It's [the car handling] one of two major decisions that ended up crippling this game. The second decision is something we can now talk about openly in 2023, and most of us are going to be on the same page.
Most of this game was indeed designed to push an agenda and seek brownie points from specific publications. I personally believe that the higher-ups at the time were simply out of touch, it has nothing to do with something like an ESG score. They'd probably noticed how every single article on mainstream gaming sites like Kotaku were taking a social justice slant and just how frequently they were running across pride or trans flags in peoples' bios on Twitter. I believe they did not recognize that Twitter is not an accurate representation of real life, and gaming journalism has become slowly populated with more and more left-leaning types, and instead believe that the perpetually online activist-types that occupy Twitter were an accurate representation of the general population.
From that point forward, things snowballed into deciding that Fast and the Furious, which had traditionally been a light-hearted car film needed to be a deep commentary on gender identity and sexual identity. [...] We were not designing the narrative elements to be fun or engrossing, we were designing it to fit an agenda.
