I am a player who enjoys collecting skins and have spent thousands over the years in games such as war thunder. I bought the $100 founder pack because I thought the skins were cool. I was looking forward to this game after seeing all the potential skins on KR. Regarding outfits they say nothing is removed but it is clear that in this beta some of the starter outfits are straight up missing. Maybe calling it censorship is overreacting but this is a huge red flag, who knows what other things AGS will remove/not approve from the game moving forward and this really turns me off as a collector.
So I will be refunding my founders pack until the game officially releases.
You seem pretty set in stone with this, but to me it might just be that they haven’t gotten to adding them yet. Korea is quite far ahead of us after all since they have been going for a longer time. So expect thing to be missing.
Really? Expect starter gear to be missing? It’s clear what’s happening and they even said they didn’t remove costumes per say but moved them to not be “front and center”. They’re essentially saying “Yeah we’re censoring the game”. Making excuses for them will only give them freedom to do even more outrageous censorship!
Yeah you can see in this thread one of the first comments by Roxx:
While she’s saying they didn’t “remove” anything, she’s also not saying they’ll be reverting that starting outfit change or that they will be using the original costumes from KR.
Censorship is pretty abhorrent, but not a deal breaker for me. I basically accepted that games are just not gonna be the freedom-filled escape from RL they used to be.
For me its simple. Plat founder hinges on if the original costumes are censored in any way. If they are then AGS doesn’t want my money I guess. Hopefully founders stays around until post launch so others can verify this.
It’s going to take more than a CM taking 4 seconds to write up a one sentence response that all is ok before I put any faith into this. That which has pretty much all disappeared after seeing the changes to previews/starter stuff already. Not even getting into all the other whack changes.
With the direction things go now in the West and especially recent game studio controversies involving sexual harassment and such, you’d be glad it will end up being just a bit of the booba covered.
I most certainly don’t see anyone in Amazon’s corporate heaven putting their ass on the line by not trying to out-prude their colleague next to them.
It’s a difficult moment, culturally, if you are in the position of being in the games industry right now and trying to import a game with the art that LA has into the current situation of the MMO game industry culture of the West, especially in the US where Amazon is based. The situation at Blizzard does have a massive impact, not just on Blizzard’s internal workings and its own products – it’s a warning to the rest of the industry about its content, and its practices. Amazon, as a major retailer with interests in the entire retail economy, really can’t risk any kind of untoward exposure here, in social media or otherwise, relating to importing a game that can be viewed as misogynistic and objectifying in our own current gaming culture, while being at the same time legitimate representations of the longstanding traditions of the digital artwork of these games that is produced in Korea.
While normally there would be some kind of balancing or weighing, as between the cultural imperialism of applying our own cultural standards to the cultural products of other cultures, on the one hand, and our own strong values relating to fair representation of women in video game art and design in our own culture, in the current moment in the West that weighing is tilted heavily towards the latter, such that it puts a company like Amazon in a nearly impossible position if they were to import the art, as it is in the KR/RU versions, with no changes. It simply isn’t feasible in the current cultural moment, especially in the US MMO industry, in the wake of what has happened in Irvine. Everything is different now.
Hopefully what they are doing is what they say they are doing – that is, moving things around rather than deleting them, such that the original artwork is available later in the game, by doing certain things to earn it, rather than at the outset of the game, where it is more obvious and in the face and would clearly be the subject of substantial ridicule in social media and the gaming press, both of which a mass market retailer like Amazon wants to avoid. Hopefully if they are just moving things around, they can preserve the art while making it less obvious to a reviewer, and thereby blunt some of the social criticism of the game. We will see, though.
In general, I don’t think we will see too many large companies like Amazon, who have a retail face to the public and are therefore very sensitive to their public image, deal with trying to navigate the maze of importing Korean digital artwork into the West in the future. Likely we will see this relegated to companies who aren’t as image sensitive like Kakao, Gameforge, etc.
Not sure if anyone else has linked said this, but yes the starting outfits have changed. But yes, the original starting outfits are still there to get and equip:
Ye they said that. But at the same time I agree with OP that it’s huge red flag and game isn’t even out yet and they are switching outfits, changing default outfits, changing main npc names etc…
I want to believe in amazon keeping their word, but at the same time I have seen it too many times in Asian made games where publisher said one thing only to change their mind months later.
If anything, it’s very good people react way harder that they should that they are not happy with those changes. It gives u slight hope they will take their feedback and rethink their future approach.
For me, all I see is wasted development time on changes like this in 18+ game.
