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Everyoneās arguing about whether or not the main character should be black while forgetting the more important point: Ubisoft is trash, and we shouldnāt be buying their uninspired shovelware anyway.
The other commenters donāt seem to understand the difference between boycotting and gatekeepingā¦
Iām with you man, I havenāt bought any Ubisoft stuff for over 10 years now. And the more I learned the more I got surprised by how shovelware can be made even worse.
The last Ubisoft game was Assassinās Creed 3, right?
I only played until revelations which was the ending of part 2 I think which honestly felt pretty mid to me, though the over arcing story was good. Black flag was quite popular no? The one with the naval combat. I donāt remember anything beyond that.
So theyāre boycotting Ubisoft because theyāre trash and make uninspired shovelware? Do you understand the difference between boycotting and gatekeeping?
Increasing amounts of dlcs(Cut off from original) & microtransactions(Gambling). They have not mended their ways so I did not support them since then. Teach me where I went wrong with my Boycott?
I fully understand why people would abstain from buying their products for those reasons. All OP said was Ubisoft is trash. Honestly I think all of this has been a miscommunication, I interpreted that comment as trash = something I donāt enjoy or something of lower quality. Others have interpreted it as you have, which I do think are completely valid reasons to boycott for.
Exactly, they are never getting my money.
I donāt understand the gatekeeping here, do you get mad that people enjoy the fast and furious movies? Itās not like these are funneling resources away from the tons of great indie games that are literally constantly coming out these days.
Movies donāt demand an unreasonable amount of money and time out of you the viewer, you buy your ticket and watch the film, maybe you buy the DVD, done end of story.
Ubisoft games demand a minimum of 70 dollars out of you and upwards of 60 hours all while blocking your progress with arbitrary experience checkpoints and pestering you about spending even more money for weapons, gear, mounts, etc. as if it were a free to play MMO like Fortnite, except you already dumped 70 dollars to play the damn thing.
Not sure where indie games have anything to do with Ubisoft.
Iām a huge fan but I still buy all games at the deepest discounts. There are also free trial periods, friend pass opportunities and giveaways of the games further down the line. Sure, most people fall for the tricks and buy the games right away and even pay for some microtransactions, but they donāt have to, so thereās no ostracizing the poor here.
They actually donāt demand anything from you, just donāt buy it if itās not for you. That was my entire point and Iām not sure how you missed it, donāt tell people not to buy Ubisoft games if thatās what they enjoy? You all can play whatever niche and indie games you enjoy and others can play the new AC, live and let live.
āJust donāt buy it if you donāt like itā can apply to absolutely anything a consumer criticizes. Itās also extremely unhelpful.
Also, thatās a really strange argument from someone who also said:
it sucks to see the state of the industry as a whole right now and really hope we can get back to being respected as consumers some day.
Again, Iām not saying people canāt criticize Ubisoft or AC as a franchise. I take umbrage with people saying they shouldnāt spend money on things they enjoy. I see you all over Lemmy and feel like youāre pretty levelheaded, am I taking crazy pills here? That was all I said in response to a comment about how āweā shouldnāt buy Ubisoft trash. Look at all the weird straw men that people have replied with. I thought this place was supposed to be better than reddit.
Iām not for gatekeeping but I can understand the pushback in this case. People had the same argument for Bethesda horse armor in the past and itās gradually been abused to stuff like day 1 dlc and Diablo IP becoming a predatory mtx handphone game. At some point if you donāt voice concerns over Ubisoft delisting games (the crew) or $100+ pricing bundles, you shouldnāt be surprised if Ubi opts to mess with previously beloved IPs for a quick buck.
Itās great that you love indies and all but shaming other people for being frustrated at Ubiās business practices is no better than gatekeeping people for liking their new games.
Youāre extrapolating a whole lot here, all I was responding to was OP saying āweā shouldnāt buy Ubisoft games because theyāre trash and all they make is uninspired shovelware. Just a weird stance in my opinion to concern yourself with what shovelware other people are buying and enjoying in their free time. Guess thatās an unpopular opinion here haha
I think youāre somewhat demonstrating their point, given that Iāve fairly consistently liked D3 and D4 and donāt have any experience with Immortal. Iāve seen lots of critique about 4 that doesnāt necessarily ring true (I canāt imagine playing well at all on mobile, especially given my choice of skill rotation) and that makes sense mostly when itās grouped with Immortal in a way I find somewhat arbitrary. Immortal itself isnāt especially predatory within the context of mobile games, though being one is a factor in why I havenāt tried it.
