this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Im ngl I have lots of problems with Overwatch but charachter design has never been one.
That's fine. That was a personal taste rant there, entirely subjective.
It doesn't help that I found previous Blizzard waifu characters grating... especially what they did with Kerrigan over time.
Yeah agreed that the waifuification of Kerrigan sucks.
She was always kind of a cliche, but a fun cliche, in the earlier Starcraft game/expansion. Blizzard really, really, likes its "corrupted waifu" cliches and has pushed that button many times since, especially in World of Warcraft.
Kerrigan was basically destroyed by waifuication in Starcraft II.
I could rant for hours about a similar waifuication of Cortana in the Halo series (yes, even when trying to kill Master Chef
in a horny way that counts as waifuication)
Halo CE original sassy tomboy Cortana is still the best Cortana. Halo 4 Cortana's characterization and story was good but they
'd her too much and then completely shit the bed with the plot after that. Don't even get me started on The Weapon or the creepy Oedipal subtext of Chief/Cortana/Weapon and Halsey/Keyes's relationships too
That's what pissed me off. The character used to be fine. I still liked Durandal a lot more from the Marathon series, but oh well.
I wasn't old enough to get into Marathon when it was new, but picked up on a lot of it through references from being a Halo nerd since that series started. I should give it a look sometime but I always got the impression it was "Doom, but with a ton of lore for nerds" and that might be unfair but also might make me like it more
So much of Marathon is in text logs and completely optional/skippable, except that at one point you're caught in an endless loop without an ending if you don't pick up those text logs and figure out how to escape the cycle.
Here, this'll explain some of it. Eventually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9rMu1XYB98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQaNQ_uePFk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vurgeAkIxY
Master Chief kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything, got it. (thanks)
John Halo would drive a ZYBERTRUKKK, just like John Blade Runner
Did you hear what Bungie is doing to Marathon lol.
Extraction shooter, loot boxes protruding. Very very disrespectful.
Not yet, but do tell me. I'm ready to be hurt.
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/fps/marathon-development-is-reportedly-facing-trouble-at-bungie-theres-a-reason-that-it-was-planned-for-this-year-and-slipped-a-whole-year/
Theyre turning it into a live service that plays like Tarkov lol
I HATE THE EXTRACTION SHOOTER FAD
I HATE THE EXTRACTION SHOOTER FAD
Trend chasing is one of the oldest game industry problems and its still one of the ones i get the most angry about. Because it has demonstrably failed time and time again so even the most dumbass executive should be able to tell that chasing another game's success works almost never and chasing the bottle lightning when it does work is so obviously not financially viable. Like how many times do the old men have to learn the lesson.
But i guess they all have enough hubris to think they can pull off an Apex Legends and trend chase sucessfully.
So many good ideas got sidelined or just thrown away over time by chasing the fad dragon.
Like, Planetside's devs and publisher wasted a staggering amount of their own development budget trying to chase the PUBG/Fortnite fad and made a completely garbage game that took the combined arms sci-fi gameplay of Planetside and stripped most of it out.
I want somebody to try making a game like MAG again, that shit was tight
Fuck raytracing and 8K resolution or whatever, gimmie something with some big ass battles and huge maps and make the graphics "good enough" and give me a stable high framerate and good physics and aiming mechanics and I'd be super happy with it
I'd enjoy more Supreme Commander style RTS and maybe developments beyond it to something even more awesome if the MOBA plague didn't crush the genre.
I'm a stupid baby and don't have the attention span to remember queueing enough build stuff and microing units so I always sucked at RTS lol
(Consequentially, favorite was Halo Wars because it's for stupid babies like me and you can just play Covenant and pump econ and just smash everything with The Arbiter and keep upgrading him if you weren't playing like, actually good opponents)
Energy swords go stabby
I admit I wasn't good at the "clicks per minute" super sweaty
ESPORTS 
emphasizing RTSes, though I was quite fond of Sins of a Solar Empire for its pacing.
Ooh, I'm pretty sure Sins of a Solar Empire is the one that somebody made a Halo overhaul mod for. Sins of the Prophets I think? I remember seeing a thing about that an some of the fan made ships from the mod ended up making their way into canon just because they were well designed and cool enough
What are you talking about, everyone loves and remembers everyone's favorite game Haze™️ for PlayStation 3™️ fondly! "Haze™️: It's the Halo™️ Killer!"
