First it was System Shock 3
Then Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2
…What’s next TimeSplitters 4?
I’m glad it’s happening but I’m choosing to believe they will be awful and unfaithful to the previous games so I can’t be disappointed but could POTENTIALLY be pleasantly surprised haha. What are your thoughts? 
Psychonauts 2, Devil May Cry 5, and Crackdown 3.
Timesplitters is more likely than you think now that THQN/Deep Silver owns it, by the way.
I’m just wondering if they can do it nearly as good as Free Radical. In my opinion a game with a sense of humor is much harder to remain faithful to when recreating it years later especially with a different team. I genuinely hope im wrong about all these games but the current industry trends have undoubtedly tainted my outlook and made me (even more) cynical and pessimistic.
Well, Dambuster is made of Free Radical veterans. 
Show me Dark Souls 4 and i will be impressed.
Ok maybe I’m wrong but I remain skeptical I’ve been burned too many times. If it does come out it will probably be a goddamn Epic Store Exclusive in the end anyway…smh
You’re right on that thanks to Deep Silver.
Next up, fortnite 2
BIG sigh
Glad I prepared myself for disappointment. What does VtMB2 need? Apparently real world politics… wait WHAT???
can’t see the hubbub here, it literally makes sense to have in a divisive multi factions politics world 
the key is gonna be how they handle/implement “whatever” they decide to toss in
I agree, politics were part of the original but this is them trying to push their own agenda.
lol, that depends entirely on what/how they do it in game
there is a grand misconception about what “pushing own agenda” is in games these days
-just because something is present, doesn’t mean anyone is pushing it on you
otherwise you might aswell run around with blinders on to the “oh so horrible propaganda"those 99.999% of everything is trying to “push” on you every minute and every second of every day in life just by something simple as getting a coffee…
you could sex sht up in the first one (didn’t allow male on male tho iirc) so lbqt"stuff” was already present
there were minorities and oppressed in the first, thinbloods ??
+it’s an old fashion hierarchical society that literally screams boot heel to the throat of those “lesser”, some uprise against “the man” is, again literally, the most naturally evolution ever -as it’s been a thing throughout history, forever??
and since it sorta has deep roots to fcn Abrahamic religion, having mentions of Islam “within the confines of the vamps” does not really seem like any farfetched wrongdoings
so yea, this oozes of "anti sjw"rant/outrage culture (which i know razorfist is fond of anyway)
-wait until the product is “in hand”/finished and see what and how they do before you start forming an opinion and base judgment of off, nothing?
and politics doesn’t make a game inherently bad regardless of “which” politics, it’s all about how you manage to blend it with being a game
^also not saying they wont fck it up, like i said, i’m not pre-ordering a gd damn year in advance, i want the blood moon edition sure, but i’m waiting until we get waaaay closer until i make my decision about what’s in hand
That’s a fair assessment. Everyone remember the beauty and the beast movie’s “exclusively gay moment” that caused so much outrage only to be pretty much nothing? Or fantastic beasts for that matter. Pretty much anything nowadays can thrive off of outrage and controversy even if it ends up being nothing (though there may be some backlash later). So wait and see, if there is a deeply pushed one sided agenda and it’s clear in the game, then sure we can get upset. But for now I’m willing to get excited at the possibilities of the game.
Maybe it’s just me but bringing in real world politics is immersion breaking which is a problem for an rpg. I wouldn’t mind if it was done naturally and not forced but from my experience these things are rarely handled with any subtlety. It seems like those moments stick out and have me thinking ‘Oh this was done for inclusivity or representation’ instead of feeling like a genuine progression of the story. Guess I sound like a prejudiced bigot.
people see what they wanna see
why is inclusion or representation bad?
why does it harm a narrative to have X real world thing, specially here in a setting that’s set for all intents and purposes in the real world, but in its shadow side? -would be sorta reasonable to expect things to blend no?
you had people lose their sht for mass effect daring to include a trans character -which for that universe should make all but massive sense everything considering
sexing up a male/female’ish humanoid alien 
non-gender strict humanoid lifeform existing 
think i even mentioned you could sex stuff up in bloodlines, you didn’t really have people rage on about that -but damn if “no homo in muh games” became a thing later(and yea i get it, it doesn’t really count when it’s girl on girl apparently)
(inc my trailing off thought about the subject of politics or outrage with games)
you have people retroactively hating on older CoDmw games because “now” they are racist, but back then it was “meh, no real biggie”
people digging up absurd non-existent issues such as xenophobia in x "(literal)aliens wants to kill us"games -which ofc was never an issue (and to any sane person wouldn’t be)
games have been filled with politics for ages, or x matter that could be considered “agenda” or controversial, but no one batted an eye (well, except for a few prissy moms not liking violence) -until we entered the “outrage era”
hell assassin’s creed, proudly, feature(d) a notation this was done by a multi racial, cultural, religious team, long before “inclusivity” became either agenda, issue or “wokeness”. The game didn’t really suffer for it (imo) but neither side of the fence came after it, “back then”
Fallout 3 wasn’t under fire for it’s "leftist socialist pushing propaganda"agenda at the time,
San Andreas wasn’t lamented or hailed for being the "woke"game of 2004 because you were playing a black character. There was some mentions about it and the potential portrayal, but nowhere near the massive “issue”, butthurt outcry and outrage attention it would have been “today”
because funny enough, back then sht like that didn’t “matter”(as much) -all that mattered was the game. These days people look more hard for this stuff, so they see mountains where there is molehills, and forget that not only isn’t it necessarily bad, it might also just not be exactly a new or different thing in a game.
so many games have had politics or religion or messages etc in them, but no one cared “then”
Bioshock, Starcraft, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Metal Gear, Half Life, beyond good and evil, abe’s odyssey, this war of mine, papers please etc etc etc a bunch i’m missing ← all highly political games, and somehow equally highly praised -where no one got butthurt about “muh politics showed in face”/didn’t care to notice
(funny thing about that last one, not tonight got called out for being “political” and some geniuses felt like calling on papers please as similar game but being “unpolitical” -which is freakin hilarious 
)
personal ex. everytime i saw some outrage about "muh females"character in x game i always got this weird thought; “am i the only fcn dude that chose to play a female character when possible??”
-idono, maybe i just got too fcn used to Resident Evil, back in 1996, coddling me with that option -dang what a beta cuck i am huh
when you have people complaining about shooting nazis, as being a wrong thing… you really gotta start to think maybe, just maybe, we’ve taken the butthurt a tad too fcn far over the cliff-side
5 years from now you won’t even be able to spray a gelatinous shapeless blob full of lead without someone seeing politics, agenda and feelings hurt.
ESRB need a new label “rated TW for Trigger Warning; might contain stuff that exist in the actual world”
(finishing up what suddenly became much longer than intended)
i don’t personally subscribe to the overblown sentiment that (all) “games are art”, and thus much less that “all art are(/must be) political”. But games are made by “real people” -living in a real world, grown and shaped and surrounded by politics both direct and subconscious. It’s gonna be hard to make a semi srs game that doesn’t have political threads weaved into it, to one degree or another
-and including someone that might not have been so much previously doesn’t automatically tip the scale into agenda either; surprise, there are different people/creeds in the universe
and even if it’s 95% political strands, doesn’t mean it’s “pushing an agenda”, it could just be telling a story
^anyway, just my pointless thoughts, i just want my games to play, preferably functional/bug free and with decent mechanics -usually that’s where devs fck up for me, long before agenda issues
(ps sorry for spelling, grammar, paragraph(ing?) and cohesion -gave up around page 500 of the novel)