Greedfall

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Aphra is the first ever BLACK female romanceable character in a RPG. I instantly had to pre-order the game when I was able to discern she was romanceable through my research (along with the other qualifications that I like about the game).

I thought she was going to be another Vivienne (black female party member with depth but somehow non-romanceable). Thankfully not.

Interesting that it took an AA budget company to break such an easy barrier, rather than the heralded diversity-inclusive, progressive AAA studio known as Bioware, or even other big AAA companies like Obsidian. Pretty crazy actually.

Kudos to Spiders, honestly. Lowkey it's something I really appreciate as a black male gamer. I know LGBT inclusion is more visible but racial inclusion of any kind in a video game is just as impactful. Orcs and blue aliens running around but non-white people are hardly even a thought process...

Yo cloud9 remember this thread? bsn.boards.net/thread/9126/after-games-romance-african-american


... and how can anyone not tell she's female?

She's not. I can think of a few others. 

I can't claim to have played all RPGs ever, but Raina Temple in SWTOR is a romance option. Sure, in that game you can customize the character's looks, but she is canonically black. Technically so is Isabela from DA2.

Bound by Flame was mediocre at best with some good things in it and a really weak third Chapter. Technomancer is miles ahead in quality, but still mostly in the mediocre range. By all accounts Greedfall is an even bigger jump in quality compared to the Technomancer, so it just might be solidly in the "good game" territory with hopefully touching on the "great" area.

Of course we can already see some weaknesses - character faces and models are not what we are used to in AAA titles (well, it's an AA title after all) and the lip sync is off sometimes. but this is pretty minor for my taste and I probably will stop noticing it a few hours into the game.

Surprisingly the combat receives quite a few praises and usually that is the kryptonite in Spiders's previous games. Voice acting is said to be very solid as well and the side quests (something very important to me personally) seem to be well crafted and more than just basic fetch tasks. And while the character models seem a bit last gen, the maps, cities and other area details appear to be polished and pretty. Spiders were always good in creating an interesting setting and atmosphere and this is their best work so far.

My expectations for Greedfall were that it will be better than the Technomancer, but I didn't expect for it to be so much better as the reviews claim. While I am not expecting KOTOR/ME2/DAO levels of fun, I am looking forward to getting pretty close to that, maybe even like DA2 (I enjoy that game almost as much as DAO, sue me). If the game remains a permanent guest on my HDD (like the aforementioned BW classics), then it's a win

I'll stand corrected if there are legitimate examples. Dating sims don't count.





Eh, I feel like the customization makes it irrelvevant and not canon. It's like saying Male Shep is canon because he's the default and on the cover.

Your comment actually brings up a question: how would the relationship have to be for you to consider it a romance? Just asking since different games for a variety of reasons depict romances differently so curious what your criteria are.

I was never sold on the "Isabele  is black" thing. Just don't see it even if there's a little lore about swarthy complected people from a particular area in the game (which of itself doesn't automatically mean black). And Bioware never went out there way to confirm her race anyway.

Again it's the same problem with the Niesha character and Clementine from TWD that I made in my post. Too many supposed "black" characters in gaming fiction and visual fiction in general are deliberately made to be ambiguous, like really ambiguous. It leads to dissonance which I think is purposeful by devs who are trying to attain universal appeal in the safest way possible. With the Vivienne thing I think Bioware just sort have a   unconscious  absent-mindedness to black female NPCs.  With Black male characters Bioware are completely comfortable writing them from the  diverse gamut of David Anderson to Jacob to Cortez to Liam; no real complaints to made (aside from  the treatment of Jacob). They're also all completely romanceable excluding David Anderson. But it's weird how black women characters have middling to practically zero roles in any of the Bioware games in comparison to the roles black male characters receive.

There's Vivienne, Sloane, and Brooks off the top of my head. Vivienne who is out-and-out the strongest developed character out of the three, but like you said just feels like a wasted opportunity. Then there's Maya Brooks, the only visible black woman in the entire Mass Effect OT and she's nothing more than a DLC gag villain despite an interesting backstory and personality. In Andromeda, we get Sloane who is the counterpart to Reyes but again is not romanceable (while Reyes IS romanceable) but could have easily been so. She has deep characterization though and has her own leading role in a novel which I liked.  Also another brash, strong woman archetype (she even shares the exact same voice actor of Vivienne) but I still found her badass and there's hints of her actually softening up to you if you side with her. Also Ashley Williams was originally intended to be black according the original concept art made for her, but was changed. Even her voice actor was black.


But yeah I'd imagine France is not too different from North America when it comes to this stuff and arguably more lonely in terms of being able to be properly represented.  No doubt that  you  guys would gravitate to American movies if you wanted some fulfilling visual representation that relates to your life experience in some real way. The struggle is universal.


I've been aware of the game a little before E3 but I  had the same mental process as  you   with everything clicking gradually. The whole 17th century colonial setting, and narrative concept of an  imperialist invasion of the indigenous  lands  is something I've never  seen before in a RPG.  Choosing between violence, diplomacy, and subterfuge  to navigate the factions. The companions look very involved in the plot. The combat looks  fun and impressive, etc. A romanceable black female was the cherry on top. The game just ticks all the boxes.

