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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Is Baldur's Gate 3 woke or parody of woke?

I am character creation screen - you can choose between body type 1,2,3,4 . After that you can choose between voice 1 and 2 , Your Identity can be Male / Female or Non Binary, then you can hide your clothes (at this point I decided that developers were actually trolling because nudity in D&D BG series was rare to nonexistent) and you can choose your genitals if the default doesn't suit you to Vulva A, Vulva B or Penis A-D ,

So you can make a decent futanari I guess.

Have you noticed that Man and Woman were nowhere to be mentioned and you can't choose your gender? That everything is deconstructed and presented in the most cold, indifferent, clinical way? I don't think that it shows welcoming or acceptance. More like indifference and very subtle contempt while not giving reasons for complaining - the video game equivalent of sliding benches that make impossible for homeless people to sleep on them.

I'm enjoying the game but they quoted a designer saying they removed a lot of character customization (face sliders, etc) because they didn't like how similar a lot of the characters looked in the alpha. It's kind of weird that you have freedom to play how you want, as long as it is diverse (I.e. you can't play a team of all halflings). It's got that 'you can have a model T in any color, as long as it is black' vibe.

I'm all for adding things in; Non-binary, penis sliders, whatever... it's great. The problem comes when things are removed because some woke designer doesn't like the idea of people playing with traditionally sexy characters.

Do you have the quote? My first instinct is that sounds like PR-speak for “we could only get it to make Oblivion-quality faces, panicked, and cut the feature.”

For some history: The alpha had a character creator with face customization and they didn't like that people made the most boring guy ever.

An actual quote:

“My personal experience with most [slider-based character creators] is you kind of customize it, it takes you a lot of time and effort, and then a lot of times it kind of looks the same in the end,” she said. “So we wanted to avoid that. And if we would make sliders, we needed to make it into something that would be truly unique and wouldn’t look the same.” According to Dubrovina, Larian isn’t married to taking this approach for all of its games, but they felt the approach worked well for Baldur’s Gate 3 and, she said, it kept custom characters from looking “mediocre.”

This was from an 11 minute video that I'm not going to listen to again, lol.

Thanks!

That's such a shame. "Local RPG Dev Shocked When People Role-Play."

Also kinda surprised that the average dude isn't going full Monster Factory. I have fond memories of booting up Dark Souls II for coop with my brother, only to find that his character's face was completely concave. Like that moon man from the McDonald's commercials. It was incredible.

Shocked that people role-play as idealized versions of themselves. There were multiple articles written about it too.

I usually go with a more wacky character on a 2nd play through. Or for anything social, funny is better than edgy. lol

Yeah that's the key in soulsbourne games - other people are there for you to impress, or make laugh or whatever, so you do that instead of just making a character you want to look at for hundreds of hours.

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