Given the game is still barely playable due to frame rate drops in chapter 3, its curious that Larian has chosen to politicise this section of the game as heavily as it did. Their time might have better been spent on, oh I don't know, trying to optimise it to the point of actually being playable. The first few hours of chapter 3 have far more politicisation than the proceeding two chapters combined. And given how slowly the game is stuttering along at the moment, that's quite the statement.
I don't know why game devs think their player base are going to uniformly agree with them or appreciate their commentary on political matters. And I think it particularly poor form to do so without being at all upfront about the fact in any of your marketing, nor the content of early access and when this politicisation is entirely absent from the BG series to which this game is a successor.
But if you are going to get political, at least don't be stupid. I am writing this having just come upon a book giving an oh so witty commentary on profiling, saying how it is narrow minded stupidity and leads to more wrongful than appropriate arrests. Did the cretin writing this know the first thing about policing? Have any familiarity with crime statistics at all? Is it the position of Larian that police should, for example, view men and women as equally likely to be the perpetrator of a given crime, or should devote an exactly proportionate amount of time to both groups, meaning actually spending moderately more time investigating the moderately larger female population? And what of age? Should suspects between the ages of 0-10 or 70-80 be viewed as likely to be involved in crime as those between the ages of 15-25? Should equal resources be devoted to them also?
If you aren't clinically insane and recognise that both sex and age actually matter when it comes to crime and police should allocate resources accordingly, you are in favour of at least some forms of profiling, which I would guess is the vast majority of the population.
The commentary is of course a commentary about race, even if it doesn't explicitly say so, and doesn't even appear to be aware that things other than race are considered whilst profiling. On the subject of race, it should be noted that, in the American context for example, the disparity in offending between black Americans and Americans of Japanese or Korean descent, for example, is actually somewhat larger than between men and women, so even here, insisting that race informs no part of police profiling is either a staggeringly unreasonable ideological position or just based on total ignorance of the facts.
And this is just one issue it chooses to crowbar into the game for no good reason. The most obnoxiously intrusive politicisation is around the issue of refugees. Lets give some actual real world context to this issue: the great majority of people claiming asylum in the countries where this game is selling the bulk of its units are not fleeing an oncoming army. The notable exception are Ukrainian refugees since the war with Russia started, who have been readily accommodated by Western nations and their claims to refugee status not been subject to any significant scepticism or resentment, and the refugee issue long predates this war in any case.
But in my own country, we have had in a handful of years over 100,000 people entering the country illegally from France, a prosperous first world nation in which they could easily lodge their claim for asylum and far from fleeing danger, are actively endangering themselves by crossing the channel in dinghies. And far from sinister government demonizing them and refusing them entry, the government actually picks them up and ferries them the rest of the way the moment they enter British territorial waters and the large majority are in short order placed into 4 and 5 star hotels at taxpayer expense. Not a single one of these people were fleeing any immediate danger when illegally entering the country and many are known to be from Albania, a country where its citizens are not considered to be at risk at all and a country which, not incidentally, has a massively disproportionate involvement in the trade of illegal drugs in my country. Needless to say, a lot of people do resent this situation, and with good reason. I am one of them.
Or take the case of Germany where Larian is based. Far from having a sinister Enver Gortash like figure refuse them entry, the then Chancellor threw open the invitation to essentially anyone wanting to claim refugee status, and people from all over the world obliged, with around 2 million entering in a single year alone, the majority of whom Germany now admits do not in fact have legitimate claims, and a sizeable number of whom repaid this act of kindness by sexually harassing German women en masse the following New Year's eve celebration. You would search in vain to find a comparable example of refugees behaving in such a manner in BG3 or apparently doing anything wrong at all. But you will find plenty of people expressing hostility towards refugees for no discernible reason.
So Larian can kindly **** off preaching to me that if I am not pro refugee, I am on the same side as the devotee of an evil deity involved in a sinister plot involving the forcible control and later destruction of huge number of people using a horrible parasite, or that I am on a par with a guy seeking to blow up refugee children with teddy bears rigged with explosives (I kid you not, this is an actual plot). The game doesn't even come up with a situation which is vaguely analogous to the real world refugee situation, which would be fine but for the fact that it so nakedly politically postures about the issue. If you aren't going to come up with an in game circumstance that even vaguely resembles the issue as it unfolds in the real world, don't propagandise about it. If you want to propagandise about it, don't insult our intelligence and at least give a vaguely plausible account of people's actual concerns.
Frankly, I shouldn't be writing this on a game forum, because Larian shouldn't be including this crap in their game. Either make an explicitly political game and market it as such, and do so with your own IP, or respect that other people may not agree with you and leave politics out of people's escapism, rather leave you consumer feeling like they are being preached to by people they don't agree with and apparently know nothing about the subject matter on which they choose to opine. Its like going shopping for groceries and being proselytised to by store employees about the virtues of a faith other than your own by someone who apparently has little to no knowledge on the matter.
Last edited by Randy McStud; 16/09/23 02:56 PM.
