It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn’t escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I’ve seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
I wholeheartedly agree. Typically, in a lot of TRIPLE AYYY mainstream video games, your choices are “goody two shoes unscratched liberal” or “edgelord scratched liberal” with the implication that killing anyone in a moral dilemma moment (no matter how much killing happens before and after that moment) is immediately an edgelord scratched liberal choice and that status quo maintenance is the goody two shoes choice.
The Bethesda Moral Binary(tm pending). Its in a lot of games, but Bethesda in particular is so bad about that being the entirety of the moral world. Or you can be “neutral” and block yourself out of basically doing anything in the game lol.
Mass Effect Games had their own awful version of those narrowly distinguished choices between acceptable colonialist outcomes, especially in Mass Effect 2 where you must play along with the human supremacist space nazis no matter what.
I played through the whole ME trilogy like three years ago. I like them, but the story is so militaristic/fascist, not even going the “renegade” route or anything just the story no matter your choices. The incredibly lib space government are ineffectual, and only the honorable military men (adults in the room) can cut through the red tape to save the galaxy (by making hard choices).
DAE LE BASED WHEN PUNCHING UPPITY REPORTER… MAYBE TWICE?
Also the space government makes no attempt to even appear democratic. Humanity is the only council species that is nominally democratic, the Turians are literally outright called an empire, and they decide which species get full rights based entirely on arbitrary vibes. Plus they have secret police who are above the law and answer only to them.
The series doesn’t even get to a place where criticisms of bourgeois democracy even apply, thus shit feels like it shouldn’t even appeal to libs. But it does coast so hard on libbrain Defend Existing Power Structures shit
I was still a lib when I played Mass Effect 2 and this still bothered me. I was like… I was shooting these guys on sight in the last game. Where is my shoot these guys on sight option???