Nals

Here's the thing.

As for future games.....

Konami has made it very clear they are leaving the video game business. There will be no more big name Metal Gear games regardless of what you, I, or Kojima wants. They might make a few Pachinko Machines, but that's not exactly going to be a plot heavy area for them, and wouldn't expand the story at all, so who cares. The biggest thing they may do going forward is remaking MG1/2, or porting the series to Xbox/PC. Metal Gear was in standby mode after 5 regardless of what Kojima wrote as the plot.

Easily Colby. Maybe Colby Jack if you let me mix them.

Chedder is good up until the 3rd or 4th bite, and then it starts getting way too harsh. If you melt/mix it, it's a bit better, but only because the things you mix it with overwhelm it so much.

Colby is mild enough you can eat it like a snack for hours. And when mixed/melted, it flavor profile enhances to the point you can still taste it properly, unlike chedder.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Nals

I'm down. If I see a fellow bombers men in a brig, I'll make sure to bring them to safety.

Like many things in KotOR2, the explanations are all on the female path. The male Exile path is practically anemic in comparison, and I barely consider it the same game.

Atton has 5 additional conversations with the female Exile, all going further into his backstory. He has a significantly more fleshed out redemption/corruption arc if you go female. He has an actual ending if you go female. You can actually figure out what he used to do and why he used to do it if you are female.

Sion as a male just appears three times and is vaguely threatening. If you are female though, he goes deeply into his backstory, Kreia's backstory, and why he does what he does. His actions cease being that of a crazy Sith Lord, and end as those of someone desperately trying to protect you, and your friends from Kreia, who he views as a horrific monster. His boss fight is entirely changed, with him basically killing himself to protect you.

As a male you get Brianna, who has a few conversations about the Handmaidens and what they do. As a female you get the Disciple, who entirely figures out what Kreia was up to, tries to explain some of it to you, has his own plans/machinations in place, has a ton of exposition about the state of the Republic, and what it's trying to do right now, and basically lets you in on how the galaxy is faring. He's deeply tied into the Kreia arc, and expands on her motivations.

Kreia has an additional SEVEN conversations with the female Exile, going into more detail on how her lost connection to the Force, her connections with her companions, their connection, and partially even Kreia's motivations. She views you as the daughter she left behind ( who is ironically very likely the Handmaiden ), and even almost tells you as much along the way. This causes her to be more motherly/explaining then she is on the male Exile path.

In comparison, the male Exile loses all that stuff for....an extra conversation with Visas where she says she loves him, and the Handmaiden, who talks a bit about Echani fighting. That's it. It's completely onesided, and I've never managed to finish a male Exile game because of it. The game was obviously made for female Exile's first, with the male Exile as a complete afterthought.

Also most importantly she "isn't" a Sith.

KotOR2 raises an important question after the events of KotOR1. What caused Revan to leave. Was it the allure of the Dark Side, or were the Jedi Masters of that era so terrible he had no desire coming back? Where the old teachings of that era so strict, so devoid of human understanding that they made the Jedi Order of that time a serious threat, because no normal humans could live up to the rules and regulations they demanded. That in it's own way, the Jedi Order of Revan's time was creating more Sith then any evil relics/ancient temples/evil threats by breaking it's students, then refusing to own up to the failures of it's own Masters, instead choosing to blame the Padawans/Knights for not meeting expectations.

Kreia wasn't evil. She didn't kill the Jedi Masters because she hated them, or wanted revenge, or anything petty like that. She killed them because in their arrogance, and refusal to adapt, they were a massive threat to the galaxy healing after the Mandalorian/Sith Civil Wars. Their outright refusal to understand what was happening, and why it was happening, instead choosing to stick to their guns was TERRIBLE for the galaxy, and she had to kill them to save it. Choosing to blame the Exile for their own failures, and yet again taking their frustrations out on her was just the last straw for Kreia, she realized the Jedi Order could not help save the galaxy, and was now just in the way, and needed to be dealt with.

To understand Kreia, you must look at her through the lens of what happened to her, and why she wants to train the Exile. She knows exactly what Revan found in the Outer Rim. She knows what twisted and corrupted his noble spirit, and saw what his true goal for the galaxy was ( preparing it for something. ). She knows that threat still exists, and still needs to be dealt with, and if anybody is going to do it they need to be taught how to do it. That's why she set up the events of the game. That's why she trained Sion. That's why she brought back all those enemies. That's why she took back the mantle of Darth Traya. Not because she wanted you to become Sith, but because she wanted to make sure she made you strong enough to face whatever hid in the dark places of the galaxy.

