It was the art style that caught my attention, but noticing the dark-skinned and clearly of African descent characters (dat fro) led to me adding this to my wishlist. Thanks for letting me see myself~

edit: Apparently, adding the raised hands emoji after "dat fro" caused the entire post to be cut short after "fro". :|

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Edit:

I now played the first campaign of the game. There is no real world politics and no political messaging. It can safely be bought and played, there isn't any annoying real world stuff.

In fact, even the contrary is true: Black characters are sometimes depicted as evil and executed. Same is true for white characters.

(1) There is no real world politics in the game
(2) There is no gender identity, gender stars, hatred towards men or women, denial of genes & natural science
(3) Black and white characters are depicted realistically, there are evil characters on both sides. I could neither observe typical left wing racism nor typical right wing racism.

The thread title is highly misleading and potentially damaging to the creators of the game.


The original message can be disregarded:

I didn't really notice, but if that's the case I have to amend my 5 star rating.

That being said I'm not so sure that this is intentional. I'll keep an eye out in later missions & if I get the impression that it's intentional I'll deduct a star.

Unrelated political messaging has no place in games & movies.

*sigh* It's still true: Off to slaughter the US' current political enemies in the latest CoD. SO not political!

I don't mind diversity if it's done in a credible way. Here in this fictional new setting, why not? We don't know much of this world or it's history, anything goes really. Unlike the Amazon Tolkien series where they add dwarves, elves and hobbits of color. When they could have added diversity to the Tolkien setting by placing part of the story in the lands of harad, where there actually are people of color and they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Being Saurons vassal lords on the one hand, an increasingly aggressive and imperialist Numenor on the other.

But i digress, even though i do get a sense of the 'strong female character' trope going on, i think Songs of Conquest is generally fine in my books. That said, I do think there's an element of political posturing that happens in quite a lot in indie games and triple A. It's generally more heart-felt in the indie games, and more forced by a directive from high in the case of big corporations. To me, it's not ideal because it potentially opens the door for conservative views being placed in a similar way, at some point down the line if we ever get a culture shift to the right. So we could see a game where peasants were only poor because they were lazy, the non believers tended to lack morals while the believers were mostly well grounded honorable people. Women were generally weak in need of rescue, even jumping in fright at the sight of a little mouse! That kind of thing. Even though I would ironically find it a bit funny, to begin with at least. Because it would be unexpected. But it would get grating in time.

We literally have AAA games where the player is getting direct orders from Ronald Reagan to carry out illegal special operations.

Conservative values are the DEFAULT in the gaming, that's why everyone gets their panties in a twist whenever there is the slightest whiff of representation in gaming media.

Also if they gave the elves blue skin, nobody would bat an eye, because elves don't exist.

Is that from one of the Call of duty black ops/cold war games? While I haven't actually played them, at least there's some kind of historical grounding to it. And while these games are inherently political given their subject matter (the cold war) and likely pro west in their narrative, i'm sure there's some nuance going on too. That not everything the CIA does is squeaky clean, i'm pretty certain it explores the dark side of the CIA black ops a bit, rather than just glorify them as heroes doing a few 'necessary' dirty deeds.

dude, almost every piece of fiction does have some sort of politics in it. Just because you only now get to see a more diverse approach does not mean they wanna shove that stuff down your throat.

There are people developing these games that are not cis-white western dudes.

How is putting some form of representation into media even a bad thing? Even if it is done in a ingenuine way.

While I still do think that it is pretty boring that most of the time it is diversity = black people or diversity = women it is way better than having your buzcut, marine in those games. I actually want way more diversity. Where are eastern europeans, hispanics, muslims etc.? Also put some trans people and other minories in there without letting them sound like that one annoying vegan at the bbq.

Look, just say it like you feel: "I take offense to any representation except my own." Don't hide behind the "political" argument, it is cowardly and shameful.

Having only watched the movies, I can understand why they might play it safe and just add/sprinkle some diversity where it might not canonically fit. Marketing. Most of their audience knows the Lord of the Rings as portrayed in the movies, so exploring a new continent (or wherever) requires a risk assessment. I'm guessing they concluded the former route is the safer bet, especially for the first series of all things. The political posturing you speak of has always been a thing. Reread, rewatch, and relisten to things from pre-2008. Go as far back as you like (e.g.: decades, centuries, etc.). If you don't notice the 'isms casually and blatantly present in everything, you're probably very accustomed to it.

Here's a more recent example that actually caught me by surprise: The Roast of Dragon's Dogma (Netflix Anime) - Mother's Basement.

If you want more examples, let me know and I'll dig some up. I'm honestly surprised you said that.

edit: Forgot to add the explanation an Intro to Art professor gave me. The reason why you see so much Catholic artwork from a certain time period in Europe is because the Catholic Church was the main customer.

I now played the first campaign of the game. There is no real world politics and no political messaging. It can safely be bought and played, there isn't any annoying real world stuff.

In fact, even the contrary is true: Black characters are sometimes depicted as evil and executed. Same is true for white characters.

(1) There is no real world politics in the game
(2) There is no gender identity, gender stars, hatred towards men or women, denial of genes & natural science
(3) Black and white characters are depicted realistically, there are evil characters on both sides. I could neither observe typical left wing racism nor typical right wing racism.

The thread title is highly misleading and potentially damaging to the creators of the game.

Lmao so basically GR11 is actually fun to hang around, got it.

He's right. This thread is a pathetic and roundabout way of virtue-signalling if nothing else, and the title could certainly be interpreted to imply the creators have ulterior motives.

Why must you inflict your self loathing upon us?

Right, thanks for posting so I can easily remove this from my wishlist.
Furies can go back to eating each other over their victim olympics and the boomer can go back to hating white people.

This topic starts to drift heavily into politics and as some of you probably know these aren't allowed by our forum CoC: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001814049-Forum-Code-of-Conduct?product=gog. I'm forced to close it unfortunately. Please remember that this is a gaming forum in the first place.