Game News Solasta: Crown of the Magister Released

[Volourn]

It is easy to avoid the sins of b00bie staring in Solasta. they simply do not exist unless I've missed them. LMAO Yes, this is my biggest annoyance in the game. It makes no sense. Talk abotu being sexist anti women. Why do these devs hate women so much?

 

[Darkzone]

Token black guy, token asian guy, two presumably-French women, hella diverse.

Why stop at token black guy, token Asian guy, and token women?

7) Token ginger

Don't worry she will be replaced by a black woman the next time.
Ginger race-swap is real.

 

[gurugeorge]

I mean, I'm always torn. I like videogames, I like playing them, and to a large extent the logic of gameplay is completely divorced from any woke or "activist" patina. People with crap politics can make good games, it's a different compartment of the brain.

Story-telling wise, it's less true, there political ideas can certainly induce people to try and make their stories pompous "teaching moments," at the expense of the whole point of telling stories, which is basically to entertain and hopefully also to induce a sense of wonder and contemplation of the weird and wonderful ways of the universe, etc., etc. Politics as propaganda in storytelling is usually just a tiresome intrusion, unless it's intelligently woven into the story itself, into the character development, etc., etc., and I hardly think most game developers (or the people they can afford to hire) are good enough writers to pull that sort of thing off.

So what can I do in the current year, except look for good gameplay in games that are all inevitably going to be slathered in woke cruft? I mean, I could just stop playing videogames entirely. But that seems like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

And Solasta has good gameplay. So the tiresomeness doesn't bother me that much. It's mostly cosmetic and ritual anyway.

On the other, other hand, it is there, and it's a microscopically tiny part of a systemic movement that's out to destroy Western civilization and replace it with a machine dedicated to serving a few oligarchs (which is actually what all the woke stuff is about, though the useful idiots who promote it haven't got the foggiest clue about the reality of the situation). In a game like this, it's just a drip. But every game is a drip these days - although some more than others.

So being a balance guy, I can see both sides of the topic, but with Solasta I lean more towards giving it a pass.

 

[Radech]

Kinda makes sense if you see their* goal to lock us into the great consoom skinnerbox. Make hyperfocused game, no sexy, just gamy, then make hyperfocused sexy box, with no gamey, etc. so that no matter the 'intellectual' pursuit, we're not allowed to be titillated outside the designated titillationhub, ensuring that no matter what experience, we're not able to stay in that comfy flowstate, because to be fully sated, we must swap between skinnerbuttons, instead of just being satisfied being and playing a game.

It's insidious as fuck if you think enough on it, but that probably applies to any nefarious conspiracy, hence the name.

*TPTB who'v'm'st'

 

[Dexter]

So what can I do in the current year, except look for good gameplay in games that are all inevitably going to be slathered in woke cruft? I mean, I could just stop playing videogames entirely. But that seems like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Bruh, no offense but if you don't define "Woke" in the most rigid way possible, it's still a minority doing that stuff. There's still plenty of gems coming out that don't have any of that or are entirely apolitical (the VR space for instance is almost entirely free of that for now) and you still got shit like JRPGs and almost anything that's come out before ~2012/15 at your disposal. I could never buy another game again and have stuff to play until my old age, but there's plenty of good shit still coming out. I feel like I have plenty of Alternatives to enjoy or give my money to, and they're more dependent on people buying their stuff, especially as Niche Indie developers, than I am on any one of them to provide me with quality entertainment, which I'd put into doubt in this case anyway. If they're willing to put their retarded personal beliefs over their product, so am I. And they could always snap out of it or change tack in ~5-10 years or whenever the fad isn't as prevalent anymore or more people got tired of/damaged by it and there's a bigger backlash.

If you're for some reason "married" to licensed/branded Western CRPGs things might look a little bleaker. As opposed to smaller Indie offerings or Alternatives, for instance I don't expect Vince's new game or upcoming ones like ELEX 2/Kingdom Come 2/King's Bounty 2 to press much on the Woke gland. Those are all things I'm looking forward to, KBII being at the Top of my Steam Wishlist for a long while, I really hope they don't fuck it up.

 

[Artyoan]

Soapbox time, I guess.

A man dying by a thousand cuts can point to each individual cut and say its nothing.

