Comments taken from Expeditions: Rome showcase trailer
The Roman Republic, well known for being checks notes not diverse. These muh historical accuracy nerds are the worst type of person.
Okay cool. Let's remove perfect teeth, colored fabrics, curve-accentuating clothes, magic and dragons, and put in lice, venereal diseases, no readable words, and arbitrary barter systems.
I want it to happen just to watch as the g*mers remain as unpleasable as ever and lose their shit over it. Imagining tooth decay as a lethal status effect would be a cool (though maybe too real these days) immersion feature.
Edit - also it would be cool to have these features:
Only makeup/aesthetics that were contemporary at the time. Watch as medieval women have hair plucked two inches past their hairline and dudes have haircuts that prevent parasites and wear codpieces.
All of the games have actual lighting. No mood shading. Night is pitch black unless you have a torch and your torch only lasts for a short while without fuel.
No soundtrack. The only music you hear is played by people using instruments contemporary at that time.
You don't get to make witty one-liners without actually risking a game over. If they forced your character to be unable to read by making letters illegible or in Latin, that would be really cool. You have to befriend a priest for them to read for you.
Every attack is difficult to pull off and meeting ineffectual without actual expensive and/or illegal weapons. Bows can still kill you pretty
In short - Dark Souls mixed with Brace Belden's 'Serf' rant.
Kingdom Come Deliverance tries to do something like this and it's a pretty fun historical RPG imo
Video games could be great for envisioning ancient worlds accurately and immediately and it would be super cool. But noooooo
For real, gratuitous titty blood stuff is fun. Just like, be honest and up front about it.
It's not enough they get those things. They don't want other people to enjoy it.
I had a straight friend tell me that Bayonetta is too gay. Literally the most unpleasable fans.
I want it to happen just to watch as the g*mers remain as unpleasable as ever and lose their shit over it.
These companies make so much fucking money turning out the same reskinned games year after year that I'm unable to take g*mer criticism seriously. Like, maybe if Activision or EA actually lost money on Woke Ninja Mercenary 3: Transgender Contras, I might consider something these assholes assert seriously. But you're going to throw $60 at the fucking game anyway. Then you're going to build a giant purple dildo cannon and shoot cum onto the map until it spells out "Hitler Was A Cool Dude", and feel like you got your money's worth because you Owned The Libs.
If they did a Real Historical Rome, you know who would be on that shit like white on a cracker? Mussolini-style fascists. They'd eat that shit up with a shovel.
I started spitefully writing further into that in my comment below and it ended up looking pretty cool. Dark Souls but with Brace Belden's 'Serf' rant. I want that now.
Every game with survival features just has meters to maintain, I would actually like a game that keeping yourself alive is a fucking pain. Like, tlyou barely ever get anything done ever. New Vegas with nerfed stats, no fast travel and hardcore mode was sort of close but still
the only game like that is metal gear survive, but it's still just meters and wandering around he desert.
Nah it would be nothing like dark souls, probably more like kingdom come deliverance
I've seen this commonly brought up and I'd like to add some more information on this person. At the time, a lot of the other political people really hated Elagabalus and it was common for people to call others feminine as an insult (Romans were very misogynistic), so it's hard to tell which descriptions are true vs which ones are slander.
Also I don't feel we can really project our current understandings of sexuality and gender onto people thousands of years ago.
Elagabalus could be trans but I don't think we can definitively say either way. (But you should definitely say they're trans to anger chuds)
Love the context. We can say simplified shit to annoy chuds, but most also actually understand the history. Its kinda like the "lol you like ancient Greece? It was woke and super gay", its funny to say to the chuds who worship 300, but people need to realize that the sexual norms for those relationships are......problematic, and that lesbianism (or I guess just female with female relationships as lesbianism as we view it was not a thing for them) was taboo and often illegal. Heck even the top and bottom sodomy stuff, it wasn't so much kinky as the one being penetrated being "lesser" because they served a role akin to a woman during sex.
Like anger the chuds, but in our own communities we should be academic about this stuff.
Projecting modern understandings of gender and sexuality backward s onto historical people is always problematic (read :foucault-shining:), even assuming everything written about Elagabalus is true.
I’ve seen this commonly brought up and I’d like to add some more information on this person. At the time, a lot of the other political people really hated Elagabalus and it was common for people to call others feminine as an insult (Romans were very misogynistic), so it’s hard to tell which descriptions are true vs which ones are slander.
