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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I have not played Black Myth Wukong, but from where I stand, most of the innovation in video games comes out of the Western world. Portal, FTL, Terraria (?), Stardew Valley (?), Slay the Spire, all of whom created (or refined, in case of (?)) a genre, are all Western.

Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.

My exposure to games from mainland China has been rather more limited. I played My Time at Portia, and found it mostly forgettable. Not something worse than a Western studio might produce, but conceptionally derivative. "Let us remake Stardew Valley in 3d, and get rid of the politically precarious 'megacorp comes to small town' storyline".

This could be sampling bias, but it is equally possible that mainland China is not good at fostering small indie game devs from whom most of the innovation comes.

With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in. If the MC has dialog options to flirt with half of the party members who share their sex, I will not be terribly offended by that, I will just not click on that (depending on the gender of my character, perhaps). Most of the core of wokeness, like the concept of white cis-male privilege is not something a game dev would touch with a ten foot pole. Much safer to translate this to fantasy races such as orcs or elves.

With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in.

It's only opt-in in the same way the game itself is; you can always turn a game off and stop playing, but to get access to large portions of what you paid for you have to directly engage with the wokeness (in this case, gay dating).

In BG3 most of the good character moments are locked behind romance. You will not learn nearly so much about your companions or their backstories, have the same influence over them, or in the end get the same encounters and questlines, if you don't explicitly choose to seduce them. There is no friendship option, you can't become good enough friends with someone that they trust you with their life; apparently the only possible strong relationship two people can have is sexual.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game. "Opt-in" is not really an accurate way to describe a core gameplay mechanic gatekeeping large storylines.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game.

I don't think so. With hades you have 3 romances (and you can max them at the same time).

Now the friendship there was also bribing every character with ambrosia, but nothing was gatekept. It was - I have ambrosia, friendship +1

To elaborate, once you max out the relationship gauge there's an explicit choice to fuck or not to fuck.

I have yet to play BG3, so I did not know this.

Typically, in earlier Bioware games, romance was mostly an additional, optional branch near the end of the character arks, so you did not have to replay the games five times because one party member was only into male non-evil dwarven clerics or whatever.

As the parallel post already pointed out, Stardew Valley is just a straight remake of the Japanese-made Harvest Moon - if it were made in China, it would no doubt be subjected to the same nonstop stream of "Chinese can only copy" slander that Genshin Impact suffered for its heavily-inspired-by-Zelda release region (which still was much less similar to the open world Zeldas than Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon). Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there). I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.

Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.

Right, these two restrictions together seem like they are designed to reach the conclusion that you want. A Chinese or SEA player (mobile-only) or Japanese (console) player willing to treat PC games as non-existent might come to the conclusion that the collective West has been a footnote in gaming (what did they make? Coin Master? Donkey Kong (a Mario ripoff with prerendered graphics)? Secret of Evermore (basically a reskin of Secret of Mana)?), and a Japanese PC player uninterested in casual difficulty would easily conclude that all Western games of note are late copycats of Japanese formulae. It's all too often forgotten that the narrative-driven 3D adventure shooter genre, which is basically the default for Western AAA games nowadays, is itself originally Japanese (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid...).

I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.

I'll grant you Terraria, but Portal has spawned Talos Principle.

Honestly, there's lots of games that feel Portal-inspired, even if they aren't particularly Portal-like in raw gameplay terms. It wasn't just a well-made 3D puzzler with a good story, it was practically the Myst of the 2000's.

Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there).

CCGs and deckbuilders are different genres. In CCGs building your deck is something that happens outside the game and everybody brings the one they want to the starting line. In a deckbuilder, everybody starts with the same or very similar decks, and changing the cards in it is a game action.

Even considering the digital CCG campaign mode you can see in the old Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon TCG console games - the kind which was which was pioneered by Microprose's Magic the Gathering - the meta-game (in which "an individual game of Magic" functions like the battle system in Final Fantasy or something) typically has acquiring new cards as a game action that takes in-game currency, but lets you shuffle around which cards you own in or out of your deck for free.

I can't get a good sense of how the Dragon Ball game stated on that wikipedia page to be an "early precursor of the DCCG" actually plays, but from what I can see from a fraction of a longplay and a wiki description it sounds like the cards are closer in nature to playing cards (basically just a number and a suit) than CCG cards.

Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there)

This is incorrect on a few levels. Firstly, Slay the Spire is not a collectible card game - it really is the first in its genre of roguelite deckbuilders: games with largely independent short runs where players customize an initially simple deck of cards to defeat a series of enemies.

Even digital collectible card games' lineage is pretty independent of Japan. Magic: the Gathering is the proper progenitor of the customizable card game, and its digital versions are also the first of the type. The Japanese games mentioned at the top of the Wikipedia article's History section really only have the similarly of being digital games with collectible cards - not the actual gripping force of customizing decks and evolving card pools and mechanics.

I really enjoyed Stardew Valley, but I'm not really sure what refinements it provided that you couldn't find in the Japanese-made Story of Seasons (formerly known as Harvest Moon due to complicated copyright/trademark reasons) and Rune Factory games.

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