For several years of build up, there was discourse surrounding the sexualisation of the main character. The usual thing of games "journalists" saying her figure is offensive to women, only wanksters will play this game. And the studio, even up til a few weeks ago, maintained they would not censor. The reviews were pretty good. Even the reviews that mention not liking the sexualised stuff admitted the game is good.
The game released to a day one patch which changed many outfits to be less revealing. Less thigh shown, reduced boob window size, less cleavage. This game has been a battlefield for the culture war for years. Gamers were buying it partially because of the sexualised stuff, as a way to stick it to wokeness. Gaming journos and similar were criticising it for being overly sexualised. Now we're in a situation where they've pissed off the gamers by censoring things; but they've pissed off the people who were turned off from the game anyway due to too much sexualisation.
There's a petition to uncensor it. It's got over 15k signatures in a day or so. It's lead by Mark Kern aka Grummz, a former Blizzard dev turned Gamergater and anti-woke campaigner. He wants 100k signatures, to be printed out, to be delivered to the Korean dev's office and Playstation's North American office. He is of the mindset that Sony forced the developers to censor the game, and he sees no wrongdoing by ShiftUp itself (the devs).
I don't usually pay much attention to the gaming culture wars stuff, not since the first month or two of Gamergate. But this is quite an interesting situation. By pissing off both the anti-sexualisation people and the horny people, they have let politics overshadow the game's merits. The petition site is funny because the featured supporter videos feature the most autistic looking stereotypical people who would drop £70 on a Korean titty soulless Soulslike.
Fundamentally, since the very start, I've really never seen the argument as all that valid. Not everything has to be for everyone. It's okay for a product to be marketed for a certain demographic. And it's okay for other products to be marketed towards other demographics.
I think the problem is that when we really dig down to it, the people who make all the noise about this sort of stuff are fine if it's the kind of sexualisation that they like. They just don't want it to be the sort of sexualisation their straw-neckbeard out-group likes. They are not arguing in good faith when they use all the rhetoric about sexualisation being exclusionary or whatever, they just want to have it their way, for whatever reason. A lot of it is completely cynical and the only reason we hear any of it is because some bigwigs out there see the pie chart of the gaming (and wider nerd culture stuff) market, and desperately want to make more money by increasing the pink slice- So it's obvious why stuff like titty waifus look problematic.
The way I see it is that that's all good and well, but like all identity politics, it has its limits where it comes up against reality. We can bend over backwards to make these spaces welcoming and respectful and appealing to women, but in a hundred years of trying, no matter what we do, we're still going to see the number of men buying Warhammer outnumber women 10 to 1.
I've seen only those two screenshots of this game and I can confidently tell you all that it's shite. I know nothing about it, but it is obviously completely and utterly shite.
>>26391 The people complaining about the uglification of women in games are fucking idiots. The woman in that video talks about how humans innately prefer beautiful characters, and that the woke crowd are projecting their ideals upon character design. I think there's nothing wrong with ugly characters. Making Lara Croft or Cammy ugly would be stupid. But something like Returnal, which had a very typical middle aged looking woman as the protagonist, I didn't feel put off because I couldn't wank to her. And one could argue that the Korean team making their characters tight arsed, big titted, sexy ladies are projecting their own ideals on the character. It's just the Koreans think she should be pretty, and the wokies think she should look like the average woman you'd see in an American shopping mall.
But then censoring this game is stupid, and as >>26388 says, not everything is for everyone. It's an M rated game, it's specifically for an adult audience, more nudity has been shown in The Last Of Us Part 2 and Baldur's Gate than in Stellar Blade. I don't think they should change the protagonist of the Horizon games, even though I find her boring and annoying. And I would totally understand someone not wanting to play the Yakuza games because of the excessive machismo of essentially every major character, but would not want that to be changed just to appeal to people put off by the blokey nature of that series.
The important thing is that I've found a way to feel superior to both.
The whole K-Pop aesthetic is fucking weird. They look like uncanny valley dolls with all the whitening products and plastic surgery, but this is what makes the true gamers tingle so I guess that makes it right.
And it's also what makes Bethesda modding scenes so fucking boring a lot of the time I don't want another fucking titty outfit mod fuck off you boring gooning fucks.
Don't see the point of covering up the titties in this, it hardly changes anything aside from being THE EASIEST FREE MARKETING POSSIBLE.
what this has always been about is co-opting other peopels space and right to enjoy their space. If the Temperance movement hadn't decided no one else was allowed to drink alcohol no one would have had a problem.
>>26388 > I think the problem is that when we really dig down to it, the people who make all the noise about this sort of stuff are fine if it's the kind of sexualisation that they like. They just don't want it to be the sort of sexualisation their straw-neckbeard out-group likes.
Stop liking what I don't like. basically. The NieR series, including Automata, is beloved by many and Bayonetta seems to get a pass with all but some niche people. The brouha over DoA:BW has all but been forgotten. What all those have in common, though, is an honesty about what they are and want to present. From what I've read about Stellar Blade, it should be roughly in the same category.
Having recently re-installed PUBG to find its item shop advertised by scantily clad teenagers and women and feeling how they grab and direct your attention, I'm starting to look more favorably on the arguments against sexualisation in videogames. That's not to say games shouldn't have attractive or provocative characters, only that it's distracting. I don't want the horny circuit in my brain to be triggered so often - I don't want to be influenced by someone elses idea of sex.
Sure thing, so I wont use the ingame shop often, except that every splash screen between games shows prominantly these colourful characters attired in boob and crotch windowed clothing.
It's notable how they trigger the dopamine or whatever with each game, reminding you there's more bare skin in the item shop - go on take a look, you can buy it!
I bought the game a couple of days ago. I played the demo pre-release and didn't like it, but wanted a good action game and wanted to check out the controversy.
It's a really good game. Some bad elements (platforming controls), but the setting is cool and combat is really fun. I'm not sure why people were calling it a Soulslike, when it has effectively nothing in common with Souls other than it uses melee combat and has dodging/blocking. It feels more like Devil May Cry but in more expansive environments.
Pic related is an outfit you can unlock after the first time going to the hub location. This is post-censorship. Makes the controversy seem a bit silly. Like that the outfits really weren't changed for puritanical reasons, but just aesthetics. If they were censoring to protect women, this one wouldn't have made it in.
