It also misses the point that in the Pac Man era, and games derived from that tradition, things were almost entirely mechanical. That sort of thing is all about the hows of the pixels interacting. Bioware’s games are fundamentally driven by narrative, and have been (along with the developers that preceded them) pushing this kind of thing for 20 years or more.
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The Dragon Age series has actually been rather good about pushing the inclusion thing right from the start. I’ve read a couple things about Inquisition that mentioned the “It’d be nice if the player character could openly identify” bit came up. Haven’t played it yet, but if I had to guess I’d say that comes down to a problem of how to execute it. I suppose you could just have dialogue options hanging out there in that particular conversation, or other appropriate areas, that directly allow that. But there’s a weird thing with this sort of game where the default assumption is “click everything!” or where everything clicked or un-clicked is something that the player character would or does say whether you click it or not. Or you end up with a weird meta-gaming situation where you absolutely must or must not click certain options to achieve a certain outcome. Or based on what character you are role playing. Its independent of subject matter, or anything to do with identity/gender/sexuality, and bugs me one way or the other. But (playing through Origins again right now) seems to come to the fore in terms of the “romance” aspects of the game. There are very explicitly “romance” dialogue options you MUST click to woo each character you can woo. But it seems a little more picked out and unsubtle in terms of Origins’ Bi character than it does in terms of the other Romance options.
So if you just had “identify as trans (or gay, or a martian)” dialogue options hanging out at the appropriate points for every character on every play through you’d probably run into that issue. It’d get rolled in with every other on the nose, immersion breaking, awkward click now for X outcome moment. So it would, I think, lack the necessary respect and casualness I’d prefer in dealing with the issue. And that respect and casualness seems to be at the heart of why everyone’s lauding this trans character.
I would think the best way to handle it would be to add an “identity” section to the character creator, and then propagate dialogue options based on that. Which would be really cool. But adds a lot of complexity and points of failure to a type of game that’s already fairly prone to bugs due to complexity. It also opens up a lot more avenues to offend and fail.
So as great as I think the idea is I can see why they might avoid it. Lack of a proper, naturalistic, and respectful way to actually do it.
The irony being, of course, that Pac-Man is predated by several years by Adventure (1976ish) which pioneered and lent its name to “adventure games”, the spiritual predecessors to all narrative games.
And in fact Pac-Man was arguably a big success precisely because it was the first mass-market arcade game to feature iconic mascot characters, rather than generic “car” and “spaceship” type sprites.
This sounds like a metaphor for elections to me, so that’s that one busted…
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If we are going that far back then the closer ancestor of the Dragon Age games is Dungeons and Dragons, not Pacman.
If we assume a D&D ancestry then Bioware, in the position of DM, has decided that their world is an LGBT friendly one. Just like any DM has had the option of doing since 1974.
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I really wish this game ran on Linux systems. As it is, I’m tempted to buy it and try it under WINE or POL.
If you gotta choose, use a separate windows partition. WINE makes your linux machine as vulnerable to Windows malware as a real windows install. So why not just make a throwaway windows partition that doesn’t communicate with your linux install and FS
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Or maybe run windows in virtualization?
Virtualization is too slow on off the shelf hardware and you should know that
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DA1 is markedly better than DA2, unfortunately. Thankfully they upped their game(so to speak) for the third; but going from 1 to 2 is a smack in the face.
Only sometimes true: If your VM attempts to do graphics in software, DA1 is going to be unlikely and DA2 impossible, and DA3 downright absurd.
However, basically anything other than QEMU set to do full CPU emulation can pass CPU load to the hardware with minimal overhead, and some VMs have made decent strides in doing the same for the GPU(VMware is probably the best at it, among those you can get for Linux, I hear they trade blows with Parallels on OSX).
Plus, if you have a system with the correct virtualization extensions(IOMMU/‘VT-d’/‘AMD-vi’) you can actually hang a physical PCI/PCIe card off the PCIe root of a virtual machine. And, if the stars are right, it’ll actually Just Work. It’s really fairly cool. The details are a bit nastier if that PCI device is a GPU; but when the stars are right it does actually work. Virtual machine, physical graphics card running almost indistinguishably from the one under direct control of the primary OS. Very handy for fast NICs and storage interfaces as well.
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