Yes.
Also I don’t feel we can really project our current understandings of sexuality and gender onto people thousands of years ago.
Yes.
Elagabalus could be trans but I don’t think we can definitively say either way. (But you should definitely say they’re trans to anger chuds)
:yes-sicko:
spoiler
thanks for doing a writeup with more context for the benefit of everyone :cat-trans:
One of the most notorious incidents laid to his account, an extravagant dinner party in which guests were smothered under a mass of "violets and other flowers" dropped from above
roman gender reveal party
good opinions get good hugs, this is the new rule :trans-specter:
"you can't please everyone" I cry, stubbornly refusing to be pleased
my favorite genre of stupid gamer take is "why did the devs spend time on [easily ignorable thing i get unreasonably mad about which was implemented in like 10 person-hours] instead of focusing on [my favorite feature from the previous games in the series which would have added another month to the development cycle]???"
A historian of Roman History does a 5-part takedown of the idea that Rome was homogenous in any way - https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/
(Could somebody post this over there for me? Opsec problem for me if I do.)
Oh, that's a good blog, the dude is kind of a lib but :shrug-outta-hecks:
Posting that into youtube comments would be straight up pissing in the wind though. That nerd probably didnt even play the previous games in the series, (you can help the native american people kick out the spanish in the first game), and definitely won't be moved by actual history from the story they have set in their mind.
the dude is kind of a lib but :shrug-outta-hecks:
Yeah. He does a good job of sticking to stuff he actually knows though, so he very rarely actually says a lib brain worms thing. I only remember a brief asside of Chinabad, and one time making fun of the labor theory of value. Dude stays in his lane more than I do for sure, I'm happy to spout off about something I only half know.
The one about Sparta was bad about this. He delves deep into ancient obscure historical sources to dispel stuff about Sparta, and then ends with: "So anyway North Korea is like a modern Sparta, with a slave class a soldier class and a monarchy."
A historian of Roman History does a 5-part takedown of the idea that Rome was homogenous in any way
it's not really a takedown unless it has a title like "The Romans were heterogeneous, dumbass" and keeps the writing constrained to that topic.
it's just a descriptive article about history
My favourite are the chuds going on about the historical inaccuracy of black people in the Witcher because there were no black people in medieval Poland
And of course, if you present a fundamentally-unjust historical (or quasi-historical fantasy) society completely uncritically (to make it "as realistic as possible"), someone playing the game is going to want to be the hero of the story - and more importantly to want to be seen as the hero of the story by the important people in that society, who are likely at best fine with and probably deeply involved in perpetuating those injustices. We're at a point where you likely couldn't present overt racism or chattel slavery uncritically, but anything even slightly less than that seems to get a pass. And so the person playing that game is going to internalise a bunch of those prejudices (an admittedly mild but obvious and recurring example is nerds constantly arguing about "the rightful king" without ever stepping back and examining what the fuck kind of bullshit is a rightful king anyway). And it's always deeply hypocritical to claim historical accuracy or "that's just how things were", because the developer and the person playing the game are always going to be bringing deeply modern ethical sensibilities to the various moral quandaries of a game. You have to have unrealistic anachronism, so what's wrong with owning it?
the historical inaccuracy of black people in the Witcher because there were no black people in medieval Poland
good thing medieval poland was full of witchers, I'd hate to have another historical inaccuracy
There was literally a non-white major character in the first game too (villain of course), making the insistence all the more farcical.
I'd also like there to be a lot more portrayals of "regular people" rather than aristocrats in historical games.
People who play morrowind and think xenophobic dunmer are correct
Ok fuckin nerd
Let's do a historically accurate (AKA monoethnic lmao) game that takes place in the Kingdom of Aksum. Super Old White Guys 5 is cancelled, we're going black, and you know what they say about that don't you??
I only wish I could live long enough to see the video games (and other media) that the african people could come up with about their own history and legends.
The Expeditions series has always been like this. Hence why female conquistadors (including the MC) were a thing back in the first Expeditions game. Maybe the G*mers should take their own advice and not expect an established series to suddenly conform to their tastes?
The Roman Republic, well known for being checks notes not diverse.
It's not a real Roman game unless I can enslave all the Gingers.
