Now, excuse me, I am not a gaming journalist, nor a journalist in general.
My OSINT activities are limited. I also lack time RL.

If you want me to make an ATTEMPT at your questions, you will have to wait an undescribed amount of time until I have time to do so, which might not be today. I would have to do extensive research and carefully proof read everything I write. It would also be understandable and EXPECTED to NOT judge me as a journalist, since I'm not one. I'm also not the best at summarizing things.
Thank you for your understanding. And if you are willing to wait, possibly a very long time - this could possibly take upwards of a MONTH, beccause rn I am having a real s**tstorm IRL and I am pressed for time - IF you are willing to wait, I can MAYBE try to attempt your requests per the "write your own article here instead" ;)

This has to be a satirical question?
YES, OF COURSE, in EVERY case, in TRUE journalistic integrity press ALL related sides of the story are given equal chances to explain their side of the story, and all of the sides are put in as unbiased light as possible, with the article being NEUTRAL.
It's why most places with journalistic integrity send out RFC to related parties, and WAIT for a response, and why clickbaity biased ones instead go full modo "TIME WAITES FOR NOONE" and spew articles with arbitrary assumptions made from thin air.
True journalism is supposed to be based on FACTS, not "opinions of the editor". A true journalist with integrity is supposed to put the story in as UNbiased way as possible, NOT make his own conclusions.

I will respond to your msg some other time. Im kinda busy rn ;)

You misread them.
Let me dumb this down for you:
Kotaku has PROVEN TRACK RECORD of being in a downright spiral of information accuracy and journalistic integrity.
Their articles are worse over time, and they continue this trend.
By now they have burned their reputation in a spectacular way and became the proverbial "EXAMPLE" for the internet as a whole.
Sure, there MIGHT be an fully accurate article of Kotaku out there burried somewhere, but those are RARE ( those are in fact more rare as time passess! ), and there's implied NEED to MANUALLY VERIFY the accuracy of their "supposedly accurate" article - at which point you need additional time to do that ( time over than just reading that one article, time needed to go to different sources ) - at which points it's a WASTE OF TIME and you may as well go to a different source which is known to be MORE reliable with the accuracy of information it provides.

Kotaku, THEMSELVES, through THEIR OWN articles, have proven they are "GENERALLY unreliable" source of information.
Do YOU go to "generally unreliable source of information" EXPECTING high accuracy?
If you KNOW **most** of the articles from the given sources are lacking information, and are flexing the remains, ARE YOU going to go to them again?
Or are you going to seek other source going forward?
IS IT worth your time to manually verify EVERYTHING Kotaku writes, considering they have proven time and again they have little to no regard for journalistic accuracy?

In other words, listing Kotaku url as a "source" is going to be automatically DISREGARDED and laughed at by virtually all people familiar with their shody practises. And even IF you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, with their track record being rather extremely distasteful - you'd have to go OUT OF YOUR WAY to verify their claims.
At which point you may as well just abandon them as a source of information and go elsewhere. Don't waste your time.
It's really that simple.

Oh, so now you are getting salty that people just happen to have less time than desired?
And if you don't care, why ask? :P

Because I feel this is a bait with a thinly veiled threat of me being judged for every single word I utter.
Therefore I'd prefer to make extra precautions IF I'm even going to do try to partake in this mental excercise you requested.
I feel like, in my linguistic imperfection-infused speech ( NOT an Eng native speaker, and I know I DO make some mistakes here and there ), I would be jumped on and personally attacked, if I wouldn't be careful enough with my wording.
Which is awfully ironic considering I work neither for Kotaku, nor their competition, nor SBI, nor any company like them.
I am not your enemy dude.
And I'm not a journalist, so expecting me to give a comprehensive analysis of someone elses article, going as far as correcting their claims, doing editorial and stuff, is a little far to expect from a random forum member online; ESPECIALLY expecting me to do this "ad hoc, throw everything you are doing RL away NOW and answer me these!" way.
I have a life.
If you want me to make an ATTEMPT at journalism here, you'd have to wait.
Your salt is none of my concern. I am not a journalist and I have stuff to do RL. Writing loose thoughts such as THIS POST is easy and fast.
Writing carefully considered "analysis of someone elses work" takes TIME, which I generally do not have.

