this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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A major limiting factor that hurts the writing is that the game will ultimately still be designed to be complete accessible, so just like Skyrim had lots of racism in its dialogue and worldbuilding but nearly zero in practice for the player, so too does Starfield have subjects that appear in the writing but which the game designers are obliged to completely avoid.
That was laughably present in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It didn't just whitewash racism and make the new racism discrimination against the poor smol bean augmented people (yes Human Revolution showed people coerced into rented-out augmentation but didn't explore it much) but that discrimination wasn't even delivered to the player in any meaningful way.
Yeah, I watched hbomb's excessively-long video essay on that game and that's probably the most memorable part, especially the coercion aspect getting mentioned and then glossed over.
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms did an impressive takedown but it focused on the ever-diluted political discourse in Deus Ex sequels, from the deep complex richness in the first game to, as he put it, CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS in the later games.