Games

I watched some videos for the game and I'm genuinely baffled by how bad the writing in this game is. The rest of the game looks fine but most of the dialogue really is Forespoken territory. I think SkillUp put it best when he said "It's written like the HR is in the room"

"Aqun-athlok" means one who was born one gender and is now living as another. So yeah that means trans. But there's also a conversation in the trans community about if Non-Binary is technically trans. I would argue it is but some disagree and others say that while Non-binary is trans it is not a "normal" type of trans. That Non-Binary is not either gender. Sometimes Non-Binary is literally no gender. Non-Binary is it's own umbrella term. So it's not necessarily living as "another" gender, it can be living in between genders, without gender, or as both genders.

So i would say that "Aqun-athlok" is probably more applicable as binary trans as it was used to refer to krem who was a trans man. Now they could have just thought up a new word for Non-binary trans but Non-Binary is just kinda the perfect word for it. I'm Non-Binary and I actually think saying this is immersion breaking is just kinda bs. Plenty of words in our world also exist in Dragon Age. Not everything has to have a different word. For instance, Dwarves are a thing in our world. Sure they're not the same, it's a medical term, but they still exist. But the Dwarves in Dragon Age are still called Dwarves. Why are they not a different name? It's a fantasy world, shouldn't they have made up a new word instead of using a word from our world to describe these people? No, because Dwarves is just the word that fits best. Non-Binary here is the same.

Now whether or not it is written well is a better approach to this discussion but also, every trans person has experienced the exact thing that this writer describes, except it's not always pushups. I've had people feel incredibly guilty over misgendering me and done some stupid stuff. When I hear this being described I don't think it's awkwardly written, I think it's an accurate representation of what it can be like being trans and how some people will just be like that when they misgender you.

I also think calling it "preachy" is 100% playing into the narrative it's Woke because people don't call CoD preachy even though it's filled with pro military propaganda. Why is this preachy just because it accurately shows an experience that trans people have all experienced in our own lives?

I haven't gotten to this place yet in the game and I might end up finding it awkward, but I more likely expect to actually relate to Taash more because of it.

Anyway, just my thoughts from a trans dragon age fan.

This article perfectly sums up the issues with this way of writing. Unfortunately people often don't acknowledge the nuance there, and will jump down this reviewer's throat for the take I imagine.

It's icing on the cake that apparently there was even an in-lore term for something like a trans character of this species that they didn't use. That makes it seem like they didn't even study their own lore well enough. Never what you want to be thinking about a writing team. 🫤

This article stinks of ignorance and bellendness. Complaining about "modern" or "new" terms is always a huge red flag to me, so now I have to wonder, for example, whether the The Bright Sword character referenced does in fact use she/her. Oh noes, the setting wouldn't have this one word! It does, of course, have the entirety of any English dictionary other than that word, though. Just the one is icky, like all of those pronouns the woke crowd keep _shoving down our throats! But the woke crowd don't exist in that world! The whole damn world is drastically different but this one conveniently common language is almost identical! Couldn't have been that they say "are with" instead of "have," noooo, it's one coincidentally "political" word that's gotta go. That's the one critical difference in "a fantasy setting divorced entirely from the real world" where they'd suddenly not say things the same way we would!

Does this person give a damn at all and have a crappy take, or just feel like spewing another "omfg woke newspeak agenda" wall of whinge onto... er, Forbes. Not the place I'd look first for sensible discussion of social matters. I guess a click is a click.

Okay, fine, let’s see what their argument is.

In my piece, I noted that—so far at least—I hadn’t encountered anything overtly preachy or that one might describe as garishly political or “overly woke”.

Aaand done with the article! Good, that didn’t take too long.

I wish critics wouldn't even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I'm finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself "Who doesn't like talking about dragons?" or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven't seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody's really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.

My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don't do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.

Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don't address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It's well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there's no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don't get fixed on the technical backend.

On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine's performance, this is the best release of the year by far.

I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.