When news broke about the new Saints Row game, I was, as many others, appalled by what I saw. The graphics were bland, the story seemed laughable, and the main characters did not immediately appeal to me. However, due to some industry contacts, I was able to get a review code of Saints Row (2022) and was able to start playing the game before its official release date (Thanks, Wyatt! You are the best!!). Even though I am pretty busy, I was able to carve out some time and, to be quite frank, I got pretty hooked towards the end, even playing until three or four a.m., which I last did with GTA V. This game impressed me deeply, so I decided to sit down and write down my thoughts on it. The result was a long and very substantial review. Please read it in its entirety, and with an open mind. For calibration, it took me about 20 hours to get 100% of the game’s achievements and afterwards I spent about five hour in the post-game, exploring the game world and replaying some of the engrossing mini games. I am currently halfway through my second playthrough.
The Evolution of Video Games as Male Power Fantasies
Let us start with the basics. Traditionally, video games were a male hobby and they therefore were made to appeal to the male power fantasy. Mario was short, fat, and ugly but still somehow always ended up banging the tall, slim, and super hot Princess Peach. This is essentially porn-caliber writing. As technology improved, so did the appeal of video games for the male gamer. In Castlevania you take on armies of the undead, in Contra you lay waste to armies of robots, and in Ninja Gaiden you are an unstoppable ninja, as the title implies, that can do absolutely everything. These were the 1980s. In the 1990s, the graphics got better and explosions got a lot bigger. This form of escapism now meant that teenage boys were brainwashed to believe that they could wipe out fleets of colossal space ships by moving a lever in an arcade cabinet and tapping on a few buttons.
With the shift to 3D graphics, this only got worse, er, better. Now graphics had a massive oomph behind them, hitherto completely unknown. I am skipping early 3D graphics, which have little appeal, and instead highlight examples of games from the 2000s onwards. In God of War, you kill monsters and Gods from Greek mythology, in Gears of War you take on the ginormous Leviathan, and Doom (2016) has you tear demons apart with your mere hands. Obviously, if you are a man with an insatiable thirst for power, those games were there to serve you, just like all those tatted up big-tittied sluts you pump and dump.
Saints Row (2022) as the Ultimate Power Fantasy
The world has changed a lot in the last ten years. The male power fantasy has evolved. In fact, human biology advanced more in the last few years than in millions of years before, and we are seeing the effects of it. Instead of the nameless pilot of some space ship in a 1990s arcade game, or the testosterone-trenched Kratos in God of War, the modern man has a more realistic outlook on life. He no longer perceives masculinity to be about asserting dominance, climbing status hierarchies, and fucking the hottest sluts he can. No, this is all in the past. The male power fantasy desperately needed a reboot, just like Saints Row needed one, and, as it so happens, those two needs converged, as if by divine intervention, to produce a video game that is the perfect fit for the current year.
Video games were always about power. Yet, it is no longer an expression of power to shoot and kill and loot and destroy. I mean, it kind of is, but the entire nature of power has changed. Quite frankly, there is nothing and nobody in the current year who is more powerful than an intellectually challenged, gender-fluid female who belongs to a racial minority. This is true power in the current year! Forget about Marcus and his Gears of War taking down the Leviathan in a fantasy world. In the real world, the woke take down society and its institutions and you, as you do not belong to this group in the real world, can now live out this power fantasy on the screen. The woke are the most powerful group on the planet and now you, too, can have a taste of it! Thus, Saints Row (2022) has as much to offer to the modern man as more primitive video games such as Gears of War or God of War (the one on PS3, not the Dad of War reboot) or Dead Space had to offer a solid decade ago. Like it or not, Saints Row (2022) is the perfect power fantasy for today.
I have to say that I am a relatively picky gamer. I am quick to dismiss a game when it does not appeal to me instead of trusting anonymous Redditors who tell me that a particular game gets good after sixty hours. My time is too precious to be wasted this way. Yet, Saints Row (2022) is arguably the best video game ever made, and I cherished every second of it. Let us look at the closest competitor in comparison: In GTA IV, the story was a cynical take on the American Dream with a clear conflict. In GTA V, on the other hand, the story was really weak. Somehow, a high-IQ white criminal joins forces with a black gentleman from the hood and a complete lunatic. The game is basically a sequence of set pieces, but it is not coherent. In contrast, Saints Row (2022) has a story you can completely relate to, and a lot more. Let’s dig in!