I'm hoping they tackle the colonialism theme more bravely and seriously than Andromeda (which barely did anything with the concept). If it can accomplish that it'll be a very special game that separates itself strongly from the rest.

To be fair, part of Mass Effect's lore is that the setting is a hundred years ahead of us in terms of racial interbreeding, resulting in more "mutts" and fewer "pure" racial representatives. That's why there are almost no natural blondes in the series, and almost everyone has brown or black hair and eyes, and a lot of the characters look closer to, say, Mediterranean than either specifically Black or Caucasian. And presumably why Shepards with anything lighter than dirty blonde hair look ridiculous.

Colonizing new planets would accelerate that process, too. If a small population with mixed ethnicities set up shop somewhere remote and isolated, the people would start looking like a mix between those ethnicities real fast. Much quicker than they would on the "mainland".

Which isn't to say that it wasn't also a strategy for avoiding having to stick their dicks in a toaster, so to speak, but let's also not forget that Mass Effect first launched in 2008. That's getting to be a while ago, and there wasn't quite this public focus on balanced representation back then.

Aside from that though, writing female characters in general to be both dynamic, interesting and believable has always been tough for writers, who are predominantly male. That's why all female fictional characters tend to act like each other, a lot more than male ones. It wouldn't surprise me for a racial barrier to just make that even more conceptually difficult, with all the apparent pitfalls involved.

Like you I really hope Greedfall has taken a chance with the expansionist themes, and is ready to throw us some difficult curve-balls. You're totally right that RPGs have been playing it way too safe the last few years.

See above and I guess I see MMOs differently from single-player games.

I don't see it as quite that clear-cut. To be honest, for a species with our history to not have developed a tendency toward fearing and wanting to distance yourself from strange-looking foreigners would have been moronic for all sorts of reasons. That our circumstances have changed so much that that instinct has become irrational and something of a liability is another matter.

I also don't see that instances of animosity between strangers that aren't tied to skin color should ever be called "racism". That's just not what the word means, and using it as such confuses matters. I'm inclined to think that racism is a sub-strain of xenophobia, but the two aren't interchangeable.

You're totally right that the natives were in for a hard time with the mainlanders no matter what, but the simple fact that a 16th-century European-looking enterprise is apparently egalitarian enough to integrate African women as experts and craftsmen without difficulty calls into question why their clearly open-minded policies suddenly don't apply to a bunch of tree-hugging yokels on an island whose medical assistance they need.

That level of racial acceptance would have been unthinkable in historical France, and either completely derails the game's conflict as a metaphor for actual expansionism and the actual conflict involved, or poses a very interesting question of how arbitrarily we're naturally ready to apply our fears and hatreds to others simply over the course of running into new people we don't have reason to trust, regardless of how open and fair we see ourselves as in general.

I'm not calling BS on the game or anything. I honestly don't know if they're saying something interesting or just playing it safe in the modern social climate. Which would be a shame if they've already chosen to go all-in on such a divisive subject as colonialism.


Yup, I can definitely see why it must be frustrating for mainstream entertainment to come from a place and mentality you don't identify very strongly with on one issue or another.

That applies to all sorts of things. I can tell you we're a lot of Europeans who are rather bored with the American view on everything in movies and games. But that's just where the movies and games are coming from, unfortunately.

I'm personally very skeptical of the idea that all viewpoints and perspectives and representations being crammed into all mainstream products is the solution though. Individual producers having the opportunities to do their own thing that deviates from the mainstream and caters more deeply to otherwise neglected niches always seemed more elegant - and more successful - to me.

A director for a project will never understand all facets of people or the world well enough to represent them all respectably. But some have enough experience with or curiosity for one or two non-mainstream subjects to be able to more or less do them justice if that's what s/he focuses on. At least, that's been my experience of movie-and-television watching as well as gaming. 

I'm not certain our understanding of either biology or psychology would support those conclusions. I can't comment on how things work specifically where you're from, but it certainly sounds like you're conflating a lot of different concepts with racism.

And sure there have been extremely exceptional individuals who were tolerated as such despite their theoretical racial status, but nothing in the trailers so far has been suggestive of Amhra having had to fight or overcome a lot of social baggage for anyone to recognize her as being human, let alone having any idea what she's talking about.

Rather, she's been presented as a competent person "who just so happens to be black, and a woman", suggesting her existence in an environment where those factors are supposed to be overlooked as irrelevant rather than compensated for, or obviously her overcoming of such prejudice would be notable. Which is nothing like the worlds Ignatius and Olaudah rose to status in. That's admittedly just based on trailers though, as all this speculation is.

I am actually pretty certain they do support what I'm saying, because I am not talking in a vacuum. Psychology and racial studies are the things I'm basing myself on...and the dictionary (which I actually read after to be sure I was saying the right thing as English isn't my first language. Dictionary are amazing things more people should read them).