- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
I think they're referring to the tactic EA did in the past where you hire some people to act enraged and go viral from there. Ryan Holiday talked about being hired to do so in his book Trust Me, I'm Lying for the game Dante's Inferno.
That said these days I'm not even sure that's needed vs "content creators" doing racist bullshit on their own.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah, the dante's inferno was relatively obviously fake - protests at big games conventions staged, cheap marketing web sites for the 'protest movement' etc. This is just stuff on twitter, which would be easy enough to fake I guess but it's a lot of existing historical right wing accounts so.
The Englanderish
Schrödinger's Kuudere Kitty Caliph(a)
- Location
- Califat de Chats
I gotta give props to Yong Yea for sternly ignoring the culture war bullshit stuff and staying laser-focussed locked on to the deranged pricing.
Fukkin implaccable youtuber knowing neither pity nor mercy.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Is $70 really deranged pricing? I mean, I don't love it but it's pretty normal at this point.
The 100+ dollar thing is just for collector's editions which don't seem to contain anything valuable. Which sure rips off superfans but they presumably derive some incomprehensible enjoyment from it. Sensible players are unaffected.
ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
I'm dubious that marketing was the intent, but my opinion of Ubisoft is on the level where if it came out that it was approved by marketing for the purpose of baiting grifters, I wouldn't really be surprised. I'd be disappointed that this is apparently what it takes to get a black protagonist from Ubisoft, but surprise is a taller order.
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The Englanderish
Schrödinger's Kuudere Kitty Caliph(a)
- Location
- Califat de Chats
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Lol fair.
I feel at this point objecting to $70 is fighting against the tide but it's hardly unreasonable.
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
I don't know - "there is no such thing as bad advertising." In this case, advertising is free - there are a bunch of Internet idiots ready to inflate any insignificant detail to unprecedented heights.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
Depends on what is in that "Ultimate pack". If it is just some cosmetic stuff it is whatever but if there is bonus story in there...
There's an 'extra mission' available starting at the gold tier. The ultimate tier looks like cosmetics and effectively a level bump?
At a minimum, the Season Pass means the full game is probably something like 100 dollars, but this is just the usual shit game companies have been pulling for over a decade at this point to milk consumers wallets, the 70 dollar base price increase is just one more piece of the pile.
Which I guess controversial opinion, 70 dollars base game price is actually totally fine all on its own in a vacuum? Inflation means games have sat at the same price for what, 20+ years most of the time, going from 60 dollars to 70 dollars would be well overdue and people complaining that they can't afford this ten dollar increase in literally one of the cheapest hobbies in the world should probably be putting more thought into actually making more money if they can't afford it.
At least, that's what I would say if 99% of the time it wasn't obvious bullshit because AAA games already cost well more than 60 dollars with DLC and microtransactions and lootboxes. As is, it's absolutely some corpo nonsense to milk our wallets and another reason to just stick with buying cheap indie games and only buying the big games like this years later when they're on clearance sales.
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- Somewhere!
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- She/Her
You can get good indie or A games for like 40, is the thing. If they didn't bloat the game dev process and how big games are they wouldn't need to charge as much - tech nominally would be making the process easier with less devs than in the 90s.
- Location
- Somewhere
I mean, before all the inflation, SNES games were $60-70 so really the price of videogames has been remarkably stable compared to just about everything else during the same time period.
The pre-order bonus extra missions in AC games are almost always pretty underwhelming and (along with pre-order weapons/armor) eventually get unlocked with uPlay points about 9 months to a year down the line anyway
it's not so much a "Bioware rewrites parts of ME3 to cut Javik and reimplement him as day-one DLC" scenario as a patience tax, of sorts
(which is not to defend Ubisoft's pricing so much as to point out that someone really isn't missing much by just getting the base game)
- Location
- Strip-mall Hell
- Pronouns
- She/They
I dont like your implication that the only reason to include minorities is to piss off white guys. i think thats a very strange thing to say, in fact.
The Englanderish
Schrödinger's Kuudere Kitty Caliph(a)
- Location
- Califat de Chats
The idea that the corpos have their Machiavellian shit together enough to be the true puppet master behind the legions of youtube grifters, and this is all according to keikaku, is also just kinda hysterical.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A "good indie game" doesn't give you what a Ubisoft game gives you. I don't deny there are systemic inefficiencies and bloat in modern development (looking at you file size) but people come to these games for the massive sizes. It's a feature, not a bug.