A frog boiling to death in a pot can point to each individual degree increase in temp and say its nothing.

At some point, each man either gives in to apathy while rationalizing each inch given or he chooses a point, no matter how arbitrary it may be, and pushes back. After a decade of 'its nothing, it doesn't affect you' logic, do you feel unaffected? How slippery was that slope after all? The pronoun molehill is my mountain. Somehow I'm supposed to believe that 'trans women are women' and yet in each avenue they must be acknowledged as something wholly 'other' with separate 'rights'. I have a stake in society, I'd rather it not be mentally ill.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

After careful consideration I have refunded my purchase. I was being witty about refunding a few days ago, but in actuality I just put off playing the game until I made a decision. A choice not lightly met, taking into account that playing RPGs is a hobby I love and something I enjoy financially supporting.

That said, I thought about writing a long winded post about how far left extremists and their worship of degeneracy is ruining entertainment, but I can't be bothered. Just this: Fuck every single miscreant that attempts to normalize or even glorify mental illness.

Spoiler

 

[Outlander]

What in the fuck is wrong with that guy's neck!

 

[gurugeorge]

So what can I do in the current year, except look for good gameplay in games that are all inevitably going to be slathered in woke cruft? I mean, I could just stop playing videogames entirely. But that seems like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Bruh, no offense but if you don't define "Woke" in the most rigid way possible, it's still a minority doing that stuff. There's still plenty of gems coming out that don't have any of that or are entirely apolitical (the VR space for instance is almost entirely free of that for now) and you still got shit like JRPGs and almost anything that's come out before ~2012/15 at your disposal. I could never buy another game again and have stuff to play until my old age, but there's plenty of good shit still coming out. I feel like I have plenty of Alternatives to enjoy or give my money to, and they're more dependent on people buying their stuff, especially as Niche Indie developers, than I am on any one of them to provide me with quality entertainment, which I'd put into doubt in this case anyway. If they're willing to put their retarded personal beliefs over their product, so am I. And they could always snap out of it or change tack in ~5-10 years or whenever the fad isn't as prevalent anymore or more people got tired of/damaged by it and there's a bigger backlash.

If you're for some reason "married" to licensed/branded Western CRPGs things might look a little bleaker. As opposed to smaller Indie offerings or Alternatives, for instance I don't expect Vince's new game or upcoming ones like ELEX 2/Kingdom Come 2/King's Bounty 2 to press much on the Woke gland. Those are all things I'm looking forward to, KBII being at the Top of my Steam Wishlist for a long while, I really hope they don't fuck it up.

I am chasing that though, because it's the best thing. It's the thing we all glimpsed the possibility of when we played games when we were younger - detailed worlds to get absorbed in, beautiful graphics, engaging gameplay. The dream of AAA as it was before the ground was mined - admittedly partly by developers chasing the LCD, but also by this rising tide of woke shit we're all starting to drown in.

And sure, there are great games not made by Western AAA developers (I'm a huge fan of Troubleshooter, for instance). But that dream of the big Western AAA crpg is what sells big, just like the dream of the all-singing, all-dancing space game induced hapless enthusiasts to shell out the moolah for Chris Roberts' project.

But it's the way the whole thing was deflected and undermined by so-called "activism" in the last decade that's really depressing.

I said there were two grades of shit before (the genuinely malicious woke and the social status/anything for a quiet life woke); but of course there are more grades of it than that. The Solasta team seem like nice guys who want to do the right thing, who want people to just get along; and they've been bombarded for most of their lives with the idea that having niggers in your game is doing the right thing. Replaying POE 2 atm (and enjoying the hell out of it) - it's easy to see that the team there is much more committed to the ideology (albeit more in the pathetic Tumblr degenerate soyface sense) - but there's still a hell of a lot of quality and attention to detail in the gameplay, story and world-building itself. Or again, Owlcat - PF:K was just ritually woke and it was partly the product of people who wanted to do the right thing as they've been told it is; but it looks like the next game is going to be more of the woke level of POE2.

All sorts of gradations and mixtures of motivation. The one thing in common is that if you don't manifest at least some ritual genuflection to today's quasi-religious political agenda, you might get your game made, but you sure as hell won't get it publicized. And pretty soon you won't even get to get it made, and if you're a "nice guy" type, you'll be edged out by the higher social-status-lunatics who want gay luxury space communism.

