PrimeJunta

Yeh, get Edér. Two wizards is tough, two wizards + tank is lulzy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion

Actually I did fine against mages with backstab + Keldorn (fast Dispel Magic on demand), and vampires by using summons (Animate Dead, then nuke them from orbit).

Wow how in the name of Mog did you manage that? I was on level 5 or 6 I think. In the BB, you started at level 4 but XP was wildly inflated (because they wanted to test the character progression as well) so you finished at level 8. At level 10 I'm sure it's a yawn.

This is true. It's a feedback cycle though. If games are marketed more to non-white-non-males, more non-white-non-males will play them. Conversely, if they're marketed to white males, it's hardly surprising that non-white non-male gamers are odd outliers. I think it's worth pushing at one end and pulling at the other: getting studios to make and market games for more diverse audiences, and getting more and different people to play them. In this stupid capitalist system we have though the latter is quite difficult without the former, which is why a lot of the push is focused on changing the marketing and general cishetwhitemaleness of the games themselves.

Can I come over to break your Obsidian products? I have my own hammer.

I know! I backed Kingdom Come: Deliverance before finding out what a Neanderthal Vavra is, so now I'm going to repeatedly hit my thumb with a hammer. That'll teach them! (Not really. I look forward to playing his game.)

BTW if it turns out this was a fake... ROFL. You SIJW's are super-easy to troll. I think I gotta makes some Twitter alts and see what I can stir up...

Somewhat, yes. Definitely some genres are more space-mariney than others, but it is a systemic problem IMO, in that the exceptions tend to stand out. As a thought experiment, why don't you write down a list of, say, 30 games you've enjoyed over the years, and then underline the ones which had a non-white, non-male default protagonist, regardless of genre or whether they even have a protagonist. I just did. My tally: One. A good many had no protagonist at all (simulations, worldbuilding games, strategy games), and some but not all allowed you to pick a gender and race, usually with little to no reactivity to the choice. All except one of the games that had a fixed protagonist or offered a default choice were set to white male. You could do this systematically. Say, take the top 10 most highly-praised games from the past 10 years, put them in a table, and mark which ones have women as protagonists or secondary characters with agency, which ones have them as murder victims to provide plot motivation, prizes to be won, titillation, background decoration, etc. etc., you would get a pretty lopsided table. This is in fact what Sarkeesian has been doing in her videos. You can argue that she's been too lopsided about it (I think she has and it significantly weakens her argument), but I think that the phenomenon is very real, and that you have to be a white straight male or really steeped in patriarchal culture not to notice. So yeah, I do think this is a systemic problem. I also think the fight is already over bar the shouting: everybody from Harebrained Schemes to inXile, Obsidian to Electronic Arts is now paying attention and we are seeing much less oblivious racism and sexism and much more interesting and diverse characters. The GG'ers can howl all they want, but if they want to continue playing games while boycotting the "SJW's" they're going to be very short on games to play pretty soon. And you know what else? In most of these games, you'll still be able to roll a white square-jawed space marine, if that's your fantasy. Which ought to count as a win for everyone, no?

@Longknife Sorry, but I won't get drawn into a discussion which involves me critiquing Sarkeesian. The reason is that I do not want to be associated in any shape or form with the group of people who does that. There's nothing GG loves more than infighting among their opposition. Which is a shame because I believe there would be an intelligent conversation to be had there. I'm just not going to do it until when somebody saying "feminism" will no longer cause an instant twitterstorm.

@Longknife This may be a daring suggestion but I'm going to throw it out anyway. Consider attempting to watch the FemFreq videos without your full battle armor on. I.e., just listen to what she has to say, reserving judgment on it for the moment. She is making a case. Her case is about the representation of women in gaming. She is pointing out things that we mostly pass by without comment or without notice simply because they're so much a part of the accepted background to things that we tend to take it for granted. She does this by picking examples from an enormous variety of games. What she is not doing is attempting to write balanced critiques -- political, ludographical, or otherwise -- of the games she's mentioning. That's not her intent. And while you're right -- IMO -- that she misses the mark on a number of the specific examples, I believe she's very much right about the general case she's making. Gaming culture does have a problem with the presence and representation of anyone who isn't white, straight, and male, and most of her examples are relevant at pointing this out.

Why don't you ask him? He's answers lots of questions on Twitter and Tumblr.

Again: they did not 'cave.' They fixed something that they would not have allowed in had they noticed it the first time. Evidence: their statement that they did this, and the fact that they are and have continuously been openly but quietly squarely on the social justice side of the GG debate.