Character Creation
Saints Row (2022) starts with a character editor. You no longer chose between a male or female character. Instead, there is a slider that is not even labeled. No matter where you move the slider, you end up with a relatively unattractive character, which is great as it powerfully drives home the point that sometimes, the world just wants to screw you over and nothing you can do will change it. Thus, the first few moments of Saints Row (2022) are already deeper than most video games, books, and movies ever could be. It is such a powerful message that I had a hard time not tearing up.
I wanted to manually adjust certain parameters to turn the androgynous creature I was supposed to play with into a somewhat more appealing character, but this was not possible. I could not even give xir a white skin tone. The lightest you can go is some kind of Mexican-brown. Hair colors are similarly restricted, but there is a wide variety of neon colors. You are not going to create a tall, slender, busty, blonde, blue-eyed vixen as this would defeat the powerful message this game wants to send. Also, if you could do that, you would cheat yourself out of the power fantasy the game provides and you surely do not want to do that. If you are playing in order to live out your power fantasies to the full, you should create a female character, of course.
The Riveting Story of Saints Row (2022)
After you have created your character, which will look unfuckable no matter what you do, you find yourself walking out of a sex change clinic. Some mysterious donor paid for you to have your sexual organs cut off, but now you need a constant supply of meds as well as follow-up visits to a doctor, a shrink, and your local drug dealer. Due to no fault of your own, you suddenly need to earn money. This is highly intelligent commentary on the capitalist system as we cannot just live in harmony with nature. Instead, we need to acquire a made up unit of exchange to get access to live-saving products and services. It really is a brutal system we live in, and I am grateful for Saints Row (2022) for pointing this out.
In the game, you can apply for a few jobs but, unlike in the real world where diversity hires are shoo-ins, in Saints Row (2022) you cannot get a proper job. Thus, you need to steal, rob, loot, and kill to make a living. There is no other way, unfortunately, and if society puts you in such a bad position, well, what else can you do?
Your first missions consist of robbing a few white guys in the banking district. In an engrossing cut scene, your character muses about the difficulties of making a living this way as those people just do not have enough money on them and it is too much effort to rob and stealma. As you do that, a lesbian, a black guy, and a cucked mestizo gather around you and ask you if they can help you in any way. At this point, the camera shows the face of your character, which smirks. The screen pauses and, with a bang, the powerful title melody of Saints Row blast out of your speakers. This is the real start of Saints Row. You would not believe it, but those mad lads really licensed the Village People’s cult hymn YMCA. The screen gets drenched in rainbow colors and the real game starts.
Hyper-realistic World Building in Saints Row (2022)
It would have been very short-sighted had the game only sent you on a wild goose chase to get money for the ongoing hormone replacement meds of the protagonist. After a day or two of in-game time, the two moms or two dads of your character — this is decided at random during character creation, as I learned directly from one of the developers on one of the many fan channels of this game on Discord — surprises you with the bad news of a letter from FannyFay, the in-game government agency that administers student loans. Your character has a Master’s in Ethnic Studies and now needs to pay back $100,000, and there is interest to pay, too.
After the real story has been properly set up, the game lets you and your jolly gang loose on the game world and, man, is it fun! Let me highlight some aspects. Overall, the world depicts a majority-minority utopia. You see a few whites in grocery stores, which you can rob, there are a bunch of white bankers, and then you will encounter gangs of white criminals. In contrast, our black brethren are depicted as smart and hard-working, and thus present an aspirational image that has the power of propelling weed-smoking Tyrone from welfare dependency to a solid six-figure income.
For navigation, you use a smart phone. Updates come via a Twitter clone, which showcases the excellent humor of the writers. A running gag is a Trump-inspired politician who is shown giving boastful speeches in almost empty venues. If you refresh this fake-Twitter feed a few times, you will come across videos in which fake-Trump gets beaten up by a mob, shat on by a dove, or attacked by a pit bull. All of this is done in a really tasteful way. There was one seemingly shocking and tasteless clip were fake-Trump gets torn apart by three pit bulls but the smart black guy then quips, “Ayo, don’tcha get ya hopes up, homie. Das a deep fayke!”
Speaking of humor, the voice work is stellar. In one mission you break into the home of a priest who, as you learned, is a prepper and and also stores a lot of hard currency at home. This is played out in a torture scene similar to the infamous one with Trevor in GTA V. The one in Saints Row (2022) is more evolved, though, as the entire gang takes part and the black character frequently, and always at exactly the right moment for best effect, utters, “daym!” It is wonderfully subtle humor that is not in the slightest retarded.