It's just terribly, terribly sad. And tiresome.

 

[Volourn]

I remember back in the day when I could watched Beverely Hills Cop or Fresh Prince of Bel Air or Alien or Die Hard or Back to the Future and simply enjoy them for the good entertainment they were. Now, too much focus is on the actors' race, gender, and pronouns. HOLY FUKK.

How long til 'heroes' in media have to announce their pronouns and accept others' pronouns before they are considered heroes or else they could literally save the entire galaxy but they call that one dude, sir, when she prefers 'ma'am and therefore isw ritten off as more evil than the villain.

Live and let live.

And, it is mostly white trash that pushes this kind of bullshit.

I believe in equality therefore I am extreme right wing, racist, and sexist even though my views have largely changed very little.

 

[ikarinokami]

very good game, love the interface. seeing the die rolls, makes it so much better.

 

[Latro]

I will NOT play this game until I'm presented with genetic makeup test results from all the developers, it's below my gamer dignity to play anything made by non-japanese

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Their attempts at justifying their antiquated and long left-behind-by-the-majority world views

But I thought blacks and trannies were oppressed all over the world

 

[jac8awol]

I'm enjoying the combat, exploration and adventure parts. Pretty much the least you expect from a D&D product. The girl power diversity just lends a phony air that stops a good product from being great.

"Look how tolerant and diverse we are guys! After hundreds (thousands?) of years mingling perfectly together we've still managed not to fuck each other at all, thereby perfectly preserving our racial heritages!"

If developers aren't smart enough to process this simple little nugget of racism, what hope is there for good story or character writing? Never mind, as long as I can genocide some lizardfolk it's all good.
p.s. I'm quite disappointed at the blatant levels of faggotry in this thread

 

[Mordru]

I guess this is alright but, as I'm really a slow kind of guy, this is making me realize that the Codex truly has a Dungeon and Dragon fixation. The love for generic fantasy shit is truly without limits. I haven't played fucking DnD since I was 13, and I'm now 22. I don't know what it is with this nonsense. I guess 80% of it is artificial grognard nostalgia ; do you fuckers even play DnD? What's so great about it? How is it not inferior to a lot of other pnp systems? You pick up your little sheet and your little dices and you level up your little character? What the fuck are you doing?

I've been playing in a 1e game during conventions (in person when we weren't told to stay in our homes, online during this fuckery). Early rpg's were less about the combat and more of having your character find alternate solutions to problems. The combat in 1e has not aged well, but the original Dungeon Masters guide is still an amazing tome to arbitrate games.

Honestly, I'm burned out on all current rpg fantasy combat. I'm not going to buy Solasta (even though a part of me wants to) because I know all it will be is a grindy slog from combat to combat.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I guess this is alright but, as I'm really a slow kind of guy, this is making me realize that the Codex truly has a Dungeon and Dragon fixation. The love for generic fantasy shit is truly without limits. I haven't played fucking DnD since I was 13, and I'm now 22. I don't know what it is with this nonsense. I guess 80% of it is artificial grognard nostalgia ; do you fuckers even play DnD? What's so great about it? How is it not inferior to a lot of other pnp systems? You pick up your little sheet and your little dices and you level up your little character? What the fuck are you doing?

So you were, what, 8 years old when you registered on the dex?

 

[Saark]

These kind of games/properties usually come along with a bevy of "design decisions" representing different pillars of Modern Western "Enlightened Progressive thought", like ugly and armored up "stronk" female characters in charge of Traditionally male institutions (Muh Feminism), a bizarre obsession with forced "diversity" (as re-defined in the past dozen years as opposed to "biodiversity") when it doesn't make sense and comes at the expense of logical world building and verisimilitude (Muh Racism)

Or, ya know, its because its a fantasy setting which is purposefully set up in a way to offer diversity because otherwise it would be fucking boring, especially in a setting like D&D. Or the fact that merit-based positions are set by characters with completely arbitrary ability scores that are supposed to define their characters strengths and weaknesses. RPGs from their very inception were supposed to be about wish fulfillment and escaping reality, not being a 1:1 copy-paste of late 2000s/early 21st century politics and cultural norms.