I think itās easy to dunk and point out things like āyou canāt earn enough currency to get the next battle pass for freeā without honestly examining what the battle pass in D4 is and realising that it offers extremely little. The free armour is cool and interesting enough that I get the dopamine reward when looking at my toon on the loading screen without paying for it. Indeed I think paying for a set to some extent cheapens that experience vs. getting that reward multiple times via picking up gear and not using transmog at all.
Might be some other parts of its monetisation Iām not considering in my assessment but I donāt think itās predatory. So when I constantly hear all about how predatory it is, often it instead serves to drive me toward the brand loyalist lapdog tribe. I wouldnāt say itās shameful at all, but itās tiring to engage with as though thereās a more nuanced perspective behind it than just general naysaying, when often that just doesnāt seem to be the case.
Immortal itself isnāt especially predatory within the context of mobile games
Damning with faint praise
Might as well say Alcatraz isnāt particularly difficult to escape from within the context of island prisons.
What about Gitmo or Nauru? I kid. I didnāt mean to praise it, my bad. I avoided it personally.
This is gonna be super offtopic: Diablo 4 was fine, I didnāt bring it up and only specified Immortal for a reason. If only the latest iteration of an IP counts, then I should have said OW2, but I mentioned Immortal because it was so terrible. It IS especially predatory even for a handphone game, worse than the final fantasy ones, Maple, PoGo etc. An actual fun app with itās progression covered in so much monetization that f2p players can literally never catchup to payers, with gambling systems that can cost up to several thousands. Donāt take us ānaysayersā at our word, go ahead and invest your time into it if youād like. People complain about OW2 mtx but it doesnāt even come close to how bad Immortal gets.
Still, I get your point as to why itās better to have some nuance on this kinda thing and not hop on corpo hate trains.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the nuance where itās offered. I think the difference in my summary perspective of these issues is in considering its intended targets. Iām aware f2p players in Immortal donāt have a hope of catching up - I do think thatās a predatory part of the summary monetisation of the game - but I think itās mitigated by being targeted at whales. Because paying in that game doesnāt only gatekeep player power; power scales linearly with the amount you pay. So even people tricked into paying for some power arenāt really able to realise that advantage. IMO this changes the paradigm a bit, because the material effect of the monetisation to the informed consumer (regardless of their level of participation) is to part rich people from some of their riches - something I donāt really find compelling as a summary argument against it. The main other group predated on would be those that choose to be uninformed, which is something that I canāt really think of a good a reason to take some kind of moral stance on
you get mad that people enjoy the fast and furious movies
No, because they are action comedies that consistently deliver.
Also, Iād be hard pressed to name a more ethnically diverse movie cast. The epitome of a āsomething for everyoneā movie.
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Wasnāt the original premise that you were a dude in the present using a time machine to explore āgenetic memoryā in a real time simulation in order to find the ark of the covenant or spear of destiny or someshit for the Illuminati?
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Yeah, I think they crammed ābecuz aliensā in there a few games later to explain away all the magic.
They did that in the first game, actually. The apple and other artifacts were always tech left behind by an extinct āfirst civilization,ā later named the Isu. Part of the seriesā problem is that the actually interesting ideological conflict between the Assassins and the Templars was put on hold to explore increasingly elaborate Isu junk after Desmond was killed off.
Yes, this was carried until Syndicate, which is the sixth game in the mainline series I believe. That was then changed in Origins.
I was guessing this was about Ghost of Tsushima since it just released on PC. Is his an assassin creed thing?
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Ah ok thanks. Good on Ubisoft I guess? Black people are part of the world and deserve to be represented. Iām sad that this is a fucking point of contention.
Technically, theyāre only āSamuraiā if theyāre produced in Nippon within the duration of the Kamakura Period through the Meiji Restoration. Otherwise theyāre just sparkling warrior-nobles.
You are thinking of 51% min of corn. And produced in Kentucky. Fuck, thats whiskey. I mean Whisky!
Bourbon, I was talking about bourbon.
Bourbon doesnāt even have to be made in Kentucky, they just canāt call it āKentucky Straight Bourbonā otherwise.
That is an inside joke for people that know whiskey.
Where was that āhistorically accurateā crowd when Keanu starred in 47 Ronin?!
Or Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia. Or Finn Jones as Iron Fist.
Or Ben Affleck as Antonio J. Mendez in Argo, ffs. A role practically made for your Pedro Pascal type actor.
Hell, Tom Cruise pretending to be Irish in Far and Away was awful enough just because of the bad accent.
Iron fist is a white dude in the source material unlike the other examples.
Oh they were there lol.
Keanu is half Japanese. Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai thoughā¦
Uhm Tomās character was never the last samurai. Did you watch it?
