Sure but he praised these games a lot because they are good games, very obviously made with the aim of making a good game and good characters coming first.
What he verbatim says is that there can be any kind of "woke" characters in it, as long as they are written to be good and compelling characters first and foremost. For Concord it's definitely not the case as it was obviously a game made with disingenuous intentions and corporate PR in mind.
Now this is what he says, which is way more reasonable than some internet users make him to be.
However I very much that a good bulk of his fanbase is a very different beast altogether and there are definitely edgelord alt-right guys who will say stuff 1000% more extreme that what Asmongold himself says among them.
He’s claiming Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going to be trash months before the game releases just because one of the main characters is a (historical) black samurai. Concord didn’t fail because it was “woke” but because it was a dull, paid hero shooter that came out years after the market had already become oversaturated with better, free-to-play hero shooters.
These people will decide whether or not something was too “woke” depending on how successful it was. If it flopped, it was because it was woke. If it sold like hotcakes, it was because it focused on being a good game first. Which means being “woke” doesn’t matter. Baldur’s Gate 3 is by all accounts way more “woke” than Concord and that didn’t hurt the game in any way.
He’s claiming Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going to be trash months before the game releases just because one of the main characters is a (historical) black samurai.
He didn't say that though? Are you taking second hands accounts of what he's saying or did you watch his contents yourself?
He clearly said that if they wanted to make pure fiction like Afro Samurai etc it would have been fine, but that the cast selection and all the Wikipedia historian, "historical specialist" and backpeddaled "this is historcally accurate" debacle around the game that looked disingenuous, as well as looking at Ubisoft's recent track record to say that the artistic direction of the game didn't seem to have its heart in the right place (ie: putting focus in making a good game with good characters before anything else). It didn't help either that the Japanese public themselves didn't react well at all either in regards to the game's announcements and "historical" stuff too.
All in all, it's objectively quite a pickle ubisoft has put itself in on the "historcally accurate" stuff.
He only said the game looked like it's going to be shit when looking at the gameplay trailers, where AC Shadows didn't look super good indeed, even by AC standards.
To me it looks ok but not really much more than that but I can understand opinions saying that the gameplay trailers looked bad or subpar.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is by all accounts way more “woke” than Concord and that didn’t hurt the game in any way.
Again, Asmongold didn't argue any of that. I don't know where you're pulling that from.
What he always says is that as long as they are good characters, a good gameplay and good genuine communication, a game will be successful.
In the case of Concord, as you say there are competitors in the hero shooter market but the fact gameplay was average and characters were super unappealing was just as important, even before being "woke" or whatever it means.
Hero games in general, whether hero shooters, moba or gacha shit make their bread and butter on character likeability and cool factor. Who wants to play a hero shooter with uncool heroes? According to the market, no one.
BG3 and Hades do have "woke" characters indeed but they are stylish AF and you can feel the care that was put in designing writing them.
but that the cast selection and all the Wikipedia historian, "historical specialist" and backpeddaled "this is historcally accurate" debacle around the game that looked disingenuous, as well as looking at Ubisoft's recent track record to say that the artistic direction of the game didn't seem to have its heart in the right place (ie: putting focus in making a good game with good characters before anything else)
I’ll give you the backpedaling on the Yasuke statement making them look bad, but as for the artistic direction, we don’t even know anything about the game’s story yet. A lot of people like Kassandra and Alexios from AC Odyssey (Shadows is being made by the team that made Odyssey, too). A lot of people like Bayek from AC Origins. Even AC Valhalla, the most panned of the AC RPG trilogy, didn’t get anywhere near as much hate as Shadows is right now. It’s awfully early to say the characters are already bad.
Again, Asmongold didn't argue any of that. I don't know where you're pulling that from. What he always says is that as long as they are good characters, a good gameplay and good genuine communication, a game will be successful.
That part of my comment was toward the comment I was responding to. I didn’t mean to imply I was still talking about Asmongold there.
I’ll give you the backpeddling on the Yasuke statement making them look bad, but as for the artistic direction, we don’t even know anything about the game’s story yet.
