Trust me, as a long-time fan of the series, this is NOT about just one or two characters. This is a general trend in the game’s presentation.

The issue isn’t the sensibilities, it’s the weasel words being used around them. Again, Nier: Automata’s Yoshida said simply: “I like pretty girls.” That’s fine. That’s all anyone needs to know. Here, they explicitly phrased it as “it’ll sell more games,” while trying to handwave the actual content, which suggests…

You mean, they might receive some social criticism? They’ll receive that anyway. If they owned it, they’d at least have the strength of their convictions. As it currently stands, their argument for including these things was “it will increase sales because our game isn’t good enough on its own, but we’re too cowardly…

If you want to do something, own it. If you can’t accept the consequences of your actions, whatever they may be, perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it. Doing something and then lying about it is the fastest way to torpedo your credibility.

Definitely. Given that she’s in-canon English nobility, a quick Google search reveals a lot of popular and colorful designs that could have been riffed off of fairly handily. Even if they kept to her persona as a dominatrix (which has been pretty explicit) and wanted to keep her “sexy,” they could have shown far more…

No, at that point it’s “you like tits,” which is limiting the fanbase. You can have incredibly flashy and spectacular outfits and moves without resorting to sex appeal to do so. So, if you’re using sex appeal because you like it, own it; if your only reason is to “appeal to the base,” perhaps your game isn’t as strong…

So, by your logic (laws have been broken, so break up families), it’s okay for your child to be taken away from you for, say, jaywalking?

That’s exactly it. Say your game has tits because you like tits. It’s honest.

I think the real issue here is that they didn’t own it, but rather tried to deflect pretty heavily. I think Yoshida really nailed it by saying that his character designs are entirely because he likes pretty girls; it’s straightforward, honest, and admits that the designs are not meant to appeal to everybody. Being…

Other side of the joke: You can “play” EVE. You just don’t do much while you’re doing it...

Not really. A friend of mine was part of a rather large corp, and he spent more time with a calculator and a spreadsheet than with the actual game. It’s not a very active game, for the most part.

“Spreadsheets in space.” Methinks your biases are showing.

Some would also argue that EVE isn’t much of a game, either. Both are technically playable, anyway.

As someone who worked in Amazon, it’s becoming increasingly clear that these articles are more hit pieces than anything else.

I’m honestly surprised by the number of people complaining about first-person perspective in a game that will heavily feature guns.

Nah, they have their daddy’s genes.

So things only have rights if they have a “soul.”

So by your logic, people with cybernetic prosthetics are less human than people without, particularly when you start talking about machine-brain interfaces. Good to know that Lobot isn’t “alive” by your definition, due to having large portions of his brain replaced by cybernetics.

The real ultimate point is that something being “alive” is ridiculous when you look for a yardstick for determining rights. For example, the pig may be able to be influenced by a Jedi, but they aren’t allowed to vote in the Galactic Senate, because they don’t meet a certain standard of intelligence.

I have to agree here. The resources previously spent trying to screen the content or quality of products should instead be put towards better tools for categorizing and screening those products. Things like improved filters and tagging systems will help significantly. Just one example would be improving the tagging…