A key mission consists of a bunch of white guys robbing a black charity worker for absolutely no reason at all. At this point, your little posse has gained the trust of the city authorities, and therefore you are able to convince the mayor to outlaw whites. You have also paid off your student debts, which is celebrated by the news papers as a “diversity success story”. Yet, the game cannot end yet at this point as there are still all those pesky whites around, which soil the utopia you have been building. This leads to the final third of the game where the goal is to kill every white in the game. Just like the buffaloes in GTA V, the whites in Saints Row (2022) do not respawn. Once they are gone, they are gone.
The game properly ends once you have killed the last white person in the game, which is a white, pregnant mother. One of the characters quips, “I bet you can’t breathe now, too, right?” and the black high-IQ gentleman in your group wittily remarks, “Now we put paid to that, finally.” The other three repeat this line, then they all say it once more. In a truly heart-wrenching scene, the streets flood with brown and black people, the sky turns into rainbow colors, and everybody shouts, “Now we put paid to that, finally.” There is a huge party everywhere, YMCA plays, and the game fades to the credit roll. This vision of a non-white future is deeply moving.
Side Missions and Mini Games
One minor criticism I have is that the game locks you out of some content if you do not complete in due time. This only applies to a few missions as they would no longer make any narrative sense. For instance, in Red Dead Redemption you can wipe out camps of criminals. In contrast, Saints Row (2022) has you burn all churches in the game. If you progress enough in the kill-all-whites missions, however, churches get demolished by the city. Thus, if you want to play an active part there, you need to plan ahead. On the positive side, this side activity is not tied to any achievements or trophies so you can still get 100% completion in one play through. (But, trust me, you are going to want to play this game repeatedly!)
There is another mission where you are tasked with dumping gallons of estrogen into the fresh-water supply of the city. This is presented as a fun series of quick-time events, and whenever you do this, the city is rendered in more and more vibrant colors. This is such a cool idea that I have to tip my fedora to the developers. In particular, I appreciate the pacifist tone of this activity.
As you know, GTA is often maligned for its misogyny as you can bang prostitutes in that game and, shockingly enough, you can kill them afterwards to get your money back. Saints Row (2022) inverts this gameplay element. This time around, you are the prostitute, and this is actually a pretty quick way to make money as all the NPCs in the game want to have sex with your avatar, no matter what. This activity is triggered by walking to a street corner and picking the option “sex sells!” from a context-dependent menu. You also have the option of lowering or raising your prices, based on race. An example of the fine humor of the developers is the “Not even if you pay me” trophy or achievement, which triggers if you shoot dead a white guy who approaches you for sex.
Minor Issues
There are no real issues with this game as everything just flows so nicely. However, I noticed a few problems with the game. Once I once spotted a very attractively rendered female NPC, a slim one with big tits. This caught me by surprise so I raised a stink over this on Discord. As I later learned, this was put into the code as a so-called “Easter egg” by a disgruntled employee who, as I was told afterwards, is no longer with the company as a consequence. Also, if you downloaded the game on or after the release day, this issue will have been patched out already because those developers really know what the players want. We are so past hot chicks, so why should we have them in our video games?
Saints Row (2022) also takes cues from Days Gone and Call of Duty. The former has “hordes” and the latter a “zombies” mode where you have to kill huge numbers of enemies. You can trigger this as a mini game by going to the in-game version of a planned parenthood abortion clinic. Pick “defend progress” from the context menu to trigger the game unleashing a horde of whites with a distinctively Southern appearance attacking the building. The developers even found a way to keep this activity in the game after that narrative event mentioned above, and this happens without breaking immersion. It works like this: Once you have killed all whites in the game, there would be no whites left for the horde mode. However, you only need to take drugs in-game to trigger a “dream” that allows you to replay his activity. The developers even went the extra mile and added a high-score table for the drug-induced horde events. I am not sure if repeatedly playing the horde mode this way will change my avatar to show long-term effects of drug use. I did notice an increasingly strong rainbow-colored glow around my avatar, which is probably unrelated.
