I checked on the steam forum and asked in a discussion what other SJW stuff was in this game from their experience. They deleted it today so I don't know any more than what was posted yesterday. But from the Nichegamer article and what people said there, not very much. Some people in the game call you racist on an occasion, and one woman tells you that ''mom doesn't need your help'' all of which doesn't sound too SJW-ey. Other stuff is not having aggressive conversation options with some trans / sexual minority characters and a character's personality being revised to be less ''sexist''.

Personally, I think the core of the issue was a dev (the writer?) saying on an interview that the previous games were "sexist", that they had "fixed" it and told anyone who didn't agree to suck it up if they didn't like it. Even I find that attitude pretty arrogant, specially coming from a company making an "embugged" eddition of older games. That unleashed the dogs, and then they went for any little piece of blood they could find to prove them right.

In short, I think it's more the angry mob found those game lines rather than those game lines creating an angry mob.

Beamdog employees are deleting threads and negative reviews both in their own forums and in Steam.

So, GGers overreact to perfectly normal stuff, News at 11. Sounds par for their course. The whole reason 4chan started organizing it was because some loser couldn't handle a bad breakup and posted crap about his game-dev ex online, they've always been about completely overreacting.

If people are hijacking game reviews to rant about their personal politics, I think that's a good thing. There's a whole General Discussion section here on GOG for political stuff, for example, and literally entire forums for political discussion elsewhere. Why clutter up game reviews with it?

If it was really heavy-handed or a huge theme, talking about it make sense. But it seems like just a few lines and nothing heavy-handed, that's really not a big deal.

4chan didn't start ''organizing'' it. There was nothing to organize in the first place, unless you're referring to email campaigns that happened months later. All 4chan did was censor discussion of it on almost all boards. Except /v/ of course. But hey, believe in what explanation helps you the most.

And yes, I also think this is an over-reaction seeing not much was altered. I think it had a lot to do with the article P1na mentioned, where the devs said they were gonna ''fix'' the ''sexism'' and stuff. And TBH they did alter the personality of one character utterly completely. I would say disappointment over that is justified but not to the level of giving the whole game a negative review overall. Maybe they'll change it after the bugs are fixed.

Don't forget all the space for games reviews on sites like Kotaku. Those are prime politics pushing tools where discussion is optional and you can make money out of it too :D

Some people may view this as a huge slight and some may not. Lets also remember no one has still yet made a whole compilation of all the ''SJW'' stuff yet. Either way, there were some fans who would've viewed any change in lore as a big mistake and rated negatively for it. Think of the guys who complain over other people liking Thief 4 or DMC:DMC for example.

4chan was definitely used in the beginning, but yeah, they started banning that stuff after getting in legal trouble (I think somebody used 4chan to target a judge or judge's relative? something like that). It switched to 8chan or some other board after that iirc but stayed an organized harassment campaign. Which then got co-opted by actual, literal neo-nazis.

It's hilarious when people talk about Kotaku as a site with ethics problems. Kotaku is one of the few sites that openly discusses ethics in gaming journalism, has kept its principles despite being banned by some major game companies, etc.

GGers - and a whole lot of people who aren't as open about their beliefs - have done way worse than make jokes about women, minorities and homosexuals for decades.

So one one hand yeah, jokes can make people really uncomfortable, and it's reasonable to not like jokes about something you believe.

On the other hand, vile people, many of whom are GGers, have used 'it's a joke' as an excuse for actually prosecutable behavior for a long time, and now they are up in arms over an actual literal joke. So that's pretty ironic. They're just getting a tiny, tiny, taste of what they've put other people through and are way over-reacting.

I hope that what comes out of this is gamers in general realizing dissing/trash-talking other people is bad and stop doing it. But I'm an incurable optimist.

1) We're having a pretty civil discussion, really.
2) No one is making you read posts you don't want to.

Wait...so a movement which had "Keep politics out of game reviews" as one of its starts is referenced negatively in a game, so now people are posting negative reviews that are purely political?

The universe is pretty funny sometimes.

IKR? It's so much irony, it might be irony poisoning.

You are right, Gilozard. I am out of here.

We can move this over to the GG thread. People don't like many threads about a single topic, somehow more so when it comes to this subject. But yeah, that is an offtopic-ness dedicated thread so we can discuss anything after this there instead of here which is about review bombing.

Anyway, I don't understand what you're referring to. The discussions about the ethical implications and opinion about the writer/s was on 8chan's /v/; at the time not being a movement or having campaigns and there was a separate discussion on some harassment board which was either /shame/ or /lolcow/. That's really quite separate considering the boards are worlds apart and most people seemingly stuck to /v/ seeing that /gghq/ is still more popular than /ggr/, and ggr is the place anyone harassing would go, if they were even interested in more than lulz in the first place.

Kotaku does have a problem with ethics. The chief editor said that see didn't see any conflict of interest between Nathan Grayson and ZQ, and they have been publishing many many un-researched and factually incorrect articles since and before then. For a good example, look at the incident where they mixed up the dates of dismissal and sexual harassment lawsuits to show that dismissal of an employee occurred after termination of employment rather than before. This lead to people thinking she was dismissed for filing the sexual harassment lawsuit and people went and harassed the employer.
Banned? As in not given review copies for leaking first-hand confidential information? Discusses? Where? How? Give proof.

http://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293

Yeah, Kotaku is incredibly sloppy, but all of the games sites are. I have seriously never seen a games site that did half of the research of an average hardware blog, for example.

Kotaku at least talks about this stuff and has a place for long-term or user-done reviews instead of just release-of-the-week gushing.

If you agree with this sincerely you should have defended the folks arguing about lack of ethics in gaming journalism from the ridicule and strawmanning.

Instead what happened was doubling down of demonization of gamer identity. A self fullfilling prophecy if I ever saw one: folks saw an enemy, and pretty much created them. Now it's scorched earth all the way.

People say the reference is just lame, and most people complain about SJW stuff in the game more. Its still overblown, IMO but a simple reference isn't the sole cause.

I think it would be useful to look at this as a "perfect storm" situation.

One has to take into consideration that this is a beloved franchise with a lot of characters that people still care about to this day, now, not only did the developers make their feelings clear about how they didnt like certain aspects of the original game, but also added changes that suited their particular vision of what is acceptable and whats not.

That alone is going to get you in the bad side of a lot of people, regardless of how you go about it.

Now add on top of this the fact that they had the bright idea to make a "joke" about a controversy that is as flammable as you can get, a controversy so flammable in fact that its guaranteed to start a lot of heated arguments on internet forums two years after its inception.

That was a dumb idea, unless the intent was to cause controversy, wich they certainly got in spades.

Add to that the inclusion of characters and themes that are sure to cause even more controversy when not handled properly,even among those who advocate in favor of them. You can see it for yourself in the steam discussion page, there are currently two threads about transgender people not being very supportive of SoD.

It reminds me of the controversy surrounding Pillars of Eternity.

Add the complaints concerning the overall quality of the expansion, the multiplayer, the bugs, the writing as a whole, the UI...in a good day, devoid of any of the stuff mentioned above, would have certainly affected the perception of the expansion.

And finally add to that the attitude of the developers towards it all, wich didnt help to defuse the situation, asking people to balance review scores is another dumb move, even if you are "in the right", you dont fight fire with fire.