You're doin that logic thing again, Arcanum. Stop that silliness right now!

Unrelated note: I am very pleased with Torchlight 2. Its fun value is inversely proportional to Diablo 3's lack thereof. It doesnt try to be anything that it isnt. Torchlight 2 simply takes what it did before and does it even better while addressing the minor issues the first one had.

Hey, that's at least sideways assholery in Snake's direction.

I have magistrate authority with all regards to Bein' Cool, and making comments to try and get under someone's skin isn't very cool. Snake's not asking everyone to agree with his perspective. I do, but he's not asking people to.

Snake said a game had issues. He explained the issues as he saw them. That the issues he sees are social justice issues does not give people carte blanche to be jerks about it, okay?

I agree with Kim. If the game has nothing to gain by the inclusion, and it doesn't actually accurately reflect history or help inform people about prejudices and biases, then logically, there should be no reason for it to be in the game, and there should be no reason to complain about people questioning it's inclusion.

Yeah another issue therein is that at no point does CKII actually attempt to communicate to the player that the medieval prejudices and lifestyle generally was ethically awful.

For example, if you're ruling as King, and you have a gay son as heir, you can kill that son and retain positive traits such as 'Kind' or 'Charitable'. (Granted, you can kill your straight sons -- or daughters -- with similar lack of consequences.) Despite the fact that 'events' in which your character is given CYOA-style choices are popularly used in the game, there's no 'event' or 'choice' in which your King character would express any regret or remorse for committing such a horrific crime.

That fundamental disconnect permeates the game. There's no negative consequence for ruling as a homophobic, misogynistic bigot -- and in fact, events conjured in efforts to stimulate 'historical accuracy' include ones where your ruler receives positive benefits (and comparatively few actual consequences) for condoning this.

As such, while it's easy to attempt to play through CKII as an enlightened progressive ruling Enlightened Progressiveville -- I once had my gay King exclusively promote other homosexuals into open high-ranking baronies because why not -- it's also easy to imagine that CKII is using 'historical accuracy' as an excuse to cater to the fantasies of privileged white men who wish they could live as a King in medieval times, declare war against Muslim infidels, sleep with all the peasant girls, cultivate 'perfect' heirs with exclusively 'positive' traits, and torture all the prisoners.

I'm so sorry that this discussion has offended your precious sensibilities, by the way. I'll be sure to never mention social justice issues in any context again lest you feel offended, because certainly any offense you might take is far more egregious than the offense a gay person and/or a woman might take in playing a 'historically accurate' game that tells him/her that s/he's subhuman and that they were born with 'negative traits.'

My friends and I ended up getting the 4pack and it's just...Man. I feel like the first game was a prototype and the second game still wasn't all that great. Ot's just highly annoying how every single enemy focuses on dishing out damage and little else - beyond having, say, a shield. The final bosses were significantly easier than any enemy I fought simply because, to balance out their ton of HP, they did less damage than a lot of the enemies I was fighting up to them. It didn't help that, on every character we played, gameplay boiled down to normal attacking, turning on a few buffs every 40 seconds ( which Titan Quest's approach of toggled buffs that reduce your max mana while on did infinitely better ) and having three terrible skills and two situational skills.

Man, I don't know. I always liked Titan Quest and how much variety the game had, now I'm used to it and everything else just feels underwhelming.

On Crusader Kings 2: To be fair, medieval times were pretty bad. It's why artistic license is so common in games that have them for a setting.

what am i missing here if the Crusader Kings II wiki states that the Homosexual Trait only reduces fertility by 15% and nothing else ?

You sure you did your homework on that one?

In Which Bells claims he knows more than the guy who's played 400+ hours of CKII
 

Yes.
Given that I own the game and have ruled with homosexual rulers before, I can assure you of that.

Actually play the game and select a vassal while you have a Homosexual ruler. Check his opinion of you, which is a number that ranges from +100 to -100.
You'll see an "Is Homosexual" penalty that corresponds with a negative number (usually -10 or -15 or so.)
Hence, a negative penalty to diplomacy. Your vassals literally have a worse opinion of their ruler if their ruler is female or gay.

And that penalty to fertility is more than enough of a downside when the game ACTUALLY ENDS if you die and don't have an heir.
(Translation: If you have two sons and the elder is gay while the younger is not, you have a sheer statistical incentive to kill off or disenfranchise the gay heir to increase your odds that your heir will have children and the game will continue.)

EDIT: Check the bottom of this screen here for proof, yo.

Yeah okay I can accept that. I haven't played the game, and I don't know how severe this penalty is, so I'll defer to your experience on the matter (since I'm pretty sure every time I see you playing a game on steam it's this game). Also the lack of choice in regards to how you act with the assigned traits is a bit disappointing, but understandable since you would have to include choices for every trait and modifiers based on those choices, and it would bring balance issues due to the increased min-max possibilites, and overall a fuckton of work for the devs.

I was going to mention in my original post that it would be cool if there were traits that affected character penalties (not just for homosexuality) such as "secretive" or "decadent" but I didn't want to get into hypothetical game design of a game I know very little about.

I never thought of it as punishment, just as a challenge. Especially in a game with randomly assigned traits. As for the game not exploring the themes, from what I gather CK2 is basically a setting and a strategy simulator. It's not there to explore themes and ideas like a visual novel, that's left up to the player as he or she forges their path through a campaign. The negative stat on being gay can be viewed as punishment and a bad thing, or a challenge and a chance to rise up against oppression. It all depends on the player.

Could it have handled the homophobia better? Based on Snake's analysis, yeah probably. Should it have been left out? I don't think so. Doing so could be seen as ignoring a significant issue, and people would have complained about the lack of homosexuality (because people complain about everything).


-after hitting "preview post" and seeing a bunch more posts-

Ah okay, didn't know it was that bad. I can understand if you secretly assassinate your kids, you don't receive a diplomatic penalty because hey, nobody knows anything, your kid just died of plague or went to visit a relative and never showed up. Still, having the choice to be repentant would be pretty great, and it's disappointing that it wasn't included.

Likewise having traits like "homophobic" and "racist" that lower relations with those people would have been a nice inclusion to show that their actions aren't without consequences. But here I'm getting into hypothetical game design of a game I know very little about so I'll just stop here.

On my simulation comments earlier in this post, in hindsight they are pretty dumb since the game doesn't simulate negative consequences for such negative actions. I will still leave the original comments there because writing all this out and re-reading a bunch of these posts have helped me understand your side of the issue better.

Is that directed at me? While my original post was based in a lack of understanding of how deep these mechanics ran, it doesn't merit a snide remark like this. Seriously, what the fuck?

Snake reacts like this

When someone simply asks confirmation on data that he said goes one way, while the (albeit little) research i did, showed something else... so i asked.

But it is ok to react like that... cause he is morally upright, you see?

Your tone was insulting. "You sure you did your homework on that one?" It isn't the tone of someone asking for clarification. It is the tone of someone certain they are right and rubbing it in.

This fits in with a history of behavior from yourself and others wherein whenever the subject of media and social justice is broached, you make an effort to dismiss or otherwise trivialize the complaints of those taking issue.

In a thread where Snake has already been mockingly called illogical for taking note of this content, he is going to have even less patience for this behavior than normal.

This is exacerbated by similar such behavior in another thread this very day.

A group of people, which include yourself, have been trying his patience and treating him disrespectfully.

I do not believe you honestly expected any other result.

If you expect Snake to treat you with respect, you ought first treat him and the things he says with more respect than you have been. This goes out to all of you.