Summary
As you can undoubtedly tell from this glowing review, I am a huge fan of the new Saints Row (2022) game. The market timing is impeccable, and the game has so many fresh ideas! Saints Row (2022) is a great symbol of the vitality of the video game market. More importantly, this is not just a game for our time. This is a game for the future as well. It is a game for all time! I see Saints Row (2022) sell more copies than GTA V, which is currently the best-selling video game of all time. Saints Row (2022) will be remastered and remade for decades as it speaks a timeless message. I only wish there were more games like this because I think that we deserve more of it. I cannot wait for the next game the 666 — yes, really — people that are listed in the credits, together with their pronouns, will do next.
Lmao. I read this and immediately ran out and bought a copy for each platform. Then I regretted not because this game is shit, but because all the money spent on consoles, a PC and multiple copies could have been put towards neutering myself. However, I rejoiced at the fact that this game will automatically take of that for me, so money well spent.
You really had me going at first thinking you had actually managed to suffer through this game lol. Your satire game is really leveling up. I bet it’s also a good outlet for you. I had fun reading it.
You mentioned Dead Space and I at one time quit the game thinking it was going to be subversive, but I think I was dead wrong. I ended up completing it many months later and even beat the sequel. I think they were fantastic. They basically took the concept of RE4 and completely innovated the control scheme. After I beat DS2 I popped in RE4 on the GC and there’s just no going back. The fact that you can’t map your guns, have no control of the camera, as well as forcing the player to remain stationary while aiming and shooting is frustrating to go back to.
The dev that made DS, Visceral Games, disbanded a long time ago because EA made too many dumb decisions on their behalf, I think. However, Glen Shofield has re-emerged with a new Studio called Striking Distance and they’re in the midst of releasing what is basically the spirtual successor to Dead Space. In the game you play as a hardened-looking white guy, but their initial teaser trailer that dropped over a year ago featured a black dude being gruesomely mutilated by a monster. I somehow get the sense that this game will be pretty solid (no age restriction on the video):
https://youtu.be/xJjj4qlQvgw
I just watched the trailer to the link I posted and they cut all the gore out of this version (which is probably why it isn’t age restricted), but it definitely happens in the original and is quite shocking. Also, I noticed that the black guy kind of resembles a young Barrack Obama.
I think if you are a good goyimer, you need to wait until Sony has rolled out the announced price increase of the PlayStation 5 before picking up Saints Row (2022). Apparently that Jewish luminary Anna Sarkeesian has advised the developer on how to make a more inclusive game, and we can now all marvel at the results. This game is a colossal pile of steaming shit.
I have the entire Dead Space trilogy sitting in a box in storage as I am in the middle of am move. Mechanically DS1 is a very good game. I have not revisited RE4 ever since playing the back-then mind-blowing original release on the Gamecube but I do not doubt your assessment. A while ago I tried playing RE5 and found it incredibly clunky, and that is without taking into account the insufferable sidekick they gave you, which is AI controlled but has her own health bar, and if she dies, it is game over. Nostalgia clearly is a hell of a drug, considering how well-regarded both RE5 and RE4 are, albeit I recall that RE5 was not that well received at the time of release.
The Callisto Protocol looks very promising indeed. It is one of very few games I am keeping my eyes on. The others are Dragon Quest X Offline, because I really enjoyed playing through DQ XI two years ago, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. Yet, the latest trailer was a bit of a let-down, in my opinion:
The second half is baffling, where you just watch the protagonist slide down some pipes for a long time. This is bad enough in a game but completely out of place in a trailer.
EDIT: The extended gameplay demo looks quite good:
In terms of gameplay, I expect Dead Space with a fresh coat of paint. What I particularly like is that the developer is pushing technology, building a new gore system that allows for arbitrary dismemberment. I applaud them for that as it is quite rare that a game company goes the extra mile these days.
If I’m not mistaken, I think the price for the PS5 is going to stay the same in the US, presumably to stay competitive with XBox maybe. If so, that’s a hypocritical move and a major slap in the face to gamers world wide.
That sewer slide scene reminds me of something straight out of REmake 2, though it has the added tension of being chased by a giant alligator:
https://youtu.be/f1JqhzDEzJU
The gore system in CP is going to be sick for sure. Something I also really appreciated about the original DS games is there is no hub. All your feedback is creatively displayed, such as your life bar appearing throughout the spinal column of Isaac’s suit, and menus can be recalled as holographic displays projecting from his peripherals. I expect them to continue this trend, such as the life bar displaying on the back of the neck (kind of less cool, tbh).
Other than REmake 4, I can’t think of anything else I’m interested in atm besides Zelda, of course. I’ll look into the games you’ve suggested, though.