Iāve seen it, Iām just making a point that Keanu is actually half Japanese so he should be able to play a character of somewhat Asian descent without complaint, especially when the character he played in 47 Ronin was only half Japanese and all the characters shit on his character because of that. It wasnāt a ground breaking movie and there are plenty of reasons to shit on it, but the race card isnāt one of them.
But tom played an American soldier stationed in Japan.
He was already retired from the military in the movie, he went over as a mercenary to train the Japanese how to use guns more effectively.
We are getting off track.
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The argument is always the same. The CHUDS donāt want to see black people, women, the gays, etc.
Actually was expecting a Japanese man and woman to choose from.
Thereās a playable Japanese woman in parallel to the Black man but I guess women donāt count because gAmErS.
Wait the black character is optional??? That would make this extra petty.
So far it looks like they both take part in the story, with their own sections to play through. The character introduction video seems to say you might have sections where you chose between offensive or stealth approach so youāll switch characters, but they want you to experience both so there will most likely be sections that force the use of one or the other.
People who still complain are just saying they refuse to play a Black man at all, so thatās still a trash take.
Why does the black man have to be the offensive fighter? Is Ubisoft implying black people are violent and canāt be sneaky?
The black guy is Yasuke, a historical figure who fought as a samurai for Oda Nobunaga. While itās pretty stereotypical, itās also accurate to have Yasuke as the combat character if theyāre splitting combat and stealth. I mean, itās also pretty stereotypical to have a woman as the stealth character, which theyāve basically already done twice. Elise in Unity, while non-playable, was decidedly less combat focused and more stealthy and diplomatic while Arno fought. In Syndicate, Elise was the stealth character and Jacob was the combat character.
In short, itās probably less that heās black and more that the formula has the man be the combat character and the woman be the stealth character.
Well then they are sexist. Why does the man have to be the offensive fighter? Is Ubisoft implying men are violent and canāt be sneaky? They also seem to be implying women canāt be strong and defend themselves.
Theyāre parallel protagonists. There will be mandatory story missions for both of them, but outside of that you can be either. Iām assuming GTA V style
Yeh I know, Iām a lady myself āŗļø
Chuds want to see women, just scantily-clad and helpless.
I mean, me too, but only if theyāre into it.
Wait there was a Black samurai? Thatās fucking awesome! I need to see more media about this
Thank you!
Yasukeās a playable character in Samurai Warriors 5 As a fan of that game Iām confused to why people are suddenly upset that he exists
My guess is its because some numpty on rumble or twitter went on a rant about it recently.
Because AC series on downhill for so long and Ubisoft tried to save it not by making a good game but making moves on āinclusiveā propaganda.
I hate to burst your little reactionary bubble but there is zero chance that a key stakeholder said āsales are down, we need to include a black personā. AAA games have been growing worse as developers seek minimum risk for maximum profit and what youāre deeming āinclusive propagandaā simply doesnāt translate into lower risks nor higher profits.
If you canāt handle a black person in your game, donāt play it. Culture and society are going to leave you behind anyway so you may as well get used to missing out.
Culture and society are going to leave you behind anyway so you may as well get used to missing out.
Lmao mic drop. I could feel how barren your field of fucks for culture war bullshit has grown. Some people want to solve problems and some people just want to bicker over nonsense which saps bandwidth (intentionally or otherwise). Weaponizing fomo is a bit of a hail mary play, but if it jumpstarts the empathy then mission accomplished without exhausting yourself haha.
Who said I canāt handle black people in my game? I just want a AC game in Japan, during samuraiās era, to have, you know, Japanese samurai. Would you be okay with AC2 Ezio to be Chinese for example?
Congratulations! It has all of those things.
AAA games have been growing worse as developers seek minimum risk for maximum profit
Yeah see, itās cause of this and the whole nature of capitalism that assures me this decision is an attempt to make more money.
Changing a characterās race is rather cheap from a cost perspective and clearly it gives it free publicity.
Changing a characters race? What character has had their race changed? The entire story is absolutely going to revolve around him being a black man in Japan and has likely been that way from the earliest preproduction.
Black people in vidya gaem=propaganda
Got it.
i miss the days when people made video games, and they were good.
Iām not sure why people are expecting the character of the video game to make or break the entire video game.
Itās a new assassins creed game, itās probably going to be ass, like the rest of them.
animal well.
The medium is alive and well.
i meant more in regards to these massive studios, of course there are good indie games, there are always good people in any community.
Baldurās Gate 3. Itās fine.
i honestly canāt even remember who made that one, there was also elden ring, which apparently was also pretty good, but that was to be expected.
