Quoting: rambo919I have been arguing in good faith but it seems like it's gotten everyone upset at me because I have surprised them with idea's they find so shocking it's led to threats and insults both veiled and outright.... which is not in good faith.

I'll just shut up then, have a good day and remember to avoid mirrors.

EDIT: I generally don't react well to bullies who abuse their power to disingenuously force a consensus, take that as you will.

No one is forcing a consensus and no one is surprised at your [sic] "idea's"—myself and others disagree, are unpersuaded by your line of argumentation, and the reasoning and presentation of evidence that supposedly supports it. You are unable to present anything that supports your wild assertions about people and history. You have not taken any steps to meaningfully engage with the counterpoints raised other than us that the way you think is right because ... that's the way you feel and think. Instead you have presented yourself as some sort of truth-telling martyr with this post, whose ideas go unheard and dismissed because they are shocking and the other people here are too inflexible and mean and not ready to hear the "truth" (which, of course, you are undoubtedly right about).

The far likelier scenario is that the complete lack of evidence from you or the sweeping assertions about nefarious—but unproven to even exist—groups and their influence on games, psychology, society, history and all the rest fails to pass the bar of reasonable discourse. No further amount of self-pitying dismissals nor passive aggressive insults will change that.

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Quoting: rambo919I also thought the way you do when I was younger, now I know better and have stopped playing certain games or doing certain things in games.

I'm just going to quote this bit to emphasize it that everything you've said in the comments seems like a you problem. Your pessimism about human nature, cynicism, perception of a "woke" agenda and other unprompted ramblings and creation of strawmen to pillory is a reflection of you, your values, your thoughts and not of anyone else in this thread let alone society at large and, certainly not, civilization (either in reality or in video game form). Most people are able to distinguish reality from fiction and to insist otherwise comes close to the ludicrous and scientifically debunked arguments made about violence in video games leading to real violence. I'll add to what was said earlier: your armchair psychology might be true for yourself but in no way can you speak for humanity at large.

Going point by point on all the outlandish things that you've said about games and the people playing them would take too long. I'll instead focus on a few quick things:

• Civilization VI does have slavery. It's not called "slavery" because that is a broad term that can mean many things in different historical contexts but anyone who can think critically (and read the in-game civilopedia) knows what's up. Policy cards such as corvee, ilkum, serfdom, and others representing various aspects of forced labor and discriminated classes are implementations of forms of slavery. To feature it more "prominently" (or, indeed, gratuitously) is ahistorical in my opinion and it being shown in these games as a fact of life is far more faithful to how societies dealt with the issue. Nobody freaked out or complained as you might imagine. Likewise, no one really complains about this sort of thing in other games like Old World, Europa Universalis etc.
  


• Similarly, there hasn't been any sort of backlash that I've ever seen about the ability to raze cities or commit genocide on whole civilizations, let alone the forced conversion of religion and inquisitors.


• Civ 6 (and 5) does have things like cultural pressure that makes cities break away and cultural bomb mechanics in some instances that change ownership of tiles without warfare. It's not the same system but sequels of games do tend to change things and try out different approaches. The important bit is that there's no outcry about that either.


• Civilization is informative and even educational and they hire historians who advise them on things. This is something mentioned in their longer video that I linked and Liam then added. That it is an entertainment product and a game, ultimately, does not mean that it doesn't strive to represent history—to a fair extent—as we understand it.


• The approach of having civilizations potentially change into others is, as mentioned by others, not historically inaccurate. An example is given in the video about those in the British isles going through various invasions and cultural shifts and ending up as what they are modern times—similar things could be said for the French (Gauls, Romans, Franks, and all the regional cultures), Italians (Latins, Germanics including Goths, Normans in the South), Chinese (very many invasions and different groups in charge), Egypt (Old Egyptian, Greek, Arab), Russia (do I really need to keep listing the obvious here?), and many many others. History, as the civ devs are saying, is layered and engaging in optional shifts during a game depending on circumstances is not very far-fetched. Whether it's a fun mechanic is a different debate.


• Insisting that "Romans remain Roman and the Zulu, Zulu" is incredibly deterministic and is not better than your alleged (and unfounded) "presentism". Cultures change significantly in terms of language, social norms, religion, law and everything else. A modern Greek person has very little culturally common with someone who lived in an ancient city state; the late Roman empire was culturally and functionally radically different than the republic thousands of years prior; modern China is very different to that first state. If such radical change happens consistently in real history, why should a video game sandbox develop in the exact same way?

