Why does it have to go back to him being from America? Is the desire to have more diversity in a game solely an American desire?Amir Kondori said:
In Witcher 3, Size Matters
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
I read an article about the scale of Witcher 3 and somehow found myself in the comments field of ethnical diversity (Not even ethnical..just black people apparently. They're the only ones that matter after all)
Anyways Shamus, I really do hope you cover this game in Spoiler Warning. Its probably going to be your longest series, but unlike certain other games *cough hitman cough* we're hopefully not going to be completely sick of it by the end (not to mention angry enough to punch small kittens..what an atrocity!)
Anyways Shamus, I really do hope you cover this game in Spoiler Warning. Its probably going to be your longest series, but unlike certain other games *cough hitman cough* we're hopefully not going to be completely sick of it by the end (not to mention angry enough to punch small kittens..what an atrocity!)
The thing is, there's already plenty of diversity. You're just not seeing it because you're looking at it through an American cultural lens.freakonaleash said:
I said it seemed "a little weird" not that it was a fucking travesty, Christ. It's true, living in Canada has skewed my perspective on this, seeing as I'm the only white guy on my block and work mostly with immigrants or the descendants of such at my job. It was just kinda noticeable, that's all.Lightknight said:
I didn't say whether I thought there should be more diversity or not, I just wanted to know why you said the want for diversity is "idiotic".infohippie said:
Well, I'm not the one who said it. However, my answer still stands. People asking for diversity are doing so because they are not seeing the diversity that is already there. They have a narrow definition of "diversity" that only means "the kinds of people I see in real life in my own country".freakonaleash said:
I have been living on this earth for over 27 years (in Romania) and the only time I actually saw a black person in real life was when I went to Belgium to visit my father.
Poland's population is 98% white. Don't expect diversity, because in some countries there is none.
Poland's population is 98% white. Don't expect diversity, because in some countries there is none.
freakonaleash said:So the want for diversity is idiotic?tzimize said:No. Its a low fantasy setting, in a handful of lands based loosely on the slavic places of europe. Witchers job is NOT to satisfy your idiotic need for diversity, it is to represent the setting its based upon. At which it succeeds greatly. And thats the only thing I have to say about that.Objectable said:When actual racists call the lack of black people a victory, that's a problemjurnag12 said:
OT: I absolutely agree with you Shamus, it is a MASSIVE game...but I dont mind having to play if for months before finishing it...the game is just that great.
10/10. Anyone not playing it is missing out on some seriously good game.
I think I love you a bit.Denamic said:
It absolutely is.
It is especially idiotic when one wants diversity in a setting that absolutely does not support it (like the witchers setting) and it is idiotic to want diversity for the sake of it. COULD there be a black guy in witchers setting? Probably, but why there have been ample reasons given for why its a bad idead spending resources on it.
What people should want are good characters. If the writers can write a good gay character, thats great. If they write a gay/black/asian/whatever minority you'd want character for the sake of having a gay character, its not great. And usually the audience knows it. After all, if we didnt the term "token black guy" wouldnt exist.
We've already had a CDProjectRed former employee in this thread explain this.Casual Shinji said:
They're too smart to go into the war torn north. They're staying the fuck away from the third Nilfgardian war. Even with that in mind, I have run into one in game, so there is at least one "ethnically diverse"(which btw there is plenty of, in game, just sharing a skin colour, ethnic diversity is more than skin deep! Temerians and Skelligers aren't the same ethnicity, it's like slavs and scands) character in the game.
See this is the issue, at what point are you no longer an immigrant? I mean all the white people in north America are immigrants, barely been there a couple hundred years. you get the same shit in Australia.SnakeTrousers said:
Also it's just possible they didn't do any PoC because they felt it would be caricature rather than character, they go towards that with the Viking/Irish mix of the isles.
The game talks about the ugliness of racism a lot, all three do. But they don't pretend to talk for anyone not them, I think that's why they use the "non humans" as a substitute. they can't talk about it from the view of some one visibly different, but from the point of view of people treated as different by people very much the same as them.
