this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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I also blame Overwatch, that was around first and people made fun of players with default skins there too.
I've always hated Overwatch, mostly because it was so cynically designed from the start to press every button in
possible about the le sexy waifu archetypes that would get sucked in and keep paying for it.
But it's D I V E R S E in its selection of waifus! Please don't ask why the cowboy character's name is now different.
Some of them are so incredibly painfully Blizzard-generic from the start that they feel like parodies of previous Blizzard slop. "Widowmaker" comes to mind especially.
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.
What are you talking about, everyone loves and remembers everyone's favorite game Haze™️ for PlayStation 3™️ fondly! "Haze™️: It's the Halo™️ Killer!"
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.
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.
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
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.
I never got into Overwatch because it just looked like Team Fortress 2 with even more micro transactions. And TF2 is my love/hate game.
Who needs new waifus/husbandos when we already had Heavy?
Exactly!