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What's even the point of this? It's all so tired. Ubisoft games are practically a parody of themselves at this point, and have been for years. They are the defining example of monogame slop. Soulless open world games with the same generic tedious grab bag of decade old game mechanics, with a sprawling cluttered minimap full of OCD bait. This one has a giant red flag that a DEI consultancy group ratcheted up the The Narrative a few notches? So what? The games before this weren't worth playing, the games after this won't be worth playing. It's just the same battle lines between people who are tired of demoralization propaganda, regardless of it's plausible alternate explanations, and people who are 100% aboard with current year NPC updates. No one will ever give an inch of ground.
If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.
I agree that they should just play better games, though.
You know, this does hit on a curious experience I had.
I was going through my big stack of George Carlin DVDs, and I got to one which opened on about 10 minutes of unadulterated white bashing. Now I recall, way back in the day, when I first watched this special, that never bothered me. But that was also performed in an era before State and Federal governments were nakedly discriminating against me. Or the schools I would send my children to began gutting the curriculum to cater to lower black achievement levels. Or preposterous notions of "restorative justice" allowed feral blacks to terrorize schools with impunity. Or before decent, productive, law abiding people were punished to the maximum extent of the law for refusing to allow themselves to be victimized by habitual criminals with a politically relevant melanin content.
It reminds me how I laughed at similar bits by Louis CK about how whites have had it so good, we've gonna get fucked so hard when the tables turn. It was funnier as a hypothetical, in the context of lots of other challenging and awful bits. Now it just makes me angry beyond reason to watch it happening in earnest.
Did I care about AC2's pope shiving when it came out? Nope. But it also came out in a very different cultural climate. Things that were hypothetical back then are actually happening now. I also never cared when the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman involved an airplane crashing into the twin towers, and it was all framed as marginally goofy hijinks. But things happened between now and then which significantly changed the cultural context in which an episode like that, made today, would be received. This is not hypocrisy or evidence of any sort of inconsistency.
Edit: I want to note, I know "feral blacks" might be an inflammatory phrase, but I am honestly at a loss as to what else to use. There is a massive cohort of aggressively and confidently antisocial and violent blacks in our schools, enabled by feckless "restorative justice" policies. They are a force of destruction, disruption and violence, unaccountable to all, and utterly untamable, as though a pack of feral animals had been loosed in schools. Some protected species nobody was allowed to do anything about.
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The same people who are complaining about woke stories today, were alive and active on Internet forums back then, and did not, in fact, complain.
Anyway, can't wait for the new Black Panther game to come out.
My point exactly.
Despite any pope-knifing, AC2 was more controversial for its DRM than for its politics. This was objectively more reasonable than today’s squabbles.
How am I supposed to even begin to argue the opposite position? I don't suppose that the fact that AC2 exists today, and the people you're criticizing are still alive, but they're not complaining about AC2 despite having ample opportunity to do so, changes your mind in any way?
Is your position at all falsifiable?
That said, I agree people should have realized mainstream games, and media of all sorts, are a lost cause, and moved on a long time ago.
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On that note, if you've ever owned The Crew, check out the Stop Killing Games campaign! Ubisoft may try to twist the past, but you can change the future!
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The initial religions were people worshiping local natural phenomena, such as a pile of rocks. As city states arose, we got local pantheon gods who sit in the local palace/temple and exert power over the local community. As Rome became an empire, it became too hard to have gods that were too Roman to be gods for the known world. Therefore, Catholicism arose as a more universal religion. The same thing happened in the Middle East with Islam. Islam allows for a billion people to follow it, previous religions couldn't.
As the church lost its power, we started to get more localized forms of religion in Protestantism where the power was shipped to the bourgeoisie, who could now read the bible in a way that fit them. The power structure became north-western European merchants.
After WWII the US became a global empire and needed a global religion. Evangelicalism is too particular to WASPs for an empire that covers most of the globe. They needed a far more universalist ideology. Human rights which morphed into wokeness is the perfect imperialist american ideology. It is extremely generic, easy to follow and preaches that we are just random individuals who happened to be born a certain way. We can be whatever gender we want and there are no groups. We are all just consumers in a world which we are allowed to consume whatever product or identity we want. The US military exists to ensure we can all be liberated from any cultural context or organic social structures.
Black people in Japan are a part of this. There is no Japanese culture, history or people. Japanese people are not a collective. They are just a bunch of players who happened to be spawned in that corner of the empire and can easily more around and be exchanged for another group. Ubisoft's ideology reflects the imperial ideology. As for profitability, they are far more profitable than building giant mosques and cathedrals was.
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