This is some of the worst discourse Iāve seen. I went to the latest Asmongold video about this topic and asked as many people as I could to explain how a black protagonist is pushing an agenda. Not replies. Guess it is hard to explain without claiming ānot historically accurateā or just sounding like a white supremacist.
I gave up on Far Cry and Watchdogs not because the games were deteriorating with each iteration (they were / are) but because the sexual harrassment ring on which the upper management fed and HR silenced the victims made supporting the company untennable. At least for me.
Since then Iāve found alternative indie projects that have scratched some of those itches pretty well. I donāt play Ubisoft, even those games I already
ownhave licenses for.I genuinely do not get why people get so angry about the color of a characterās skin in a work of historical FICTION. I dgaf about things being historical accurate in my video games. Does the guy look cool? Yup he sure do. Is the game gonna be good? Itās Ubisoft so probably not. But letās assume that it will be for arguments sake.
Why is it so important to you that the character not be black? Assassinās creed as a franchise has been around for like what? Almost two decades now? And in all that time weāve basically played as only white characters (with some exceptions). I donāt see anything wrong with increased representation in works of art or entertainment. The more representation we see in media for any minority group the less likely it will be for the kids that grow up playing these games to grow up as racist assholes. And if you belong to a minority group, seeing someone with your skin tone represented in media will make you less likely to grow up with internalized self loathing. Like you might if all you see in media is the white dude saving the day.
At the end of the day these are works of entertainment. Their purpose isnāt historically accuracy. Itās entertainment and escapism. If we canāt escape racism in a fucking video game how tf are we supposed to prevent it in real life?
Dude, these same folks flipped their shit when the default main character in Crackdown was black, way back in 2007. These idiots donāt quit. I mean, weāre talking about a game where youāre a genetically engineered super-cop and had multiple choices of character race but their fragile egos were shattered because the default choice wasnāt the white guy.
Itās pathetic.
Mind you, Iām sure they were all fine and nodding their heads when Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.
Man that game was so fun.
Yeah, was a blast. Shame Crackdown 3 didnāt recapture the magic.
Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.
Did you actually watch the movie?
Spoilers: The Samurai all die in the end. White guy does NOT save the Samurai. In fact the he is the one saved by the Samurai, in a mental health kind of way.
Itās not at all a white savior movie. Tom Cruise is more of an audience surrogate character. When they explain Japanese culture to Tom Cruise, the audience also learns about Japanese culture. It wouldnāt make any sense for Japanese people to be explaining Japanese culture to each other so there needs to be an outsider in the story for it to work.
You should watch the movie instead of judging it from the movie poster. It really pays a lot of respect to Japanese culture and portrays a sense of loss that happened in the rush to modernize during the Meiji era.
It was also a huge boost to Ken Watanabeās career. He was actually the star of the movie, just that he was an unknown in the west at the time. So they put Tom Cruise on the poster to bring in an audience, but itās really Ken Watanabeās movie. Youāre missing out if you canāt get over the movie poster.
Iāve seen the movie multiple times. Despite my comment, itās a decent enough movie. But the entire situation that led to Cruiseās character not dying initially (where heās taken prisoner instead of executed) was kind of absurd, and then for him to actually be allowed to meet with the emperor at the end, after essentially engaging in a rebellion and convincing Katsumoto of the same instead of committing sepukku (and then him doing it anyway???)ā¦ The whole thing would have been considered shameful, and just stretches belief generally. And Algren (Cruise) was basically the pivot point for the whole thing.
When I refer to the āwhite saviorā thing, he didnāt save an individual, he saved āJapanās honor.ā Itās kind of bad in that regard.
Oh, and he wins the heart of the widow whoās husband he killed in that first battle. Woo.
From the trailer he just seems so terribly out of place. Also, itās bullshit to have a samurai in Japan in a game about assassins when they had fucking ninjas, the Japanese equivalent of assassins.
The AC games havenāt been about covert assassination since Syndicate. Theyāre much more focused on open combat now, and playing a samurai fits that better. Yeah, itās pretty stupid that a game series about assassins isnāt really about assassination anymore, but thatās where theyāre at.
Origin was still about stealth and assassinations. Itās only Odyssey and Valhalla that broke away from it.
I wasnāt really following it but didnāt Mirage go back to its roots somewhat?
Iād wager thereās no accurate historical depiction in any media.
Everything is stylized or fictionalized to some degree.
Maybe The Passion of the Christ is closest I can think of as they did all the speech in Aramaic and Old Latin
If we are talking about ethnicity, there were huge liberties taken. I think a few of the romans were actually Italian but no one else was close to plausible.
