What kind of games are y’all playing? In the games I usually play the sexual orientation of the characters isn’t mentioned at all. So for all I know they could be straight, gay, bi, pan or whatever.
The last game I remember playing where the protagonists wife was mentioned (implying he’s not gay) was Max Payne, 25 years ago.
The engineer in Factorio doesn’t care for men or women, all he cares for is that the factory must grow. And afaik it’s never mentioned wether Jebediah Kerman is into Bob, Bill or Valentina. None of the thousands of enemy soldiers I have shot in various shooters ever told me whom they’re in love with. And all the Sims I might have killed by burning down the city were just numbers for all I know.
The Last of Us 1 & 2 are the first ones that comes to mind. And both games are really fucking good because of it, not in spite of it.
You’re talking about games that don’t have a narrative, of course the characters aren’t going to have sexuality.
Character driven story games place at least some emphasis on sexuality and relationships in many games. Cyberpunk, The Witcher, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Last of Us.
Story-driven games are expensive, inferior books. Fite me.
To be clear, you define the sexuality of your own character in BG3. Every companion NPC, on the other hand, will have a boner for you if you take them on adventures and do stuff they like, regardless of your character’s race, sex, or religion.
Ok, maybe I just play the wrong games. I haven’t payed any of those.
It’s definitely a genre thing.
Sim games, platformers, management games, multiplayer shooters etc very rarely bring it into the equation because in those games then either:
A) There’s no named protagonist at all
B) The protagonist is ‘You’ so as little as possible is depicted about them to be unobtrusive
C) The protagonist notionally exists and has a name and depiction, yet they are so irrelevant to the story that no details about them are provided.
Narrative-driven games are a totally different beast.
Bro playing Gear Simulator wondering why gears don’t have names, feelings, gender, or sexual preference.
There’s never a wrong game! Play what you want.
It’s breaking my immersion! /s
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.
Or just letting everyone use their left hand, it’s not like waving around a wiimote requires super fine motor skills
Iirc there was a lot of fpv aiming for arrows, slingshot, and claw grabbing. I would have been frustrated trying to aim with my left hand, but then I suppose I could have switched for those sequences if needed.
Even better, maybe they find a way to allow the player to choose which universe they wanted to play in, left or right.
I’m left-handed and played through twilight princess on the wii multiple times before I found out that link was changed to be right handed. It really doesn’t effect the gameplay at all to swing the sword with a different hand than the one on-screen - I didn’t even notice it was different.
Does this mean you moved link with the movement stick in your right hand? Honestly, that’s the crazier part to me.
Aside of some 8BitDo thing I’ve never heard of, I think the Wii’s controller might be the only one you can do this with.
Kinda. I only have 2 fingers on my right hand, so I usually sat down and held the nunchuk between my thighs while moving the joystick with my palm.
Oh yeah, him. Totally. Fuck him, and his right hand.
You don’t fuck your right hand?
I do often, but I’m not him.
Alright, but I have yet to see a game character that’s left handed though
Yeah, Link surprised me, he’s left handed in most games before BOTW, which is neat.
He is right handed in the Wii games with motion controls for the benefit of the majority of right handed gamers, but left handed everywhere else.
Twilight Princess was crossgen between GameCube and Wii. The two games are mirror images of each other because it made it simpler to port the game than mirroring the character animations alone.
Weird that they never bothered to swap him back to left handed for the Switch games, though.
Isometric Link (Link’s Awakening remake) remains left handed at least, but Switch era 3D Link is right handed.
I’ll just chalk that up to the Switch games wanting to switch (heh) it up a bit, with his primary color association also switching from green to blue. Maybe if they decide to make an older style 3D Zelda again, they’ll go back to left handed Link.
Weird that they never bothered to swap him back to left handed for the Switch games, though
They are different characters. OoT Link has always been a leftie, BotW Link has always been a rightie
Almost all of the Links between different games are different characters, but they were all still left handed until the Wii era. That includes Wind Waker Link, Twilight Princess (GC) Link, Oracle Link, and even NES OG Link who are all distinct from OoT.
BotW Link is right handed either because they forgot he was originally left handed before the Wii era, or because it was a deliberate choice to break convention from older games (like also having BotW link wear blue instead of green).
I wouldn’t be surprised by either possibility, just given that BotW deliberately had relatively few series veterans working on it.