I think you underestimate how fast some people can type :P

Is this some sort of play on words? Because if so, it's extremely poor choice. Using CAPS lock for words ( which is because I keep forgetting BBcode on this forum exists, because I don't REGULARLY post here, thus keep forgetting, and when I do remember I tend to deem it not worth it the extra time to write brackets and stuff - after all most people disregard this and just read into what I actually said, instead of the HOW aspect of it ) - then this has NOTHING to do with capitalism.

Attacking me personally isn't particularly beneficial in regards to this conversation. It's just petty.
And I disagree with your assessment btw. Sounded perfectly coherent in MY proofreading ;)
And if something was hard to understand for you, you are always free to ask me to reword something.

huh ?
This is text... you... know that... right?

Because this is what freedom of speech and democracy is about. Having freedom to make an REDACTED out of yourself on TV.
Giving him equal time means the television channel doesn't get accused of being biased towards the scientist.
I also don't know who those "most people" are and what exactly are they supposed to realize.
If those people are intelligent, they should easily see through the science-denyer's claims and disregard them, instead of getting outraged he gets equal screen time.

I also haven't watched the actual interview. If BBC mishandled it, it's their fault. I don't work for BBC, and I cannot be held accountable for that.
If you are attacking me for what some TV station did, it's a at least a little bit dishonest, don't you think?

I'm not defending either side. I just want the story to be shown in as fair for both sides light as possible.
If you have a problem with that - how can you talk about fariness here at all?
Now that I think about it, WHY would you even care what >> I << have to say about SBI in the "analysis and correction of Kotaku article" ? Wouldn't you just concrete your feet in a belief you have, set THAT as a baseline for your views, and then bash me for whatever I say that doesn't align with your vision?
Maybe you wouldn't. I DON'T KNOW.
But to be honest, I am now even more inclined to believe your "request for in-depth analysis of Kotaku article" is some disguised BAIT.

I don't recall you hiring me as my representative. Your words hold no weight here.
You cannot say what I would think, as you simply don't know that. This argumentation logic you used is just utter nonsense.

Define your own then. Please. By all means!

Just remember that noone pays me for this, and I hold no legal requirement to do that. I am not bound by any contract or obligation.
And in case I don't do that after all - don't forget to get massively salty - that some random person on the internet didn't cater to your dedicated 'work for free' request :P

Well then maybe tone it down a notch, instead of attacking me personally for not meeting your highly artificial demand in a timely manner...
A demand which, the longer I think about it, the more it feels to me is some form of bait, through which I would be publicly judged - even tho I am not a journalist - nor do I work for any parties relevant to the story.

And to ANYONE who'd like to attack me personally for "writing long" - with many such individuals showing up in other threads I did partake in in the past - I write verbose. Deal with it. Don't want to read it? Then don't.
Attacking me "because long" is just impressively pathetic.

Now... this is a little brazen...

Your age is ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT in this discussion. Please DON'T try to pull the "I'm older, hence I know better" card.
It is distasteful and automatically makes you look worse :S
Just a friendly tip, but the "age" / "did longer" argument holds no value at the end of the day.
Everyone's experiences ( including experience INTENSITY ) varies - the "age" argument is like saying "my life experience was better JUST BECAUSE my life was longer than yours". Or stuff like "I lived longer therefore I have more knowledge". Or "you should listen to ME because I am older than you". It really doesn't work like that.
Please don't use this argument going forward :S

The technology used is being upgraded and evolving.
NOT the core point of the whole thing.
The whole point of gaming is entertainment. It's SUPPOSED TO be entertaining to the user FIRST AND FOREMOST.
NOT to be a propaganda tube spewing whatever PR spin it's maker has for the day, be it political, racial, or else.
And most people, when they sit down to a game after a long day of work, want to have an "escape from reality", NOT get bombarded with exact same bs they keep hearing everywhere around them the whole day prior to that.

This is blowing smoke and misdirection. Do you honestly believe the very games SBI was involved in were explicitly designed to "talk about political issues"? Because I would personally not agree to such statement.
The whole problem at hand is that companies like SBI, and few others with their brazen attempts, are inserting their shtick in places they have no business messing with, in games which AREN'T "talk pieces to provoke thoughts".
There are games which ARE explicitly designed to provoke reflections in a very direct manner, not "subtle" like most other games.
However the games SBI is involved in, arguably AREN'T such games.

I don't think sale numbers for some random game from the past, from a completely unrelated franchise, have much bearing as an argument in this discussion.
Let alone resorting to "this game was unusual, it sold well, therefore this one unrelated game 10+ years later is entirely excused for their pushed agenda". This is shody logic and invalid example imo.