I wrote a reply but the thread got locked before I had time to post it. Fortunately I saved it: Those are pretty good questions actually. I'm not all that interested in endgames. I see culture as more of a process and find it more interesting and productive to identify things wrong with it and then attempt to change them, and also make constant course corrections in case of unintended consequences or more pressing concerns coming up. I would like to live in a kinder world: one where it matters less where you were born and who your parents were, which provides more second chances when you screw up, and where generosity and cooperation are valued more than possession and competition. I don't think games "need" to represent anyone in particular at all. However: I observe that in actual point of fact, until very recently games have overwhelmingly represented and catered to a pretty small and IMO not all that interesting subset of the population. If the protagonist isn't a macho square-jawed space marine type, she's a big-boobed scantily-clad package of fapping material, the occasional exception or half-accidental Fem-Shep aside. Men by and large are presented as characters you want to be, women as objects you want to possess. It's formulaic, tired, and clichéd, and it's unappealing to a very large number of people. I would like to see that change. Not that there won't be any games with white straight male lantern-jawed space-marine type protagonists, but that that will no longer be the default expectation for the protagonist. So yeah, if a new game is being made, I count it as a point in its favor if it features an Inuit mother-of-five and a Polynesian scholar as companions, and if the dominant technological and cultural power happens to consist of people with dark skin. I also feel very strongly that games should not shy away from difficult themes and materials. I don't, generally speaking, like "safe" or bowdlerized stuff. Again, P:E does this rather well. It references rape, child murder, genocide, and all kinds of heavy stuff, but does it intelligently and coherently. I don't want every game to be suitable for everybody. However, I would like to see more games suitable for and representing more people. Partly it's for altruistic reasons -- I think it'd be cool if we saw more non-white non-males here -- and partly because I myself find it interesting to vicariously see the world through other eyes. In summary: I observe a problem, namely that gaming culture in general and places like this forum in particular are not comfortable places to be if you're not white, straight, male, and argumentative, and I would like that to change. Finally, I don't think there is a "formula" for this. It's all about intent and self-understanding. I detest transparent attempts at being "politically correct." DA:I for example. It's ghastly. Randomizing everybody's race and making half the characters gay without any examination of what that would mean, while leaving in things like the transparent and hideously racist "Qunari = Arabs" is worse than naively oblivious racism and sexism. It's not about what's in the game; it's about approaching it thoughtfully and intelligently. And finally finally, I do agree that a bunch of people on the "social justice" side of the fence go to ridiculous extremes with this. I do not want trigger warnings on everything, jazz hands instead of applause, or the removal of spiders. Nor am I in favor of censorship -- i.e., an outside authority determining what should or shouldn't be in a game. I am, however, strongly in favor of critique and criticism, and I'm thrilled if the critique and criticism changes things for the better, as the backlash to GG has by and large done, DA:I idiocy notwithstanding. Did this help at all?

Got a source on this? http://www.feministfrequency.com/donate/kickstarter-backers/ Search for J.E. Sawyer.

@BugsVendor I at least eventually grew out of the fireball phase. In my latest attempt at BG2 I'm running as a ranger/cleric with Jan as my sidekick, and it's clearly the easiest run I've had so far. I think Jan packs one or two fireballs for emergencies but I relatively rarely end up using them because there are better ways to deal with almost all situations there. A fireball is rarely the optimal solution for a combat problem.

@Luckmann You may not have noticed, but Obsidian has actually picked a side in this whole debate, and it's not GG. MCA is good buddies with Leigh Alexander, Josh is a Feminist Frequency sponsor, and so on and so forth. The Twitter twit just pointed out something they had missed that they certainly would have addressed had they noticed it, simply because that's the way they roll.

@Delicieuxz: I'm playing on Hard too and there definitely is plenty of stuff that can get two-shotted with Mind Blades. You just have to apply a buff or debuff first. Try comboing with Curse of Blackened Sight or even plain ol' Divine Radiance (+5 ACC). Used un-buffed against un-debuffed enemies it's not so strong, but then neither is any other DD effect.

The issue is not the expression of an opinion. The issue is catering to nutjobs and caving to what amounts to nothing short of soft terrorism. They didn't 'cave,' and they won't change this quest.

Haha cool. Gonna have to give the monk another try. Won't be until the end of the month as I'm on the road and my laptop isn't beefy enough to run it... :sigh:

Yeah it's ghastly when people express an opinion, isn't it?

Ain't gonna happen. Which of course puts paid to the "Obsidian caved" line, but still.

About sums up my feelings on the matter at this point.

They're working on a standalone patcher which should be ready to go by the time physical-tier backers get their DVD's. Or thus I have heard.

Yeah pathfinding needs work. IMO it should have different containing circles for friendlies and hostiles, letting you squeeze past a friendly but be blocked by a hostile. (Same thing obviously for the opposition.)