Bravo, people. Well done.
OT:
I've got this game sitting in my admittedly extensive backlog. The last open-world game I played that I could consider content-dense was (a heavily modded) Skyrim.
The one bad thing about it is, I'll undoubtedly be juggling this game with at least a few others that suck all of my time away, like Anno 2070. If there's truly as much stuff in this game as you say there is, I might actually have to temporarily shelve all of my other games for now. But if I do so, I risk burn-out.
I have one more night off before I go back to work so I don't think I'm going to get very far in that time, but that might just be a good thing in the long run. I'm actually curious to see how long it will take me to finish this game.
The point with the dwarf in White Orchard was that people were more mistrustful of him because he was non-human. A human blacksmith could shrug and say "They'd kill me otherwise," and get sympathetic nods, while dwarves care only for money and would sell out Temeria for an extra crown or two, in the eyes of his neighbours. They're old prejudices that receded a little during Foltest's reign because it was (relatively) peaceful and there wasn't as much use for scapegoats, but during The Wild Hunt, the peasants couldn't very well fight the heavily-armoured Nilfgaardian knights, so they invent some supporters to target.Dornedas said:3 weeks straight and still not finished now this is what I call a dirty casualCasual Shinji said:
For the dwarf: I think you might be right and he only believed that it was because he is a non-human.
I think he says something about " blah blah thought I was finally being accepted after 50 years of living here. blah blah"
And for the other elves that are being beaten up. They are not exactly part of some larger story. Which makes sense since beating up elves is just something that happens because of racism. You just get the "quest" when you are riding nearby and suddenly there is an exclamation mark on your compass because some elf gets beaten up. I had that happen 4 or 5 times I think. Once it was elves beating up a human .
If you think about it operating like anti-immigrant sentiment tends to - Willis, the dwarf in White Orchard, is the only local dwarf and has no family members who would stand up for him. He would be relying on the good graces of his neighbours and customers, half of whom are starting the pogrom in the first place, and so in their determination to lump him in with Nilfgaard, they drive him into Nilfgaard, so to speak.
On the racism note, I could tell you several jokes taught to me by Polish friends where the punchline is "there are no black people in Eastern Europe." One involves an American spy, who, after the best training and the best funding from the CIA lands in the Russian wilderness, whereupon he encounters a farmer's daughter. He greets her in fluent, perfect Russian and behaves exactly as a local man would. She takes him into her house and offers him food, and he accepts, even eating in a Russian way (whatever one of those is.) At length, the girl asks him, "So where in America are you from?" Taken aback, the spy pauses for a moment and in doing so blows his cover, and winds up asking, "How did you know I was from America? Did I say something wrong?"
She replies, "There are no black people in Russia."
If you draw parallels between the Witcher and reality, with Nilfgaard taking the role of the Holy Roman Empire and Redania and Temeria the assorted Slavic states laid out before them, you'd find even less ethnic minorities there than there are now, and anybody with anywhere to run to would certainly have run there by now. There's an overwhelming sense of entrapment in Velen, and it doesn't help matters that I didn't hear anybody saying anything nice about Zerrikanians. Somehow I suspect they'd be met with as much suspicion and xenophobia as anybody else who wasn't a true, patriotic Temerian.
I only say so much because I didn't notice the lack of ethnic diversity in the game until it was pointed out in this thread. Seemed perfectly normal to me that the only people left in a war-torn European land would be the people who had nowhere else to go, or were too bound by senseless patriotism to even try. The only real complaint would be that there are no ethnic witchers, but then we've only met four from the Wolf and...two from the Cat? Oh, and one Viper. That's not a lot of witchers.
