It's so stupid, I don't know why any creators of entertainment do it, it never works out for them.
I know it because I've been in a AAA publisher and have friends in many other studios from big companies: they add DEI "best practices" document to the list of the best practices documens, a.k.a. content censorship based in gender, sexual preferences or skin color. And add a DEI group in the HR department to discriminate white, men, heterosexual worker regarding hirings and promotions because of their gender, sexual preference or skin color.
They do it to keep happy a few hedge fund investors like Blackrock (who demand/demanded -in some cases they did stop doing it- DEI and ESG in the companies where they invest).
In theory the woke content is to make it more appealing to 'underrepresented' demographics and enlarge their userbase, but on practice these are games that sell mostly in North America and Europe, where a super huge percent of people is white and heterosexual, and the game genre preferences between men and women have pretty important differences: games very focused in competition, intense action, gore or sports/racing appeal way more to men, so doesn't matter if you put there a female lead: percentually a huge percent of people interested on this still will be male.
So moving their target in these type of games from white heterosexual males to non-white, LGBT and women doesn't increase their target userbase, but instead decreases it. Which isn't good for big AAA titles because they need the highest audience possible. The logical thing would be to keep the white heterosexual male as primary tarket and focus on making the games appealing primarly to them, with some minor tweaks to also make it a bit more appealing -or at least not too offensive- to the secondary targets.
Then for female to make other separate big games targeting primarly them (mostly white heterosexuals, but as secondary targets non-white and LBGT too, plus a few males) in but in genres, settings, tones, artstyle etc they prefer.
And then non-white and LGTB, representing smaller demographics niches of these games that mostly sell in NA+EU would also receive games focused primarly to them, also considering their sensibilities and preferences but regarding budget taking into consideration they are a way smaller market.
Same goes with DEI in HR: in theory it's to make sure people isn't discriminated, something that would be great if true.
But the reality is that careers preferences are pretty different between male and female. In some departments like programming open job positions way over 90% of people applying are males, so if you don't discriminate and choose the best candidate, statistically pretty likely will be male. Same goes with promotions. And same with non-white and LGTB, if they represent a very small percent of the population in these countries that studies that career, when choosing objectively the best candidate statistically pretty likely will be white and heterosexual.
So what DEI departments does in HR, in addition to stupid and worthless activities is to discriminate people because of their gender, skin color and sexual preference (in this case males, whites and heterosexuals) to force having higher percents of women, non-white and LGTB even some aren't the best candidates for these positions, the opposite of what HR should achieve: the objectively best candidates for each position independently of their gender, skin color or sexual preference.
I mean, they fast foward 300 years just to kill any remote possibility of Jin even showing up.
Say whatever you want, but I don't consider this a sequel.
Yep, a direct sequel would have been very cool and interesting:
Jin's story arc was in a great point to make a direct sequel with him taking a new beggining with more ninja/ronin dark approach, and historically after Tsushima and Ikki Islands the Mongol invaders arrived to mainland Japan in the Hakata Bay, so we could have there bigger areas and battles.
7 years later there was a second invasion in Tsushima, Ikki, Hakata Bay and also Nagato, so they could set the sequel here too.
It just doesn't look like a game that's been in development for 5 years.
Well, they released GoT in July 2020, but also GoT Legends in October 2020 and the Ikki Island expansion + Director's Cut + PS5 version in August 2021. There's also the PC port but that one was outsourced to Nixxes.
We also only saw a small part of the game, it may have many new features and content we didn't see in addition to the many improvements and additions we saw, which maybe specially in visuals may not be as flashy as we use to get from big Sony AAA games.