Even her most controversial teaching, that you must use your friends as human shields entirely makes sense in the context of what she's preparing you to face. You aren't going to be some podunk Jedi Knight going world to world solving problems, you will be facing down the greatest threat the galaxy has ever known, and of your party, only you can honestly handle it, being disconnected from the Force as you are ( you never really reconnect to the Force. As the game describes it, you can still use it, but you use it like a tool, like a gun or a sword, rather then a part of your body like it used to be. ). If you fall because you tried to save Atton, or Kreia, or Bao Dur, then you fail the entire galaxy, and now everyone must suffer the price of that failure. It's better to let them die now so you can finish your mission, then put yourself at risk before the final battle. She wanted to harden your heart now, so you could deal with the loss you'd inevitably face along the way, rather then potentially lose your cool.

She's not a nice character, but she's definitely not an evil character. Every single one of her goals, from her training, to her planned suicide existed for one purpose. To make you the strongest you could be, right before you took on the Emperor, in the hopes you'd actually be able to pull it off and save everyone.

It's a bummer all around in my books.

The batmobile fucking sucks. This'd be fine if it was just used to get around, but you need to use it constantly. Platforming batmobile sections, batmobile races, batmobile dealing with the million drone tanks everywhere in the city. You can't just glide around like you could in City/Origins, now you need to fight your way everywhere in this stupid fucking tank thing. Rather then make new gadgets for Batman ( the best part of the old games ), they just made everything have a batmobile shaped lock, and you need to figure out how to get your batmobile from point a to b.

They removed the Riddler stuff ( always the best! ), and added in......BATMOBILE STUFF! Don't worry, the Riddler saw you were getting a fancy new car, and set up some Need For Speed style car areas for you to race in. Riddles? What the fuck are those, he's the RACEDADDY. Oh, and since we all know platforming with unwieldy things is the best part of videogames, he made them PLATFORMERS! as well.

The City DLC had us watch Harley as she sat in her room crying over her miscarriage, desperately trying test after test to get another positive. Since then, the treatment of women has just gotten worse. Catwoman somehow got easily taken down by the Riddler, Poison Ivy decides to join Batman, only to get taken out in the first 5 seconds. Harley Quinn has become a stripper. Just like City, it's aggressively sexist. If a character is female, expect her to get raped/captured/beaten sometime after you first see her.

The combat is far worse. Asylum had large groups of basic enemies, so you basically played the counter game. City jumped to smaller groups of specialized enemies, so you had to play a bit more cautiously, but it never felt overwhelming. Origins went back to spamming basic enemies, which I can understand why some people didn't like that. Knight just spams specialized enemies at you, forcing you to play some asshole hit and run Batman, because fuck fighting 30 zapper/shield/gun enemies in a small enclosed area with nothing else going on. It feels like they forgot to add basic guys for you to build up a combo on so you could use your special abilities on the special enemies.

The VA and the story is -terrible-. It starts out with some ok things, but they ruin it all with the ending, which is almost Mass Effect 3 levels of stupid. I felt insulted after watching the end video. I'm not going to spoil it, but basically they did everything wrong with the plot they started to set up.

As someone who loved Asylum/Origins for being Batman games, and loved City for it's mechanical underlay, this game is a disaster. It fails as a Batman game due to it's awful story/mistreatment of major characters, and it fails as a mechanical game due to it's worse combat/focus on graphics that make it harder to see what you are doing.

I got this for $15, and I feel like I wasted that $15.

She has a point.

I mean she had amnesia as well, but she kept her proverbial dick in her pants, and realized there was someone soulbound to her waiting for her. She had plenty of opportunities to have flings but didn't.

Across Witcher 1 and 2, Geralt mentions several times that although he doesn't remember HER, there was obviously someone very important in his life that wasn't Triss. And even as far back as Act 1? 2? of Witcher 1, if you talk to certain Innkeeps you can learn what happened to Yennefer, who she was, and how she also seemingly died trying to resurrect Geralt, but has been potentially seen here and there.

Geralt may have had a point about his amnesia if we are talking super early Witcher 1's sex bit with Triss after healing her, because he could assume she was the person that meant a lot to him. But after that he goes on to sleep with every peasant villager/woman in the kingdom, so he's not even really committing himself to Triss. He's manwhoring himself out across the game.

People are engaging in the intellectual underpinnings. The issue is you aren't, you are pulling the "well it's just fantasy card" and expecting us all to blindly accept that.

