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General discussionExtremely unfortunate themes in games you love(72 posts)(72 posts)
(72 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 13, 2022
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Darvond: Elaboration requested.
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Warloch_Ahead: Not putting words in their mouth, but on my end, I think it's because you play as a cop that gets betrayed and has to stop a conspiracy surrounding the privatization of police, only to then be given the keys to the kingdom. Well, kind of inferred, not really elaborated on and probably never will be.
You are exactly correct. Not getting into it, but certainly the broader strokes of the story are delicate to handle and the implication, at least as I read it and it seems like other people did too is that the main character plans to take the embezzled funds and use them himself after fighting a conspiracy doing the same thing.
Posted October 13, 2022
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LootHunter: I really doubt that. And even if there was some "universal truth", it wouldn't be the subject of this thread, for (since it's universal) no one would try to argue against it in the game.
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Darvond: I was trying to carefully circle step around the broad idea that for the majority of cultures around the world, certain practices have ceased or have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
And *I* was trying to tell you that the very fact that certain practices, that majorities of cultures reject, actually *did* exist at some point in history means that current views that reject those practices aren't universal.
Posted October 13, 2022
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XYCat: what? :D

anyway, in a Warhammer 40k game you're working for some horrible fuckers no matter what side you pick. The ones presented as the "good guys" of that franchise are like actual cartoonish space nazis (and hilariously enough, extremist internet chuds love to idolize them, never even seeing the caricature) lol :D
I love Warhammer, but I'm not sure it qualifies precisely for what you're saying: 40k is half satire, half over the top weirdness - only, deliberately written in such an overly serious tone some people just don't get it.

Then again, we live in a society where some people tought "The Boys" is unironic and got offended when it became clear it wasn't. :P
Posted October 13, 2022
Disco Elysium. Whilst I found the detective, mental breakdowns, battling drug addiction and other mature themes an interesting ride, I found the game got overly talky and wanted to discuss political themes far too often. In fact it got to a point where I was skipping through dialogue in boredom, which is NOT how you should end up playing a role-playing game of this calibre.

Sure, you CAN avoid those parts of the conversation if you wished, but sometimes you don't see it coming and you can find yourself neck-deep in it by a simple click of a dialogue option.

I would rather the game had keenly concentrated on the case in hand, rather than chat about ethical moralities of socio-political ideologies. But hey, some people might like that too *shrug*.
Posted October 13, 2022
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Telika: Also GOG sells a game, which name I don't remember, and which I haven't played, where, according to the description, you're supposed to play as a gang of modern day robin hoods, robbing museums for profit and giving that profit to the poor. Except that, duh, museums are precisely public, democratic institutions bringing art contemplation within reach of everyone, as opposed to private owners and art traffickers who just keep it in their own living rooms. Great job, justice warriors.
The robbing museums part sounds like Crookz, but not the giving away part...
Posted October 13, 2022
Bioshock 1. I really love the setting of the game, Rupture, as well as the history revolving around that people of that place as communicated through the radios you find along your journey there. It's just unfortunate how throughout the time the player spent fighting there both to survive and doing other objectives, turns out that the only character we thought could be trusted also happened to be the one who had been manipulating us this whole time.
Posted October 13, 2022
Some examples of sexism:

* Bard's Tale 1 and 2: There are no female characters in these games. Well, actually, there's one in BT2, a princess that you have to rescue in an optional quest; problem is, her portrait does not look like that of a princess, or even of a female character in the first place. (The remaster addressed this by giving her a new portrait, and by allowing player created characters to be female. Bard's Tale 3, even in its original version, has female characters, including playable characters, NPCs, and even enemies; I think I remember at least one female illusionary enemy.)

Early SSI games: Shard of Spring and Demon's Winter don't let you specify gender for your party members, and then use male pronouns to refer to them. The Gold Box games are arguably worse; you *can* make female characters in these games, but in doing so you are subject to a lower strength cap than what male characters get, and they get nothing in return.

Final Fantasy 4: There's two instances in the story where the (male) main character orders the two female party members to stay behind for their protection. In the first case this results in you having to fight some battles without and magic (and, in particular, no healing magic). (Fortunately, the second case has those female characters essentially refusing to stay behind.)
Posted October 13, 2022
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dtgreene: The Gold Box games are arguably worse; you *can* make female characters in these games, but in doing so you are subject to a lower strength cap than what male characters get, and they get nothing in return.
Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls 3) did a much better spin on this: males and females have different starting attributes, but amounting to the same total of attribute points. The minored/majored attributes are different for each playable race, meaning that they are not all following the usual trope of "males are stronger, females are smarter".

This is only affecting the starting attribute levels, the biological gender has then no influence on the maximum attribute levels.
Posted October 13, 2022
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dtgreene: example of sexism:

Final Fantasy 4: There's two instances in the story where the (male) main character orders the two female party members to stay behind for their protection.
LOL! The usual...