I'm not falimiar with this particular game therefore I won't comment on it.

I haven't played them. I know little to none about them.
I'm not going to form my opinion about them arbitrarily ( I'm not this kind of person ).

WHAT is even the argument you are trying to make here?
Do you BELIEVE God of War series games were
" designed as thought experiments first and games second " ?
Nobody is questioning these are all GAMES.
However MOST games AREN'T "artistical pieces", or "thought provokers", and aren't supposed to be.
MOST games are just supposed to be entertainment.
And MOST people don't sit down to games to hear political bs.
They want to enjoy what they play, not hear about RL problems.
Speaking of which, I'd like to raise a crucial point here - MOST GAMES OPERATE ON FICTIONAL CHARACTERS AND STORIES, for MOST games there's no real life ACTUAL elements!

I am not a God in disguise. I am also not familiar with every single game released to date.
You cannot expect everyone to universally always guess what you mean.
You need to name the game by it's full name.

I don't see how this is relevant in this discussion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Define enjoyment for me please. Because I get the impression you are thinking about another word.

I said nothing about "young men and women". This sounds more like your projection than an valid argument.
Also, if your implied conclusion is that >> I << want the characters to be "generic default", you have completely misread my words and should re-read them carefully.
I don't care what character I play as. I want the character to be WELL WRITTEN, to make SENSE in the story, and not to be ARTIFICIALLY shoved into the story "because the consultant told us we need to put 1 more character of this given group, so that our sales will be higher".
I want the story and the characters to make SENSE, to nicely fit together, forming a nice full product. NOT some software slop lazily thrown together, with artificial "numbers" to appease some gaslighting consultant.
I want well written characters and good storytelling, NOT a "this guy is here ONLY BECAUSE consultant told us to put him in here".
Everything needs to make sense. If it doesn't, it takes away from the experience.

I can't BELIEVE you GUYS are STILL fighting WOKENESS here AND even ESCALATED to CAPSLOCK rants! :o

awesome :D
what fucking year is this?

I do not know what the conversation is that has preceded this but it doesn't look like it's about God of War...

... but...

... I did read part of your post and have to say...

... you describe the way you must synthesize and digest information in this modern age (although you discount it).

Trusting that "access" equals truth is in fact the crux of the problem; those with access often have many vested reasons to obfuscate truth.

As for God of War...

... I'm glad it's here on GOG! One of the best action games I've played in years.

not really. i was pressed for time. i did want to talk about that one specific idea while i had the time and was at a keyboard.

re: age:

most of the reason i bought this up was to suggest that gaming is a spectrum and that it has changed over time to incorporate a lot of different ideas. one of those ideas is that games can be more than just vehicles for fun. they can be political. they can be pieces of art. they can be just - as you desire - vehicles for just having fun. all of these are valid.

i bring this up, in turn, because it allows games to focus on different things [including different characters.]

and this was entirely what i meant by "your central thesis."

i'm afraid that i simply don't buy into this way of thinking at all.

it feels fairly reductive to me.

put another way: if games CANNOT ever be about real world topics then books shouldn't be about real world topics, and likewise, movies shouldn't be about real world topics and art in general shouldn't be about real world topics.

that feels pretty limiting to me.

it's 100% ok if you want games that are just "for fun." there's plenty of those around. i want games to live on that spectrum and be more than just fun. i want occasional experiences that make me see things from a different perspective or that teach me about ideas that i may not otherwise encounter.

let's - for a second - talk about superhero games, since they worked on a superhero game [specifically, they worked on suicide squad: kill the justice league.]

you can look this up - and you may be surprised to learn it, i'm not sure, but /some/ of the very earliest superhero comics are SPECIFICALLY political in nature. [i'm referring, here, to early issues of superman written during particularly world war ii.]

in fact, i'd go so far as to suggest that superman in that era veered into propaganda.

i haven't played suicide squad: kill the justice league, but i'm willing to go out on a limb to suggest that it likely has political themes if you're willing to scratch the surface. [these may not be themes the developer intended, but i wager they're there all the same.]

that political bent - and the political bent of almost ANY piece of media is there and would have been there REGARDLESS of sbi's involvement with it.

with all due respect, you're missing the point here.

i was trying to add context to my suggestion, and i was specifically trying to suggest that gaming hasn't just been narrowly focused on "fun" for almost all of the time it's been a medium. [this is also why i bought up "a mind forever voyaging."]