Weird that they never bothered to swap him back to left handed for the Switch games, though.
It’s not even that they “didn’t swap him back”.
Twilight Princess for the Wii U uses the original left handed link from the GameCube version (it swaps to the right handed version of the game in the harder difficulty).
Link is left handed in all of the 3DS entries, Hyrule Warriors, and Smash 4. In Smash Ultimate, both “Young” and “Toon” Link are left-handed while “Link” is right handed (he’s based off of BOTW in this entry).
In The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, you primarily play as Zelda, but Link is left-handed when he appears.
It was a very deliberate decision to make BOTW/TOTK Link right handed, and it’s not as simple as “not changing it back”.
Just checked in game and he actually does swing with his left. Never noticed until now. Apparently newer games retconned him to be right handed
They changed it because of the Wii controls.
Swinging with your left doesn’t necessarily mean you’re left handed.
I’m right handed, but I play sports like baseball and golf left handed.
That’s called cross dominate.
I think mine is partially because the vision in my right eye is worse than my left, because I shoot left handed too (clay pigeons)
I’m the opposite but I think it’s mostly because much of the tools being mass produced are mostly made for right handed people. Computer mice, golf clubs, guitars, catcher mitts, etc. It’s not impossible to find left handed versions of these things, but you usually have to go out of your way to get them and most people don’t teach these skills in a left handed mindset.
It’s not a retcon if it’s a different person. Most games introduce a new Link. We’re currently at twelve unique Links.
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.
Artorias from the Dark Souls 1 DLC is left handed.
The necro in Diablo 4 too.
Doomguy
He holds the pistol with his left but holds the shotgun right-handed:
He probably holds the weapon with stronger kickback with his dominant hand.
Conclusion: he’s right-handed but trained to hold the pistol with his left
Or he was trained to hold the shotgun with the right (for example because of which side the spent shells come out of)
As a leftie, shooting rifles in the military was not terribly fun because of the ejection port being on the right. Luckily the rifle was well enough designed that I didn’t have any casings grazing my cheek.
Yep. Got one shell stuck on the right inside of the elbow. Not fun!
This can be explained by him being left eye dominant.
Sheva Alomar, Mr.Zelda - that’s about it, I think.
Talking about things that exist makes me uncomfortable! Stop pushing your ideology on me!
Sums up so much about society right now ^
Those evil left-handers, always pushing their sinister agenda!
In my limited experience, it’s not that
In games and movies it’s usually:
This character who famously has been hetero, now suddenly bus gay and we just recon that they were always gay, you just didn’t notice
Which is then followed with a “huh?”
I rarely see people having issues with characters being gay or trans or anything really, it’s just when it gets shoehorned in really badly, or when everything about the show/movie/game is really bad, but my main character is gay, so now you MUST LOVE THIS PRODUCT!
Just make a good product, and I honestly don’t care if your main character is straight, gay, brown black or purple
Mind providing an example?
Elton John in Rocket Man.
What do you mean he was always gay?!?!
I’m a bit out of the loop, but which ones are you even talking about? Marvel?
I don’t recall any doing this.
bus gay
wut?
This is Lemmy where we all must support gay characters in movies and games, even when it makes no sense and has an obvious agenda, or face downvotes. :)
Any examples of this?
Star Trek Picard
Takes the character seven (of nine) and just scrambles everything about her to the point where she doesn’t resemble her own character that she played 20 years prior
Amongst the changes they made was that hthe character was suddenly gay, even though in three years of shows she has basically been straight.
Now let me be real clear: I have zero problems with her being gay, perse, this is star Trek and Star Trek fans aren’t transphobic or any phobic or they wouldn’t be fans of the show, watching each time how you should think about treating your favorite enemy better.
I have a problem with it being abused from here to hell and back again by shit shows and movies to try and hope that the audience won’t notice that the writers were the fucking worst
And this isn’t just me, basically any time I see someone pissed about a gay character, it’s because of that
The writers were too lazy to write a new gay character, so let’s just take an existing one, must be pretty enough, check, so now we make her gay and just recon that it was always like that and we’re just misremembering
The writers also have no talent so instead of using a fat character for some moral dilemma, well just have them make out on screen, so much simpler.
And of course once people have legit criticism, you just start a nice Twitter campaign where you call them *phobe, anything better than actually delivering a quality product.
