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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?
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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