Slimebeast on 23 February 2018
RolStoppable said:
Indeed, it doesn't make sense. I was curious and looked up the review and here is the uncut version that I found: When Kingdom Come does succeed, it's peerless. The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher can feel flimsy next to the sophisticated systems and heft of history on show here.
But there's also a big problem. There are no people of colour in the game beyond people from the Cuman tribe, a Turkic people from the Eurasian Steppe. The question is, should there be? https://www.resetera.com/threads/separating-games-from-their-creators-kingdom-come-deliverance.17250/">The game's makers say they've done years of research and found no conclusive proof there should be, but a historian I spoke to, who specialises in the area, disagrees.
"We know of African kings in Constantinople on pilgrimage to Spain; we know of black Moors in Spain; we know of extensive travel of Jews from the courts of Cordoba and Damascus; we also know of black people in large cities in Germany," the historian, Sean Miller, tells me. Czech cities Olomouc and Prague were on the famous Silk Road which facilitated the trade of goods all over the world. If you plot a line between them, it runs directly through the area recreated in Kingdom Come. "You just can't know nobody got sick and stayed a longer time," he says. "What if a group of black Africans came through and stayed at an inn and someone got pregnant? Even one night is enough for a pregnancy."
It's not conclusive proof but it's readily available doubt to undermine Warhorse's interpretation. What muddies the water further is whose interpretation it overridingly is: creative director, writer and Warhorse co-founder Daniel Vavra's. He has been a vocal supporter of GamerGate and involved in antagonistic exchanges on Twitter (collected in https://www.resetera.com/threads/separating-games-from-their-creators-kingdom-come-deliverance.17250/page-2%23post-3450110">a ResetEra thread). More recently, he wore the same T-shirt depicting an album cover by the band Burzum every day at Gamescom 2017 - a very visible time for him and his game. Burzum is the work of one man: Varg Vikernes, a convicted murderer and outspoken voice on racial purity and supremacy. He even identified as a Nazi for a while.
This isn't to say Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a hotbed of racism, because it isn't. The Turkic Cumans speak a different language and are a hostile enemy, which seems like a limited portrayal but no less so than any other war game I can think of. Then again, I'm white, so maybe I've missed things. And racism can take many forms, one of them being exclusion.
More apparent to me was the back-slapping laddishness revolving around bedding women. I'm pursuing a love story over here, while over there bedding a noble and having one-night stands. That's in addition to my Troubadour perk which makes me even more irresistible to women and lets me use the "bathwenches" for free, which ties into a key mechanic of keeping yourself clean and patched up. It also means I get the Alpha Male buff (+2 to Charisma) because I've been satisfied and apparently it shows. It literally says that. The game's Codex even feels the need to describe the ideal woman of the time: "a thin, pale woman with long blonde hair, small rounded breasts, relatively narrow hips and a narrow waist".
All of which means that a shadow lingers over Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Instead of challenging the Dark Age it reinterprets 615 years later, the game seems to delight in it. Instead of seeing notes in the margin of a history book, we get what feels like a glossy pamphlet advertising an escape into an oddly romanticised past. And it's that, ultimately, which makes me too uneasy about Warhorse's work to be able to recommend it.
So the reason why it doesn't make sense is not because the historian is a complete idiot, but because the original poster provided selective quotes to misrepresent the review. That doesn't mean that putting calls for diversity into reviews is a practice that should be encouraged, but merely that the situation isn't as deplorable as it was depicted in this thread. |
But the full review is even worse. How can he make an issue about Vavra wearing a Burzum shirt? A still popular black metal band.
Had the developer instead worn a shirt with a disgusting sickle and a hammer on it, the reviewer wouldn't have uttered a word. What a shameless hypocrite. These kind of people are perverse and dangerous.