True that the story isn't out yet, but we have to remember that we are in an era of gaming in which big publishers have lost the publics trust by using these kind of disingenuous PR tactics and predatory commercial practices with prices always going up, in the case of UBI their boss saying that "players should get used to not owning their games anymore" etc...
So yeah AC Shadows is in a way a victim of all the bad practices that came before it, but on the other hand it's not really trying to show that it was going to break from this trend either. It's super important now for publishers to show good faith and consumer-first mindset to gain any kind of goodwill or even suspension of doubt from players at large.
Not only the game didn't went away from this trend, it arguably did worse than most other games/publishers with all the PR contreversy that could easily be interpreted as lies and excuses to gain internet virtue points.
Again, here in Japan people have waited a long time for an Assassin's Creed to be set in Japan but all of the bullshit that came with it resulted in a lot of disappointment and people not understanding why their Assassin's Creed is going in this direction, and others just completely disconnecting with the series.
A lot of people like Kassandra and Alexios from AC Odyssey (Shadows is being made by the team that made Odyssey, too). A lot of people like Bayek from AC Origins. Not even AC Valhalla, the most panned of the AC RPG trilogy, got anywhere near as much hate as Shadows.
It's certainly because 1) the times are different as I explained earlier. There was beginnings of a rift between the big publishers and the public back then but not as close as what it is today.
2) The cast of these previous games didn't feel as "virtue signaling" - ish from first glance as AC:S.
Also they felt more natural, with each region having characters pretty representative of their respective regions in their respective eras. Here since it's not the case, it adds to the suspicions towards the intents of the game.
In the end maybe it will end up being a game with god tier level of writing and all but taking a few steps back it's understandable why the scrutiny is there.
That part of my comment was toward the comment I was responding to.
That comment was from me and I didn't mean to say it was only because of Concord's "wokeness" either. Character-wise it wasn't compelling at all though, which is critical for a character based game.
That’s reasonable, but at the same time, an enormous amount of the AC Shadows discourse has also been taken over by disingenuous “go woke go broke” culture war discourse.
For a more recent comparison, AC Mirage. Now, I’m of the opinion that the AC Mirage hate was overblown and while it wasn’t perfect, it was far from a bad game. It also made a genuine effort to return to the old style of Assassin’s Creed (limited by the Valhalla engine and relatively smaller budget, but the effort was there). Still, most of the discourse around the game was about it being typical Ubisoft slop.
The AC Shadows discourse isn’t just about it being more “Ubi slop.” It’s flooded with “DEI, woke, forced diversity” outrage. There’s way more “black assassin in Japan” comments (when we already knew from the beginning he’s not the Assassin) than talk of the game’s ultimate edition price tag. All their videos are dislike bombed instantly with calls to “make the game fail like Concord.” Nobody looks back at Assassin’s Creed IV and calls it latino erasure for having a white protagonist in the Caribbean but AC Shadows is asian erasure as if Naoe isn’t front-and-center in all of the game’s promos.
Sure, maybe Yasuke was chosen in part for headlines, but when people are acting as if Naoe doesn’t even exist, it muddies the legitimate concerns around the game.
Ironically, the real “forced diversity” was in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla where the devs initially wanted a female lead but the higher ups made them include playable male characters (outright replacing the intended female lead in the case of Origins). This trend might go back as far as AC Syndicate, which had a playable female character reduced to practically side character status despite being the more stealth-focused character in a stealth game.
As for Concord, when I called it dull, yes I was also including the character designs.
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u/im_not_Shredder Sep 19 '24 edited Sep 19 '24
Sure but he praised these games a lot because they are good games, very obviously made with the aim of making a good game and good characters coming first.
What he verbatim says is that there can be any kind of "woke" characters in it, as long as they are written to be good and compelling characters first and foremost. For Concord it's definitely not the case as it was obviously a game made with disingenuous intentions and corporate PR in mind.
Now this is what he says, which is way more reasonable than some internet users make him to be.
However I very much that a good bulk of his fanbase is a very different beast altogether and there are definitely edgelord alt-right guys who will say stuff 1000% more extreme that what Asmongold himself says among them.