My favorite bit of Halo lore is that the character of Cortana was created by a guy who paid for college by winning a He-Man character contest as a kid, and people found this out through a blog post on x-entertainment.com.
Something I wish there was more useful information stored in my brain.
lolwtf, I know a ton of useless Halo lore and behind the scenes shit and somehow never heard of that
I don't think that's the issue with Kerrigan in SC2. SC2 was ruined by Amon and Kerrigan's character was collateral damage. Honestly, in Wings of Liberty she was more of an archetypal dommy mommy waifu than in Heart of the Swarm onwards where she just became a dull, incoherent mess of a character.
Subjectively, I hated both post-Brood War portrayals.
She was really one-dimensional in WoL. Problem was that they tried to give her the same treatment as Sylvanas, where they go "Oh actually she was just evil because she was under the control of the super-mega-satan villain" and try to sell her back to us as a good person, which is more marvel-fication than waifu-fication if you ask me.
Amon killed the story so hard it's genuinely depressing. An evil so great that it leaves 0 room for any individual motivations or interesting personal conflict between the other characters, we must leave all our differences (and everything else that might make us interesting) aside to unite against this existence-ending threat. An evil so great that, once again, the only reason anyone might be on his side is fucking mind control. An evil so great that he was actually behind everything bad that happened up until this point, retroactively taking away agency and character depth from characters before his name was ever mentioned.
No room for conflict between Kerrigan and any of the Protoss or Terrans whose loved ones she killed, after all, we can't waste time squabbling amongst ourselves while Amon is preparing to kill us all! No room for intrigue between any characters, this is not the time for personal motivations, we all need to follow the exact same goal, doing anything else would be suicide.
I really hate Amon. Like I said, Kerrigan was collateral damage of Amon blocking any character in the story from having depth.
I consider Marvel-fication to be a form of waifu-fication so I put them under the same category but we could get to an impasse there if we both held firm.
I admit I checked out of Blizzard slop by that time but it sounds a lot like the bullshit Wish.com-version-of-Lovecraft that World of Warcraft was plagued with for a while, where every character was just a recipient of "corruption" until the knockoff-Cthulu was sort of yeeted away in a single patch, from what I hear.
what is your definition of waifu-fication then?
yeah pretty much that, villain as a pure plot device
When a character (either from the start, or over time) is designed to pander to the (usually cishet male) consumer's gaze and push their buttons in both a titillation and wish fulfillment fantasy way. Not always directly sexually, but still in a cynically pandering way that often gets more blatant over time.
Not exactly academic rigor on my part there, I know.
I feel like more people should get made fun of for blizzards idea that shooting lazers at women make them sexy and evil.
Agreed. But Blizzard was a cultural monolith that was almost impossible to directly criticize, even for storytelling cliches, until a relatively recent tidal shift where all the sex pestery and general assholery in those offices came to light.
I guess I have to give them credit for having non-white characters who mostly aren't teenagers or early 20s, but most of the women still have the same
body type (and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly, just g*mer things).
I'll believe it, and that's fucked up. It's part of that "HIRE GAMERS"
that was that mad that Aloy looked like an actual redheaded human being that lives in a post-apocalyptic society that doesn't have easy access to Hollywood tier makeup.
I have a theory that a lot of the capital G gamer hate for the Horizon Zero Dawn game series and Aloy is a subconscious thing given the themes of the game, at least in the first game. Without spoiling anything, masculinity and femininity are some of the main themes present in the first game, often in opposition to each other, and more often than not the "masculine" side is in the wrong. This kind of thing probably annoyed a lot of gamers even if they didn't pick up on it themselves.
I think so too. Faro was just
with bazinga machines that actually did what they were promised to do, and having billionaires be directly responsible for destroying human civilization and life on the planet may have made them feel uncomfortable with the status quo that was otherwise selling them treats.
Horizon Zero Dawn spoilers.
Yeah Faro is basically Elon Musk but death robots instead of Tesla cars. So him being the main villain will ruffle techno optimist and gamer feathers. Then there's the juxtaposition between what Ted Faro and Elisabet Sobeck represent. Faro represents the masculinity of the old ones, to go forward without restrictions, without care, not to show restraint, even with death robots. While Sobeck represents femininity in a sense, caring about earth, nature, eventually creating basically mother earth as an AI in GAIA to restart life on Earth after the apocalypse.Then there's the in game villan Helis, who leads an ultra masculine religious cult and is the personification of them himself, with his appearance and beliefs. A religious cult that was an offshoot of carja patriarchical society. Meanwhile Aloy comes from a matriarchical society in the nora, and is a genetic clone of Dr Sobeck, created by the mother earth AI GAIA to restore the world. So the juxtaposition is obvious.
