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Company News Logic Artists successor studio Campfire Cabal shut down by THQ Nordic

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
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Messages
15,175
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Eastern block
Pillars 1, D:OS1 and 2 and both Pathfinders sold very well too but not as much as BG3 because they didn't have "Baldur's Gate" in their name. That's why people's interest was up therefore journalist interest was up therefore people's interest was up etc.
If BG3 looked like Pathfinder Kingmaker and was made by Owlcat, it would have 82,000 concurrent peak on steam, not 820,000.

so?

does it matter if it had 10000000000 players?
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
11,021
Location
Free City of Warsaw
You have misunderstood me. They went from (masculine Japanese guys and feminine women) and (masculine mostly-white men and feminine women with a token black) to (cartoony prominent strong black woman leader with her stoic and strong female friends and goofy male underlings). Vibe shift.
Judging from those screens, they also went from a historical setting to a fictional one where everything goes.
 

Sensuki

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
9,860
Location
New North Korea
Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
It was worse with Rome. They put black centurions in the game.

At some point 90% of my Centurions for recruitment were black so I just quit the game.

If they want to make "reparations", hire only black people into their studio, but don't ruin historical settings.
They were possibly told to do this (ESG bucks? Who knows). ELEX 2, also published by THQ Nordic, suddenly had black people everywhere too. Mimimi went from

Yeah, I think you're right. It's pretty much everywhere now. The 'female Conqs' and 'female Vikings' thing never bothered me because it's literally like that in any RPG going back as far as I can remember - post Lord of the Rings movies I think there was a subtle shift towards more prominent female NC-NPCs but there has always been a mix. The 'standard' CRPG style of NPC sex distribution only stood out because of the historical setting.

But yes Exp:Rome definitely has that extra 'forcedness' in it. A bit like how every Netflix TV show must have an interracial relationship and showing white men being assholes or weak and the token required archetypes.
 

Nortar

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Sep 5, 2017
Messages
1,506
Pathfinder: Wrath
Even the "modern agenda" aside, E:Rome just turned out to be a shit game.
Strategic layer was a boring grind, with legion battles are nothing but mindless card clicking.
Not once I had a legion battle and thougth that even though the odds were against me, I won it thanks to good planning and smart play.
Nah, it's click-click-skip-skip "roma victor!"

Tactical layers is a joke. The only interesting thing is how they implemented shield.
The way they saddle you with story companions, but then don't let you to use them in most of the ecounters is mind boggling.
And story battles that can be won with 1 character action, is... I can't even.

If E:Rome was any indication for the production quality to be expected from that team in future, I'd say it's for the better they are dissolved.
 

Jrpgfan

Erudite
Joined
Feb 7, 2016
Messages
2,126
I didn't know there were black people in Poland.

I need to update my journal with potato demographics.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
11,021
Location
Free City of Warsaw
I didn't know there were black people in Poland.

I need to update my journal with potato demographics.
Ogi2-1024x993.jpg
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
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Messages
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KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Don't like to repeat myself, but:

There was more chance (above 0%) for a sub-Saharan centurion in the Roman army, than female conquistadors conquering Mesoamerica.
Wrong.

I can give you several names of female conquistadors who actually existed. Yes, they played a minor role in the conquest of the Americas and were exceptional individuals, not the rule, but they existed.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inés_Suárez

I can give no such examples for sub-saharan Roman centurions because if they existed, we know none of them by name.
And even if they existed, it is more likely they came from Ethiopia than from west Africa, and Ethiopians look very different from west Africans in their facial structure. The Latin word for black people was Aethiopiae, because that was the only place Romans knew black people to be from. Contact with sub-saharan Africa was minimal, if it existed at all outside of the connection to Ethiopia by the way of Egypt.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
11,021
Location
Free City of Warsaw
Don't like to repeat myself, but:

There was more chance (above 0%) for a sub-Saharan centurion in the Roman army, than female conquistadors conquering Mesoamerica.
Wrong.

I can give you several names of female conquistadors who actually existed. Yes, they played a minor role in the conquest of the Americas and were exceptional individuals, not the rule, but they existed.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inés_Suárez
Yes, everyone speaks about Ines Suarez, because it was such a rare event.

In Expeditions: Conquistador half of all recruitable characters are female.
I can give no such examples for sub-saharan Roman centurions because if they existed, we know none of them by name.
And how many centurions do we know by name? Except for Julius Caesar, they weren't actually the most prominent topic for the Roman writers, because they were plebeians, usually not worthy of mention. And even if, nobody cared about where they come from.


