funding a vicious army of angry war veterans

The funniest part is they weren’t even veterans: there were only a tiny handful of survivors of the actual First, the rest were just dumbass fascist fanboys they found in FC bars who were all “hell yeah I would love to join your death cult and subscribe to your newsletter!” All the actual veterans were old, since they’d been locked up for 20 years and they were pretty much just the handful of officers left after all the grunts got thrown into a meatgrinder for literally nothing.

At least no one gave you any shit for executing Ron Hope, though it’s kind of weird that the FC’s only federal law enforcement agency was just like “lol, lmao” to you executing one of the literal dictators of the FC on the spot. You’d think the other dictators of the FC would be upset about one of their own facing consequences for his actions, and at the prospect that someone could come after them for their own crimes.

ultra rich CEO […] funding a vicious army of angry war veterans

Sucks that you cant kill the dickhead CEO tyrant in Neon because “essential” (i know mods can remove it and people would complain about no world impact if hes killable but still wtf) Come on Todd at least dissable the essential tag in Ng+. Like if you break a questline just make a new game+ like in souls games.

i’ll still kill the ultra rich CEO, you don’t need to have private “entrepreneurs” to create jobs

there are other ways

It’s ok impirl, just suck on your happy meal cube and remember MURICA took humanity into the stars 🇱🇷

What do you mean there’s only two types it’s like black and white

The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.

I like this but I’d like to point out these criticisms apply to every playable country in the game though not just the Axis. The UK/France were also decaying imperial powers and the minor allies(Netherlands/Belgium/Brazil etc) are completely irrelevant. Yes players can brute force achievements but its more to do with limitations of the game than actual realism, I mean fucking Brazil isn’t capable of conquering the entirety of South America in 6 years or whatever either but its fairly trivial.

Anyway point is the US obviously found itself fighting Germany by chance and a chain of events rather than much deeper ideological differences and if you handle Germany like that then the probably should do the same with the other capitalist shit countries too.

At the end the only valid WW2 game should be a USSR simulator lol.

by making it super hard/impossible, it might become a challenge. Holocaust speedrun/WAVE 250 shit.

Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful.

One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.

I’d like to see a John Brown Isekai

good news!

COD is just straight up nazi propaganda. like they’re not trying to avoid their message, they want you to join the military so you can be the cool guy that kills for the empire.

On a related note, I’d like to see a John Brown Isekai

Someone wrote one and I’ve seen it linked here before. Let’s see… ok, I managed to track it down, though google only returned reddit threads of people talking about it even though I remembered the name. Haven’t read it though.

PDX is not that straightforward, they’ve done decently well all with Vicky 3 politics all things considered. But on the other hand you can go do whatever war crimes you want in Stellaris. Yes its obvious the corporate decision making here but if the main argument is a WW2 strategy game would be better with ample depictions of the war crimes committed then I don’t agree at all.

One thing I want to add here is that while yes I agree about Stellaris having a genocide machine and allows horrible things to be done to other aliens, I do actually wonder if we can get stats on how many players play as xenophobic and see if we can get names and locations wink wink

I will say that I have a soft spot for Stellaris now because they have recently added features that allows full complete fully automated space gay communism

what they should do is make playing the fascists an extremely punishing experience. they set out from the outset for it to be “fair” and either side could win. the whole world less japan and tiny european countries fought germany. they should lose every time and the heuristics for high level play should’ve been how long they could hold out or whatever

deleted by creator

They cost a lot to make. Just like Marvel movies, AAA game studios have to infest so much capital that they’re extremely risk adverse.

It reminds me an episode of the Deprogram where they ask Noah Samson what game development would look like in a socialist society and he says AAA style games probably wouldn’t exist. I think he’s right. I can’t see games being some kind of national project and the only way I can see that sufficient people would all work together to produce a huge game would be something like Rimworld where the game is really just a framework that smaller teams all develop pieces for to express their own vision

Wolfenstein 2 gets a pass on that one for accurately showing white Americans as evil nazis.

RPG’s let me play as the nonhumans for literally once challenge (any%)

why do JRPGs always have cooler monster designs than character designs

Later in the story, once the Garleans are driven from Ala Mhigo, there’s this horrid moment where the ruling class of Ul’Dah decree that the treasures that Theodoric looted from his own people should not be returned to the people and instead invested in a new business. With Ul’Dah’s ruling class running it, of course.

The moon cat race (can’t remember what they’re actually called) are also a race of religious pariahs in the woodsy place (fuck I can’t remember what anything is called) because the theocracy that runs the place views unsanctioned hunting as blasphemous and they’re a people who are traditionally hunters.

You do a ton of quests for the theocracy, especially if you’re a Conjurer/White Mage.

drug use, child murder, nazis, etc

You might see more interesting themes from smaller devs.

I don’t see how cramming those in those would make an otherwise bad story/setting automatically a good one, or automatically more “interesting” as you put it.

I’m trying to think about what it is that really bothers me about it, and while the whole essay about diegetic essentialism and how one really shouldn’t look at fiction as if it it’s coherent and real even diegetically is stuck in my head I can’t help but think maybe that bit of literary theory is incomplete. Like I’d almost want to call my perspective on this “diegetic materialism” as the idea that when creating or depicting systems in fiction they should adhere to the same material pressures they would if they were real, that if you’ve got a system based on stratification and elitism that it should actually be realistically awful, that it should have the problems that inevitably follow from its structure. Like how in Starfield the hyper-stratified military dictatorship with massive interstellar corporations that just straight up denies basic rights to a supermajority of its population is also this nice tolerant society where there’s poverty and dysfunction but none of the misery that goes along with that, none of the brutality that would be required to uphold it, none of the attitudes or hyper-exploitation that would lead to its specific system being designed in the first place - it’s like an old Disney cartoon with happy singing serfs who like being the property of the fair and beautiful nobles because it’s all just play and there are no material consequences to poverty at all.

For all that’s to be said about author fiat and the fact that creators can just say “actually it’s all fine and nice in my world,” I can’t help but feel like that’s just doing “thermian propaganda” to copy the term someone else coined to describe it the last time I posted about it here, that the creator is effectively doing an intentional appeal to the thermian argument by constructing a world where [bad thing] actually is fine and good actually.

But then that line of thinking runs into the sort of issue you bring up there, that following this principle to its logical conclusion effectively means that a huge array of topics/settings effectively end up being locked to either “don’t touch it at all” or “depict the living hell it must be” and we have to start getting into the question of the responsibility an author has to not normalize or do apologetics for [bad thing] by treating it too casually or nicely, and what the standard for “casual” is and how much the work has to explicitly and textually condemn it as bad, etc.

And I just don’t have an answer for that despite thinking about it a lot while I’m writing.

The funniest part if this statement, no man’s sky kinda has a plot too these days. It’s just easily ignored.