Good essay, I gotta say it's weird how many times Obsidian games have had a major female character who doesn't get a name.
Very conveniently avoids talking about The Outer Worlds.
EDIT: Also neglects to include Icewind Dale in the list of Black Isle games??? Wack.
Very conveniently avoids talking about The Outer Worlds.
essay was written before outer worlds was released.
neglects to include Icewind Dale
the essay is called 'a brief history' not 'an exhaustive list'
Ah, yeah, 2018. Interesting that Chris Avellone responded to it; I wonder if this article actually influenced The Outer Worlds.
It's possible. Although I think Avellone had left Obsidian before work started on Outer Worlds
Cool read, although I haven't played most of the games discussed. Makes me realize how overwhelming male-dominated the main plot in FNV is. As far as impactful women there's really only, what, Cassandra Moore? A couple factional leaders like Pearl as the article mentioned?
As far as Dead Money goes, the instrumentalization of Vera and Christine's suffering seems like a strange charge to levy, given how the entire plot revolves around people and their lives being used as a means to an end. I'd also disagree that the purpose is to villanize Dean to the character given how unless you get on his nerves in dialogue options the game basically invites you to buddy up with him, even if he is a manipulative creep. Less about individual shittiness than it is the lengths people go to when they refuse to let go™ (which is it's whole own discussion altogether).
And yeah Honest Hearts is wack. There's the barest shade of self-awareness there (the Sneering Imperialist perk and dialogue option(s?), for example) but you get the sense they were just having too much fun letting you play the part of neocolonial kingmaker to actually unpack anything. Blergh. Well, it was already the worst DLC if the bunch, so not much of value was lost.
Isn’t Kreia like the main antagonist and evil mastermind behind all the events of Kotor one and two?
Oh I was talking specifically about Fallout New Vegas, as it's the only one of the discussed games I've played
Children all over the land are being born “without souls,” which amounts to them being severely developmentally disabled, although the way we hear it told is put in terms of likening them to either zombies or wild animals – incidentally, the exact same kind of rhetoric as that deployed by anti-vaccine types who like to blame children with autism for absolutely every single thing wrong with society. The only good thing about this notion, which puts the player in the shoes of an eugenicist trying to safeguard the future of the race, is that the game frontloads it, so that it’s not possible to have any illusions about what you’re getting into. Regardless, I kept going for a good while after having it made clear to me that I just do not care about this world at all, mostly for the sake of finding out if it gets better. It never seemed to.
Some truly astonishing leaps here. The most malicious possible interpretation that also manages to equate autism with brain death. The hollowborn aren't disabled, they're literally mindless. Purely running on autonomic functions.
And the player is cast as a "eugenicist" for trying to restore the cycle of reincarnation?
And "safeguard the future of the race"? What race, exactly? There's a million of them and you can be any of them from basically any country on the fantasy planet.
The rest made more sense, but my god, the takes in this paragraph.
It makes some good points about the nature of gender politics in Black Isle games, but falls short.
For instance, of course Planescape Torment has a Madonna/Whore archetype in a city canonically entirely made out of archetypes which is the setting of an allegorical tale. And as for the player meeting literally everyone he knows, uh, yeah, that's how an amnesiac redemption plot works.
