Hey, you, who's reading this in the future: you can find out who I am today at https://rarf.zone/about/. 💙

E-mail me at:

info@rarf.zone

Mastodon/Fediverse

yiff.life/@katja

Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/rarf.zone/

Tumblr

www.tumblr.com/kxantares

www.furaffinity.net/user/ktdrg

🌌🐈🐉@kda5/1/2023, 1:59 PM

bcj @bcj

Aura @MOOMANiBE4/30/2023, 7:45 AM

after poking a little bit at The Outer Worlds on a whim (and bc it's on game pass) I am starting to feel like it's not that the game's corporate satire is toothless (my previous opinion after watching @ticky play) so much as whoever wrote it is genuinely incapable of envisioning an argument for radical action, which on some level is worse. The player is given numerous opportunities to argue for movement against the corpos in the game and every time all the dialogue options are hilariously bad, ranging from "I'm just an evil worker-supporting dude >:)" to "~I believe.... in alternate ways of life~" like this is woo or something

in the devs' efforts to, as a corporation, write an anti-corporate setting they have envisioned a magical world in which even actual labour movements can't articulate the reasons they exist. amazing. baffling

Aura @MOOMANiBE5/1/2023, 6:09 AM

screaming endlessly at this new quest

Quest lady: hey i'm the manager of this business, can you please BUST this STRIKE for me (quest auto accepted)
Me: ........ok so surely I can take the side of the workers right? why cant you give them a raise
Quest lady: I'm so poor and good im a good boss its just we have no money, at all ;_; those workers are sooo greedy
You then find the striking workers NOT picketing the business but instead sipping fancy drinks on a rotunda because that is how striking definitely works
Workers: (after you navigate several menus in which most of the options are "I CANT BELIEVE YOUD NOT WORK OMG") we think she might be embezzling some money that she could pay us instead (you immediately find out this is true)
Quest lady: its true... i'm embezzling money.... because I work twice as hard as everyone else... and twice as long... im so productive...... how could you rob me, a hard worker, like this....
Me: ok but you're lying about not having enough money to pay them right
Quest lady (IN COMPLETE SINCERITY): no we have no money at all which is why im thinking about hiring scabs (the game calls them "contractors")
Me: .....if I threaten you you'll pay them because game mechanics, right
Quest lady: yes but as the game writer I want you to know that i the boss am objectively in the right and striking is bad
Me:
Me: ok intimidates and gains quest xp

#only the finest anti corporate satire

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Natalie @nex34/30/2023, 8:42 AM

every time I see writing like this I wither up a bit inside

Binary @binary4/30/2023, 12:27 PM

Yes, absolutely. It's bizarre to me that it's like this! I don't know what inspired them to make a game along those lines if they didn't have any driving force other than some extremely vague 90s-ish "consumerism bad, or something".

(It's not a fair comparison at all but as an uncharitable person it was also absolutely not helped by dropping at the same time as Disco Elysium.)

Annie D @ann-arcana4/30/2023, 12:45 PM

I literally fizzled out after the tutorial planet. The writing was so consistently bad. Just plot after plot of “hey the corpo is doing a bad now let’s do absolutely nothing of substance about it the end”.

I think people might read it wrong and that just IS the message. That activism and resistance are immature and naive, and protest is just making things worse for everyone, now look what you’ve done, etc. it’s very “the worst system except for all the others” kind of liberal thinking, and it was too consistent through everything in it for me to discount the probability that it’s intentional.

Digital Beast Plus+@DigitalBeast4/30/2023, 1:34 PM

Hilariously, I ended up quitting the game a few hours in because the inventory screen was so bad it should be criminal. I played until my inventory filled up because I didn't want to manage it, then quit when I couldn't pick up anything anymore.

I will now almost instantly quit any game where the inventory item popups cover the inventory itself.

I could forgive the bad writing (since I'm there for gameplay first), but a bad inventory that you have to deal with every 20 minutes? Imma head out.

@Arentios4/30/2023, 10:32 PM

It felt like it was stuck in the 'there are no systemic evils, only evil people' mindset, but they'd made a game where there was in fact very obviously systemic evil and just could not engage with that.

It reminded me of games which want to do the 'oh no killing is wrong the main character would never ~murder~ anyone' thing but then create a scenario where actually shooting the bad guy 20 minutes in would have saved a whole lot of people.