Dissing Mass Effect Andromeda because it has diversity and equality

[Nature Guardian]

So, I have zero interest in Mass Effect Andromeda.
I never liked that series anyway.

When I heard people were bashing the animations of that game, fun was had when I watched videos and gifs that show all the wacky mistakes. I didn't care if the game wouldn't sell - I was tired of that series to begin with.

However.... I then stopped to read the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-msmx9yW5Q

From blaming it all on a female developer and claiming she was hired just for minority quota (as if animations are made by a single person), to mocking the characters because they aren't supersexy, to calling Bioware "anti-white", and so on and on and on. Almost all of the comments are about that, and they hardly discuss the actual game.

Then, a very different picture formed in my mind. And I no longer had fun watching the videos about the game glitches.

Why is it so many crappy uninspired sequels are released, but only this Mass Effect Andromeda gets bashed so much?

It appears people hate the game for "having too many non-white human characters" and "not very sexy girls".

 

[Nature Guardian]

(...Wait, I can't see my thread.... glitch?)

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Congratulations, you just discovered that YouTube comment section is full of shitty people. These are probably the same people that complained about the new Beauty and the Beast movie because of one insignificant gay character.

 

[tippy2k2]

(...Wait, I can't see my thread.... glitch?)

After the maintenance, for whatever reason, threads/people's posts don't appear immediately in the forum page. Not sure why and I hope they figure it out. Sidenote; I removed your dup thread already if you're wondering why it disappeared.

OT: Stupid people are being stupid? On the internet?!?! Actually, yeah, that sounds about right...

 

[Redryhno]

Congratulations, you just discovered that YouTube comment section is full of shitty people. These are probably the same people that complained about the new Beauty and the Beast movie because of one insignificant gay character.

To be fair, it did change the character dynamic from hero worship to hero whoreship(emphasis on the ship).

But yeah, mostly insignificant, but it wasn't something that was needed or added anything positive to the work either. Though Emma Watson was a lead in it, so it was probably fated to be poorly done anyways.

As for why Andromeda, because it's a C-tier game made by C-tier fanboys and it's using the name of the parent company and largely loved franchise to sell more than anything. I mean, people still say the same crap about everything post 1980 Star Wars.

Not saying it's good to single out a single dev, but it's simpler to blame one person you can put a face to than the people that hired her and allowed her to continue to work after seeing what she could do. Especially since there's been a large public outcry that people need their jobs and saying that an entire studio sucks has recently just been spun into "You just want to put everyone out of work" the majority of the time, even around this part of the internet.

 

[American Tanker]

I must spend too much time on One Angry Gamer(website owned and run by "GameJournoPros" whistleblower William Usher) when I can honestly say that I firmly believe that the people working on Andromeda were purely hired because of diversity quotas.

And it probably says something even worse about me when I can say sincerely that I believe that's the biggest reason Andromeda is going to be shit.

 

[Nature Guardian]

(...Wait, I can't see my thread.... glitch?)

After the maintenance, for whatever reason, threads/people's posts don't appear immediately in the forum page. Not sure why and I hope they figure it out. Sidenote; I removed your dup thread already if you're wondering why it disappeared.

OT: Stupid people are being stupid? On the internet?!?! Actually, yeah, that sounds about right...

Thanks for removing the double thread, I was gonna ask that!

So, stupid people being stupid is ok (or not?), but..... it put the whole thing in a perspective I didn't like. It went from "ahahah look how Bioware dropped the ball" to "oh my gosh these idiot fanboys are really pushing hard to cancel all progress of equality... it's frightening".

 

[The Lunatic]

On the "Bioware is Anti-white" thing.

This image has been floating around for a bit, and recently made it to the front page of Gaming on Reddit. Thus the spike in people saying it, most likely.

Now, he's clearly racist, there's not really any doubt about that. But, it seems a bit overblown to suggest this entirely affects the game and that the whole company is "Anti-white", there's no evidence that he's in any position to affect the game.

However, it certainly doesn't fill me with much joy to know there's people like that working in the industry. Racism is unacceptable in any form.

The character creator doesn't let you make a character paler than "Mocha", which has been addressed by the lead designer here:
https://twitter.com/tibermoon/status/842476969518350336

Something they're fixing, apparently.

 

[American Tanker]

*Manveer Heir being a racist shitbag*

The one thing I want to know is why this man was never called out by his employers for being a racist shitbag.

 

[The Lunatic]

The one thing I want to know is why this man was never called out by his employers for being a racist shitbag.

