Perpetual Soup: Deliverance

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7 years ago

I have a blanket policy to never support games by people who supported Gamergate, so even if Kindgdom Come Deliverance had the best gameplay of all time I still wouldn't buy it.

Quizzical_Quark

7 years ago

@zaheelee I understand that but if I play the advocate of the Devil, I can't support people that voted Trump in office... Should I boycot all American products? Do you have a smartphone? Because there's a 95% chance it's made with components mined by slaves in Congo. The list goes on and on. It's impossble not to compromise on your principles and go for a full on boycot. Also the whole gamergate shitfest had no right side to be on. I agree it's impossible to support gamergate, but there were still some valid points about ethics on that side. Crap like this is never binary, the truth can always be found in the gray zone.

KalsEls

7 years ago

That Lion comment as explanation just seems racist.

slowlettuce

7 years ago

how ashley is with ffx, i am with fallout 4.. i totes get it.

also, soylet cafe has an insane amount of caffeine. ur a tank, adam

calpine

7 years ago

Looks like my hopes for a switch coming with an SD card with a bit more space won’t happen so I’ll wait for a deal with a major title and bite bullet

M_Keyn

7 years ago

THE ONLY JUSTIFICATION FOR THAT IS RACISM?!?!?!? Are you fucking serious??

Here's an idea - let's check how many black people live in the Czech republic today? Few? Veeery few?

Now don't get me wrong, I don't actually know anything (outside of what you've said) in particular about he guy who made the "no people of color" decision/argument - so he may be a racist cunt for all I know - but saying "the only justification for that is racism" is just fucking retarded...
This is about as stupid as the black Queen of England shit... Not quite as, but pretty fucking close...
Ergh... Look... let me say it like this - before you diss the shit out of a game for "being racist" and all that - consider that unlike the country you live in - which is LITERALLY called "melting pot of cultures" - Europe - especially medieval Europe where there was a general religious fanaticism still going around (Hey, guess what? Most black people in the middle ages were not Catholic... At all...) - was far less diverse.
As someone who lives in the same region of "Slavic/German" areas that Bohemia was/is in - I can tell you that even today I see maybe 1 black couple/family every month and I live in the second largest city in my country... Perhaps irrelevant, but I believe that even today the Czech republic has an astoundingly small population of dark-skinned people - so why the fuck would there be MORE 600 years ago???
Ergh... again... I don't know if that guy is racist but the whole "Well I'm not gonna buy this game now" thing is just... pig-headed... I know somebody commented on this thing saying - "Well, we can't prove aliens weren't there so why aren't there green-skinned babies as well?" Obviously that's over the top... but the basis is fairly understandable... After all - even if thy can't prove/disprove the fact that there were ANY black people in Bohemia at the time - they sure as fucking hell can prove that the large majority was white... Caucasian white. Germans, Czechs, probably some Hungarians etcetera...
So basically... If I tell you that I know for a fact I had a glass mostly filled with water... are you gonna put grape juice in just because I can't say with certainty it wasn't there...???
Maybe a stupid analogy - but I hope it gets my point across...
P.S. To be perfectly clear, if you had said "Just put some people of color in for the sake of not white-washing" - that'd be fine... But saying that just because they didn't makes them racist just undermines the arguments against actual racist acts which are done with the intent of being defamatory towards a certain race...
Also... learn some actual European history before you try to justify SJW-ing with it...
P.P.S. Imma get flamed to absolute pieces here - but I couldn't not say it :P Welp - whatever - guess I'm not commenting on this site ever again...

LantzeN

7 years ago

It's okay, we're the silent majority. Seems like most of these arguments and discussions by mostly politically biased American medias get the same reply from the educated sensible masses. We've also got to understand that Americans get a very shitty education about 15th century European demographics.

Quizzical_Quark

7 years ago

The criticism on Kingdom Come: Deliverance is from such an American point of view. If the game was set in modern day Czechia, it still would be odd to see people of color. It's mainly in the former colonial powers where it's a melting pot, countries like the UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Portugal... Anything else is mostly white people with some north African immigrants. And even then those colonial powers had their major influx of people of color after the colonial times. To a horrible point that in the 1800s central African people were put in exhibitions, because the locals hadn't seen black people.

I don't like for games to be inclusive just to check all the racial and gender checkboxes. If you make a game about feudal Japan, I don't care there's only Japanese people in a game like that, even though there's proof there were travelers sailing the islands. I don't need white people in a game set in Africa (why has nobody made a game in an African setting) But you have to do it games where it makes sense. Any modern day setting, games like red dead redemption (why haven't we heard any criticism there?), fantasy games in fictitious countries, ....

