Guaranteed the word "woke" will be thrown around left and right
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Just to be safe, which part? Those things being what most people are protesting or those things being true?
That they're being forced to make characters ugly. In the case of The Witcher 4, she looks how you'd expect given her age, physical abilities, what she's gone through, and also the book descriptions. (The books basically say she looses her physical appeal.)
They're making games primarily to make money. The companies are trying to maximize that. If they're telling them anything about character design, it's to make characters that sell the game. I think it's significantly more likely games with the ridiculous clean, skimpy, sexy characters are having that dictated from above. The Witcher 4 is designing the character that they think works with the game they're making.
Complaining when art isn't being made to appeal to you specifically is the most entitled thing you can do. Play the game or don't. I don't care. If it doesn't look appealing to you, then fine. You don't get to have every game made for you. If you only want to play games with sexy women, there's plenty of those. Go play them and stop complaining when anything else is made.
The Mona Lisa isn't a particularly attractive woman, but it's one of the most famous and renowned pieces of art. Personally, I think it's highly overrated, but that's just my opinion and doesn't change the fact other people love it and DaVinci chose to make it on purpose.
What even is this? It looks like a mix of putting things in my mouth and making straw-man arguments.
I have no issue with Ciri and am looking forward to Witcher 4. Never said anything to the contrary.
I gave an easy to verify example in Sony and Stellar Blade, when the game developers publicly spoke out about their intentions to not censor.
It is difficult to verify what effect the pressure from "game journalists" like Kotaku had, but the articles are public so you can see them advocating for "less sexualized" characters and giving bad reviews to games that don't comply.
There is also plenty more evidence like deleted tweets. But if this isn't enough to protest against, then nothing is. So the question is, do you really believe that developers should not be put under pressure in either direction? Or do you believe it is only entitled when we demand "more beautiful" characters but perfectly fine when other demand "uglier" characters?
Exactly what I was saying I want as well. Doubly so if you are not even the intended audience and are just pushing your religious/moral beliefs.
What does that have to do with anything. DaVinci was not pressured into drawing Mona Lisa the way he did.
Thats what this thread is about. Why are you even commenting this kind of stuff if you don't care?
Marketing. Hell, even still the incels complained that it was censored because a few outfits were slightly different, a few with a tiny bit more cloth. The Witcher has been far less "uncensored" than Stellar Blade, with full nudity. What does it even mean when their game with no nudity is "uncensored" when no one was trying to censor them?
Which includes the belief that all the characters need to look attractive, right? You're angry at them too, right?
The point was that art can be whatever the artist desires. It doesn't have to look attractive. Substitute it for any unattractive art made for profit if it's not a good enough example. There's plenty of them.
I was replying to a comment that was general. In the first place, the few complaints about Ciri I saw was about playing as a female, not her looks.
Yes. Not all characters need to look attractive. Ciri is an excellent example of a character whose looks fit her setting and story.
I am even more angry about them, since they muddle the argument I am trying to make and make me look bad.
On the other hand, I 100% support putting pressure on Games to not cave in to the outside demands for "uglier" characters in all games. This creates an awkward dynamic where there is no way to verify the original intent of the artist so we just have to guess based on how well the art fits the game. There may be some Games being falsely accused, but I find this less problematic than doing nothing and having the pressure in both directions not be balanced.
This point we seem to agree on.
I chose this example because it is easy to verify it was not the devs choice. Yeah, the difference is small, but the principle is the same.
This is the entire issue. You're assuming there's some horrible outside pressure to make characters ugly, so you're in favor of outside pressure to make them attractive. Isn't outside pressure the issue you're arguing about, not them being ugly? How is the outside pressure you're in favor of better than the outside pressure you're arguing against (and making up without any evidence of it even existing)?
First of all, modern games are not made by a single person. Second, how can you verify it was their choice? It's marketing. They were making a product to make money, as all studios are doing. They saw a market and made up stuff about "not censoring" to sell their product. That doesn't mean they weren't forced to make a product they didn't want to make. I'd bet on it being the opposite in fact. They saw they could put a sexy woman in the game and people would buy it, so they forced the devs to do so. (I'm pretty confident this is at least partially true, because the game doesn't seem to do anything unique or interesting. It only copies other things. There's no creativity or passion from what I've seen of it. There's no reason for the character to be hot given, unlike Nier Automata for example.)
I am not assuming there is outside pressure. Among other things, the articles criticizing games for unrealistic body standards and the negative reviews of otherwise good games from "game journalists" are public. (note that reviews are recommendation for which games to buy, so giving bad review as a journalist is the same as saying not to buy a game)
Ok, so in your interpretation, the Game producer/developer I am criticizing tricked me into criticizing them. Then fuck them. They reap what they sow and I still want to express I am opposed to what they pretended happened.
That's totally unrelated to being ugly. Can people with normal shaped bodies not be attractive to you? Do you only get off to hentai?
You can find a games journist saying practically anything. Who cares? Don't give the ones you don't like views.
Maybe, but that's not what I meant. I meant the people behind Stellar Blade were saying they weren't censoring was pure marketing. It was stupid bullshit. No one was trying to censor them. It's like yelling out "I'm going to eat this burger" and acting like you're standing up to something, when no one was asking you to stop. Sure, it worked to make the stupid incels buy it, but it didn't mean anything. They were going to make the sexy character regardless, because they knew those people would buy it, and the "not censoring" thing was just icing on the cake.
There are games that try to rage-bait too though. The incels yelling about it is free PR. Most people don't give a shit, as long as the game is good. They wouldn't even know some of these games existed without the rage though. The people angry about it were never the target market anyway, so it doesn't cost anything.
I just explained why I believe we shouldn't let pressure from one direction be unopposed. So no, I will not ignore them. And yes, it absolutely is pressure, when bad reviews from several large sites try to lower sales and deprive devs of money they earned.
So do you care about people putting pressure on game devs or not? You can't have it both ways where we should just ignore one group but the other one is an issue.
What people get off to or what you find attractive is completely unrelated to whether it is what the devs wanted to make.
Also, you bringing this up and throwing around words like hentai and incel really makes me doubt that you want no pressure on artists in general, rather than just being opposed specifically to more "over-sexualized characters" or "beautiful characters" or whatever you want to call it.
I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say. What does that have to do with anything?
So the last minute changes appeared themselves? Or the devs voluntarily made them, for some reason after already shipping some physical copies and after saying they would not make those changes? (whether for marketing or other reason) Consistently across multiple outfits? Together with other censorship-like changes, such as blood splatter reduction/removal? Unlikely.