@hassun: I think a lot of it comes down to there being a much bigger cast of characters, and since all of them are pretty well designed (visually and mechanically), it increases the chances that a player will identify a character (or multiple characters) that they really like.
It's also worth saying: When someone says "These characters have more personality," they're reporting their honest perspective, which means that it's worth investigating why that might be true. In this case, my educated guess is that while the minimalist, silhouette driven character designs of TF2 def have personality, the denser, more colorful designs of Overwatch characters give fans lots of material to read "character" from. (And it doesn't take reading a comic to start digging into that for them.)
@grondoth: I've replayed this mission like five times now, and I don't think it's actually a stealth/loud mechanic. The second I stealthily turned on one of the objectives, everything automatically went loud. Maybe that was a bug or something, but it seemed totally like I just triggered combat to kick off.
@phuturist:Two things before I get back to my Sunday evening:
First, your antagonism seems misguided. Maybe you should go back and re-read the actual things (here, here, and here) I wrote about The Witcher 3 before charging me with the defense of a perspective I never argued for. I explicitly stated that it was not about racial quotas, and even then when I wrote it, the comments included people who said that's what I was arguing for. Instead, I was arguing that we should apply critique holistically both to individual games and to games as a larger medium.
Which brings me to point two: Any attempt to identify generalized, ahistorical "rules" for "good media" fail to engage honestly and directly with the complexity and uneven nature of history and power. More than that, even, "If you don't like this in X, why do stand for it Y" forgets that games, movies, et al are more than their individual component parts, they are a network of those parts. I don't love the loot grind in The Division but I kinda dig it in Destiny, why? Because there are different games build around those similar mechanics.
There is no checkbox list of qualities that a work should hit, and no critic worth their salt has built such a list. More often than not, I see this desire for a generic ruleset as the beginning of a path that can lead to claims like "White people should be allowed to say nigga" and "Men have it harder than women these days." It's a path that illustrates a dramatic misunderstanding of what is at stake, since these sorts of acts (as with The Witcher 3 shipping without any PoC) aren't under any existential threat anyway. They're only being criticized.
They're the targets of someone saying "Hey, maybe we could do better than this," or "Hey, have you taken X into consideration?" At the most extreme, we get a critic saying "We should get rid of this via law or other means!" which is a position that I have historically opposed and which I think represents the most inelegant and boring form of critique there is. Again, I wrote about this a year ago, but maybe it didn't stick.
The long and short is that you're engaging with a strawman version of some stuff I wrote about The Witcher, and the rhetorical question of "if it's cool in X, why is it not cool in Y?" is a way to retreat from the careful work of criticism and towards the safety of ideological purity.
Oh, also, just as a heads up: Aurion totally has white folks in it. They're even in the game's trailer on Steam.
@firecracker22: Consider: I'm specifically not playing and talking about UC4 right now because I don't want to just be a contrarian on the podcast. I was explicitly asked about the game on the cast, and I answered honestly, otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up at all. I know what my tastes are, and while I'm curious, I'm not rich, so for now I'm going to pass on the thing and when it's a little cheaper, I'll give it a fair shot.
@riven53: We'd love to have Jeff on more often, but that dude has a full time job! Any time you see him appearing on our stuff is time he's donating (and time he can't be working on his own projects for Cnet).
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