This alligator chase scene in REmake 2 looks really good. I should get a PS4 at some point and play through this game. Probably, the alligator is not even a real threat but the camera angle and the mere size that monster makes it appear so.
Dead Space made look other third-person shooters look almost ancient when it came out. The hub, or the absence of it, was a major part in that. I also really liked the waypoint system. If you were not quite sure where to go, you only needed to press one of the thumb sticks, L3 or R3, and you triggered a holographic marker on the ground. This could be seen as infantilizing to some, but not only is this optional, it also does not take anything away from the game as it is not about wandering around aimlessly. I have only played a few hours of DS some months ago, but the overarching impression was that its creators had a very clear vision of what they wanted to build, and really thought about it, as opposed to other companies who seem to be developing games off a template.
Speaking of templates, I would even include FromSoftware here. A friend of mine wanted me to have a look at Elden Ring on his PS5 a while back, showing me some early and late game content. While the game is graphically impressive, it still baffles me that that you still need to roll to evade (why not just sidestep?) and there is also nonsense like a boss character roaming the opening area, which you are highly unlikely to beat the first time you encounter it. Yet, this is not seen as a design flaw by From fans as you are supposed to clearly see that you cannot take on that guy yet. Oh, and monster weapons still are not blocked by walls, it seems, whereas yours are. For whatever reason, this is hardly ever brought up by anybody, fans and reviewers alike. From fans also keep their rationalization hamster busy when they talk about external guides and FAQs “being part of the experience”.
I would like to play RE2 again. During my first play through I was dating this chick who was also into gaming. Generally during that time she would always be playing some game when I was over, which was fine, but she made it hell for me to sit down and play this game for some reason. She almost sapped all the fun out of it, and it was such a shame because it should have been a brilliantly nostalgic experience that will always be tainted now lol.
I can’t say much about Elden Ring personally. I never gave Demon/Dark Souls much of a try as they just never really appealed to me. However, things like you mention with the walls and all would really just kill the immersion, I think. The game already seems kind of bullshit enough with invisible speed demons one shotting you out of nowhere, and you can’t even take cover apparently.
A big problem with open world RPG games that I’m finding is that they’re either too hard or too easy. With the Witcher, I did a lot of points of interest objectives and high level contracts, so that now in story mode it’s not even that challenging on hard difficulty. At least there is a scaling option you can activate to balance the difficulty based on your current level, so I’ll try that and see if it helps. The story is miles above most other games, which also helps keep the player engaged.
Also, as far as consoles go I’ve been thinking about going PC. I would primarily use it for audio editing so the cost’d be somewhat more justifiable, and just grab some Steam sales here and there. I don’t ordinarily spend that much money on toys, though.
When I was a kid, I recall a guy I hung out with occasionally, primarily probably due to proximity. We frequently played games together, and I recall that he began trash-talking me whenever I did well. For instance, one afternoon we took turns playing Actraiser 2 on the SNES and if I got further than him in some level, he was busy to tell me that I will not make it, that I suck at this game, or that I am only getting lucky. It was pretty annoying, and I did not play this game with him again afterwards. That kind of nonsense also ruined my enjoyment of the game that afternoon, and these were similar lose-lose dynamics than the ones you have gone through. Also, if a chick annoys you, it is also less fun to bang her. At best, you get some satisfaction out of banging her really hard as some kind of anger fuck, but this gets old fast.
I have the impression that open-world games are mechanically quite mediocre, almost as a rule, so if you do not enjoy the story, or find the graphics unappealing, you are probably better off just dropping the game. I don’t think that Witcher III is mechanically remarkable at all, it is also quite long so at some point I lowered the difficulty just so that I could get through those boring fights more quickly.
I’m getting less and less interested in (modern) gaming. It is not just all the wokeness, business practices are also getting worse. Nowadays even Nintendo puts out countless cosmetic DLCs and engages in shady practices like time-limited DLCs so that you can never have a complete game. It is worse in some games than others but the practice seems to be getting more common. Thankfully there are enough great classic MAME, SNES, Saturn, or Dreamcast games around to last me for the rest of my life.
You got me thinking more about that CP sliding segment so more. The fact that they show cased that for what seemed like a full 30 seconds is sort of suspicious. Something tells me they’re not going to top this quick and exhilarating sequence from DS2 (no spoilers):
https://youtu.be/
Man, the graphics in this game were nice!