I agree about Gold Box games though. Arcanum was better balanced with male characters having +1 Strength and female +1 Constitution.
Post edited October 13, 2022 by LootHunter
Posted October 13, 2022
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dtgreene: The Gold Box games are arguably worse; you *can* make female characters in these games, but in doing so you are subject to a lower strength cap than what male characters get, and they get nothing in return.
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vv221: Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls 3) did a much better spin on this: males and females have different starting attributes, but amounting to the same total of attribute points. The minored/majored attributes are different for each playable race, meaning that they are not all following the usual trope of "males are stronger, females are smarter".

This is only affecting the starting attribute levels, the biological gender has then no influence on the maximum attribute levels.
There's still other differences, most notably weight, which affects movement speed. Since male characters tend to be heavier than female characters, particularly if we're talking about Orcs, male characters have an advantage in terms of movement speed.

(By the way, in Oblivion and Skyrim, it's height; as a result, High Elves (in Oblivion, female high elves) have the highest movement. The Oblivion speedrun (all main quests) uses a female high elf for this reason, at least on exiting the sewers (before that, you want the Redguard's temporary speed boost IIRC).)

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LootHunter: I agree about Gold Box games though. Arcanum was better balanced with male characters having +1 Strength and female +1 Constitution.
Actually, that's not quite true. Arcanum used male as default, and then gave female characters -1 Strength (meaning they can't ever reach 20) and +1 Constitution (which does not allow them to reach 21).

To be truly fair, if female characters get stat modifiers, then male characters should as well.

Arcanum also has the issue that half the playable races are male-only, and there are no female-only races available.
Post edited October 13, 2022 by dtgreene
Posted October 13, 2022
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dtgreene: There's still other differences, most notably weight, which affects movement speed. Since male characters tend to be heavier than female characters, particularly if we're talking about Orcs, male characters have an advantage in terms of movement speed.
That’s right, and males have the advantage here for almost all races.

Some modders saw this as an error, and fixed it with unofficial patches (decorrelating movement speed from racial weight). I for myself think that the difference in gameplay is too small to care about.
Posted October 13, 2022
There's too many games to mention but for me, it's the bikini armor. Every time I see men in full armor and women 80% naked, I think that if the ladies of this world are that durable and the men are that fragile... why not have a world setting where the men stay home, raise children, clean the house, and do domestic stuff. It would be win win for everyone -- people who enjoy bikini armor would get even more of it, and I wouldn't see fully armored men next to it.

Final Fantasy is the only setting that gets a pass when it comes to bikini armor only because the men tend to be overly sexualized and sometimes half naked as well.
Posted October 13, 2022
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Cavalary: The robbing museums part sounds like Crookz, but not the giving away part...
https://www.gog.com/game/15_days

"A three-man activist group has set out to make the world a better place by stealing famous pieces of art in the world's most renowned museums, selling them to private collectors, and donating the money to charity."
Posted October 14, 2022
Urban Empire eventually blocks your progress if you don't enact limited-liability shareholder corporations. Most games I can overlook things (like the obscenely anti-humanist theme in Disco Elysium), or the cannibalism/humanleather options in RimWorld (that I don't use and aren't exactly optimal), or the everything in most 4x games... But the up-close scale of Urban Empire made it really unsettling to me. I don't want to enact such a corruption-guaranteed, anti-market intervention as that. I was REALLY enjoying the game until that. I guess it was "prospective love".

It looked like I could have continued without it, but that I would have been extremely hamstrung. So I stopped playing.

Related, but not quite the same [especially since I never loved the game]: Democracy 3 had this asinine thing that ending cannabis prohibition caused rather marked crime increases, and even more organized crime. This is extremely counter to reality. But, hey, at least it modeled the disgusting power of the "motorist" constituency well.
Posted October 14, 2022
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mqstout: Urban Empire eventually blocks your progress if you don't enact limited-liability shareholder corporations.

It looked like I could have continued without it, but that I would have been extremely hamstrung. So I stopped playing.
Oh, that reminds me of a couple of things.

Caesar III and most Impressions games (or those inspired by them) have a class system. Your Nobles and Serfs, basically. Basically once your houses evolve beyond a certain point by being (annoyingly) regularly served goods, they graduate from being serfhomes into nobility palaces.

With that comes a loss of your workforce because of course the stupid nobles don't work. So you either carefully organize your cities to never evolve beyond a certain point, or you organize slums. The simple problem being that many scenarios will require you to have a prosperity level which more or less demands that you'll have palaces.

As the matter of Block'Hood, the entire thing is backwards. It's based around a system of decay as influenced by a lack of resources.

There is no penalty for excess. It's supposed to be hamfisted balancing act, but they forgot to balance the game around this fact. And in fact, there are several ways to shortwire the whole grid, since many things produce for free. Too many acorns on a square does not cause the square to clog and become inaccessible. Of course, this is the least of this half-finished prototype's issues...
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionExtremely unfortunate themes in games you love(72 posts)(72 posts)
(72 posts)