Honestly, I've no idea. They even let him speak to the Press about the game, and game industry in general.

If it was some random coder, or some modeller who wasn't a public face, I'd understand them not catching that the guy has said racist shit on twitter.

But, he's been the public face in several interviews. It's... Difficult to quite understand why they wouldn't have done something about that.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

What, that's it? I've seen more offensive mayonnaise jokes. This thin-skinned hand-wringing is getting ridiculous.

OT: But yeah, clearly, the wonky animations in a AAA that had multiple levels of supervision and sign-offs is clearly the fault of a possibly under-experienced team lead. One of several.

And while we're at it, we're apparently going to discount that Mass Effect has always had wonky animations. It's like if idiots got really mad at a single coding lead because Skyrim's horses could walk straight up mountains, because they were obviously a "diversity hire"

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

the new Beauty and the Beast movie because of one insignificant gay character.

What Gay Character?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

the new Beauty and the Beast movie because of one insignificant gay character.

What Gay Character?

Gaston's sidekick who was implicitly crushing on Gaston went to explicitly crushing on Gaston.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Shallow dickheads gonna shallow dickhead. Am honestly getting a little fedup of these double standards constantly pronounced online. It's time to take a bit of a break methinks. This ain't the hobby community for me it would seem.

 

[The Lunatic]

What, that's it? I've seen more offensive mayonnaise jokes. This thin-skinned hand-wringing is getting ridiculous.

No, that's not it.

That's the image which has been posted. As I said. Not the full extent of everything he has ever said.

He's all spoke about killing white people and so on. If you want more, you're welcome to go view his twitter.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I must spend too much time on One Angry Gamer(website owned and run by "GameJournoPros" whistleblower William Usher) when I can honestly say that I firmly believe that the people working on Andromeda were purely hired because of diversity quotas.

Well I don't know why they were hired, but looking at the game it doesn't seem like they hired the best people for the job. The game just looks soulless.

 

[Hawki]

So in other news, the grass is green, the sky is blue, my shit is brown, and shits are on the Internet too.

But bad poetry aside, I'm not sure how Average Joe works out that bad facial animations are somehow pushing some SJW agenda, or that bad facial animations are the result of "SJW's." I mean, okay, SQW's tend to see any divergence from the norm as being part of a conspiracy, but this is Mass Effect. MASS EFFECT. A setting where various species of various biologies have to work together, and in some cases, sleep together. Mass Effect has been diverse from day 1.

 

[Zhukov]

Ah gaming, still the hobby of choice for mature, well-adjusted adults I see.

But bad poetry aside, I'm not sure how Average Joe works out that bad facial animations are somehow pushing some SJW agenda, or that bad facial animations are the result of "SJW's."

Oh, and angle is that the "SJWs" intentionally made the female characters look crappy to kill gamer boners.

No, I'm not making this up. People have been grumbling about it since the very first WIP demo reel which showed the Asari squadmate's face and she was promptly deemed insufficiently attractive.

 

[American Tanker]

No, I'm not making this up. People have been grumbling about it since the very first WIP demo reel which showed the Asari squadmate's face and she was promptly deemed insufficiently attractive.

Well you compare the looks and anims of this Peebee character to those of Dr. T'Soni from back in ME1.

And damn, it's not even just the asari I found at least somewhat attractive even back then. You look at a bunch of the human females, too, I'd consider more than a few of them attractive: Dr. Michel, from the health clinic in the Citadel Wards. Emily Wong, the reporter. Ashley, the Alliance soldier. And that's not even half of them.

I honestly do believe that even if BioWare have never been known for their animation quality, they were never THIS bad. Not even at their worst were they as bad as what's been seen from Andromeda.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I am deeply troubled by the notion of a game "having equality" on a logical basis. You can say this game has dragons, or chainsaws, or big cities to traverse. Equality isn't quite that easy to pinpoint, however. Exactly what is the formula used to measure and find it not wanting?


To me it seems the game is praised for "having equality" due to people's arbitrary feeling of it having "enough" (whatever that means) people of specific groups, regardless of how it treats them, weather they're tropey or actual characters, etc.

In that sense, people supporting the game due to these traits (or feeling bad about them being bashed in comments on youtube) fundamentally view them in the same exact way as those who are bashing them do. There's no individuality, just groups, and all that changes is weather you feel positive or negative towards these groups and the resulting good feels and self-patting in the back for being a good person.


I just don't care if it's equal or unequal or if it "has" diversity (again, how do me measure it, how many gay trans eschimos do we need before we "have" diversity?), I just care about weather the individual chars are compelling or not.