Splash Damage

Merely two weeks after awarding Dragon Age: The Veilguard a 9 out of 10, IGN published a long critique of the game’s writing, worldbuilding, and roleplaying, which account for about 99% of what makes RPGs RPGs. We also discuss the game’s likely poor sales and Jason Schreier walking back a mocking tweet about the game’s critics along with news that Alyssa Mercante no longer works at Kotaku and Ubisoft’s hilarious takes on “creativity” when it comes to making Assassin’s Creed Shadows have a black protagonist.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is finally out in the wild, and it’s already stirring up cringe from its terrible writing and voice acting, stale character interactions, and incredibly preachy woke nonsense. We discuss its success (or lack thereof) so far, reviews, and examples of embarrassing moments along with Concord’s official permanent death, Thomas Mahler’s reaction to Alyssa Mercante’s insults, and research that shows women prefer playing as the sexy characters they love to hate.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed to February, no doubt due to criticism against playable character Yasuke, a black samurai in a feudal Japan setting, and the announcement of Ghost of Yotei, a sequel to a game that actually did a historical Japanese setting justice. We discuss how the final game might look along with Ubisoft’s awful response to criticism along with Kotaku complaining about Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s character creator, Silent Hill 2’s manish-looking women, Moon Studios’ CEO’s based take on DEI, and more.

Preorders for Dragon Age: The Veilguard are apparently poor. It might have something to do with the fact the game is now basically a cartoon, the character creator looks like trash, and the devs don’t even know characters from the series. We discuss this train wreck of a sequel along with The Gamer actually admitting the protagonist of Star Wars Outlaws is ugly, a Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts dev discussing why he makes characters hot, the Concord director stepping down, Elder Scrolls Online’s first nonbinary character, and Game Devs of Color Expo.

Concord will go down in video game history as one of the most colossal failures of all time. The game, filled with ugly character designs and pronouns for each one, lasted barely a week before the developers announced they would take it offline and refund everyone who bought it because it sold so poorly. There are others like it, including Dustborn. Will developers finally see the truth that no one wants these woke train wrecks? Probably not, because another one—Fairgame$—is on the way.

The Dead Rising remake is making some notable changes, including changing the race of one of the baddies from Asian to white guy and removing the feature that would reward players for taking risque photos. We discuss the censorship along with the death of Game Informer, Black Myth: Wukong’s alleged lack of diversity, Scientific American’s take on D&D removing the term “race,” rumors about the development studio behind Concord, Runescape removing sexes from character creation while adding pronouns, and more!

Capcom announced they want to increase female representation in management roles to 15%. Surprisingly, even the far-left sides of the internet disagree with the idea of hiring based on sex. We discuss the terrible effort that is DEI along with Ubisoft “apologizing” to Japanese fans over Assassin’s Creed Shadows and wokies upset that Genshin Impact is too white.

The Kotaku brand is one step closer to death as Kotaku Australia shut down last week. We celebrate this fact and also discuss a D&D creator’s reaction to inflammatory remarks about the game’s origin, Japanese players petitioning for the cancellation of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, The Boys showrunner being a hypocrite when it comes to handling sexual assault on the show, and more.

Elden Ring’s expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, arrived to stellar reviews, but a Kotaku writer couldn’t help but use her article to compare her life of mean tweets to the brutality of the fantasy RPG. We discuss this ludicrous take (and our impressions of the DLC) along with the developers of the upcoming Black Myth: Wukong rejecting DEI consultants, woke devs finally realizing video game women are being uglified on purpose, Ubisoft’s hilarious reaction to Elon Musk’s criticism of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and more.

Ubisoft is finally making an Assassin’s Creed game set in feudal Japan, so who is the protagonist? A black samurai. We discuss the controversy around this decision along with Shift Up releasing uncensored versions of the Stellar Blade outfits they originally edited and how far Tomb Raider has fallen.