Which brings us to now. Naughty Dog released a trailer for their new IP at the game awards, called "Intergalactic: the Heretic Profit," possibly the worst title for anything ever made. See? Some criticisms are valid! Anyway, here is its trailer.
For those of you who are somehow too busy to watch the four and a half minutes of video, but not too busy to read the rest of this post--thank you! TO show my appreciation, I shall summarize: young girl who is a shade darker than pale shaves her head, bullies an acquaintance into doing her a favour, gets on a weirdly retro-looking rocketship full of product placement, and blasts off into space to the tune of generic '80s. Notably, there is no release date. My reaction upon watching this: "Huh. Well. That's... Naughty Dog's new game. Wonder how it'll work. Hope I can play it!"
Apparently, though, this reaction was wrong, or at least out of step with the zeitgeist, as Naughty Dog turned off the youtube comments on their version and the ones in the Sony version are largely dunking on it. Which is fine, we all have fun dunking on silly stuff, but a lot of the hate is clearly some copium for an offense that they feel quite deeply in their feelings.
So I went looking up some more info about this, to see if there was something that I was just missing, and found this insane Forbs article "covering the controversy."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2 ... mparisons/
First, let's take a moment to appreciate that we are living in 2024, an era so accepting of mental illness that you can trauma dump all over the internet and forbs will call it gaming journalism. That done, let's see what we can learn here.
I'm going to skip over how utterly chickenshit this is--"critics say say something, which is kinda dumb actually, but I'll bring it up anyway"--to directly addresss the Concord comparison. It is true that these are both Sony games. Beyond that, this take is braindead. Concord is (was?) a live service game, Naughty Dog doesn't do those. In fact they recently scrapped their attempt at a live service game without launching it, because they have no experience with that model and didn't want to support it.Critics of the trailer have called her character design too “woke” and likened it to the recent Sony failure, Concord, which bombed so hard it was taken offline two weeks after launch. That game’s failure can’t entirely be blamed on “woke” character designs. Uninspired gameplay, derivative characters and plenty other factors went into the tepid response from the gaming community. But it didn’t help.
It's fine if a story game doesn't do well at launch--well not fine, obviously, particularly if you burned a lot of money on it. But you can recoup your profit loss in the long run, because you're done with it and it is out there for people to discover. Live services games don't have that luxury. You make the biggest splash you can as soon as it comes out, ride the hype wave, then fight like hell to retain all those players over the next five years. For a live service game, A failure to launch is death. This game hasn't even launched, so like I said, this comparison is MEANINGLESS.
Ohai, blatant racism! I did wonder when you would make an appearance in this discussion. Faster than expected!Personally, I very intensely dislike Jordan’s character design, though I’m not sure it’s as simple as saying it’s overly “woke” though she does certainly look a lot like Lev from TLOU2. I think it’s odd, first of all, that the character is so much less attractive—and lighter skinned—than Gabrielle.
I can't even--what?More troubling to me is the inclusion of recognizable celebrities, which also feels very much like a Hideo Kojima game in recent years, as Kojima has made it clear how much he values celebrity.
You know who else likes celebrities? Everyone. Who else likes Death Stranding? Literally everyone. (I mean, not me--I can't play it. I am just saying) Who likes Hideo Kojima games? Again--fucking everyone. What the hell kind of criticism even is that?
Again, just, what?I remain leary of the protagonist beyond just her looks. The “smarmy, know-it-all girlboss” is the new “grizzled white dude” when it comes to tiresome video game character tropes.
I recognize that I am a tad disconnected from "the mainstream" when it comes to this, but where are all these games with "girlboss" protagonists that everyone is tired of? There's... The Last Of Us II, obviously. And there's Horizon Zero Dawn, not super recent but fine. There's Hellblade/Hellblade II I guess, she is a girl, but she can't even boss the voices in her head so I'm not sure this qualifies. And there's Max, from life is Strange II. I feel like that one's kind of a given though.
And that's it. That's the list. When I think of games that have come out recently, I think: Elden Ring (dude), Hades II (dude), COD6 (dude, obviously), Spiderman/Miles Morales (dude)... I just pulled up a list of recent video games to help me, one of them is called "Dog man impawsable"... let's be generous and say it's gender indeterminate. The point is: I have no idea what this is even talking about, but it sounds like an embarrassing amount of projection.
Finally, we arrive at the crux of it: Whitey Van Whinypants is afraid his video game will "preach" at him. It's not clear whether or not this game will, because all we've seen is four minutes of girl in spaceship, but it's a valid concern, he says, because political themes in games make them feel dated. Games like Deus Ex, or Half-Life, Bioshock, the whole Civ series, the Fallout series, every Metal Gear Solid game--all dogshit, apparently, according to this guy. Nobody plays any of those games!like many other gamers, I’m tired of getting preached at, and maybe that won’t happen in Intergalactic, but it’s a valid concern at this point when it comes to AAA Western video games. I don’t mind political themes in games, but modern politics—whether they’re rightwing identity politics or social justice identity politics—just break immersion and make a game feel instantly dated. We shall see.
And that is why I am laughing. This guy and all the youtube commenters could be 100% correct. This may well be a pompous, cringey knockoff of Guardians of the Galaxy but with worse writing, with no point and no redeeming qualities. It could be, in 20XX, a huge waste of my $70. I don't know! But they don't know either. For all we know, they decided to go back to Crash Bandicoot for this one and all you do is jump from tree to tree to collect magic beans. I actually hope that it is that dumb and boring, because it will force these morons to make content about how they had to uninstall because they couldn't take the constant barrage of woke-coded messaging from the design of the branches they are jumping from.
The venn diagram of people who are shitting on this game because the main character isn't neon white and shaved her head (and is therefore a lesbian/trans) vs. the people who are still traumatized by playing The Last Of Us II is a flat circle. It's almost as if their hatred is fueled by an irrational obsession over something--the death of someone close to them, perhaps.
