Except when they want to port the game from GameCube to Wii, so rather than modify the game, they just mirror the entire game to make everything gay so the motion controls can be straight.
I was so ticked when they changed him to be right handed just “because that’s what most people are”
I played Twilight Princess on Wii and GameCube, and it was pretty fucking cool to feel like I was swinging the master sword. I probably would have just switched hands if they hadn’t. It would have been an adjustment, but I would have gotten there.
But I can understand not wanting to create a barrier to entry.
But I can understand not wanting to create a barrier to entry.
Unless it’s left-handed people. They can get fucked.
They can get fucked all the way to the settings menu where the option to mirror it back to lefty-mode is hiding
Wait, is that really a thing?
Unless I’m misremembering, yeah. I no longer have my Wii set up to check
Wii version was mirror / right hand only, it’s the HD version on the Wii U that had the default as left-handed map and the Master Mode using the right-handed mirror map, IINM.
Adding a left handed mode was too complex I guess. Minecraft was able to do it.
Dev: “This man is ripped in the apocalypse”
Gamers: “Yeah that makes sense, you’d probably be more out and about”Dev: “This woman is ripped in the apocalypse”
Gamers: “what the actual fuck”Yeah, that doesn’t really track, tons of people fetishize so-called ‘muscle mommies’, lol.
Well, the problem is you can’t be a muscle mommy unless you’re hot. If you’ve got muscle but no titty nor a pretty face and long hair, you’ll make the losers mad. Female characters can be badass, but they also must have said ass.
A muscle mommy can be with short hairs and no titties too
I suspect the people who unabashedly yell “MUSCLE MOMMY” and the ones who self-righteously cry about video game girls not being pretty anymore are two (mostly) different subsets of the gaming community. The complaint is about the latter, and I definitely have seen people cry foul about Zarya (Overwatch) or Abby (The Last of Us 2). I’m fairly confident the only reason I haven’t seen anyone complain about Karlach (Baldur’s Gate 3) is that I no longer engage with larger gaming communities nearly as much, precisely because of that subset.
I was thinking of Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2. But yeah, things have changed slightly since then.
That’s really inviting the real issue with Abby. They designed a story for people to hate her, with the expectation that she’d grow in you and you’d sympathize with her at the end. She literally looks that way through a whole game for the big reveal at the end when you see her.
It’s a post-apocalyptic setting, and she’s the only one jacked. It would have taken all of 30 seconds to show an active dairy farm, a weight gym, and other people also jacked. Bulking up muscle if you don’t have the resources is not a wise thing to do.Turns out there’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” gym. Very possible to not see it if you don’t rotate the camera to look. Still, a single person walking up looking like her (jacked), to be VERY explicit would have gone a long way.If the second game had started at the end of the first game, from the perspective of Abby (basically take the one flashback and make that the start), and then you move forward in time bouncing between Ellie and Abby, giving players time to learn about Abby, that would have changed a lot.
Instead we are forced to play Abby, who has an unnecessary sex scene with her friends (Mel) boyfriend (Owen), who immediately kills Joel, who appears to be wasting resources on a selfish revenge plot, in a game with a story was written by writers who saw Momento + GoT and thought they could pull off clever writing (they couldn’t). And at no point is the player given any agency, especially at its ending.
Abby sucked, because Naughty Dog set the character up for failure.
Not even ripped or anything. Just “doesn’t wear makeup and get hair done professionally during a zombie apocalypse” seems to piss gamergate jackasses off.
The opening of Gears Of War 3 where the humans live on some boats subsisting on vegetable patches and the male soldiers are still built like they eat an entire core a day raw.
I am pan and I have played a few games where a character is revealed as gay and got the same response from me because it just felt forced. The token gay person. Or, in at least one, most of the characters are gay and it’s not strictly about gay stuff. They’re just there for brownie points and tend to also be incredibly shallow characters who are only defined as “gay.” I don’t feel that is representative of anything but some empty corporate suit saying “we want your money, fag.”
Zagreus in Hades is obviously Bi (or Pan) the whole time and no one cared, why, because it’s not forced, I think it’s kinda expected actually, so it just feels right. Same with Lucifer in the Lucifer TV show.
