Assassins Creed: Origins – Feminism and SJW dialogs Save for later Reblogpost

The issue with feminism and the influence of social justice warriors on games has become more prevalent in the last couple of years. Unfortunately calling for more “diversity” and more “strong female characters” in video games most of the time does not mean better, more in-depth characters and more detailed, better written stories; but rather, in most cases, it means blurred gender roles and identities, which sometimes lead to female characters being written as very masculine males making them unbelievable and sometimes even very annoying. A good – although lesser known – example to this writing would be Lieutenant Nora Salter (wingman of the player) in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and other characters in Infinite Warfare.

Feminism and SJWs can also affect game design choices – for instance many people and outlets claimed that BioWare was making all female characters in Mass Effect: Andromeda ugly and unattractive on purpose, and it can cause imaginary issues after release, like or PUBG’s cameltoe problem for no apparent, real reason than being “offensive” to a small group – a group which is unlikely to ever play the game. If you were unfamiliar with these examples, there is probably something that you heard about, a poster released by Blizzard Ent. depicting one of their Overwatch characters, Tracer doing a signature victory pose showing her butt, which became apparently too much for the same group of people before Blizzard opted to replace it.

Overwatch, the most popular FPS before being decrowned by PUBG thanks to the great influx of new Chinese players, is one of the premier games which is pushing these agendas just looking at the characters and their sexual quirks.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins is Ubisoft’s latest and greatest game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, its world is about the same size as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag if you include all the map space which is being covered by the Caribbean Sea. None the less, a huge playground and a beautifully crafted world hasn’t made any game a good game to play yet, Origins’ story is good – being halfway through the game – most of the dialogs are well-thought-out, however, there are some things which are just left to be desired.

The game is way better built in terms of the terrain and the buildings than any previous Assassin’s Creed game. The designers were really pushing themselves with this title and it shows. The revamped lighting system, the new visual effects give more depth to the ancient world. It would be really hard to say anything bad about this aspect but on the other hand the gameplay, combat and sometimes the dialogs that I find to be lacking. As of combat, Origins was reduced to something along the lines of the Witcher 3, with the same quality animations and similarly with a couple of execution moves. Comparing this new combat system to the ones that you find in any previous Assassin’s Creed is probably impossible. Origins tries to be more-or-less an action-adventure game with RPG element to it, which it constantly fails to pull off.

If you are playing these game for the world and the feeling of the historical era, Origins will Not disappoint you, the details that you will find, the pyramids and other structures that you will explore will totally take you away for at least a few days, it is just that awesome. Though, if you feel like being more interested in the gameplay of the game, you will probably find the combat part of the title severely lacking in quality, especially if you liked the combat system of the previous Assassin’s Creed games.

Let me explain why that’s my opinion in detail. There is the side quest in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, named “The Old Fighter” 

Unfortunately, I have not found a walkthrough of this mission without commentary. Basically, if you watch the video and compare it to the comic book, America #2, it’s of the same quality and it required about the same amount of brainpower. The main plot of the mission is that there is this big old/older man who is betting beaten by even the skinniest fighters, no matter how much effort he puts into brawling. Allegedly he was a famous fighter in a foreign arena in his prime, yet it appears that he cannot compete with amateurs. His character is very vague and unbelievable and contrary to his physical abilities known to him, he even insists racing (running) to the next checkpoint of the mission about halfway through.

Approximately halfway through the game, there is a main quest, actually, two main quests formed into one, “Aye: Blade of the Goddess” and “The Battle of the Nile” which are very closely related and cannot be viewed separately. In the first one you are with Aya and in the latter on you control your regular hero, Bayek. These two missions have much more issues than the one that I brought up previously as an example and the other quests which include such moments mostly vaguely hear-and-there. If you play the second part of the mission, you will hear from Aya (wife of Bayek, the main character), that: “Give me the powder, Caesar thinks a woman cannot do this job.” looking very aggressively at Bayek (his husband) before going to the top of the lighthouse through the flames of the warships once afloat on the waters of Alexandria’s harbor. After she gets to the top of the lighthouse he gets attacked by a guard and they struggle a bit, after that moment the game cuts to the main character, Bayek, and Julius Caesar waiting in the tall grass for the signal (the signal is meant for the Roman ships to commence an attack on the harbor). Caesar makes this comment: “I can’t believe you trusted a woman to do something of such importance.”

My main issue with the game is Assassin’s Creed: Origins rather satisfies the standards of today’s vile social norms than it tries to make a historically accurate and believable story within its very-well built world. These are a few examples of just that. Although if I may say, the game somewhat caters to a politically correct audience and it is somewhat apparent in the decisions of Ubisoft, however, the game fails to deliver on such important aspects like combat, story and sometimes even functionality. The Assassin’s Creed series always had a current age timeline to it (Desmon and others), but it is now reduced to a very similar character to Aya. As Aya, she is probably one of the most aggressive and masculine female character in the whole series (including Assassin’s Creed I, II, Brotherhood, Revelations, III, Liberation, Rogue, IV Black Flag, Freedom Cry, Unity and Syndicate), two characters who can only be compared to the main hero of Freedom Cry and one of the main characters of Black Flag, Adéwalé, who was by the way a believable (and even loveable) character in my own opinion, although seemed to be overly aggressive and cruel at times, that is why his main weapon was a 20inch machete.