I havenāt seen the film and donāt plan to, but most Romans werenāt Italian by that point, especially in the military.
Heās for players like me who like to hit stuff, not sneak around. Thereās another stealth main character for people who wanna be sneaky.
So itās like in Syndicate? Thatās cool
I know youāre not op but I donāt really engage with public gamer forums since gamergate. I donāt need the idiotic, racist/sexist/whateverist takes. I just want to forgot about the world for a bit and talk to my friends about how cool the pixels looked at that one point in time. I can get that with my friend on discord.
I thought it was common knowledge that āretainerā was literally the job description of all samuraiā¦ but I guess I should have known that the Weaboo Gamergate Brigade would conveniently ignore actual history.
Thereās a lot of nuance and hair-splitting involved; itās unlikely Yasuke would have been granted the title of samurai, but he was referred to as kosho. He was given a short sword, but not a long sword to pair with it. Samurai were required by law to wear the paired swords, known as daisho, and anyone else was forbidden.
Almost all samurai were indeed retainers, with the exception of ronin. But bushi who were not samurai could still be retainers. Itās all kind of a huge classist mess. Thanks feudalism!
If you throw out the hierarchical nonsense, Yasuke fit the role of what most people today would think of as a samurai. Itās kind of weird for anyone to argue against that in the fast and loose setting of an Assassinās Creed game. Ubisoft arenāt known for churning out painstakingly accurate historical reference works. Itās a game with a character roughly based on a distinct historical figure.
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Youāre working backwards trying to find excuses. Even disregarding the fact that āblack guy is meant to be stealthyā is looking objectively wrong, the āI put my hood up and sat on a bench so now Iām invisibleā mechanic has been a joke spanning back to literally the first AC game ever made. If you wanted to get upset about how implausible it is, youāre more than 15 years too late.
Have you played AC Syndicate? This game is led by the same studio. Going by that game and the official videos on this one, heās not stealthy at all. Heās a strong brawler, while the woman is a ninja and youāll get to choose your approach from mission to mission.
If your problem with games is a lack of realism, you must not play very many.
They do something similar in the first Nioh game, but the main character didnāt stand out in a world covered in half demons and spirits that all look way weirder than a foreigner with pale skin. Whatever locals they met were mostly dead or fleeing from monsters and the xenophobic culture bits were mostly brushed aside.
That being said I donāt think Team Ninja enjoyed the online controversies that happened from making a white guy the main character in Nioh. Nioh 2 went back to having a Japanese half yokai as the lead. Iād wait to see if Ubisoft is capable of making an interesting story out of the foreigner in old Japan premise.
Idc that heās black my issue is that assassinās in ac "blend " into their environment they are āghostsā
This hasnāt been true for a while, except Mirage that tried to do a callback to that. But you know thereās also a playable woman who is the perfect ninja archetype? Clad in black and hookchaining over buildings and throwing kunais in peopleās necks from the shadows or from 10 feet in the air, the type that never actually existed in History.
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The stealth missions will use Naoe, the open combat missions will use Yasuke, nothing is broken. get a clue and drop the excuses already.
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Good for you? Youāre still pretending that a Black guy in Japan somehow breaks some rules of the game. Itās still true to History, the stealth is still there, nothing is broken, this is still the same Assassinās Creed as the previous games.
Actual Ninjas blended in by just dressing as regular peasants (they came from the peasant class after all) and the nobles never really cared enough about the peasants to notice āhey I havenāt seen this guy around beforeā.
Probably not a technique that a black dude in Japan could use effectively.
Also it would probably be boring in terms of story. The shinobi being peasant class probably werenāt invited to the courts of nobles. Also not a good idea to have assassins hanging around for dinner. Just discretely pay them for the job you need and that would be the limit of the interaction with them.
A retainer would be invited to court so you can involve him with some palace intrigue and such.
Iām sure theyāll probably include ninjas in the story and have the protagonist spend some time with them and learn their secret ninjutsu techniques, though probably the more mystical (mythological) variety.
Probably the same way every AC character has blended into the crowd while wearing radically different clothes from every other person in any given crowd, and those clothes also being extremely overt about the Assassin order membership of the wearer. I mean the assassins robes are color coordinated and adorned with they group logo for god sakes.
G*mers: Not even once
I havenāt played any AC games in a long time but why would a game series thatās all about playing as stealth assassins have you play as samurai instead of ninjas? Seems like a really big missed opportunity for something like Tenchu
They have strayed far from the original series. Itās large open world combat not hidden in the shadows at all now. Even the ninja you play as in this game is operating in the middle of the day in the streets.