Is everyone enjoying rolepalying a genocidal plunderer?

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鬼殺し wrote:

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KalAthar wrote:

Well to be fair everyone is thinking about historical similarities only skin deep (which is a reflection of their own need for stereotyping "outrage").

The Vaal were not the low tech rubes being taken advantage of by a more more powerful culture in this scenario, they literally made a magic version of skynet and destroyed themselves... the "conquistadors" here are more like mad max-esque scavengers of that more advanced tech.

"But they were brown and looked sort of like a real culture" is all window dressing, and you should be ashamed of your own shallowness.

We didnt choose that window-dressing, and the people who did tapped a bunch of cliches to do it, thereby cheapening any depth behind it.

Nice try though. Bet you were proud of yourself in cleverly reversing things.

Dont be.

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johnKeys wrote:

Imagine if Cortés had Arc Traps.

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鬼殺し wrote:

As usual, my wonderful girlfriend summed it up nicely when I showed her the Incursion artwork. She has some artist friends in the industry (bioware and blizzard are the two I can think of on the spot), so she's a bit more sensitive to this stuff than some of us.

Her reaction:

"So they've made the invaders the good guys, and they've made the people being invaded the bad guys...uh, that's not good."

Even though we know the real-world historical details that inspired Incursion are a lot more grey than that, this is the essence of Incursion.

In regards to why this is so significant, here's something that we need to remember: the Karui represented the Maori, who although never really invaded still had to deal with encroaching European forces. At the same time, Oriath represented those European forces, fiercely colonial, very white, theocratic and rather fond of indigenous people as slaves. You do remember who was the bad guy in this original PoE scenario, right? Hint: the Karui didn't have nazi-style symbolism.

GGG gave the Karui depth and ambition and a desire for revenge. The Karui might have eventually been wrong in which gods they chose to worship, but at least we understood the Karui motivations. Kitava might be the bad guy but who can blame entire generations of slaves for finding him appealing if he was the enemy of their enemy's god, Innocence? Even before that revelation, we had diverse Karui npcs in Maramoa, Haku, Siosa and Lavianga; hell, we have a Karui player character, giving us a primary perspective of the Karui's place in Wraeclast and Oriath. PoE was a game made in a way ONLY New Zealanders could have made it, because only in NZ did you have this mixture of warlike natives, colonising outsiders and the varying resistance/acceptance responses by the Maori tribes. No other studio could have given us the Karui the way GGG did.

In that light, Incursion seems positively tone-deaf. TencentGGG are supremely ignorant to anything but the surface level of what Incursion might represent, and they clearly made no effort to try to learn any of it.

Were Incursion a movie, it'd be slammed with so many rightful accusations of racial stereotyping and tone-deafness it's not funny. It might have been okay in the 80s with stuff like Indiana Jones but we're way past that. But since it's safely tucked into a bubble largely populated by insular gamers not really known for grasping cultural nuances or the implications of art, it's not even a blip on the radar.

Still, either GGG fluked it first time around with their excellent depiction of fantasy-world Maori through the Karui or TencentGGG should have stuck with what they knew instead of misappropriating cultures and histories (and I believe it is that, having seen that art and discussed it briefly with the GF) about which they have an almost cartoonishly low level of understanding or apparently empathy.

You might not care about any of this, and that's fine, but TencentGGG sure as hell should have. What you should be worried about is what this level of laziness and lack of effort on their behalf might mean for future content.