If Bioware put people of color in Dragon Age, this is fine, because hey, the world THEY CREATED is diverse, and the idea of a black Elf isn't exactly taboo. As you said, it's fantasy, I'm not going to lose my shit if something is changed slightly. If you dig into the backstory, you can see that Rivain and the lands surrounding are filled with darker skinned folk, and over the years they've intermingled quite a bit thanks to the Blights/being a major shipping hub. This is why there are so many darker skinned folk in that world.

If Obsidian put people of color in Pillars of Eternity, this is fine, because hey, the world THEY CREATED is diverse, and the idea of a Republic along the coastline that features darker skinned peoples is fine, because it's a world built to support that. It's a fantasy world, and they wrote in the tools to support diversity. When the world created supports diversity, only an idiot would get mad about that diversity.

CDPR did not create the world of the Witcher. They have no creative control over the world of the Witcher. They have to put forth every design doc, every story idea, and every major plot point in front of the author and ask for his approval. And guess what the original author never wrote into the Witcher series, because he wrote it as an internal viewpoint for Slavic Fantasy/Culture, a culture that exists in a region where less then .5% of the population is Asian, and .2% of the population is Black.

CDPR can not magic in people of color into the Witcher. There is exactly one region in the lore where people have darker skin, and it's Zerrikania, a region so remote from the Northern Kingdoms that over all of Geralt's years of travel, he met three people from there. And even then, Zerrikanians are more tan then they are black, and are supposed to be an India analogue more then an Africa analogue. There is no cultural exchange between Zerrikania and the North. Zerrikanians would have to cross a massive distance ( Zerrikania is basically fake India, and there are no real travel routes set up yet, so they'd have to walk the distance from India to basically France to get to the Northern Kingdoms. ), get through Nilfgaard, and for some reason want to be in the backwater shithole of basically the deep south that is the Northern Kingdoms to be in a region where Geralt is.

If they stuck to the fantasy world they were given, at most they could add 1, maybe 2 people from Zerrikania before it was obviously just hitting checkboxes to fill a quota. And then we'd have this same conversation, just with the topic changed to "Why are there so few people of color in the Witcher 3."

It's the Lord of the Rings issue. Tolkien wrote all people of color as evil and living on the outskirts of the world. Lo and behold, if you make a game/movie in the Lord of the Rings setting, you can't put in anybody who isn't pasty white. And the exact same argument came up back when the Lord of the Rings movies started getting popular, and this was the exact same response they gave. When you are working within boundaries that were imposed by another, you have to adhere to them. Tolkien did not write in a way for people of diverse backgrounds to exist within the areas of that world we would see, so they basically don't exist.

Surprising as this may be, I'm a massive liberal. I'm just as annoyed as most that there isn't good representation in games for women and PoC. That the average game forgets to add people of color just as readily as they forget to write women as anything other then sex objects. But while these questions are perfect for a self created or coopted world that HAS people of diverse backgrounds/skin tones ( ie if you made the world itself and forgot to write in anything outside of white people, or made a game in let's say DnD and decided not to add in any diversity despite it supporting it ), they don't really work when applied to a game world like Lord of the Rings or the Witcher. Maybe in the future Tolkien's kids will write in additional appendices talking about cultural migrations that could allow this, or Sapkowski will make a new Witcher book talking about how there was actually a whole bunch of intermingling between Zerrikania and Nilfgaard, but for now, anybody working with those worlds has to follow the word of god.

Like I get it! I totally do. Games are fucked, and if you want diversity you are basically shit out of luck. It's just the author picked the worst fantasy game possible to prove his point on because CDPR didn't create that world.

You just entirely proved my point.

Skellige has nothing to do with Anglo Saxon Vikings. It's an analogy to the Rus people of Russia/Ukraine that raided Slavic settlements around the same time. We have a far different history with the Rus people then Anglo Saxons have with the Viking people, and they are entirely different histories/groups/cultures.

And yeah, I'm stoked I live in the US where I'm not treated like shit whenever people realize I'm Slavic. Shame whenever I go visit Europe vendors charge me extra, I get told by shopowners upon entering a shop that they "Are watching me, Slav thief", and the Hotel I prepaid for to stay in while I visited Europe told me I'd have to find a new Hotel because they "didn't serve Slav filth.". They were all white as could be, as am I, but I guess racism is entirely along skin color boundaries, not actual race boundaries, isn't it?

