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Ubisoft apologizes after controversial (and accidental?) Division 2 beta email
- Thread starter Real
- Start date
Making The Division 2 take place in DC and trying to be apolitical about contemporary politics is the equivalent of creating a minefield, getting black out drunk and waking up the next morning in a pit of sand to a hand written note that is barely legible saying "DoNT StEPP ON MinEs!"
The problem is the developers have insisted over and over again that the game isn't political
Give me a game about the conservative apocalypse. Make a statement. Be bold. But instead, they just use this like veneer of politics and buzzwords to give you a vanilla game afraid of actually saying anything. I'm still pretty hopeful for that game as being a fun thing to play. But yikes
I don't have any problem with it.
My problem is with the devs insisting that this game is completely apolitical.
I'm more inclined to be offended by Ubisoft's cowardly fear of doing real commentary in their games during these times of political upheaval and social unrest.
To be fair this is based on second hand accounts of storylines such as Far Cry 5's so I might be wrong.
To be fair this is based on second hand accounts of storylines such as Far Cry 5's so I might be wrong.
That always got me, how can you call a game apolitical when the grandfather of Right Wing Power Fantasies is on the box?
By being fucking cowards using charged imagery and tone but trying to be middle-of-the-road in message. I wish they just leaned into the ridiculousness and have one of the enemy groups just be Republican Senators and House Reps who got a bunch of the militarized police on their side, trying to go full Handmaid's Tale on it. Just actually lean in!
I want a fake Mitch McConnell in a prototype power armour suit as a late-game mission boss, goddammit.
It wasn't. People were just cracking up about how it was just on-the-nose enough to be likely something they'd later apologize for.
As a government worker who was not furloughed I thought it was funny, but I can see how if I had a family to support and wasn't getting a paycheck it would at least feel flippant and incosiderate.
The Division 1 was so tone-deaf that it feels like a farce. Wildlands even more so.
You have to protect a baby clone of Ronald Reagan from a cult lead by a Dick Cheney who gains super powers by changing out different animal hearts with his own.
I was honestly expecting something extremely racist or sexist or transphobic or anything along those lines based on the thread title. This is much better.
100% guaranteed to be a fucking disaster. They should hire actual writers and thoughtful people to work on their games. Division 1 was problematic as hell.
Far Cry 2 was an overtly political game that at the same time never actually took a stance on anything beyond "The protagonist of this game can go die in a hole".
Oluwagembi: Do you ever choose sides in a conflict?
Jackal: Eh, I did it once, was a bad idea; cut my profits in half, almost got me killed. Never again. You sell to both sides. You can help level the field, stabilize the market, draw out the conflict to make more money. A big sale to one side doesn't generate repeat business. Both the APR and the UFLL are using my weapons. Now, they're in détente. Both sides are stockpiling - less violence, more spending. It's perfect.
Oluwagembi: But it's anarchy. Thousands are dead. Hundreds of thousands are displaced.
Jackal: If I pick sides, fewer will be displaced, but more will be dead. And I would probably be one of 'em.
Jackal: I'll tell you what's sick. People in the UK, US, fucking Canada, Sweden. They pay their taxes - and some remote piloted drone fires a missile into a public market to hit some warlord. Yeah, so maybe war doesn't happen for another six months, and the price of their gluten-free sorghum bread stays low. It's not sick to arm people. It's sick to bump off their crooks and dictators in protection of our interest, and then call it "international justice". These people don't have remote piloted drones guarding their interests ten thousand miles away, they don't have a war machine paid for with taxes, where I am - they usually don't even have a fucking government. The drone is the oppressor, the gluten-free sorghum bread is the oppressor, the AK-47 is the great equalizer. I empower these people.
A trend that began with FC2 and carries over to many modern Ubisoft games is to use the game's antagonist as a proxy sounding board for political concepts that the player is supposed to chew over of their own volition. This sense of "decide for yourself" is why you have those philosophical/moral/ethical debates with Socrates in AC: Odyssey. Ubisoft are not going to tell you whether something is right or wrong. They want the players to explore these things. Whether The Division does this well is another matter entirely, of course.
As part of this, Ubisoft steer clear of contemporary politics for the most part in favor of more abstract generalities. The political themes explored in Ubisoft games tend to be broader in nature and apply on a global scale. To more general aspects of the human condition. This is already evident in Far Cry New Dawn. And again, they tend to place the harshest political sentiments in the mouths of "bad" people so that it doesn't seem like they are statements directly from Ubisoft.
The one time Treyarch tried to get political with a super, super USA USA fanbase, they did the same thing, using Raul Menendez to talk about the economic anarchy of capitalism and the military industrial complex. They can express political ideas while also washing their hands of them to prevent backlash. If they give the player the ability to put a bullet through the head of the character who says things the fanbase doesn't like, that's even tidier.
Oluwagembi: Do you ever choose sides in a conflict?
Jackal: Eh, I did it once, was a bad idea; cut my profits in half, almost got me killed. Never again. You sell to both sides. You can help level the field, stabilize the market, draw out the conflict to make more money. A big sale to one side doesn't generate repeat business. Both the APR and the UFLL are using my weapons. Now, they're in détente. Both sides are stockpiling - less violence, more spending. It's perfect.
Oluwagembi: But it's anarchy. Thousands are dead. Hundreds of thousands are displaced.
Jackal: If I pick sides, fewer will be displaced, but more will be dead. And I would probably be one of 'em.
Jackal: I'll tell you what's sick. People in the UK, US, fucking Canada, Sweden. They pay their taxes - and some remote piloted drone fires a missile into a public market to hit some warlord. Yeah, so maybe war doesn't happen for another six months, and the price of their gluten-free sorghum bread stays low. It's not sick to arm people. It's sick to bump off their crooks and dictators in protection of our interest, and then call it "international justice". These people don't have remote piloted drones guarding their interests ten thousand miles away, they don't have a war machine paid for with taxes, where I am - they usually don't even have a fucking government. The drone is the oppressor, the gluten-free sorghum bread is the oppressor, the AK-47 is the great equalizer. I empower these people.
A trend that began with FC2 and carries over to many modern Ubisoft games is to use the game's antagonist as a proxy sounding board for political concepts that the player is supposed to chew over of their own volition. This sense of "decide for yourself" is why you have those philosophical/moral/ethical debates with Socrates in AC: Odyssey. Ubisoft are not going to tell you whether something is right or wrong. They want the players to explore these things. Whether The Division does this well is another matter entirely, of course.
As part of this, Ubisoft steer clear of contemporary politics for the most part in favor of more abstract generalities. The political themes explored in Ubisoft games tend to be broader in nature and apply on a global scale. To more general aspects of the human condition. This is already evident in Far Cry New Dawn. And again, they tend to place the harshest political sentiments in the mouths of "bad" people so that it doesn't seem like they are statements directly from Ubisoft.
The one time Treyarch tried to get political with a super, super USA USA fanbase, they did the same thing, using Raul Menendez to talk about the economic anarchy of capitalism and the military industrial complex. They can express political ideas while also washing their hands of them to prevent backlash. If they give the player the ability to put a bullet through the head of the character who says things the fanbase doesn't like, that's even tidier.
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Just because the game is set in DC this time doesn't make it any more or less political than the first game.
It's still just about a virus that killed a lot of the population and an agency trying to restore a little bit of civilization among groups that have used the incident as an opportunity to be violent gangs.
Yeah really is a shame someone held a gun to their head forcing them to apologise.
Two of the enemy groups in the first games are Looters and Union utility workers. You shoot them on sight.