I'm a huge fan of this game, but I'll definitely acknowledge it has flaws. I was only mentioning out loud that the Cumans' portrayal never bothered me.
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Kingdom Come: Deliverance
- Thread starter Yonatan
- Start date
- Location
- The Final Frontier
Hey, it's not like twentieth century events caused the near eradication of Jewish culture and population in the area depicted in the game, and that Jews in the area had a rich cultural background or anything.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
Honestly even without the racism the game is still fucked beyond all help, what with the basically broken control scheme, asinine save system, and all the game breaking bugs.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
I never found the saving thing a problem tbh. By the time I had run out of the 6 or so Schnapps you get in the prologue I had so much money that buying more/ingredients was never a problem. It did make me think a bit more about how I was going to play which was great; one of the hunting bandits quests way before I even had a hauberk required real planning which was actually pretty fun.
Of course I worked out the bow after that so it all became pointless because headhsots are so incredibly powerful. The melee combat is indeed pointlessly broken when you go beyond 1v1 though. Didn't have that many bugs either but I picked it up after a few patches so Idk how bad it was back when this first came out.
Edit; Once you start picking up the swords you get so much money so quickly it's not even funny.
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A few reasons.
Historians (both of the academic and amateur variety) recognize that conflicts are rarely one-sided showdowns between a good side and a bad side. As a general rule, the worse the behavior and reasoning, the more likely what you're reading is propaganda. Now it is entirely possible that the relevant facts are literally true, but being a pack of lies isn't a requirement (or even preferable) for effective propaganda. If you're going to tout historical realism, you really can't have orcs running around.
Secondly, the majority of us have literally grown up with real conflict on our television screens featuring a lot of moral ambiguity, with some seriously bad actors on the nominal good side. "Good guys sometimes aren't good people," and the reverse, has become part of western culture's understanding of war. People crave differently at times, but a lot more lap of anti-heroes and bad guys with reasonable motivations and methods.
Finally, whatever you think of the show (to a lesser extent the books as well), Game of Thrones has had a serious impact on the way people view good/bad in medieval/fantasy fiction. If you're going to take a story from 15th century Europe -- not influences, not inspiration, not the idea of it, but actual 15th century Europe -- a lot of people are going to look for something similar to Game of Thrones, complete with complex politicking going on and most importantly no orcs.
If you're going to have orcs, you better make them seven feet tall and green.
- Location
- Mons Regius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Did you miss the "popular" bit? It means he was renowned enough that normal medieval folk would at least have heard of black people. And in a society largely illiterate, the positive depiction of a black man in art and in your churches means everything.
Of course it's not just "one saint", don't blame @Mila for you not looking it up yourself: one of the Biblical Magi, Balthazar, was frequently depicted as a black man in medieval art. Likewise, you have Saint Benedict the Moor, who is even more explicit.
But let's say you don't accept Saint Benedict as an example since he lived and was canonized centuries after the year KCD takes place in, 1403. Let's say I have to refrain from mentionning events later than 1403, like the Christian Emperor of Ethiopia who sent a delegations of Coptic priests to the Council of Florence in 1441, and who was confounded with the mythic Prester John, a foreign and fantastic Christian king in pagan lands.
Well then, I still have the fact that we have concrete proof of contacts between Crusaders and Christian Nubians in the 13th century:
Robert de Clari's full text here.Robert of Clari's account of the Fourth Crusade said:
And if you say that this is taking place far from regular European medieval folks, I can always point to closer things, like a 13th century chivalric romance from the Arthurian cycle about a black knight looking for his deadbeat father:
(and yes a black dude is described as handsome in a medieval story, weird huh)Morien said:
Anyone interested can read the rest here. This was popular at least in the Low Countries.
And Morien is not the only black character in Arthurian legend, you also have Feirefiz, half brother of Percival in Parzival, one of the most popular story in medieval Germany. Feirefiz, despite being half-black and with a magpie-like skin, is the equal of Percival in prowress and described as very handsome.
I could go on but I think you get the point: the idea of black people was not completely alien to medieval Europeans, and, unless the Czechs were as completely isolated from the rest of the world as were the Australian Aborigenes, they should have the idea of it. Even better, as shown in my historical examples above, contriving a reason for black people to show up shouldn't be that hard if you bother to look up African-European contacts before the Atlantic slave trade.
As an added bonus, I just demonstrated that lily white medieval Europeans had no problem at all to insert black people into their works of fiction, and in a positive way to boot 1. That in the Year of Our Lord 2018 people are still against the idea under the pretext of "historical accuracy/realism" says a lot more about us than it does our forebears.
(well not mine, my forebears were in Africa, but you get what I mean)
1Not that there weren't bad depictions, The King of Tars come to mind.
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Magic_Pal
On long term vacations in hell
- Location
- Poland
I'm terrible at explaing things so I will paste others people explanations.
"Africans would be mostly present in high trade zones. London, Marseilles, Venice, Genoa, etc would have a notable small minority population of Africans bringing in goods either from Africa or the Middle East. Outside of them though, you probably aren't going to find many. I highly doubt an African merchant would be found wandering around in Bohemia of all places either. Place wasn't exactly an economic hotspot."
"People of color that you would likely see in Bohemia at large during this time period would be the Cummans, a Turkic people that I know are prominently displayed in the game, and perhaps the Roma. They were appearing on the scene around this time. I don't know if they show up in the game."
Now my words. Finding some color characters in paintings, stories etc. in so, so many is like finding a oil drop in an ocean. Yet it is there but if you weren't looking for it you wouldn't even know it is there.
