autistically (no spellcheck, I did not mean "artistically") dedicated to authenticity in everything from the location of natural springs to the consistency of the pig shit that they're able to mostly get away with paying the same sort of attention to demographics.
Super solid game that actually takes its medieval setting seriously and avoids the dreaded "Marvel dialogue" that infects so many otherwise great games (looking at you BG3), while still being fun and colorful and even silly when appropriate to the grounded setting. Easily the most immersed I've been in a video game since my first Skyrim playthrough 15 years ago.
I haven't played TLOU2 so I don't have opinions about it specifically, but this sort of fits into a pattern I've seen in people talking about "woke" games and other fictional media as being bad not because they're "woke" (i.e. gay/trans/etc.) but because they have other generically bad qualities like leaning on some super-simplistic message as if it's some revelation. But I think this sort of claim ignores a big part of one of the defining features of "wokeness" which is that people ought to get jobs on the basis of identity rather than on the basis of competence. As such, hiring poor writers and poor editors and poor managers who greenlight the poor writing produced by the poor writers and coming up with something that would make a 5 year old embarrassed for stating the obvious as if it's shocking, is a direct consequence of the "wokeness" of the game.
Oh, 100%. Wokeness can be the reason something is bad even when "wokeness" isn't the thing that's bad on an object level. I would not be suprised at all if part of the reason TLOU 2 is much less well written than its predecessor is that they were forced to diversify their writer's room with less talented DEI hires and/or forced out some "problematic" but irreplaceable employees between games.
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Allegedly, the first game in the series is not that good and many people prefer to skip it, while 2 and Brotherhood are the peak of the series, and Revelations, 3, and later titles devolve into repetition—with the arguable exception of 4: Black Flag, which may be called "a good game but not a good Assassin's Creed game". (I personally have played only 2, Brotherhood, and 3. Regarding the other games, I am only relaying what I have seen others say.)
I liked AC1. Its a bit of a flawed game and AC2 is better but there is actually some attempts to center the game around assassinations unlike later games in the series.
Later games are better mechanically but AC1 is more focused on executing it's concept, which was good enough for me.
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