That's not to say the games themes are as simple as masculinity = bad and femininity = good, the matriarchical nora society has plenty of flaws and does a lot wrong, but the game has an interesting way to explore both masculinity and femininity. Which all goes back to the flaws of the old ones and how the robots raising the first generation of humans were programmed, with the mother persona being the nurturer and the farther persona the disciplinarian, and how that understanding has influenced the current socio politics of the game world and the tribes that exist in it.
Also I haven't played the second game yet please no spoilers lol
spoiler
Action for action's sake and murderous contempt for the feminine, just like the Italian futurists that preceded contemporary fascism, then.
The writing sounds like it both went over the heads of most blue curtain bazingas and still had enough flavor tones to upset them anyway.
The writing went over most peoples heads I think. It even went over my head during the mid game, I thought it was really boring and didn't play it for years. Then I got back into it and suddenly it all made sense and became a lot more interesting after I got through the mid game.
spoiler
Also that happens in the game again when Helis orders the genocide of the matriarchical Nora tribe before capturing Aloy, even after capturing Aloy he still wants to carry out the violence and conveniently can't stop it with the crashing of the focus network
I think I had a similar issue in my own novel trilogy; the feedback I got from test readers ran a baffling range from "What is Megan's special power? I can't tell" (she didn't have one, unless you count running and climbing a fence fast enough to get the job first as a superpower) to "this story is too dark for me (came from an in-law that was particularly enthusiastic about fucking Gambo Thrones which still baffles me)" to "this is a terrible retelling of the Ramayana" from someone that missed the fact that I didn't like the Ramayana either and part of the latter end of the first book was a direct criticism of that story's misogyny and Great Man Theory ideology. I liked the Mahabharata a lot more and deliberately used names/themes from it throughout the rest of the trilogy, if that matters.
Yeah the pacing of Act 2 in a three act story is probably one of the most difficult things to do as a writer or creative. I certainly couldn't do it. Though sometimes the audience just has to continue on with the story and it will all make sense. But how to get them to do that is very challenging.
I also updated my previous comment after noticing an interesting thing in Horizon to do with what you mentioned about Italian futurists prediction of fascism
Second/middle acts tend to be a hard sell in most stories, I noticed, with a few exceptions where for some reason the second/middle act is considered the high point, like in the first three Star Wars movies for most people.
In my own work, I think my first book was, unfortunately, growing pains and that I actually am much more proud of how my own "Act 2" turned out by comparison.
Since we're on the subject of Halo/Marathon, I think I hated Halo's lack of satisfactory story resolution and the absence of an actual meaningful conclusion enough that I went out of my way to wrap up my own story series with great care. Those that got that far and left me feedback seemed to like the ending at least.
For a very funny and jokerfying example of this in gaming, most people consider 2009s "Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2" to be the peak of the original Modern Warfare trilogy. And I have to say that I agree with them lol. As cheesy as those games were, MW2 probably has the best story of the three.
I never played Halo because I didn't have an Xbox, but yeah I'm glad that the people who finished your book trilogy enjoyed the ending. That's a good sign.
Thanks.
I admit that sometimes I wish I started with the second book and somehow crammed in some "so you might be wondering how I wound up here piloting a mecha while fighting billionaires" record-scratch exposition after the fact.
I don't hate my first book as much as I feel that it was on-the-job training to write the next two better.
yeah i can see that the game is basically at it's core a war against the bourgeois of the past. the ultimate conflict with FALSAC being the end goal (i haven't finished Forbidden West yet just btw)
I am certain many
felt deeply uncomfortable with the treat-dispensing masters of their world being portrayed not only as world destroyers, but as those that had already destroyed the world and had come back for more.
Mei's my favorite actually.
Im less put off by body type's fitting that certain mold than you are really. And the one that does the most to me, Mercy, is my least favorite design lol. And then you got charachter like the body builder one and uh... the tall and lanky one (forgot names) that arent even waifus in the traditional sense.