in essence, i was building a case for my final statement that "games are about more than fun."

i guess i'll spell this out again: my suggestion - and the point i was leading towards - was that games are about many different things. entertainment might well be something that a game can do, but it isn't the only thing.

as i suggested: if you're just not interested in that style of game, that's fine. there's plenty of games out there for you that you can enjoy.

i want at least /some/ of my games to have meaning and be art.

i 100% did. it was "a mind forever voyaging." i used the acronym simply because it was faster to type.

related to "a mind forever voyaging, again."

i was building toward my closing statement and wanted to add context.

not going to do this.

there was nothing nefarious in my choice of words. it wasn't a trap.

this was part of my closing statement in my post. i'll re-iterate that: games can be many things. they don't JUST have to narrowly focus on entertainment.

this IS a thing i wanted to talk about, but it's a rather involved topic and it'd require a separate post.

the too long; didn't read of my thoughts here are:

a) i don't think sbi shoved anything into any game. the kotaku article pretty much spelled this out. the developers approach sbi. sbi look at the situation and suggest ideas. the developers either take or leave those ideas. i don't think it's much more complicated than that.

b) let's - for a second - bite the bullet and say, "ok, cool, sbi shoved something into the game" - how could you even tell where that process began and ended? because i can guarantee that there's LOTS of content in all of the games sbi had a hand in. it would be IMPOSSIBLE to say, "ok, i can see the hand of sbi here." [i mean, i can kind of see how you COULD do it if you were being uncharitable, of course.]

we're still talking about gow. just sort of along the way as it pertains to the sbi situation.

---

this was an idea i wanted to return to, so thank you for bringing it up.

we're about go on a kind of windy journey, but i promise there's a point to this.

buckle up!

---

in order to become a scientist - in fact, in order to get a doctorate in anything - one of the criteria towards doing that is [usually] writing a thesis. in order to write a thesis, one step along the way is that you have to read...a lot.

you also have to [sometimes, but not always] do an experiment.

in order to do an experiment, you very often have to take the information you've read, previously and you have to synthesize it somehow.

the problem with this is "how do you know that these people are telling the truth?" and this is a theme i've been hammering on a little in this thread.

in academia, you know people are generally telling the truth, because the truth is often multiplicative. by which i mean that lots of scientists do the same experiments over and over again to prove the same set of ideas over and over again. that's /some/ of what goes into a process known as peer review.

i bring all this up, because one way to know if a source is truthful or not is to see if OTHER venues have bought up THE SAME facts and to see if they came to THE SAME conclusions. you'd want for this to happen over and over again and, likewise, you'd want it to happen in an independent way.

---

i'm hammering this idea pretty hard because different venues have bought up the same facts time and time again. you can see it in the kotaku article. you can see it in developer tweets. you can see it in other articles about the same subject.

in /most/ places that are trying to set the record straight, the record seems to be fairly simple: sbi are what they claim on the tin. they're consultants. sometimes - and if asked - they will do diversity consulting. but it's important to note that the studios DON'T HAVE TO take their advice.

in this case, i think access has reasonably given us a fairly accurate picture of the situation. and i think i can reasonably assert this point because DIFFERENT folks have all rendered THE SAME facts.

---

do i think access works all the time? no. [and sometimes for the reasons you stated, in fact.]
do i think it's had a reasonable result this time? yes.

The very first post in this thread said "Sweet Baby Inc wasn't involved in this one".

no. but it has been an ongoing topic of discussion as it relates to ragnarok [and related games.]

edited in later: i bring this up, mainly because i'm fairly sure that folks who see the sbi stuff upfront WILL make buying decisions for this game based on what they know about ragnarok. [that's unfortunate, but it is just a fact of life.]

Yes... and? God Of War Ragnarok needs to be released on PC first. It is one of the most successful games on the Playstation 4 and 5 with 15 million sold copies.

https://blog.playstation.com/2023/12/07/god-of-war-ragnarok-valhalla-dlc-revealed-coming-december-12/

If this lands on GOG you can be sure that it will sell as good as God of War (2018).

i hope it DOES land on gog. :)

It has three wishlist entries.

This is the one with the most votes:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/god_of_war_ragnarok_1

The other two are:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/god_of_war_ragnarok
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/god_of_war_ragnarok_pc

:)

i want to say julius caesar is still alive, but i'm not sure. ;)

Now on page 67 bestselling all-time