Oops. Link didn’t paste correctly:
https://youtu.be/xGuzmE1jDXY
“When I was a kid, I recall a guy I hung out with occasionally, primarily probably due to proximity. We frequently played games together, and I recall that he began trash-talking me whenever I did well.”
I remember after I finished RE2 with Leon I suggested she play as Claire. They’re almost identical play throughs and she boasted that her final rank would exceed mine. Once you’ve watched someone play it you’ll know how not to trigger the Tyrant, f.e., so you can complete a few sections and puzzles without being stalked while you’re figuring it out. Not only that, but she had seen how to complete most everything (minor scenario differences excluded). It was amusing watching her struggle through the few sections that require some skill, and on an easier difficulty as well. So, in the end I think she ended up with a B rank while I had a C. What irritated me the most was that she wouldn’t sit quietly during cutscenes and tried seducing me a couple times while I was concentrating. I remember at one point I just stopped playing and went and made dinner, which was too passive aggressive for her. She really ruined the nostalgia I wanted to experience from that game.
I’m finished with the Witcher now. I liked it quite a bit overall. I’m curious to see how the next installment turns out, without optimism of course. I had recently read somewhere that they switched to Unreal Engine 5, and that by utilizing it versus the Red Engine (I think it’s called) they can prevent a lot of the bugs and glitches they unintentionally created in Cyberpunk. I don’t know how much water this holds. I figured it was diversity (tons of female staff) hiring that caused at least some of these problems.
This made me chuckle. Some women indeed just cannot stand that anything could be more interesting for their man than them. They can tolerate you reading a book or playing a game to some extent, but eventually they need confirmation that they still have power over you, and try to initiate sex. This can be pretty annoying, and it is, perhaps ironically, the fast-track for a woman to getting dumped.
I completely forgot about this game until this combat trailer just showed up in my feed. Atomic Heart looks a lot like Bio Shock, which I never played, though without the whole infiltrating the Breakaway Civilization and killing all the white people angle. It looks to be like you’ll mostly be fighting machines and bio-experiments. I like that Mick Gordon is composing the music for the game too, as controversial as his break from ID Software was:
https://youtu.be/jLmukRHiXUE
This trailer looks really interesting. I may have encountered references to Atomic Heart when skimming some gaming news sites, but until now I have not watched any trailers, or even looked at screenshots. Interestingly, this game is made by a Russian studio. As the Western studios descend into wokeness, hopefully the other countries step up. China could probably put out a solid AAA game, but sadly they are too focused on the f2p market. Let’s see if Project Eve (Korea) or Black Myth: Wukong (China) can deliver. Bright Memory: Infinite (China) seemed to have done quite well last year, but it was a pretty short game.
I also came across a very interesting-looking game the other day, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Check out the trailer:
Bright Memory: Infinite recently got a Switch port, so if I get a chance and catch it on sale and play it I’ll tell you what I thought. Atomic Heart certainly has some of the most surreal looking visuals I’ve seen in a while. It looks sort of like a retro sci-fi version of the Soviet Union. I’d be interested in what you thought of the chick in this game, though. Seems like they could have given her a more feminine hair style and some big titties. She looks kind of lesbian-ish:
https://youtu.be/X4VENshiOkw
That Wo Long trailer looks pretty nice! I’m keeping an eye on Black Myth in particular. A lot of these Chinese devs seem to have pretty small teams, which perhaps explains the succinctness of BM:I. I’d like to see what a team of these guys could pull off with a Triple A budget. Fingers crossed for that. Mundfish (AH) is also a pretty small dev, but they’ve been developing the game for quite a long time. Hopefully it’s not fucked up when it launches.
I’m quite concerned that some of these non-pozzed developers could have to deal with Western platforms like Steam cancelling their games. With conflicts like with the Ukraine and what soon appears to be Taiwan (Biden preparing a billion dollar war package for Taiwan), and just plain ol’ being homophobic, transphobic, sexist or whatever buzzword they can label the game to see it effectively censored. There was recently a story about a game called Domina that was removed from Steam for being transphobic. So much for freedom of expression:
https://www.pcgamer.com/domina-has-been-delisted-from-steam-after-yet-another-transphobic-diatribe/
This chick in Atomic Heart is in dire need of some cosmetic surgery. This is nothing a mod couldn’t fix, but if someone told the developers that hot chicks in games are deeply offensive to the ZOG regime, they might improve their look themselves. On that note, it seems that the only bigger developer that readily puts hot chicks in games is SNK. Check out the compilation of the sluts in King of Fighters XV:
Sometimes, they tone down the characters a bit. For instance, Angel looked even sluttier in KoF XIV. Team Ninja seems to have lost the plot completely, though. Dead or Alive 5 did pretty well, and with Dead or Alive 6 they pretended that these games are not about chicks with pornstar proportions in revealing clothing but instead about deep fighting mechanics, and as a consequence, the game tanked, and there is no talk about a sequel. I recall one of the more popular videos of this game on YT consisted of some guy in training mode just throwing the chicks over and over, so that you could get a better look on their legs and asses, so all Team Ninja would have needed to do was keep an eye on what their fans actually want. I know, I know, this approach is sacrilegious in the current year.