God, modern Star trek is baaaaddd
I’m telling you all this (and hopefully you read it) because I know that most people really aren’t that bad once you stop screaming and blocking and instead try to have a normal conversation. Once you do that you find out that you’re mostly thinking the same.
I’m LGBT+, I’ll support almost anything left, that’s why I’m on Lemmy too, I just want good movies
Really? That is your issue with Star Trek Piccard? That the character specifically driven on a mission of self discovery isn’t the same as she was 20 years ago?
What good shows has this “issue” ruined?
You asked an example, i give you an example. This is a fairly common fandom complaint for the very reason why were having this discussion, so what is your point?
Believe me, ST Picard has a hundred other issues that combines together ruined watching any star trek for years. Its a shit show.
Name a single example, please
Non game one, Dumbledore was declared gay by Rowling.
In games, Kaiden Alenko becomes gay in ME3 if he’s still alive.
Dumbledore wasn’t “famously hetero”. Revealing the sexuality of a character who never had one established isn’t a change, it’s just new information. Getting offended at that is no less bigoted than getting offended at a new gay character being introduced.
I’m pretty Kaiden is one of male Shepard’s romance options in the first game dude.
1 was straight or liara only. 2 was straight with aliens except for Kelly being a bi option which didn’t actually trigger the romance achievement. 3 actually had some gay/bi options, but only Kaiden was a character that already existed.
I thought every party member in Bioware games was basically bisexual tbh
Maybe in the new ones. Mass effect is old, gay options would probably have killed the series of they existed in the first game. 3 was the only one with real support.
A quick Google shows that both male and female player characters had the exact same romance options, so he was always bi
Maybe an AI hallucination, or you misread the part about it being possible with save editing.
Ah, nah, I misread a guide on it apparently
I don’t have all the details but I think they did this with Ice man a while back. Could have been an alternate timeline or something though I’ve never read that storyline.
Comic books are a bad example imo because retconing characters is just what they do over there lmfao. But yeah they did decide in 2015 that Iceman was a closeted gay man. His sexuality wasn’t really a major point of his character beforehand tho and I think the way they did it told an interesting story for his character, so I think it was a worthwhile retcon of an otherwise kind of mediocre character.
Noticed zero examples listed. Interesting.
People lost their absolute shit when dragon age vanguard came out because of a scene many hours into the game, for a side character, during a side mission, that they didn’t need to do. The clip out of context makes it seem like it’s shoved in your face for no reason, but if they actually played the game that characters entire side quest was building up to that moment where they come out to their mom.
It’s one game, you can’t write a trans character into one game without outrage.
I think it’s more that “Dragon Age” Veilguard is a shit game in a beloved series. They’ve always had gay characters in that series and no one (sane, mind you) batted an eye. I think the only reason this trans character got fully blown out of proportion is because the writing is mediocre at best, and everything else wrong with the game, which means the trans issue is even more overblown because it got swept into the “bad game in general” train.
There would’ve still been outrage, no doubt about it, but we should all be aware that 90% of that is bots spreading hate and manufactured outrage. If it was an actually good game that got the treatment it deserves as a Dragon Age game, the general populace would’ve shrugged and kept playing it because it’s good.
This is just my opinion though.
Beloved series
Is it? II received a lot of hate (though I personally loved it EXCEPT for the repetitive ass dungeons) and Inquisition I just couldn’t get into. Was Inquisition good?
I wish I could just go back and replay DA:O and DAII right now, but they take so much time!
TL:DR: Veilguard is garbage compared to Origins.
I would say so.
Two had a lot of hate because the fanbase was so in love with what they did with the first game. They essentially took everything that made the first game great, and watered it down for the masses. Flashy combat, sure, but the RPG elements were hardly there, which is kind of what the fans loved about the first one. Multiple origin stories (name of the game baby) and a swath of “play your way” gameplay. Tactics for AI companions, the different branching paths for how you handle the choices during the game, and companions who were really well written for the most part with quests to flesh the world out and let the player immerse themselves.
Two was city, back and forth. Watered down game mechanics, a story that didn’t feel as well written as the first, and I’m pretty sure they had the dialogue wheel in two, which is all around god awful for an RPG game. The lines hardly matched what Hawk was going to say.
Inquisition was a step up in some areas, and yet another downgrade in others. It was a solid 5/10 for me. Playable, but nothing to rant or rave about.