What I don't like about this whole situation is that just because game is not diverse enough and have no token characters people are so willing to throw shit at it. It is first game from this studio. With not big AAA budget, yet people are bitching like it was suppose to be next Elder Scrolls game or something. Yes it is buggy but what game now is't? They are already fixing all reported issues. And more stuff is coming in free dlc and maybe paid one. Including a story with female protagonist.
The facts are: They were close to 0 poc in bohemia at that time. It is insane to call someone nazi for saying that. It is just stupid to rate games by looking at cast diversity.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
And yet no Jews...
Edit; Like even if you were 100% correct above (you're not) that doesn't excuse the terrible portrayal of the Cumans and the almost fairytale nationalist narrative as has previously been noted in the thread.
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Magic_Pal
On long term vacations in hell
- Location
- Poland
*shrug* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they were probably more focused on gameplay and other shit.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
Yeah considering the bugs and all that Vavra has said I can sum this argument up in one word; Bullshit.
Edit; This game should be all about historical accuracy. The portrayal of the Cumans and the lack of Jews are in this context literally gameplay issues.
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Magic_Pal
On long term vacations in hell
- Location
- Poland
Please mind that the game map is just 4km by 4km. This is very small. The whole Czech country now is 78 866 km². You could say that this small area just happensto have that ethnicity.
People will always find something to complain about. Even if there were jews, poc and good cumans in game there would be other issues, like woman treatment in game ect.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
Yeah no. Anywhere from 1 in 20 and up should have been Jews. The Cumans should not be portrayed as ravening monsters. There should have been one or two other ethnicities visibly present.
Like dude I'm a historian. You can't pull this with me.
Edit; In a game all about historical accuracy we must contend with these issues be it race or treatment of women*.
Because they did then too. The modern world does not exist in a vacuum.
*Or whatever.
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- Location
- Somewhere in the stacks
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The game was literally marketed on being "historically accurate" and now you claim they spent time totally failing to iron out the multiple bugs AND not doing the research they supposedly did to make this game the most historically accurate vidya game ever?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh, incidentally, not actually questioning your credentials, but can you tell me more about this part?
(Currently a first semester History Grad Student.)
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
Did a BA in Ancient history, MA in History of Warfare.
Magic_Pal
On long term vacations in hell
- Location
- Poland
1. Budget and time are a factors. Yes deadline was set too soon. Remember this is their first game. Mistakes are bound to happend.
2. Show me a document that can confirm in 100% that their portrait of ethnicity was wrong.
3. Show me more historically accurate "vidya" game.
De3ta
Mae
- Location
- The hellish pit known as New Jersey
No they weren't this game is buggy as shit.
- Location
- The Final Frontier
Honey, please no.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Well for one medieval armies had a bad habit of deserting like nobody's business. The individual semi-professional soldier and mercenary frequently finds themselves in and out of many sides, even as bands organized by ethnicity like the "Basque", "English", or "German" Routiers in the Hundred Years War often had a similarly heterogeneous soldiery and were distinguished by the particulars of their present officers. Cuman mercenaries would find themselves employed in all sorts of places, especially as individual Czech lords and knights start side-eyeing their fellows and the imperial claimants. That's not even touching all the non-mercenary Cumans outside those bought by Sigismund.
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Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
So they marketed the game as being historically accurate, which it isn't because they were allegedly more focused on making a stable and fun product, which is why the released game is apparently buggy as shit and plays like the president fucks (poorly)
my dude it sure sounds like you're describing a soggy piece of ass
- Location
- Somewhere in the stacks
- Pronouns
- She/Her
1. You can't have it both ways, which is my point. Either they devoted so much time to being historically accurate that they should have got it right but didn't or they didn't actually spend that much time on historical accuracy and spent it polishing the game, which they also didn't do because it's full of bugs.
2. I can't because you're basically asking me go diving into JSTOR or something to do serious academic research and/or undertake a thesis level amount of research to prove you wrong in an internet argument and I don't have time for that shit since I do enough work for grad school as it is. Plus it's not going to be just "one" historical document. What you'd need would be an amalgamation of multiple primary and secondary sources because no one document has all the information you're asking for.
3. Why do you keep asking me to do your research for you? I'd wager any of the modern Sherlock Holmes games are more accurate in their portrayal of their setting. Or maybe Titanic: Honor and Glory. Technically still in development, but hey.
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- Location
- Mons Regius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
ok.jpg
Are you saying paintings of the Magi, part of one of the significant events in the New Testament, the one event celebrated each year by Christians everywhere, would be rare? That it is a drop in the ocean? Whut?
And even Wikipedia notes that Parzival "was the most popular vernacular verse narrative in medieval Germany", so what are you talking about.
It's not a drop in the ocean, it's there in plain sight.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
In all fairness to the dev team they did a lot right as I noted earlier (the map is so gorgeous as is the architecture etc).
However this only makes the myriad...questionable decisions all the more glaring.
This game is pretentious. Never thought I'd say that but fricking Vavra. So close to greatness.
Bugs can be patched. An asshole lead dev? Not so much.
However this only makes the myriad...questionable decisions all the more glaring.
This game is pretentious. Never thought I'd say that but fricking Vavra. So close to greatness.
Bugs can be patched. An asshole lead dev? Not so much.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Boo this man, boo him!
(One of those "Social Historians" you might have heard of.)
- Location
- Somewhere in the stacks
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ayyy history majors represent. I did a BA in History, mostly focused on the modern era in Eastern Europe ( so 18th century forward) and now I'm doing a Masters in Library & Info Science