There wasn't a black protagonist in HL2? And Alyx is more of a mulatto? Though here you can point to the fact that Valve sacked the original VA for Alyx in HL:A because "she wasn't of the true ethnic background of the character", just to show that even Valve isn't clean on this matter.
Dead Island had a black
male protagonist much like Left 4 Dead.
Those may be good examples of black female characters being in the lead cast of the games, however there's this one tiny detail being left out:
White characters without adding lectures about racism and/or shoving in diverse friendships
Back then, when such characters were added to the game, they were actually done in a natural way as a mean of simply having a diverse set of characters for the sake of them being different rather than being tokens for ESG points.
Sheva was a partner of the white boulder punching brick shithouse Chris Redfield and they've developed a strong friendship through simply being a part of the same group working together to take down a psychotic biological experiment that wanted to destroy the entire world with a lethal virus that was Albert Wesker. It was never done in a way that was meant to shoehorn in that black = good and white = bad.
Same with Left 4 Dead 2, Rochelle is just a news reporter that ended up teaming up with a black obese high-school teacher, a shady gambler and a inbred redneck truck mechanic, all of which being of completely different backgrounds, and all of which weren't really getting along, but through the necessity of having to survive a goddamn zombie apocalypse they've developed a strong bond.
Their race was never there as a mean to shove the agenda down the player's throat, it was only a small piece of already good writing. That's the big difference between the old and new multicultural narratives. What happened here was that Remedy after becoming public really lusted after those ESG bucks to the point where they've tripped and fell down hard.
I always like pointing to one game to show that you can make an insanely diverse game with none of it feeling forced, where you'll have to actually stop for a second to realize how diverse the game really is because it's done that well.
That game is Grand Theft Auto IV.
There are so many different nationalities and ethnicities in GTA IV where they all meet and don't end up devolving into preaching about racism or white guilt. You're a Serbian, and you befriend Jews, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Irishmen and Afro-Americans, as if you're all the same with no major differences, and for a brief period you also work for Italians.
This diversity was never abused to push a political talking point. It was there to represent that USA is a really diverse country, and that people move those differences aside and have no issue becoming friends even if the color of their skin, or the accent they're talking in is different.
However the big issue is that with IV, R* actually put in effort into the writing and their number 1 priority wasn't to push such an agenda straight in your face at the cost of everything else so you have no doubts about what they wanted to show. Because that's how modern day ESG writing looks like, and people who don't understand this love to yap about how old games were also political and diverse, but their brains are so burned out they can't understand subtlety which made the old games so much better.
Hell, even GTA:SA was pretty diverse, and it had some political undertones, however it was never forced or was done to push a narrative. Plus, it alluded to real life events that happened a decade before the game's release, not to the shit that the media is peddling in the current day. But again, consoomers don't understand it and will put GTA:SA on the same level as slop like Alan Wake 2 to prove that you're just an evil racist bigot nazi.
