Is he the sword?
CoD: Black Ops 3's campaign doesn't allow you to change race
- Thread starter Lime
- Start date
Principate
Saint Titanfall
The whole it set character argument is complete and utter bullshit because there's a female version of the "set character" so it's not a set character not remotely and pretending like it is won't change that. The funny thing is in terms of modelling etc it would have been more difficult to add in that female character option than to add in different races, for which is literally just a aesthetic variation of the same model. So the fact they missed it is a glaring omission.
BronsonLee
Member
I'm a goddamn Samurai Detective!
And yeah I'm almost done with it, and what the hell.
He's the hammer. It fits better.
But you don't understand they would have to make the black hero swear every 2 words and the asian counterpart would have to make the character be honorable or something.
Clearly if you're not white you don't speak plain english and you fall into a stereotype or another, the only diversity that could have made it without exploding the budget was female.
AlimNassor
Banned
Carson is the hammer that will nail the lid on on all our coffins.
You don't know what he implied, you're choosing an interpretation. I read it as him preemptively shutting down anybody saying he must not care because he's white, which I've seen from this same crowd before.
RichiRamjag
Member
Someone say that here? If not, it really doesn't matter. Your assumption of what he meant holds no more weight than mine.
Also, what "crowd" is that?
AlimNassor
Banned
The sad thing is you're pretty much right.
dapperbandit
Banned
Personally I was triggered all the way to the moon by the gender options being binary.
It's 2015, like, the current year ffs smh fam
It's 2015, like, the current year ffs smh fam
But the female is also a set character and both are at least partially based off the voice actors. I get you don't like this but at least attack it from the right angle. Both the male and female options are "set".
You're trying too hard.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
Yes the female is "set" adding another race would also be "set", thus that argument doesn't hold any water. There's nothing stopping them adding more "sets" they've already done it once, there's literally no story related reason why they can't do it again, unless the story itself is very racist and only works with a white character.
Just finish it or at least play the last level it gets much worse.
CassidyIzABeast
Member
If Volition found a way to get multiple actors for multiple genders and races on THQ's dime I don't want to hear shit about it being too difficult for Treyarch who are working on Activision's money. If they got 5B for King Games they got the 3 million to hire some more actors.
AlimNassor
Banned
OR maybe t b email developers just plain didn't care. It's 2105 it c as bright get that hard to implement another race.
RichiRamjag
Member
Jersey redguards mate.
I mean it sounds like they hired the player characters for a medium pizza and a fanta. So it can't be that expensive
ShinMaruku
Member
This is the wrong game to be looking for in diversity. That said don' be surprised by what you see. Who makes these games, who is in the management? I am certain for 70% of devs there is no person of colour in the power structure. Now it's not done on purpose but more that's what they get in applications and other things.
Agreed. Maybe they didn't care? Because they didn't think people would care but once again people FIND things to be upset about.
The black guy is called Prophet, he's well on his way to fill the magical black stereotype we see in Hollywood.
Adding another race also does whether people want to admit it or not take time and effort, it wasn't a priority. The argument for not just slapping darker skin on the existing player characters is legitimate.
Psychoward
Banned
I still played as a white guy in NBA2k my player a few years ago
Neither do you though. It's my opinion that knee jerk issues like this do greater harm than good. OP herself is projecting her own thoughts here. She said she was white, so I don't know. You're free to to be upset but then don't say others have to be upset as well. The reason so many people of colour have to say 'I'm not white, but' is because they get falsely attributed to being white.
I'm of the opinion that this was no big deal. Someone else mentioned how hard it would've been to include full campaign assets featuring different people. Maybe actually see what goes on in modern games development, speak to people in the industry. It probably took Activision hundreds of man hours to do the motion capture and facial animation for the two character asset models for the campaign over a a period of 2+ years. It's not as simple as taking their captures and then adding darker shades of skin and saying voila, we have different characters.
Motion capture and facial animation requires studio time, full direction, etc. By the end, they had the complete profile for the people in the OP. And using their faces and captures, they tried to vary it up and give you 9 different portrayal but obviously they couldn't give you different ethnicity looks without it looking like blackface or caricature.
If they wanted black campaign actors, they would have had to hire them from the start, make them go through the exact same motion capture and facial capture and the end result would have been different than the first actors, likewise and so on. I brought up Jameson Locke aka Mike Colter because in the Halo Sprint episodes, they spent several hours, created an entire set, brought all the actors, rigged them up and shot the same scene over and over and over again till it was right. And in the end, it turned out to be 5 seconds of game play cinematic at the start. Now you could argue that the default characters shouldn't have been white from the start and I agree with you there. They could have picked anyone especially since their multi-player captures they hired black and Asian and other models for the role. But cost feasibly it's only one man, and one woman they picked, and in this instance they both happened to be white I'm assuming.
It's fairly obvious why they did it too. Call of Duty sells well in the US, UK, Australia, Canada etc. All primarily and majority white countries, with the majority of buyers fitting the 'Kevin' demographic, 18-30 year old male etc. Just look at the commercials, average Joe white guy etc.
Fbh
Gold Member
So why is there outrage about this game in paritcular?
Why isn't there an outrage that you can't change the race (or even gender) of Nathan Drake, or the guy from Quantum Break, or Adam Jesen or Lara Croft or Faith Connors, or the main cast of FFXV or the girl from Horizon or Bayonetta or the Kid from The Last Guardian?