I heard about the whole, Yasuke thing second-hand, since I haven't had much interest in recent entries to the series.
At first I thought, well, that's semi-reasonable. People have been wanting to see ninjas in the series since AC1, and how ninjas connect to the Assassains, so it would be kind of a shame to not have an actual, native born Japanese person as the protagonist, even if Yasuke is cool.
Sure, certain unpleasant people were undoubtedly weaponizing it, but those people always show up.
Then I found out that there was a playable Japanese character as well, so most of those complaints... were apparently never even semi-reasonable in the first place.
It took me days of hearing people yell about Yasuke before I even heard a whisper about the bullet to the head of those arguments.
At first I thought, well, that's semi-reasonable. People have been wanting to see ninjas in the series since AC1, and how ninjas connect to the Assassains, so it would be kind of a shame to not have an actual, native born Japanese person as the protagonist, even if Yasuke is cool.
Sure, certain unpleasant people were undoubtedly weaponizing it, but those people always show up.
Then I found out that there was a playable Japanese character as well, so most of those complaints... were apparently never even semi-reasonable in the first place.
It took me days of hearing people yell about Yasuke before I even heard a whisper about the bullet to the head of those arguments.
- Location
- Ether
They're not EA, so they're not intentionally doing it.
Remember the Dante’s Inferno video game (and its deranged gonzo marketing)?
Today marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri—and the world Dante created in The Divine Comedy has influenced creators across the globe for those 700 years. You can take a look …
lithub.com
Still, the culture warriors are completely playing into the hands of the mundane reality of this game is going to be almost certainly cookie-cutter, little different from any other annual installment, and totally undeserving of any spikes in publicity caused by social cesspit controversies.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It seems kind of foolish to suppose you can divine some trend in how a country feels about a thing based on posts you see on social media. This actually also applies to the positive comments that have been shared around: these are just snapshots of a limited selection of people in a country of over 125 million people.
But I was curious about this so I jumped on amazon.jp and saw that Shadows is in the best sellers list for video games. If you look at just games instead of Nintendo peripherals and eShop points cards it's actually in the top ten, the only non-Nintendo game on the list, and not even released. So whatever sentiment there is over there isn't stopping it from performing well in that respect.
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- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
I'm still surprised and puzzled that Nioh did not receive more controversy for its depiction of William Adams.
The game made William Adams Irish. Which I believe is a very sensitive and touchy subject regarding the distinction between English and Irish (and Scots and Welsh).
Nioh also had Yasuke, and honestly a much better integration in the story than in Nioh 2.
In Nioh 2, Yasuke's role as The Obsidian Samurai is literally just "Oda Nobunaga wants you to go spar with his retainer, for entertainment purposes". It's the same level of excuse plot as many of the other side missions where the player gets to fight a single boss (or multiple bosses at once) in an arena.
In Nioh, Yasuke actually has relevance to the plot: the villain wants to resurrect Nobunaga, and Yasuke reluctantly fights William to prevent him from stopping the ritual. William (ie the player) defeats him, and goes "you don't have to do this". Then Nobunaga gets resurrected, and tells Yasuke "you don't have to do this". It's surprisingly effective in showing Yasuke as an aging samurai who is torn between loyalty to Nobunaga, and knowing that the resurrection is literally dark magic born from the suffering of countless innocents.
- Location
- Canada
Probably cause it was made by a Japanese Dev? The calculus for Japanese representation are different when you're looking at things from a Japan perspective vs an American perspective.
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If anything, the controversy might just be a smokescreen to distract people from realizing this is the same tactic that they were doing with Star Wars: Outlaws.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
... do you think that Mark Kern secretly works for Ubisoft?
Hasinaw
Team Buster Busts onto the Scene
- Pronouns
- She/They
There is no "smokescreen," there is no greater plan, there is no conspiracy; there is simply a vocal group of people that turn anything notable, every release that receives some attention, into another front for the stupid culture war they're waging with shadows and phantoms.