That said, the dev dude is a douche, but there's a lot of douches out there, it's not going to influence if I buy a game or not.

The game on the other hand makes me feel a lot like I'm playing Red Dead Redemption, it's slow paced, the kind of game where you sometimes just feel like walking rather than getting as fast from quest point A to B. I do agree the saviour schnapps is an annoying system, I wouldn't have minded it as much if the game wasn't this buggy. In certain zones you can't get a game to load if you life depended on it (well for pc users spamming alt enter triggers the loading screen sometimes)

I like the atmosphere of the game, I actually love the fighting and the alchemy, but other systems are shallow compared to alchemy and fighting, it feels out of balance. You're the blacksmith's son, why isn't there a forging mechanic like the alchemy table. I wished it was more, still prefer mount & blade as my favorite eurojank game, which include black people because part of the game had an African desert region.

M_Keyn

7 years ago

Thank you!

ElSuperNova

7 years ago

You know what POC hate (or my black ass self at the very least)? People getting mad FOR them over non-issues. One of the devs/leads is an asshole but the team has built an incredibly immersive historical experience and to diminish their hard work for an absolutely petty reason like this shows a lot about your character.

waffle134

7 years ago

In MODERN Bohemia, according to Wikipedia, the population is 95% Czech with the rest of the minority’s population being German, Romani, Poles, and Hungarians. And that’s with planes, roads, boats, etc. Now let’s talk about the medieval Bohemian countryside the game is set in. Most of the people living there would have maybe heard of people of color but the vast majority would never have even seen a person of color if they never visited any major trade cities (which most peasants under a feudal Lord never would have.) There’s might have been PoC traders in major cities traveling, but that’s about it. I believe you misquoted the Tumblr historian, they were talking about the odd PoC merchant travelling, not secret populations in the countryside this game is set in. Controversy over the gamergate antics of the head guy is understandable, but arguing the game isn’t historically “inclusive” is ignorant and a very American viewpoint to take.

waffle134

7 years ago

I did some follow up on the tumblr historian who did a follow up post after people claimed that one or two aristocratic Bohemian paintings did not indicate some sort of significant PoC population. The historian’s rebuttal? That there was evidence for one Asian group called the Cumans. These Cumans are in the game...

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/76014227110/going-to-have-to-side-with-awful-noise-the

Ashley

7 years ago

FUUUUUCK I typed out a whole thing and then the edit button is next to the delete button. SO HERE WE GO AGAIN.

I hoped I covered as much of the nuance as possible during the conversation, but I think I could have been more succinct and honestly it took some rock tumbling in my head to really settle on what was bothering me about the developer's response to questions about PoC.

I think this game actually does a great job of setting up an authentic historical setting and dropping you in as an ordinary, every day person caught up in bigger events. And I don't think it's at all necessary to force inclusion or changes to history when the goal of the game is to be as authentic as possible. I've seen people ask why you can't be a female protagonist and, as much as I love playing ladies when I get a chance, I don't think it belongs here. That would be a different game and probably not a very fun one.

But, I think questions about racial inclusion could have been welcomed by the developer as an opportunity to examine and share history. That's the goal of the game, right? Instead, they got defensive, took an "I know best so shut up and stop trying to censor my vision" approach, and hunkered down for a siege.

A rational explanation would be: "In this region, at this time period, there really wasn't a lot of racial or cultural diversity. The most common other cultures you might see were German, Romani, Hungarian, etc. and we've included those. At the time, while there may have been other races or cultures in the region, they'd have primarily been around major trading centers, and even rare there. A common person in a rural area would probably live their entire lives without seeing any PoC. And that's the experience we're trying to show with this game."

They seemed to get close to that a couple of times, but always ended up getting aggressive about it and doubling down on the absolute impossibility of the presence of any PoC in the region AT ALL. Then people take exception to that. Then it keeps going around.

To some degree, I wonder if a lot of the discussion is a result of the developer's rocky relationship with games media. I can picture this getting picked up initially, he sees it as an attack on creative vision by games media he's critical of, and doubles down.

It's a shame. I do like the game (bugs and save potions aside). But I feel like questions could have been embraced and created a really cool examination of history. Instead it's bogged down in a bunch of us vs them politics.

