Lae’zel and Shadowheart can be mean sometimes, and it’s okay to embrace women in video games like them.
Nobody’s afraid of them. This article created its own problem to complain about.
Lae’zel and Shadowheart
This feels a lot more like the author is upset by the way these two were done, and is in turn projecting that upon “other gamers”.
So the author argues that unlikable characters should be liked because: buzzword, buzzword, woman, buzzword and that the customers are wrong. It’s art, it’s subjective, and that means people can also not like it. If it is indeed the case a vocal group of customers are finding it hard to get into the game because some characters are perceived as badly written, I doubt this is because they are all misogynistic neck-beards.
Yeah, “people don’t like the racist authoritarian because she’s a woman” sure is a hot take.
What…? This isn’t a real issue
Minthara, a companion who could previously only be recruited by joining her side and more or less committing genocide on a grove full of tieflings, can now simply be knocked out and talked to at a later point in the game where all of that drama can be ignored.
Minthara was being mind-controlled. When she’s free, she’s still evil but not that evil - she even asks the player character what his excuse for killing the tieflings is, since he wasn’t mind-controlled.
(Knocking her out still doesn’t make sense, but mostly because at that point in the game the player has no in-character reason to think that she’s special aside from the fact that all the other enemies are goblins and she’s a
Forgotten Realms BDSM sex symboldrow.)Nice… A big old spoiler
Yeah, I blew her the fuck up. I didn’t think she was a companion until I looted her and she had underwear and a backpack. Strangely only companions wear underwear in BG3. I don’t know what’s up with that.
The least important part of a character is their sex.
Well that’s not true at all. Men and women have different life experiences and that often is what drives a narrative.
So you can’t have a good character or story unless it’s centered around whether the character is a man or a woman? You’re gonna lose your mind when you hear about aliens, robots and other non sexed characters.
So you can’t have a good character or story unless it’s centered around whether the character is a man or a woman?
Where on Earth did you get that from my comment?
You’re gonna lose your mind when you hear about aliens, robots and other non sexed characters.
….which often is attached to specific unique narrative concepts for those types of characters, since they too share a unique world view that is helpful or even necessary to set the background and future specific storyline.
Lemmy is full of people who wants to get into battles over their own gender issues. Stay clear.
If you even express that a man and woman is different, it’s a personal attack on those people. Their personal life experience has made them way too sensitive to this topic so they can’t think clearly anymore.
Men and women are different and I dare to say that in general (with exceptions), each gender is better than the other at certain things. This is common sense.
Mate, you’ve gotta be trying to be offended to misconstrue what was said so badly.
Maybe to you.
I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.
And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.
I know it’s very hard for me to care about Mass Effect 1 Ashley Williams.
I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone, because cheap emotional engagement trick.
May as well send the one-dimensional specist asshole with absolutely no other character trait.
the one-dimensional specist asshole with absolutely no other character trait.
I used to think that about Ashley until I did what I nicknamed my Asshole Run. I was an Adept, so I usually had Ashley and Tali around me. I ended up listening to their elevator conversations, and Ashley treated Tali a lot differently than she did Wrex or Garrus (the ones she saw as a military threat) - she warmed up to her and treated Tali like a little sister. So when Tali died in that run on 3, Ashley was gutted and was crying when you go talk to her afterwards. Seeing her actually have a character arc made me like her a lot more.
I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone at the end of 1, because cheap emotional engagement trick.
Yeah but that’s the other thing, that’s how you get gamers to let somebody from their group go: You force an obvious “One or the other”-pick. I can totally see how we as consumers can more readily accept that than we can accept the very understandable part of Karlach leaving as that was not presented right in the moment you made the choice. It didn’t feel like there should not be any Option C at all.
That made me think about the most arbitrary and broken player “moral choice” I know : the end of Fable 2.
spoiler
Bad guy enslaves lots of people for years for his project, killing many of them. Then kills your family and your cute puppy because fuck you.
After you beat bad guy, magic ascended girl appears, rewards you with one of three wishes for post-game : revive everyone enslaved by bad guy, revive your family and cute puppy, or give you lots of useless monies.
The player is not really responsible for the slave deaths. The ability to “fix” ten years of history by magically erasing all the deaths is weird and undermines the impact of the whole story a lot.
Also, and perhaps more importantly on the player’s side of things, the dog is a freaking gameplay mechanic, not having it prevents some actions and blocks a few minor quests.
Well, sorry, nameless, faceless theoretical people who died years ago, I really need my cute puppy.
Really, the game never even establishes why that very specifically determined choice has to be made. It feels very rushed, very cheap and the whole thing is over in 5 minutes.
Look, I’m a lesbian, all hot girls intimidate me.
Do people actually have a problem with them?
I’m
arousedimpressed by strong women, physically and emotionally. And in a world that can do better by them, this is balancing the scales.I also want to say that as we saw with Legend of Korra, if they’re interesting characters and are ‘cool’ nobody will care about gender.
