So we’re not going to talk about their massively transphobic advertising campaign, the last-minute crunching or the in-built, unavoidable epilepsy section, we’re just going straight for dick jokes?
Cool. Cool.
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Low hanging fruit, I guess; enage auto-mute.
Fuck any company or individual that’s transphobic.
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That depends which genitalia options you pick. And presumably the temperature.
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Oh yeah. I seem to remember the Witcher 3 (their previous game) had a similar kind of controversy?
“The next book we’re going to be adapting,” Currit said, “is the Cyberpunk rule book.”
Plus the source material has its own problems even before adding in the variable of adapting it to a new medium … Witcher is based on a Polish book series, and Cyberpunk an existing late-80s RPG with some kinda stereotype-y tropes?
The developer is Polish, and politics in Poland are kinda scary right now as well.
I hadn’t thought about that (and I never played the Witcher 3 but it’s on my list to play eventually), but adding it all up, not exactly a recipe for ideal outcomes…
I mean… I’m Hungarian, and politics in Hungary are kinda really damn scary right now (Poland is doing pretty well compared to us, really), but I don’t see how that reflects on my job which is completely unrelated to all that…
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Definitely a lot of corroborating evidence of intentional misbehavior, e.g.
Even more evidence is the “sorry to all those offended” non-apology that was on offer 
Anyways, I honestly wasn’t aware just how long this kind of stuff had been going on with them… but as the developers are in Poland, the political climate in Poland makes me kinda not-so-surprised this is the case? The article indicating Poland’s political trajectory could predict what eventually happens in the USA scared the living crap out of me, and continues to scare the living crap out of me…
Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.
In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.
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Thank you for this. I was going to go seriously look at picking up this game until I did further research in part due to your response here.
More info here:
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No problem.
The twitter response has not been positive the last few weeks at all, their EULA is a mess and the game is full of graphic glitches and other gaming issues.
The excitement and gloss of having Keanu Reeves do a mo-cap a few months ago has well and truly worn off.
The new Watchdogs game, set in London, featured recordings for radio stations and one of the voice “actors” was a UK transphobe happily spreading her BS and there was a free-speech issue there too; sure, she can say what she likes, but the gaming company paid her for it, so…
Not a good look from game producers this year, especially when you add in things like the new Call of Duty game co-opting the BLM raised fist logo as an in-game symbol for a group of terrorists.
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That one surprised even me. Like nobody on the dev team thought “uh, this might be a little bit on the nose?”
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I think that was the latest Tom Clancy game. Call of Duty actually added an explicitly pro-BLM message into their game last summer.
https://www.dailyesports.gg/ubisoft-apologizes-over-raised-fist-image-in-tom-clancys-elite-squad/
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Have you seen the following? Someone has been putting in the groundwork on this to show just how long the transphobic culture of this company has been in place.
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I mean, the whole company has been revealed as at the very least deaf to their portrayl of trans people, and arguably transphobic soooo…
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Yeah you can probably read about all the ball dropping in the article @Hylyx posted.
The general gist of things is their entire approach on the subject is shallow, and as likely to foster mockery of trans and non-binary folks as anything else. But it is there, and some effort was made. Which is a big thing in a piece of media of this scale.
There are signs that they were thinking about it, but i dunno that there were any trans folks in the room. My read on the company on issues like this has mostly been that it’s more failure and cluelessness than antipathy. Others are not so sure, and when it comes to LGBTQ anything it’s honestly hard to tell.
I don’t know that I’ve seen them address this sort of criticism with changes to the games much. Certainly not by changing plot or dialogue, which they don’t tend to alter overall. Seem to prefer adding things. Though they generally seem to improve from outing to outing.
But tweaking the character creater with more options or a better thought out approach is exactly the sort of thing they do in free updates during the post release cycle. Every one of their games has gotten that sort if thing in the month or two after release. While new voice tracks are a bit more extensive/expensive to add. And I doubt they can re-record game dialogue with a “they” option. A lot of the other shortcomings would be very doable.
Whether they address any of it on that front will be fairly telling.
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I wonder if that could actually be a good use of deepfake technology, an editor that allowed pronoun substitutions that not only fit the actor’s voice but also dialogue before and after to make it sound seamless.
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How much dialogue uses third-person personal pronouns to reference the MC anyway? You only use them when two people are talking about you after all.
With some creative writing to avoid the reflexive and the objective case (or using one or 'em for objective), you could probably just get away with using the MC’s name V everywhere since it is so short and have a single set of dialogue. Though it would be tricky to avoid it sounding awkward.
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You know i was just wondering that myself.
It’s a little more complicated than just pronouns, dialogue and writing can convey or assume gender in a lot of other ways.
But tweaking the language to soften that might not be as hard as I initially thought.
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From the few pics I saw, that wasn’t a problem.
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It is weird that “gender must be reflected in your voice” is the hill they opted to die on here. Such an easy character configuration option…
However, that possible excitement turned to disbelief when gamers realized their character’s gender and pronouns are not determined by genitals, but rather by voice. Only deep-voiced characters can be identified as male, while higher-pitched characters are identified as female, which purports the harmful idea that people’s genders can be identified by certain traits.
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That’s disappointing. When I saw the bbs thread on the game with selectable genitalia, I assumed that it was somewhat progressive in that respect. I mean you try to think about what identity will be like in 50 years and that’s the best you can do?
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