:yea:
Or The Outer Worlds approach
Would like you to solve the problem by:
a. Siding with capitalist psychopaths (Evil outcome)
b. Uniting the oppressed to overthrow their cartoonishly evil masters (Naive outcome that ends up badly as well)
c. Finding a compromise so that the capitalists will be less psychopathic (Good outcome)
Outer Worlds won so much respect from me with the opening scene of the crazy old guy calling the space cops bootlickers and blasting off. Then spent the rest of the game slowly draining all of that respect with West Wing brained bullshit.
This is what killed me by the end. I went full radical anyway lol fuck liba
The last straw for me was when the one radical communist movement you encounter just ends up being le epic liberal revolutionary stereotype (see also: Killmonger, etc.) in which it was all just a cynical ploy to feed his narcissism and sociopathy. Knowing that libs can't even comprehend someone actually valuing class struggle means that I always see this stupid "twists" coming from a mile. The Boys last season was the same way. Libs just literally CAN'T UNDERSTAND an actual radical with love for humanity.
One of the worst pieces of Marvel media made in the past decade was Marvel's Inhumans, which featured a cast of protagonists who were monarchs over a slave society on the moon. One in which people randomly get a superpower at a certain age, or they get nothing. The ones who get nothing are forced to work in the mines for the rest of their lives.
The rulers of this society were treated sympathetically by the show, and the villain was the person with royal blood but no superpower who overthrew the rulers to free the slaves.
They had to do something so that he wasn't the obvious hero, so they just made him random kill and torture people for literally no reason. And of course use the revolution as a pretense for grabbing power because any capeshit media depicting revolutions must do so negatively (Killmonger).
He is, and every work he's in hates him for it despite him being basically right. They paint him caring enough to be willing to be mildly ruthless (towards combatants, not even civilians or something) as if it's a giant character flaw
My favorite example is in Jedi: Fallen Order. You can find the corpse of a stormtrooper Saw ambushed, and Cal comments "whoa, Saw's so ruthless". Meanwhile, Cal cuts down stormtroopers by the dozen, including by ambush lol
Fallen Order sorta just....does the "he goes too far" thing offscreen the whole time which I guess was good cause it means less moralizing. But the worst fucking example is the first Rebels two-parter with Saw, which was just atrocious. The second 2-parter however is fucking perfect aside from Hera's B-plot which was pure shit.
RO honestly does just prove him correct which is nice, though they cut a bunch of stuff with him that Edwards shot, and given that the scenes we know Edwards shot are openly just the empire as US troops in the Middle East vs the rebellion as like Sadr or the insurgency
That whole fucking game was gaslighting me. Every conflict never really gets solved, you're just shuffling people around, not fixing the underlying pressures that created the conflict, so you get a sense that "oh yeah, obviously I'm just setting up the pieces for the real conflict", and then it never came.
IDK if at some point in the dev cycle that was planned and instead we just got an epilogue of "Oh yeah the factory town/eco commune mostly sat around and starved, (unless you change the factory owner, then everyone lived happily ever after)" instead of the side you screwed over attacking, and also if you changed the owner, the same conditions are recreated.
Shit I need to reinstall that game. Last time I played it I managed to align all of the musical sources and it dawned on me that this was a moment I haden't experienced in games for a long, long time.
The whole game is basically 20 hours of that feeling happening every 10 minutes. It's so good.
I genuinely wish I could inflict targeted amnesia on myself so I could play it again
Fallout 4 where every multiple choice loops back to "yes".
HATE NEWSPAPERS
This is how I felt playing the mass effect remaster...
Like why tf does "renegade that doesn't respect authority" equal being EXTREMELY racist?
I don't respect authority because THEY are
The dialogue selection and dialogue will not match up at all most of the time. The option will be like "politely reject request [renegade]" and Shep will just yell slurs at the aliens for 5 mins. Like chill dude, I just didn't want the side quest, no point making it a whole thing.
DE at least has the choices of be a communist, be a fascist, be a lib, or be an ultra lib
Yes I agree, selecting for your character's ideology can still make for an interesting dilemma in a game.
Or the two options will be identical for all intents and purposes, you're just rude in the dialogue with one of them.
Fallout 4:
Y: Give me more info before I say yes
X: Sure
B: I’ll come back and say yes later
A: Yes
As much as I enjoy the series, my jimmies are still kinda rustled about infamous: second son. The choices were
a.) Be a lib
b.) Be an anti-fascist (but.....evul!?!?!?!?)
And almost half of the "evil" stencil art isn't even that malevolent, and just basically conveys "DUP bad".
It's also sour when you have many options but you like none, but I guess that's kinda realistic.
This is why JRPGs are better as these fundamental choices in views and actions are too fucking big.
Become Final Fantasy 7 and kill the evil company. Your choices are gear and combat and pacing, because you are playing the role of Cloud.
I like RPGs with actual roleplaying and you tend to get more of that in JRPGs
Blank slate self-insert protagonists are boring
Dialogue options are the least important thing in video games. They don't even need to have them 90% of the time. Nobody buys a game so they can click words!!!
It's a very obvious and discrete way to implement story paths. Also, something of a throwback to the old text-based adventure games of the 80s and 90s (Zork, Planetfall, etc).
If you really want to read a Choose Your Own Adventure by squinting at your laptop, its a great way to game.
I think I've developed an extra lobe in my brain to create headcanon that circumvents this bullshit.
Also love that people who claim to like role-playing games hate playing roles that aren't conventionally attractive cisgender straight white people.
Both obvious and when painted with a thin veneer.
"Orcs aren't real, therefore it's impossible to consider them racist portrayals!"
And then World of Warcraft making Panda people as a race.
or just making a black character and talking "ghetto" when they play as them. Or playing a magic race with devilish qualities and going for an Italian or Hispanic stereotype.
Choices I've seen in the last g*me I played were even more simplified,
A. what is being a reasonable human being?
B. What is being an asshole for no reason?
Just a media thing in general makes it a headache but its extra bad in g*mes for whatever reason. Generally you get either a simplified morality system of sorts or that and a tendency toward chud world, especially the ones that try to put 'we're making 'realistic' choices here'. Realistic where? Hell? No where on physical earth is as reactionary as in the vidya. Its like no one ever took a psych or sociology class beyond 101 if at best.