But, finally, on-topic. Is The Wild Hunt too big? Only if you play your games with the intention of seeing the end as swiftly as possible. I had the problem in Skyrim where I wound up ignoring most of the side-quests for the sake of the story not because I had any particular desire to see the game end, but because nothing particularly interesting happened in the side quests. No witty dialogue, no interesting characters, just a variation of 'clear this dungeon,' which isn't a bad thing per se, but it takes a little more to really make a world interesting. I liked Velen and Skellige. I liked exploring them. The fact that half the Skelligers had Ulster accents and the folk in Velen sounded like Midlanders made me feel right at home - and the Brummy Baron never bored me.
I think that might be where some of the allure was, at least for me. Being surrounded in-game by the same accents I meet in real life gave it more of a sense of realism, whereas Skyrim had a mix of Nordic minor characters and American major ones, and, no offence to Americans, but you do not have an interesting collection of accents. Except Letho's Texan drawl, of course, that was pretty great.
Really makes a game for me when only the anti-social, out-of-place man-robot is saying the word 'erbs.'
So what?Objectable said:
And using a post from Stormfront to show someone saying something racist is like shooting fish in a barrel. Maybe you would feel better if you, you know, didn't look at white supremacist websites????
OT: I started this article saying over and over in my head ''Please don't say it sucks, please don't say it sucks. . . '' I have it on my shelf just need time to play. Now I am apprehensive to start because I am afraid I will be short on time and fall out of the story :/
Demanding that a country like Poland only produce works that match your own country's demographics is what's idiotic (I would call it presumptive or arrogant rather than "idiotic", maybe ignorant too?). Not the general desire for diversity. In Poland there aren't even 1 black person per 100,000 residents. So the Witcher 3 is demographically appropriate to the country in which it was made.freakonaleash said:
Racists who think it is a victory for "white power" or some such nonsense are just displaying the same level of ignorance as those who think it is a loss for diversity.
Had an American company produced this game? Then yeah, it would be a worthy discussion on why minorities weren't even considered.
When you are born in the country it means you did not immigrate and ergo are not an immigrant. The term may also be applied to people who identify as a member of a different nation's culture moreso than the culture of the country they live in. So if I, an Irish blooded American, still associated myself with Irish culture rather than American and hung out with Irish communities then I would still be considered an immigrant in many circles even though my family was in the US before the declaration of Independence was a thing (something like 1622 or really early like that). So cultural assimilation is something to be considered in the equation even if the person isn't an immigrant "legally" speaking.Hoplon said:
Or, Poland has a nearly entirely racially uniform population and the game was correctly demographically appropriate to their own demographics. Do we want to impose American demographic distribution on products made by other nations? Because that would be hilariously arrogant of us.
My wording of this paragraph was regarding the people in this thread largely complaining that the demographics of the Witcher aren't matching our (North America's) demographics. I wasn't levying it specifically at you while I was responding to your belief that it was odd not to see them.SnakeTrousers said:
Like how if I walk into a room full of people here in the US I am quick to notice if everyone there is white and start to wonder why. It is weird from an American sensibility. But that's just it. American.
It was (or at least the lore of it) written by a polish man having been born just post WWII and grew up during the Cold War. What are you expecting?Casual Shinji said:
I hate the idea that this is even a thing. No - people of different skin colours don't exist in the witcher games. Why is this something that needs to be justified or explained?
In short - why can't I go anywhere these days without someone bringing up the race card?
Even if you want to do it in a "scientific" manner:
Maybe the star that circles the planet of the witcher does so in a way that gives everyone the same amount of sun exposure and thus the same amount of melanin. Maybe people don't have melanin in the witcher world and have another chemical/thing that does the same job?
Finding a problem is not the same as there actually being one.
You seem to want to an enforce a very specific type of American diversity on the game designers and ultimately the author of the books. The diversity I want to see in gaming is Polish culture in Polish games, American culture in American games, and African culture in African games. If we try and be imperialists, telling other cultures that their media needs to reflect American cultural norms, I think that is way out of line and makes for a less interesting expressive medium. Cultural exchange is about enjoying the works of different cultures, not trying to mold all cultures to look like our own.freakonaleash said:
