Borderlands 2 "Girlfriend Mode" Helps Noobs Win
- Thread starter Cognimancer
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Two things.Biodeamon said:
1. There's no need to imagine. That's what Xbox LIVE is. That's all it is.
2. The implication that Xbox LIVE is in any way a go-to for first-person shooters is laughable to me, and I don't even make a regular habit of playing them.
Well actually, that wasn't the quote I was thinking of. So nyeh, I'm fashionably late.Boudica said:Too slow!Easton Dark said:
It's easy to feel like a target, sometimes. Any time someone makes a silly British accent I want to slaughter half of America, so I get the feeling of being a minority. But yeah (barring that one totally sexist dude you quoted) this site is like a safe house, out of reach from the crazy 12 year olds on Xbox Live.Boudica said:
This. Really, who cant play a FPS? They are the most simplest and easiest games for a person to play. Aim with cross hairs.....bang.DVS BSTrD said:
I am demeaning and I find this female.
Why did said man not refer to it as casual mode, or friend mode? I know more guys who don't play shooters than girls who don't :|
Plus, most of the guys I know who play Borderlands have girlfriends who like video games too and are well practiced at shooters, but I suppose not every guy can have such perfect girlfriends.
Why did said man not refer to it as casual mode, or friend mode? I know more guys who don't play shooters than girls who don't :|
Plus, most of the guys I know who play Borderlands have girlfriends who like video games too and are well practiced at shooters, but I suppose not every guy can have such perfect girlfriends.
After what they were trying to do with Ellie (the fat mechanic NPC), I had higher hopes for Borderlands 2. They set out to intentionally create a character that was not sexualized, not typically considered beautiful, but also never painted as goofy or pitiful. That showed a lot of potential to demonstrate maturity in handling a tough issue.Cognimancer said:
Then they decide to call this "girlfriend mode." So many things wrong with that decision, especially when it's pretty clear there were myriad other names they could have given it.
Snowbell said:
This was mentioned in the article, and in several of the posts in this thread, but it's not officially called "girlfriend mode", it's the "Best Friends Forever" skill tree of the Mechromancer class. Supposedly another tree will be centered on shields and electrical weapons, and the third on difficult to pull off tricks.Dastardly said:
Also yes, it's a bit sexist, but given that most of the point is to target your significant other (or child, or other person you have a close personal relationship with and would want to game with you regardless of skill) who might not be as serious of a gamer as you are (or an FPS gamer at all) so they can play with you without being a detriment to the team. Given that the target audience (and if you listen to "teh feminists" the sole target audience even though it should never ever be the target audience of anything) is probably 15-30 males, the devs likely envision it being used to get your girlfriend into the game, especially since it's on the "cute" female character.
Wow, the inb4 in this thread REALLY was worth it and the moment I saw the title of the article I knew it was coming, since on the escapist, any reference to anything ever remotely related to gender will always be met with a shitstorm of epic proportions.
IN conclusion, I bring you a new title for the mode:
The "person of unspecified species, gender, age, physical build and skin colour, whom you may or may not be in an loving/caring/friendly/emotionally distant/hateful/know each other from work relationship with, which does not regularly indulge in playing FPS-games but wishes to play with you anyways" - mode.
Better?
And I for one know more girls than guys who do not play First-Person-Shooters. Am I a bad person now?
IN conclusion, I bring you a new title for the mode:
The "person of unspecified species, gender, age, physical build and skin colour, whom you may or may not be in an loving/caring/friendly/emotionally distant/hateful/know each other from work relationship with, which does not regularly indulge in playing FPS-games but wishes to play with you anyways" - mode.
Better?
And I for one know more girls than guys who do not play First-Person-Shooters. Am I a bad person now?
It is sexist because it singles out one sex and suggest they are not as good as another....that's pretty much the definition of sexism.Sparrow said:
'Some folks' meaning men, while women can just sit there and be insulted yeah?
Edit: Oh look @Boudica fielded it for me.
Team Feminism.
(and yes we do spend most of our time fighting each other)
NO WE DONT OMG BOUDICA!Boudica said:We don't fight each other! We argue the best way to help the world! <3Moonlight Butterfly said:
hehehe ;P
Well this got ugly fast since the last time I ventured into this thread.
I guess tongue-in-cheek humor isn't for everyone apparently. Considering who is making Borderlands 2 I thought it was a given that anything they said about the game would be an exaggeration or funny.
Ah well, maybe next time!
[sub][sub]Why the hell isn't it September yet? I wanna play this already.[/sub][/sub]
I guess tongue-in-cheek humor isn't for everyone apparently. Considering who is making Borderlands 2 I thought it was a given that anything they said about the game would be an exaggeration or funny.
Ah well, maybe next time!
[sub][sub]Why the hell isn't it September yet? I wanna play this already.[/sub][/sub]
Awww, thanks! =pBoudica said:
The "teh feminists" bit was more a rib at the local internet feminists, if anyone gets offended by it then they're precisely the sort who gets offended by people talking about Nice Guys(tm) because they try to be decent people and don't see why you hate decent people so much. I can point you at some writing by "teh feminists" if you like, some of them are pretty crazy. I can spell and not use shock quotes when I don't intend them, just so you know.
Now, for the other part -- do you seriously think the intent on their end was any different? Do you think it's completely arbitrary that they decided to give that tree to that character, or that there was any other kind of logic behind it on their side then what I said?
There is one reason you give the "easy" skill tree to the "cute" female character, and it's because you expect people will at least mildly favor characters that they can identify with, and you are assuming that people who would identify with the cute female character will gain the most benefit (or generate the least frustration for themselves or others) from such a tree. That's the part that should really be offensive.
Especially if that name isn't utterly inoffensive to any possible reader or viewer, or else you might have an internet hate swarm on your doorstep. Unless of course, you are trying to argue that people hate your point and people who agree with you should give you money to get the message out, then intentionally creating internet hate swarms and declaring them proof of your point is an efficient way to increase funding.4173 said:
It is, but it's not applied across the game, just to the one class... The cute female one... With the poorly chosen in-house nickname (though not as bad as "feminist whore" as an internal name left behind in a single debug function that never gets called referencing the skill that let the one Dead Island character do extra damage to men -- now *that* was a case of looking for something to get offended by, given you had to pick through the code to find it, it was about as silly as the "hot coffee" incident or the "TES nude mod" one)... yeah, not the best choices on their part.Trilligan said:
Idiotic move when the feminism controversy is at an all-time high in this industry. You can say it was cheeky or satirical all you want, but it's also insensitive and foolish.
Wrong. You're either woefully ignorant of the subject, or an outright liar.Mouse One said:
Take your pick.
The percentage of female gamers only climbs north of forty percent by including every type of video game, which would include casual games. This was noted as being the case in a publication such as the New York Times no less.
Nor does the ESA publish the methodology of their data collection, nor do they release the raw data so that people can draw their own conclusions as to who is playing what. In fact the annual ESA releases, and many other industry backed surveys and studies like it, are little more than industry propaganda. Carefully cherry-picked data that has first been collected, then stage managed to display the gaming industry that paid for it in the first place in the most flattering light possible. Which is in a large part why the industry fact sheet goes out of it's way to report that women over the age of 18 make up a larger portion of the entire industry's audience then young men under the age of 18.NYTimes said:
But lets have a closer look at the percentages they did release.
If we do a little simple math, and reverse engineer the statistics that they feature on their website[footnote]http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp[/footnote][footnote]http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2012.pdf[/footnote], we will get a really interesting result. Male gamers seventeen or under might only make up 18% of the market, but that would female gamers seventeen or under make up 17% of the market. A gender neutral result as far as I'm concerned. The percentage difference between the genders of adult gamers is a lot wider on the other hand, with adult male gamers making 35% of the audience compared to female gamers coming in at 30%.
Combine the 'essential facts' published by the ESA with a wider knowledge of the industry. Social[footnote]http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/[/footnote] and casual[footnote]http://www.igda.org/online/quarterly/1_2/casual.php[/footnote] gaming audiences skew towards a much older female audience, with once of the sources I've listed mentioning a female participation rate of 75%, and I begin to wonder how much of that adult female audience would be comprised of that non-core audience that wouldn't be interested in playing an FPS like Borderlands because their idea of a fun time would be playing a rousing game of solitaire.
If the games as they're currently presented are capable of attracting a near gender neutral result amongst younger gamers, what barrier then exists for an older generation of female gamers that doesn't similarly exist for older men?
That was my understanding too, and didn't he hint that the Mechromancer will have some abilities for players that want a challenge there will be a tree for that?D Moness said:
Ah well, it has been an amusing read nonetheless.