And sometimes a character is just gay and you find out in notes or something and it’s like, neat, and then you move on.
On the other hand you have a random trans character in Hogwarts Legacy. It’s a magical world, you have potions and spells to change not only your gender but you can even be a tiny mouse or a massive dragon, what’s the point of that?!
You had me in the first half. She was there, but she didn’t force you to listen to her story. She just existed. Like, sure, she was clocky; that’s just how it is for girls who transition later in life. She mentions that she’s been on a journey, and if you, the player, choose the appropriate dialogue option, she’ll tell you her story, which, oddly enough, might be the less realistic thing. There are a lot of trans people who would prefer not to share that, because there are a lot of not-trans people who will change their tune and use information about a person who no longer exists to hurt the person they’ve transitioned into.
Zagreus (and Melinoë presumably) on the other hand are not obviously pan until you, the player, start pursuing same-sex relationships. Given that Hades and II are based on Greek mythology, it might come as no surprise, but it’s not like there’s an aspect of facial or body shape that obviously identifies someone as being lesbian/gay/bi/pan like there tend to be for trans people (especially femmes and women, ESPECIALLY in a world without cosmetic surgery, hand-wavey magic aside). She didn’t hurt you, so be happy that some people did feel seen and move on with your life.
Don’t get me wrong, maybe I came out too strong, she doesn’t bother me, and if it makes someone happy then I’m happy. I just think it’s bad storytelling that’s all.
I don’t like it when fiction makes a minority “special” like only queer people being protagonists who can save the world, because it still singles them out. It doesn’t matter if it’s something positive. We are all one, nobody is special or less than a person because they were born with this or that characteristic.
Remember that quote from Rick and Morty? “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”? Add “nobody is special” and we are cooking.
Then the epic protagonist can save the world even if they aren’t really special, and still happen to be queer. Not because they are queer, not despite being queer. They are simply who they are. And they are someone who saves the world.
Gets man bro protagonists in the last 100 games:
Gets 1 female protagonist: WOKE GIRLBOSS BS!
One female protagonist that’s written exactly like a male and is basically just a skin swap*
Funny how men can’t write female characters but that’s still the woman’s fault lol
Can we stop giving attention to these people? The vast, vast, vast majority of gamers are not piece of shit bigots. There are probably Ike a few thousand of these bigots in total but they spend their entire life online and report on each other as if they are a majority and make a ton of online noise.
Ignoring them clearly hasn’t worked, because too many who actually pull the levers pay attention regardless.
This character is ambidextrous because we just flipped the sprite
Broke: This character is ambidextrous because we just flipped the sprite
Woke: Link is right-handed because we flipped the entire game
I went out of my way to wait and play the GC version of Twilight Princess because I didn’t want to play in a mirrored world with a right-handed Link. No waggle controls was a bonus.
Talking about things that exist makes me uncomfortable! Stop pushing your ideology on me!
Those evil left-handers, always pushing their sinister agenda!
This gamer: chooses a female character so I can stare at her ass the whole time.
On an unrelated note, I am really enjoying Stellar Blade.
Good
Spoilers ahead, BTW.
I was playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and legit didn’t realize there was a romance option with Hans Capon until the cutscene where Henry locked the door, at which point, I was quite startled, and then realized that the dialog options with a heart next to them are romance and not just being a good, supportive friend. I am not gay and did not really want to see that myself, but do applaud the inclusivity. 🙈 I can imagine gay people feel the same having to muddle through the straight romance options in other games. The fact that I wasn’t expecting it shows this is way less common than it should be.
The one thing that bugs me about cyberpunk 2077 is the main story has an unskippable (straight) sex scene, I know they’re almost a meme in gaming culture but I’m not here for that kind of content.
Yeah, I have no interest in seeing stuff like that in games, tv shows, or movies. Fade to black quickly while they’re kissing, we get it, let’s move on. If you want to watch porn then watch porn, I’m trying to game or follow the story.
Only time it should be shown is if it advances a specific plot point in some way or form but 99% of the time it’s not that.
You think that’s bad? I was playing Leisure Suit Larry and it was almost like sex was the focus of the game. I almost didn’t complete my play-through because of all that diagusting smut.