And even if they existed, it is more likely they came from Ethiopia than from west Africa, and Ethiopians look very different from west Africans in their facial structure.
ok, you want to say judging from the mugs of centurions in Expeditions you can tell from what part of Africa they come? This is slightly ridiculous.
The Latin word for black people was Aethiopiae, because that was the only place Romans knew black people to be from. Contact with sub-saharan Africa was minimal, if it existed at all outside of the connection to Ethiopia by the way of Egypt.
Lots of guys here lose their shit over tanned centurions and nobody mentions your character can become a female legatus :-D

At least centurions you recruit are all male. That's a big win for historical fidelity over Conquistador.
 
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cvv

Arcane
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Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
19,088
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Not sure where these Subsaharan Berber pictures come from but from everything I've seen so far Berbers look distinctively Mediterranean.

Anyway, not ruling out dark skinned centurions. I seem to remember a historical account of an "Ethiopian" Roman soldier serving in Britain at some point (probably after Caracalla shat the bed with the citizenships). Must've been quite a few of them in the legions back then, maybe even low officers.

As usual tho - "there were probably a couple of black Roman soldiers, maybe even centurions, therefore half of your roster will be black.....there was one known conquistadora therefore half of your roster is female.....there was one black samurai therefore there'll be dozens of black samurais in the upcoming XYZ from the Edo period" is so currentday.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Messages
34,611
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Berbers as depicted in an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb:
Berber_ancient_Libyan%3B_as_depicted_in_the_tomb_of_Seti_I.jpg

Temple-Pharaon-d-Egypte-Seti-1er-Libyens-Amazigh.jpg


Very white skin color there. Same as the Syrian, and modern Syrians are your regular near eastern tanned people - same with Berbers/Amazighs.

Modern North African countries have the same phenomenon as Europe: sub-saharan African immigrants. That's why photographs of black people in Moroccan garb exist. That does not make them native Moroccans, or ethnic Berbers/Amazighs, or anything of the sort, just like a black guy in Poland can't trace his ancestry back to the old Rzeczpospolita.

I know a traditionalist Amazigh pagan who follows the ancient traditions of his people and is a hardline ethno-nationalist. His people are even more racist towards black people than your average American, lmao.
And from his looks, he's indistinguishable from your average south Italian or Greek.

The ancient world was a very Mediterranean centric world. Your average person in the Roman Empire would have looked like your average Italian, Spaniard, Greek, etc. North Africa was populated mostly by:
- natives like the Amazighs in western NA
- Greek colonists who've been living there for centuries (Cyrenaica had a Greek colony even before the Hellenic era, for example)
- Phoenicians, who were a Semitic people and would look similar to people from the Levant or Arabia (Carthage was originally a Phoenician colony)
- Egyptians, who mostly stayed in Egypt and the Levant and didn't travel west much

None of these groups were black-skinned. Tanned like the Egyptians, yes. Black like sub-saharan Africans, no.

The only black-skinned people known at the time were Nubians/Ethiopians, who come from east Africa, to the south of Egypt.
There was little to no contact with sub-saharan Africans on the western half of the continent. Places like Mali only really came into wider contact with the Arab-Muslim world in the middle ages, and even then they didn't intermingle much beyond trade. There were a few Carthaginian naval expeditions down the west coast of Africa, but no permanent colonies or contacts were established. Only during the age of exploration in the 15th century onwards did Europeans and North Africans have regular contact with west Africa, which up to that point had been terra incognita.

As for the Nubians and Ethiopians, a few individuals of these did travel to the Roman Empire, yes. Some as slaves: we know that during Nero's time as Emperor, Ethiopian slaves were used as gladiators and considered quite the spectacle by the Roman citizens who found such dark-skinned people to be an exotic and unusual sight. Is it possible that, during the height of the Empire, a few Ethiopians/Nubians could have joined the legion and risen up the ranks to become centurions? Yes.

But the game is set during the late republic, the time of Caesar and Pompeius. A time when all men of the Roman army were Romans. From Italy. They didn't even recruit northern barbarians from Gaul and Germany yet, which became a common practice in the Empire, particularly during the late period when the majority of Roman soldiers were of Germanic ethnicity. In fact, during the time that Expeditions: Rome is set in, Egypt hadn't yet become a Roman province, it was still an independent kingdom.

How, then, would a black African - who could only come from Nubia/Ethiopia, which had access to the Mediterranean world only through Egypt, which at that point wasn't yet part of the Roman Empire - join the Roman legion and rise up to the rank of centurion?
For this time period, within the context of this particular game, this is completely fictional and ahistorical.

Female conquistadors are more historical than black sub-saharan African centurions in the late Republic.

If the game was set in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, fine, I could accept one or two soldiers of Ethiopian origin. But late Republic? Complete bullshit, made up, didn't happen, more fictional than female conquistadors for which we have at least one example.
 

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