The fan base has slowly lost interest in the series as time goes on because their writing is just getting so god damn awful now. Where in Origins, it felt like they could be real people, all reacting in different ways to a Blight that’s at their doorstep, and quickly coming in. In Veilguard, it’s like the writers have only ever consumed marvel movie dialogues and thinks that EVERY single character needs to have some quip, comeback, sob story, or other marvel movie quirk. Really big “well, that just happened!” energy in that whole game.
You don’t even need to write a trans character. Starfield merely gives you the option to change your pronouns and the anti-woke dickheads lost their minds.
There were people shitting on FF14 because a voice actor is trans. Not an Alpha-Bit in sight and they’re still crying woke DEI.
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.
Is it actually “gamers” saying this?
Gamers, posters, gaming press people, also idiots…
It covers an awful lot of people.,
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.
Steve Bannon basically used gamergate as a fascist breeding ground, and a model for our modern political discourse.
I’m not even kidding. Just because you weren’t aware of it, doesn’t make it unimportant.
Edit: sources:
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-harassment-joan-donovan-meme-wars
Since gamergate “gamers” in this context stands for the most vocal and bigoted group of people.
“”““gamers””“”
Not the majority, I’d wager
It’s really complicated, and on per-game basis
nobody talked much about gay romances in baldur’s gate
but every bigot whined about Dragon Age Veilguard
tbh, i think lgbtq+ topic is just being used by stu#ios as a scapegoat, so the people would whine about it rather than how shallow the game is with or without “them gays”.
Yeah, people are mad about execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Some (sadly kinda many) then also take that and start complaining about everything they perceive as woke even in otherwise fine games, when it doesn’t affect the game quality at all. Like the oblivion remaster renaming gender to body type (or sth similar).
execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Is this even true? This always came off as gamergate BS propaganda to me.
I’m a straight, white, cis male, and I want more gay (and other underrepresented) characters in games. The more variety of experiences available to me to interact with, the better.
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!
That response is from loud mouths
„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?”
No, I get what you mean. I just see a lot of clumsy getting lumped in with malevolent on a regular basis, and want to call attention to it.
Edit: Like the people who say your point about Hermione is racist because black people can blush too, when that’s not what you’re trying to say at all.
Frankly I would much rather a character be gay but it have no relevance whatsoever, it’s just a random fact about them
But also what another poster said, make it come up organically, don’t just force it in for diversity points. Makes it feel cheap and tokenized
If you don’t need a plot reason for a male character to mention his wife, then you don’t need a plot reason for a male character to mention his husband.
Note the quotation marks
Hmmm, your quotation marks are rendering as commas on my client. I thought you just put commas at the start for some random reason.
In languages like German the opening quotes start at the bottom „…“ and closing quotes go to the top. In Russian they can look like «this».
Just someone typing on English with a keyboard not directly mapped to the keyboard you are used to.
This is what your comment looks like for me on Voyager:
You mean, the same reason why anybody’s gay? They’re born that way?
What do they expect? “A wizard turned him gay.”
I don’t think sexual orientation needs a reason, it’s just there.
Me neither. That’s why i put it in quotes to make it clear i was aping stupid objections.
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”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 cow a day raw.
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.
Yeah, that doesn’t really track, tons of people fetishize so-called ‘muscle mommies’, lol.
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.
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.
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.
I will say I’ve never played the game, but from looking at a collection of her cutscenes on YT, they literally do?
The first time they show where she lives, they show an active gym (filled with people using the equipment), a food market with meat, and a farm with cattle.
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.
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
“Or, we could make it a woman”
“Um, ok, wait, we need to think about this”
It all starts with a grift from a bunch of illiterate idiots in the ancient near east who practice foreskin blood magic
gamers: this is a war against right handed people by the sinister lefties
This is supposed to be a role playing game. I’m not left handed how are they expecting me to be immersed in this game? It totally breaks the realism!
Some people just want the complain like they’re on a crusade for justice when they’re just bitching cause they can’t figure out how to be content with life (mean don’t get me wrong things suck but have to find out own peace too and things don’t suck cause media is inclusive). Unfortunately they’re loud and obnoxious and for some reason we don’t know how to mute them as a society.
Unsure why I ended up replying to you specifically but it’s here now.
Don’t worry. When we start the war against you guys it won’t be via video games.
I etymologically saw what you did there