I'm guessing you were fuming at the thought of Amiri being a strong (as in starts with STR19) barbarian in Pathfinder. I hope you're as outraged about the fact that a man is Archmage of Menzoberranzan, when we were repeatedly told how Drow Society is ruled by women. Or how the Head Mistress of the Academy of Shapers and Binders in Mask of the Betrayer was in fact a woman. How dare they put a woman in charge of it, when most wizard-academies over the last couple of centuries were always men.
Oh wait, its fucking makebelieve and the fact that some things go against the grain isn't a signal that "more women should be in power" or some other cultural or political virtue signalling, but its simply a design choice. A game can have a predominantly female cast in high-power positions, and when the backstory and how they got there supports it, it can still be an amazing game. If the writing is shit and people have jobs they shouldn't have due to incompetence, thats another issue entirely and has nothing to with SJW propaganda being put into video game. But no justification should be necessary for a character in a video-game to hold a specific position.

But hey, I'm sure you're LARPing through Skyrim and complain about there being way too many Redguards who steal the Nords jobs as well, or that a town might have a female Blacksmith, which I'm sure is a thing of impossibility and never in the history of mankind has there been any.

distracting social commentary about real-world as opposed to in-setting issues to point out that something "is okay" and random Virtue signalling with things like Pronouns, Flags (Muh LGPPQ), so it's not very hard to notice and I'm not very surprised how it turned out.

I agree that those can be pretty offputting, but you will always have these in a game that explores political or social topics. Not every "this tyrant is a bad person" is a reference towards Trump, not every "this minority is being oppressed" has anything to do with blacks or jews and how those things are human travesties. More often than not it is simply part of worldbuilding and you cannot realistically avoid any of these subjects without compromising the quality of the games narrative. Elves have been oppressed or even enslaved in some settings and yet people don't always draw a comparison to blacks and jews, same as "Skyrim for the nords" isn't supposed to say anything but the fact that the people there are upset with their leadership and the growing influence of certain cultures at the cost of the native population.

 

[Kalin]

What in the fuck is wrong with that guy's neck!

This is his mum:

 

[Azdul]

That said, I thought about writing a long winded post about how far left extremists and their worship of degeneracy is ruining entertainment, but I can't be bothered. Just this: Fuck every single miscreant that attempts to normalize or even glorify mental illness.

Whole D&D is and always was a leftist conspiracy to corrupt the youth. Since 3rd edition they are not even pretending that D&D thing is not about devils and demons worship.

 

[Dungeon Lord]

I know all it will be is a grindy slog from combat to combat.

I have been playing Solasta for 5 hours and there was 5 minutes combat so far.

The camera, the grafix, the UI, the cutscenes, all terrible awful shite.
Why cannot they make a simple town like this:

 

[Baxander]

This is not a historical game!
Thought that was pretty obvious. Fantasy settings don't have to adhere to anything, they "just" have to be internally consistent.
Mind you, the Solasta setting might totally fail at that, I don't know, but I'll find out at some point when I have the time to play it...

I know, but we are shaped by our own history.

Oh, so now we're down from "blacks shouldn't wear armor" to "black women shouldn't wear armor".
Going for both sexism and racism now, are we? If you want to add something homophobic to get the trio of assholery, I'd suggest adding "but maybe she's a tranny".

They can, but it's going to be one of those things that immediately break me out of the world. Notably, Pallegina from Pillars of Eternity did not, but that's because the feathers already make her look weird and unusual, thus she just feels like another part of the world.

Anyway this is all a distraction from the point that the inclusion of so many black and brown persons is a signal of their political allegiances: making an active commitment to ensuring the population of their game is ethnically diverse. Count the number of platemail-clad black people in combat crawlers from the 80s/90s/00s. Non-existent in the gold box games and the Icewind Dales and ToEE and Knights of the Chalice and the likes as far as I can tell, except for Deric in Secret of the Silver Blades, which is considered one of the worst for other reasons. These kinds of thoughts did not cross the minds of devs until the 10s.

As expected, the team looks like this:

Token black guy, token asian guy, two presumably-French women, hella diverse.

It is 2021!
Why do I need to rotate and move and fight the camera always?