Quizzical_Quark

7 years ago

@Ashley The problem is that we can't prove something didn't exist, just like they talked about the EXTREMELY poorly chosen Lion example. But not being able to prove that something didn't exist is no reason to assume they might have. Based on the evidance available you can take a pretty hard stand on the subject, until somebody comes up with facts that question initial conclusions. That's just how science works. All evidence indicates Darwin's theory of evolution is correct, you can look for flaws in that theory, but as long as you don't find any evidence you should not act as if creationism is as valid an answer to the question.

farson135

7 years ago

The first Final Fantasy game I played was FFXIII. After playing the game for a long time, I started to feel a bit of repetition. I was looking up how many more chapters were left, and I saw a forum post from someone complaining about the grind setting in 2-3 chapters ahead of me. Immediately after his post, someone told them to just wait for the “real grind” 2-3 chapters further on (which was about 7 chapters from the end). I shut the game down, and never played it again. So, good for you Ashley.

On a different note, why would there be any non-white people in Bohemia at the time? That is the thing, it is theoretically possible for any race to be anywhere. There is a theory that the Vikings made it all the way down to Mesoamerica (and there is some evidence for it). However, without a recognizable population shift of some sort, there is no reason why a significant number of non-natives would live anywhere. Unless some evidence can be presented showing that there were non-whites in Bohemia, or some reason for non-whites to be in Bohemia, it is safer to say that they did not exist (aside from the odd traveler).

Honestly, instead of complaining about not having non-white people in a predominantly (or almost exclusively) white, European setting, we should be talking about having a non-predominantly white setting. There are plenty of very interesting non-European historical locations/events/myths/etc. we could base a game on.

maka556

7 years ago

The Kingdom Come Deliverance thing is some BS that really screams that the gamergater project head was offended at the possibility of people of color defiling his precious home land. Considering that around the 15th Century the Ottomans were consolidating their rule over Serbia, can the devs really say that nobody of Turkic descent had made it northwest to Bohemia? And there’s the fact that the devs already make serious concessions to gameplay that compromise the “historical accuracy” of the depiction. It’s always very telling when people are very tolerant of historical inaccuracies except for when it comes to non-white people in historical Europeans settings.

CawlMehJed

7 years ago

In time period where ethnicity was synonymous with national identity, yes, it could very well be seen as fact that there was "nobody of Turkic descent" in Bohemia. Any Turks looking to settle down and raise a family on a little farm would've been seen as invaders. God help them if they were Muslim, because then they would have been seen as heretics AND invaders. On those rare occasions where people of one ethnicity did interpolate with another, they would have stuck their own villages. By this I mean a nation with 5% "poc" population would not see 1 in 20 people walking around any given village being a minority. Rather, 1 out of 20 villages you traveled to would be ENTIRELY "poc". (side note: I doubt highly that there were even as much as 5%)

Given that a game of a few square km isn't likely to contain more than a handful of villages it's VERY likely that you could pick out any area of rural Bohemia in the 14th century and never see anybody who didn't fit the modern definition of "white".

Given also that this game takes place during a time of civil upheaval, and humanities long history of stabbing anybody who looks different when things go bad, I'd be willing to present the theory that any "poc" in the country at the time were likely not traveling far from home.

It truly boggles my mind how many people are willing to jump to racism as the reason for somebody not including some ethnicity in a game produced today, but refuse to consider the possibility of rampant, universally accepted, STATE ENDORSED racism as the reason that different ethnic groups didn't intermingle all that much in the past.

Do you honestly believe that world is somehow LESS tolerant now than it was in the 14th century?

LantzeN

7 years ago

You haven't played the game clearly. There are Cumans and Turks. Nice argument.

ElDuderinoSC

7 years ago

I saw Kingdom Come Deliverance on steam before it released and thought to myself, "Oh I could use a new RPG experience" purchased and started playing it, THEN read about it and heard about all the BS politics of it... Now I am ashamed I bought it along side people who felt it was some sort of political stand "against SJWs"

*edit* I apologize if I brought on feelings of negativity from these mods I received, I just hate a stupid game became political at all, aren't we all trying to escape that?

LantzeN

7 years ago

You really gave it to all those people who worked on the game because of the producer having a different political view than you. Fuck the guy who did all the model work right?

Occisorx

7 years ago

God dam Yanks again pushing there version of races on people again and useing one historian who knows better than anyone else I guess the know didnt learn anything from Funhaus whos own podcast on kingdom come was massively derailed

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Perpetual Soup: Deliverance - #40

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