It's fine to not like Civ or even disagree with the direction a game has taken but you can do all that without relying on unsubstantiated allegations and political biases. And as a moderator I'm telling you that going on and on about perceived culture war issues that seem unrelated to the game (and reality!) will not only not win you any friends but will likely see you eventually banned. Stick to arguing in good faith about games and related topics and not going off in unprompted rants about whatever imagined groups that are ruining everything or that imagined outlooks are "disrespectful to the ancestors" whatever that means.

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Those curious may want to check out the showcase video that goes into the big changes with the game. Seems to be adapting a few ideas from Humankind and giving them their own twist—just as well as I disliked the execution of most of those things in Humankind. Some of the changes mentioned in previews I'm not so wild about and the diplomacy potentially sounds annoying. But, overall, I'm cautiously optimistic for this one. The explanations given by the team sound reasonable and the game looks engaging. Though, ouch, that preorder price is steep. I'll blame 2K for that one.

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This is a reasonable, civil comment because Liam expects nothing but the best from GOL's community going by his words elsewhere ... unlike the exchange of these overpaid suits. I love it when lawsuits force disclosure of the inner workings of the industry; everything is needlessly secretive and everyone seems obsessed with having a degree of control over their image; everyone would be better off if there was more transparency in general, with things like salaries, working conditions, sales, publisher contracts, and more were known. Instead, the crumbs we get are largely either due to bragging/spin or because of courts compelling the release of information.

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No problem supporting the small MacOS userbase before he got into a spat with Apple over money though, eh? All the talk of open platforms being important just means that he wished to control everything himself. You're an odious hypocrite as always, Tim.

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The demo was an absolute treat. Love the aesthetics and the feel of the gameplay, the shootouts are really intense and fun. And the blog post has me confident that the rest of the game will be as good or better, so I'm looking forward to the end result. Never thought that one of my most anticipated releases of 2024 would be based off Doom (via GZDOOM.) Goes to show how awesome free, libre, and open source software is

I'm fairly neutral about Early Access—I've had both good and bad experiences, much like with "full" releases—but I'll likely hold off getting it right away, because my backlog is huge as is and I only ever manage to clear stuff from it by playing singleplayer games in as few sittings as possible. Otherwise my attention is bound to get stolen away by life or other games

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Haven't played a Blizzard game in a decade and a half but curiosity (and the price of free) got the better of me. Runs well and haven't seen any stutter (probably due to Mesa's GPL) and the couple of matches I played were engaging enough. I could see myself casually playing this from time to time, especially with friends. That said, I'm too old and my free time is too much of a premium to ever care about battle passes and seasons or, for that matter, heroes, skins, and all that other shiny stuff

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Quoting: GuestAlright, I actually wasn't aware of either of these. So I'll go with the "corporations are our friends" approach and say that they have active interest in blocking these projects because they were remakes, and they are/were potentially remaking games.

At the end of the Sega article, they posted that Sega released a port of Streets of Rage 2 the next day.
As for Capcom, I believe they've recently put out a survey asking if fans want remakes of non-numbered entries or something. So it's quite likely that their own Code Veronica Remake is in development (even though the fan remakes presumably would've been closer to the original games).

I'll admit that I've lost in this case, but I don't think either company has shut down fan games that aren't remakes (though, I'm clearly going to have to do research on this topic).

Yes, Nintendo's attempts to stop fan sequels, remakes and the like is fundamentally different because ... reasons, I guess. Well worth singling them out. Capcom has shut down RE remakes of all sorts year before their own products came out (2, 4 come to mind). Look it up. Don't even get me started with Sega (I would recommend a video from the channel I recommended on Sega and IP, incidentally). You won't convince me that this isn't just hypocritical apologetics without evidence.

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Quoting: GuestAll game corporations don't act like this. [...]

This is a tiresome trope. This Capcom? This Sega? They are not your friends. Nintendo is not special, they are just blunter about their copyright enforcement.

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I'll forever be bemused by the special hatred Nintendo seems to attract from corners of the internet; they simply act like any other corporation; corporations are not your friend and are businesses first—including Valve who notified Nintendo about Dolphin on Steam and set the ball rolling.

Emulation is also legally shakier than most people realize and I'd recommend anyone curious as to the why and how of this whole fracas watch this video from an actual lawyer. There's good historical context there that gets omitted or distorted in most discussions about emulation.

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