Because a lot of terrible people insist on being able to rotate the camera in pseudo-iso instead of having a static camera with levels designed to be viewed at only one angle. Even Owlcat sabotaged their Pathfinder sequel with this nonsense.

Good thing though is that all those middle aged/young adult white males are probably gay, so they get a pass. Stay woke brothers!

 

[thesheeep]

same as "Skyrim for the nords" isn't supposed to say anything but the fact that the people there are upset with their leadership and the growing influence of certain cultures at the cost of the native population.

I've always been somewhat surprised that there was/is no mass "journalist" outcry about the "clearly racist" Nords and their cry for "racial purity".

In contrast to some other games, "journalists" wouldn't even have to dig deep to find anything, they just have to willfully misunderstand what is being said. Which is something they are incredibly good at.

 

[gurugeorge]

same as "Skyrim for the nords" isn't supposed to say anything but the fact that the people there are upset with their leadership and the growing influence of certain cultures at the cost of the native population.

I've always been somewhat surprised that there was/is no mass "journalist" outcry about the "clearly racist" Nords and their cry for "racial purity".

In contrast to some other games, "journalists" wouldn't even have to dig deep to find anything, they just have to willfully misunderstand what is being said. Which is something they are incredibly good at.

Yeah I always thought that was a strange gap in the relentless anti-White narrative.

It's a weird thing about the woke and Vikings, they seem to be quite popular with that crowd. I suspect it's a kind of patronizing nostalgia, like watching the "ghost dance" of a tribe soon to be extinct; or maybe it's just their inner Nords screaming to get out

It might be a feminine/faggot thing of wanting to tame the big blonde beast too.

 

[Saark]

I honestly think that its just part wish fulfillment part "one of us" mentality. Vikings by and large have been portrayed as not giving a shit, and have been fairly open-minded in a time where the "civilized" western civilization was still very much in the grips of the church. So they're seen as this fairly progressive culture during some of the darkest times of mankind, and so they are forgiven their many trespassings same as most leftists would like to be treated themselves. They fear speaking up or voicing their honest opinions, while vikings generally didn't give much of a shit what anyone outside and even inside their circle thinks of them. That's something most weak-willed virtue signaling people can identify with.

I'm guessing Skyrim being a depiction of those values carried over some of the goodwill that vikings received in popular media.

 

[Thac0]

same as "Skyrim for the nords" isn't supposed to say anything but the fact that the people there are upset with their leadership and the growing influence of certain cultures at the cost of the native population.

I've always been somewhat surprised that there was/is no mass "journalist" outcry about the "clearly racist" Nords and their cry for "racial purity".

In contrast to some other games, "journalists" wouldn't even have to dig deep to find anything, they just have to willfully misunderstand what is being said. Which is something they are incredibly good at.

Yeah I always thought that was a strange gap in the relentless anti-White narrative.

It's a weird thing about the woke and Vikings, they seem to be quite popular with that crowd. I suspect it's a kind of patronizing nostalgia, like watching the "ghost dance" of a tribe soon to be extinct; or maybe it's just their inner Nords screaming to get out

It might be a feminine/faggot thing of wanting to tame the big blonde beast too.

Eh given that this is the garbage thread anyway:

Norse are primitive, Anglo-Saxons are civilised.
Woke agenda sees the superior actor in civilisation and technology always as the malicious one, and the inferior one as virtous. It is the American mindset of always root for the underdog made an ideology. The British Empire is insanely powerfull, so it must be insanely evil.
Now the Norse weren't really all that primitive judging by their metallurgy, and they weren't all that weak judging by how much trouble they gave the entire upper continent with their raids, but in popular culture they are the underdog. The barbarian. The noble one.
Put on top that they are pagans warring against Christians, and wokoids hate Christianity beyond belief, and you got a stew going!
Also the loose (and idealised) Thane social structure is a lot closer to anarchistic dreams than a proper monarchy, which is associated with evil aswell.
The cherry on top is that the Norse Saga's contain the valkyries, giving birth to the mythos of the shield maiden. Female warriors in history are absurdly rare, and pushing a myth of an equality of female and male physical strength is a core tenant of wokeness. The shieldmaiden is practically made for this.

Add all the bits together, and the only thing that does not appeal to a modern audience about the vikangz is the skin colour. At least about their romanticised idea of Norse raiders.