Is it actually “gamers” saying this?
I’d say a vocal minority do. A common form this takes is resentment over perceived “shoe-horning” of “politics” into games that “leads to bad games”.
The thibly-veiled bigotry becomes clear when the shortcomings of the game are attributed primarily to the diversity representation, rather than anything else, with the assumption that it would have been better without it. “The writing is bad because they wanted to make a political statement above all else.”
This becomes especially apparent when you consider that those same people would never blame bad writing in a game on making all the characters in a game heterosexual.
Some people are just straight-up haters, no veil necessary.
I can sympathize a little with people who had a romantic expectation for a character that they might have fantasized or self-inserted and feel disappointed or even betrayed by having their expectations subverted, especially if they had a strong attachment, as in franchise characters. But they also need to get over the fact that not everything has to be made for them. 95% of whats out there is already made for them.
Ironically, most of the people I hear engaged in gamergate/anti gamergate noise don’t actually play games. Maybe they did back in school, but now they’d rather listen to some podcast or like twitter posts for whatever team they chose.
That’s funny, in my bubble I’ve only heard references to gamergate recently from game developers in podcasts. I wouldn’t imagine non-gamers know what it is these days.
Huh, I did a quick search and interestingly, there are a couple mainstream news articles referencing gamergate re: recent anti-DEI in games. Lol I guess games really are part of mainstream culture now.
The people I know are nerds, but don’t play video games. They play ttrpgs or that use to play video games and read comics. I brought up how EFAP seems to have a one sided feud with RLM to a friend of mine and he got really defensive of EFAP. This was a little longer ago, but when Battlefield included female models for the player, it caused a bit of a stupid uproar online that the ttrpg friends mocked. I think BF is a bad franchise, so I only commented that they should also include a bear option for the USSR. This was a reference to Woktek, not the more recent meme.
I got tired of hanging out with both groups who were more interested in complaining about shit then talking about what they do enjoy and stopped reaching out to them.
When you’re fine with taking a quote from a subset of a group and applying it to the group itself, you can make any group of a large enough size say anything!
gamers: this is a war against right handed people by the sinister lefties
I etymologically saw what you did there
This is a war against the dexterous right handed people, by the sinister lefties!
There, now it’s even better.
Some people play games and some people live vicariously thru games. And alot of men in the US have been conditioned to expect to be the victims of violence or social ridicule if they’re suspected of being gay. I don’t agree with their discomfort but I understand why it happens.
Shoving gay characters down our throats!
Go on…
Alright, but I have yet to see a game character that’s left handed though
Here’s a couple random ones, outside of the obvious (Link from The Legend of Zelda).
Some of the character models in Warcraft 3 were left-handed, like the Footman and the Grunt. The weird implication in this is that in the Warcraft universe, left-handed is the default, because while the common Footmen were lefties, the heroic Paladin was right-handed.
Some of the party members from early Final Fantasy games were left-handed: Leila and Leon from FF2, and Kain and Palom from FF4. Because of the 2D sprites it didn’t show very well during battles, but it did affect the way their equipment was arranged in the menus.
The necro in Diablo 4 too.
„But what‘s the plot reason for them being gay? I don‘t mind gay people being in something, but if there‘s not a reason for it, then it‘s just pandering!“
This is where the line gets blurry tho. On one hand, yeah, bigots exist, but on the other hand, I could see this being a clumsy attempt at complaining about poor writing.
Like, I’m pretty sure I said something like this when Rowling said Dumbledore was gay. I’m not cishet, amd it still feels like she retconned that in for points, especially now that we’re seeing exactly what she thinks about LGBT stuff.
Oh she absolutely did. Just like she did the “i never said Hermione *wasn’t * Black” thing, despite having described her cheeks as “pink” on more than one occasion.
But that’s not what the people i was quoting mean. They’re doing the “straight, white, cis, man is the default, and anything deviating from that needs an explicit in-universe explanation”.
There was a thing that did the rounds a while back which was variations on “what race are you? White or political?”, “what’s your sexuality? Straight or political?”, etc.
it’s basically that. Straight guy? Fine. Gay guy? “But what’s the *reason *he’s gay? How is it relevant to the plot?”