Not being oppressed doesn't mean my culture has survived particularly well. Slavic heroes, Slavic legends, nobody talks about or knows these things in America. Several of the Anglo Saxon legends I was taught as a kid in fact treat Slavic peoples as villains, as bad guys, as a people to avoid. In games I play, I'm an Anglo Saxon, surrounded by other Anglo Saxons, we share the same skin color, but it isn't the same race I was born into or raised into. And that's the thing, skin color isn't race. If someone made a game where you played as a Sikh from India, you wouldn't call it a hallmark game for people from Turkey/the Middle East because "you are all the same color anyway.". Grouping cultures and races together off skin tone alone is just as damaging as ignoring cultures or races based on skin color.

Slavic culture isn't a dominant culture that is portrayed often in media. That's the point.

Anglo Saxon culture is. Slavs are considered subhuman, were originally slaves before Africa, and have serious problems in England/most of Europe even today. We are considered welfare abusers, wife beaters, thugs, and criminals just for being Slavs. Slavic culture is ignored, painted over, or misinterpreted to sell a better take on Anglo Saxon culture. Sound familiar? From what I've seen living in America, African Americans suffer many of the same issues.

That's the issue. Saying the Witcher is another example of Anglo Saxon culture is a lie. Anglo Saxon culture may be the dominant in America, England, or South Africa, but it's not in Eastern Europe. Growing up, I found I had more in common with Turkish mythology then I did with stuff like King Arthur or Snow White.

It'd be like if you made a game about Australian Aboriginals, then said it was a great representation of African Americans. No it fucking isn't. Africa isn't Australia, just because both groups are black don't mean they were the same culture, have a similar cultural heritage, or are anything alike. Just because two groups share the same skin tone don't make them the same culturally. A game set in Turkey isn't going to, and shouldn't be "enough" for the people of India just because both groups are "swarthy".

So yeah. I'm "Caucasian". But that doesn't mean Caucasian media in America is any more mine then someone of color. I get to pretend my heroes are Slavic because I have pale skin like they do, but I'm still surrounded by a whole bunch of polite Angle Saxon NPCs in most games. The Witcher is one of the few series that actually feels like a game made for me. I can play it as a member of the race I was born as.

Where do they come from.

In the Game of Thrones world, you have the lands outside Westeros as the lands people with darker skin tones live in. Migration through cultural appropriation, and expansion have led to diversity in Westeros, albeit only slightly. You'll often seen people of diverse skin colors, but it's largely in the forms of outsiders, mercenaries and the like. It's not a very diverse landscape but it at least attempts to fill that void.

In the Dragon Age world, Rivain and the lands surrounding Rivain are the lands of darker skin tones. Cultural expansion has happened thanks to the united efforts against the Blights, an oddly interconnected worldspace, a desire to live elsewhere, and Tevinter slavery. If someone is of a non white skintone in Dragon Age they, or someone related to them is originally from Rivain.

In the world of the Witcher you have........? Zerrikania is the only group that is even remotely nonwhite, and they are more tanned then dark skinned. Even worse Zerrikania is a very isolationist culture far away from both the Northern Realms as well as Nilfgaard, it's the India analogue to the NR/Nilfgaard's Europe, and is roughly the same distance away. It's people want nothing to do with the politics of the Continent, and across all Witcher literature we've seen three people from there. Two mercenaries that were shipwrecked off the coast, and a Mage that was so intune with the Elements he was led to Kaedwan/Temeria. There is no cultural appropriation or desire to expand, nor any historical evidence of it. A Zerrikanian in the Northern Realms would be a strange sight/an outsider for sure.

While CDPR has a great deal of control over the lore, they cannot just create a new continent/race just for the games. And the original author never gave them a race that is noncaucasian to work with.

The bigger issue is that racial and cultural diversity require specific events to be led to. America, South Africa, the Mediterranean, and Turkey have some of the most diverse cultures in the world, but it's due in part to the histories they had growing. They each were major trading hubs, abused slave races who eventually integrated their culture into the global whole, or had major exodus events leading to them.

However look at places like England, Poland, or Canada. They haven't had such an influx of other cultures, and nowadays without that diversity are largely majority driven countries. You will find very few other cultures in those places, and this is actually a huge problem in England right now that they don't know how to handle the fact their ages old "Caucasian" culture is being appropriated/changed by an increasingly large population of immigrants.

The Witcher has never had that. If they put in people of darker skin tones, they'd exist literally just to check a box off. And if that's cool with you, then sure, I guess it's not a big deal. But I don't think that's what people want. They want a more diverse world, but that's asking the impossible of CDPR, as they can only write in the world they got from the original author. And he may or may not be racist if he never wrote in an area for people of darker skin tones to come from, but that's not really Witcher 3/CDPRs fault.