I don’t think you need a big team to put out a large game. I see this in the real world as well, when there are sometimes teams of developers who have negative productivity. Now throw in a bunch of diversity hires and nothing gets done at all anymore. For instance, I do not think that Ubisoft would be able to make a game that is as succinct as Bright Memory: Infinite. They have become too big to be efficient.
I happened to have read the “anti-trans screed” of the Domina developers. Incidentally, the tranny-activist they allegedly target is behind Cloudflare dropping KiwiFarms. All of this only serves to undermine the mainstream even further. Back in the days, before the Internet became hyper-commercialized, you had underground BBSes and newsgroups on Usenet. This may be the way of the future, seeing that dissenters no longer have a home on the normie-net.
“I don’t think you need a big team to put out a large game.”
What’s considered a big dev team exactly…staff of 50? More than 100? I’ve never played the AC games, but I had a buddy that was really into them when it was focused on the Renaissance period. My impression was they legitimately had some talented people (probably mostly white men) working on those first 2 or 3 games. After the concept had been established, it seems like they just streamlined a new entry every couple of years and it became more and more watered down. I’m sure they also implemented heavy diversity hiring after 2010 or so, and now they just have a big inefficient team working with an outdated model, compensating for a lack of innovation by being ‘progressive’ instead .
I believe Nintendo had a bit more than 300 people working on Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at its peak. However, these were almost exclusively Japanese men and a few white guys, so I imagine they were putting in some serious work into this game at that time. As you said before, it’s probably pretty much completed, with a stripped down team polishing it up now.
Including contractors, AAA games have thousands of people working on them nowadays. Surely, a lot of it is bloat, and I furthermore do not assume that a lot of these people are particularly productive. Pictures taken from the teams at various Microsoft studios, CDPR, or Ubisoft support this hypothesis. Also, I just recalled reading that AC: Black Flag had over a thousand people working on it, and that game came out almost ten years ago. With an increase in numbers, communication becomes more difficult, and the effect of one talentless diversity hire is probably enough to negate the contributions of a solid team of 10 or so.
Nintendo is incredibly productive. They put out blockbusters with a rather modest number of people. I would be curious what Ubisoft could do with a 300-strong team. Probably they would be able to put out a buggy mobile game.
As it turned out, Saints Row (2022) underperformed:
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/embracer-ceo-talks-about-saints-row’s-underperformance-and-polarized-fan-reception.1641738/
I recall seeing non-binary bonfires because the game debuted at the top position of the physical sales charts in a few countries, but the fact that the publisher did not reveal sales figures should have been reason enough to get those people to crawl back into their corners and weep. There is a good chance that this franchise is now dead, with three failures in a row: Gat out of Hell, Agents of Mayhem, and now the failed reboot.
This is great news! Let’s see what happens with GTA6. Should be entertaining—not the gameplay, but the shit show surrounding its release. Apparently, Rockstar games has made the incredibly original decision to include a far-right faction in the game that antagonizes the Latina chick and acts as fodder. Maybe they can include a feature where the game punishes you for targeting minorities and women on the streets. Imagine if in the future they cancel people in real life for this very act lol.
It is more likely that you will not be able to shoot women and minorities in GTA VI, just like you could shoot at anything in The Last of Us II expect everything in a synagogue that was shoehorned into the story because Neil Cuckman is a Jew himself.
I sincerely hope they do implement a system like that in GTA. I imagine a lot of white goymers not being able to ignore the messaging there. You could get away with repeatedly killing Nazis for years and years, now however the switch is being made to the “radical right”. It can only escalate until, as you say, something as glaring as preferential treatment for non-whites and outright hostility towards whites being condones becomes way too obvious to ignore.