I understand and can get behind the idea of wanting more diversity in main roles of videogames. But why is the source of outrage when COD goes with a fixed character as opposed to all the other games that use one
Principate
Saint Titanfall
It takes effort but far less so than adding the female option. They also already exist in multiplayer, so that effort is about as minimal as possible.
There's outrage because you can change the gender, unlike in those games those, you are able to customise the character to your wants. They just do not to give you that option specifically, because they believe it's not worth the effort in comparison to everything else.
paperspace
Member
So they have to just because they can?
It's just his call-sign tho. It has nothing to do with anything else.
AlimNassor
Banned
They didn't think because, black people's opinions don't mean,anything to them. It's frustrating how nothing will change.
BibiMaghoo
Member
Is it better not to try and force something that wasn't intended into a game purely for the sake of diversity?
My answer to that is perhaps, yes. It would depend on how it impacted the game, if at all. It would depend if that was a decision made for the sake of inclusion, or a decision made for the sake of vision or coherency, or a number of other things.
I'm not saying games should chose to exclude people. I'm saying that games should not as a blanket rule, have to cater to every single person, because they can't. In this instance you could say it would be really easy to rectify, and be right, I don't dispute that.
I implied that people should stop posting stupid shit like "i don't give a shit about representation AND i'm a minority!!" like it's some attempt to discount all the other people of color that actually do give a damn about this kind of stuff.
it's hard for me to articulate exactly how it makes me feel, but those kinds of posts always irk me because the subtext with them always seems like it's trying to paint other poc as just falling into 'outrage culture' or being too 'pc', and that the poster is 'one of the good ones' or some bullshit
this, basically, lmao
Spring-Loaded
Member
Nah, it's he right game. Big-name, AAA game part of a series that sells millions with each title guaranteed, the publisher of which has enough money to do something like this, and which by default has a varied player base because of it? Yeah, this is as good a game as any to expect this.
Hence why I said "preemptively." And my point is made, you shouldn't be assuming anything about his intentions.
As far as the crowd comment, I'm not going to call them out by name. You can tell by the content of their posts that they aren't following the real discussion and are ranting off in a valiant attempt to defend us all.
Spring-Loaded
Member
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Mostly unrelated but it's interesting that poc, which I assume stands for people of colour, means everything but white.
After all white people are as literally white as black people are black and neither of which are technically colours.
After all white people are as literally white as black people are black and neither of which are technically colours.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
This is the Prime fucking game, biggest series in gaming, and just added the option to change the gender, you really can't get a better game to ask this for and you as consumers really aren't asking for much.
CrichtonKicks
Member
This has been a thing in all of the CODs since CoD4. At some point they show you what most of the main characters look like who you get to control (Soap, Price, both Masons, etc).
Saint Gregory
Member
it doesn't seem like character customization was ever the intent, they were just allowing people alternates for MP so everyone didn't look the same and carried the selection over to the SP.
While I thought it was strange without understanding why they set up the character selection that way it didn't put me off playing the game at all. I do find a lot of the replies in this and other threads whenever issues like these are raised sad though.
I think it's more like a preemptive response to this type of exchange
i didn't mean this
i just meant stuff in general. There's way bigger issues in the world than a AAA game not having other races in single player or coffee cups not having baby jesus on them, but almost no one is talking about that stuff.
BronsonLee
Member
Ah no.
You see it's never the right time to seek change.
If you don't get diversity it's because the almighty publisher/dev entity's sacred vision would be infringed and that is something that must no stand.
If you don't get it because the publisher vetoes it while the dev wanted it, it's because poor dev doesn't know the reality of the market and the publisher knows better and it's because it wouldn't sell.
If you do get it, it's an outrage that the PC culture is trying to change our pristine games with their PC values trying to make a mixed genderless dystopia.
It's kinda like racism, it's quantum locked.
You know there's a problem but each and every example is not a problem and you're just too sensitive.
RichiRamjag
Member
Well I know that now, but going in and reading articles and statements, it came across differently.
I think many of us simply misinterpreted these statements. It sounded a lot more robust.
It's basically false advertising if you ask me. Someone who hoped they could change the hairstyles, nose, mouth etc. will also be disappointed.
If that's true, then that's fair, and maybe I'm a bit cynical, because I feel like I so often see it with the sort of subtext I posted about a little ways up the page.
CassidyIzABeast
Member
Well clearly they don't have to because they didn't but when you offer the option to create a operative don't be shocked if people ask why basic options are missing.
Onion_Relish
Member
I don't know why people are looking to video games for trenchant social change mechanisms. It's a business and they clearly had no interest in doing anything else other than pandering with the inclusion of female operators. If you don't like it, don't buy the game. The amount of people who won't buy this game due to lack of racial options is insignificant and clearly activision knows that internet SJW's arent going to buy the game anyways.
Even if they did allow character customization, you always end up with stuff like Dark Souls where people make horribly racist characters. Alternatively, you could have one black, one white, one chinese, one japanese, one egyptian, one french, one argentinian, one mexican and one iraqi operator, and then people would criticize you for not having transgendered operators or not having a character who is a 7th day adventist instead of an episcopalean. This shit never ends.
Even if they did allow character customization, you always end up with stuff like Dark Souls where people make horribly racist characters. Alternatively, you could have one black, one white, one chinese, one japanese, one egyptian, one french, one argentinian, one mexican and one iraqi operator, and then people would criticize you for not having transgendered operators or not having a character who is a 7th day adventist instead of an episcopalean. This shit never ends.
ShinMaruku
Member
Not that company and design team. I have seen nothing that indicates that they are the right people for it.