Confirmed: Andromeda is socialist commentary about current world-events

I disagree. Mages -V- Templars in DA wasn't black and white, Geth -V- Quarians, the choice with the heretical Geth, the genophage, etc all have good arguments for making either decision. In fact there are threads all over this community that hash out those arguments. If these decisions were truly black and white then these arguments wouldn't exist. 

A player's perceptive matters. I don't consider the Family Matters quest that grey, Anna didn't want to have the child of her abusive husband, because there is no legal abortion she had to go to the Crones for help, who screwed her over. It is a very understandable thing that happens all the time (with performing an unsafe abortion in place of magical Crones) The game wanted to paint it as grey and I didn't agree, you do - that is fair enough. That is why this talk of 'heavy handedness' is too generic a statement for a dev to take onboard.

Um, since when did Duncan/Isabelaesque people stop existing? We have Josephine and her family.

but you yourself are not consistent about what you think impacts world consistency. For you Isabela & Duncan = world consistency,  black templar breaks world consistency. It's not like people with skin types like Isabela & Duncan were removed, they still exist. It just seems so arbitrary.

It is, but I addressed this before, you believe that the first game should show you everything there is to a world, which is just not possible. The first game gives you a foundation of the world and the rest expands on it; qunari horns, darker skin humans, the cultures of different Dalish clans, more detail on Tevinter etc. By that logic no gay people in DA:O means there can never be gay people in the game, just bi and straight, the only classes any DA game can ever have are the ones in DA:O, want to journey to the parts of Thedas the Hero of Ferelden went to during the events of DA:I? I'm sorry you can't because they weren't mentioned in the original DA:O.

Seems like you want game devs to be limited by ideas they came up with in the first game and not be able to expand or develop them. What to you want Vivienne to do, go into a monologue about how she's decedent from a part of Rivai with darker skin? Have a codex entry about how humans have varied skin tones? If I recall none of the codex's about each of the human nations go into much detail about skin tone in DA:O and since we were only in Ferelden why did you assume there were no black people? Is that not filling in the blanks in lore yourself and then getting upset when Bioware expands it in a way that is different to your own assumptions. 

I don't really care if Bioware wants the game to have a theme or a bunch of social commentary about humility. It's the instant they force me to be humble no matter what with a heavy expositional dose of how being humble is the best and correct choice that they move from art to proselytizing.

The thing with this is that comparing interactive RPGs with a static art-form like fiction or film is a specious comparison. With static artforms, the creator is inviting you to watch his characters and whatever messages or themes he wants to relay. With games, the creator is inviting you to *be* his character and experience whatever messages and themes he wants to relay, but there is still no audience agency here. Your only agency at all is to choose to keep watching/playing/reading or not.

RPGs are explicitly different. The creator here is inviting you to *help* create a character and dictate some of the tone. RPGs have never been about passively receiving the message that the creator wants the audience to receive. It's always been about providing the player with complex and interesting ideas and a fluid enough character and setting that he can do interesting things with them. It is an explicitly collaborative type of artwork. So the instant the creator starts pushing a specific *correct* message instead of merely providing interesting messages and setting structure for the player to engage, it stops being an RPG and IMO degenerates into one of those static forms of art. It's still art, sure, but frankly if I wanted to look at art from the other side of one of these:



then I would go look at paintings in some cold, snooty museum.

You know, after going through all the Mage/Templar debates on the old forums back when DAI came out, I was kinda glad that I wouldn't have to worry about discussion of ME:A devolving into a mess of strained and/or completely baseless claims that the whole thing was some sort of direct political allegory.

Why are we like this?

I assume that most of the people on this forum would be fine with the presence of such themes in Persona due to the fact that they most likely live in other countries and can therefore distance themselves from the commentary presented in such pieces, though this is just a guess.

I personally am always excited to see different themes and topics expressed in the interactive medium of games. I do, however, take issue with discussion of direct allegory as it relates to Bioware games, whether intended by the devs or simply interpreted by the fans, mostly due to the fact that such allegory often doesn't work in a direct sense due to the fantastical settings employed in their games, and the underlying logic present within such settings.

Very amusing.

So do you only consider RPGs that allow you to direct the tone of the game RPGs? This would exclude many JRPGs, which often carry several explicate messages that the dev would consider "correct" FF7 for example, has a heavy 'let's not destroy our environment' theme, that the game pushes as correct. The Persona games have heavily questioned traditional gender roles, particularly Japanese traditional gender roles. This questioning is the "correct" view in the game. 

As I think about this more I think that JRPGs tend to have more explicate moralising than Western RPGs which tend to cloak everything in so much allegory that many players miss the point. 

If an RPG is a collaborative work between the player and the dev, then that still doesn't mean it can't have messages in it. The player can still engage with the message and decide what they think about it and make one of the choices associated with it (even if it's not 100% the choice that they would have made). The effort is still collaborative as you suggest because you can dictate elements of the story and character but the dev is still able to provide the experience that they wanted to provide. 

Whether or not these elements pull you from a story is entirely a matter of player perspective, something that a game dev can't be expected to 100% account for. 

Often? I didn't say that. Also, it's not necessarily to make a political point rather than a thematic point. Consider, for instance, Shepard's breakdown after Thessia in ME3. Apparently the writers wanted Shepard to doubt himself, drown in guilt or self-recrimination about something or something similar. OK, let's assume that the writers *can* tell my character how they feel, even though that - in an RPG - should really be the player's domain, but the way this was presented made no sense at all. It made Shepard appear to have the IQ of a child. thinking they could've influenced what was so clearly beyond them. Even if I do respect the writer's desire to control what should be my character. the least I can expect is for things to make sense. I'm firmly convinced that this is a point that can't be shrugged off by "player perspectives are different". You, personally may not care if your character expresses mind-numbing levels of stupidity. but if nothing else in a story that's by necessity limited by what's doable in an economic manner, in an RPG character expression should be the domain of the player.

Consider, as a comparison, the Inquisitor's flying into a rage in Trespasser. Maybe it wasn't marked *quite* clearly enough on the wheel, but you could choose to do it or not. Also, if you did it, everything you said, while appropriately exaggerated, made perfect sense. While not all of my Inquisitors went there, I could really imagine being driven into it, and the decision, once I knew what was coming, was exclusively about "Would my character really do this". More to the point, if, for me, that scene hadn't made sense, I could've had an alternative.

So yes, I say, quite firmly, that the ME team - or at least the writer responsible - failed at that point in ME3, that they sacrificed the protagonist's integrity and took away the only freedom you can really have in a modern rpg on electronic media, namely the freedom to express your character, in order to drive a thematic point home, and I maintain that this can't be shrugged off by saying "player perspectives differ".

Also, to go back to TW3 - Geralt *is* a more defined character, but the game never hid this from me. He's a pre-defined character from a book series, so I knew right from the start I could expect less freedom in character-expression. Yet, in the end I actually had more freedom than in ME3, because the stoic facade could hide any kind of emotion. There were a few quibbles, but as opposed to Shepard, none of them touched the core of the character. It is, of course, perfectly possible to dislike Geralt so much that you can't enjoy the game, this is only to be expected with a predefined character, but I didn't expect this to be a problem with Shepard, advertised as it was as a game where you could shape your character and influence events. Yet, it was a bigger one there.

Heh...how did we get from socialism to here?