Dustborn - The Latest and Biggest DEI Flop to Date that No One Asked for!

[invisibult plus+]

Null streamed some.

 

[PeruvianPerun]

Norwegian site published semi-article semi-interview with Ragnar about game and it has English translation
English Archive Original Archive of original
I don't know how well translated it is, but it has some gems like "It's not a flop because reviews great" and "game done with humor"

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Norwegian site published semi-article semi-interview with Ragnar about game and it has English translation
English Archive Original Archive of original
I don't know how well translated it is, but it has some gems like "It's not a flop because reviews great" and "game done with humor"

More like "It's not a flop since given enough years it will return the money" which is highly optimistic. He uses Dreamfall Chapters as an example, but that was in the days when Humble Bundle was in vogue and Steam wasn't filled with far better games for a dollar. Plus DC had a lot of goodwill from TLJ.

 

[Drama Fan]

There was a reddit /r/games thread about the article (kiwi thread) with the devs crying that they could have never predicted their slop game would fail.
Redditors seem largely confused about whether the game was unsubtle right-wing satire or the most tone deaf leftoid media. Even redditors are declaring total chud victory.

Redditors on /r/games try to figure out whether Dustborn was the least subtle piece of right-wing satire or if the developers are literally that retarded (archive)
Even redditors think the devs need to touch grass or at least leave their Bluesky bubbles
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Null's favorite song gets criticized
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Redditors aren't buying the fake "death threats" and "we're a small team" talking points
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These chuds even think that you should make games that gamers want to play
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One person notes that they made a game so bad that the only financial benefactors were the chuds dunking on it for their social media bux
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When even mainstream reddit has to admit to a total chud victory, it's a total chud victory.

 

[Safir]

Redditors seem largely confused about whether the game was unsubtle right-wing satire or the most tone deaf leftoid media.

Having just watched Null's first stream, I am 100% sure it's NOT the MOST tone deaf leftoid media, it's a typical result of retards making propaganda they don't actually believe in. Noted cow Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this "belief in belief".

I once ended on a Muslim site which had children's stories. Those stories were exactly this retarded. One was an Indiana Jones pastiche in which a pagan priest was incinerated by sunlight refracting through a (nonmagical) jewel, the child protagonists (brother and sister) did nothing to effect it except pray 5 times a day, every day, each pray time autistically announced by the narrator. There was a yeed on the Writing Stacksexchange who was writing a children's book about yeed children who get isekaied to bublical times and accidentally drag a neo-nazi bully in their wake. There was a Russian Orthodox priest who wrote a tranny Harry Potter haydur fanfiction. I can't really explain it, but if you read enough of these, you can see it plain as autism on a sped's face. It really hit me (haha, "hit") at the last scene, with the upgradable flying returning baseball bat, only a true sped could write it like that.

It's similar but not quite the same as attempts at long-form fiction written by untalented children when they don't just steal from existing media but try their best to be original -- except children's work tends to have a core moment of greatness (or "greatness") that motivated them to phone in the rest. Returning to that baseball bat (haha, "returning"), a child would have just given his protagonist the bat with no explanation.

Someone mentioned plagiarism in the Steam reviews and I immediately (again) thought of the best* game @Jaimas played on here, Extreme Meatpunks Forever. I'm surprised no one's made the connection yet: "punk" near-future, gross crippled genderspecials, road trip, heist, bashing the fash, they go to a place of all she-hers. It's made by a troon, who actually lives (or lived, I didn't check if he 41%d yet) his ideology (although with as much effort as in the game, next to none). Dustborn has no idea, its core is "here's $1.5M for a game about fighting disinformation".

Were the game a right-wing satire, you'd immediately notice it because it'd be sparking with fun. This is not funny, this is scary like Jonty Bravery or Bionca Ellis, it is legitimately frightening that 16 of these creatures were able to form a game development team and release a game.

* Signalis is trash

 

[XMassAllYearRound]

Out of what I assume to be boredom one developer behind Dustborn has decided to go and sweep the steam forums.

Most of what they have done is lock up forum discussions with copy-pasted statements such as "Thread locked, since it violates the guidelines for the forum. Interactions with players and developers should not be abusive or inflammatory, or create an unwelcoming environment" or parrot things already stated in the interview. But there are three posts that caught my eye and I will post without personal commentary

• They haven't given up on the game and are planing an update to fix a few performance issues

• Pax as a protagonist is supposed to be unlikable at the first and grow as a person as the story progresses

• The whole "Fighting disinformation with memes" thing is supposed to be satire and they didn't intend for the game to appeal to any political side in particular

 

[Sneed Halation]

Looks like someone's been editing the wiki again and hasn't gotten caught yet. Mostly just image edits, but there's a few good text changes too.

 

[Jaimas]

I think it's really important to note that what demarcates a game as actually woke is an issue that goes much further than just a few themes. As one of the site's resident idiots who plays this shit for the amusement of you all, I feel uniquely able to make that determination, and I can say without hyperbole that wokeness, much like really shitty ideas of other flavors, is a matter of degree. A work that has a few themes that are woke or woke-adjacent or a game that has some of that shit forced on it by mandate isn't really on the same page as some of the worst offenders.

And that is important because it's those worst offenders where you notice some really interesting weird shit.

In Extreme Meatpunks Forever (since I am apparently never escaping this fucking review), you don't get what you get with some games from the usual suspects where you get a 100% unfiltered view of the inside of the creator's headspace; instead you get a game where good worldbuilding, characterization, and game design can theoretically exist, and the developer is outright capable of creating good stuff, but has actively instead consciously chosen to make things the way they are to appeal to a very specific audience that consists of a very tiny subset of Reddit and Twitter. Every bit of good in the game - and there is some, the game knows how to build intrigue and some of the characterization is actually quite clever, which makes the whole thing even more frustrating - there are elements there of good design, but it's utterly choked out by the bad. The end result is you seeing where needing to appeal to the very worst weighs the whole shebang down like an anchor, and you quickly realize that a game made to appeal to this crowd specifically is fundamentally doomed from the word go.

But there is another, equally surreal bit of nonsense you can observe that's frankly haunted me since I played it.

A long-ass time ago, me and my friends were doing.... Basically what I do with JPATG, but with shitty titles from our era, which tended to be much different - a lot less shit like Dustborn or Concord and a lot more shit like Pools of Radiance. But there is one game genre I noticed that we played with full intention of tearing it to shreds, and it was shit like Ethnic Cleansing where you have a game that's fundamentally broken made by people who don't understand game design but believe the purity of the cause trumps absolutely everything. It's here that, ironically, you see some overlap with the wokiest of woke trash, specifically via the likes of Terfenstein.

The games stem from the same rotten core: blame a specific population for all the ills in the world, make a game where you violently murder them with minimal context and just go all-in on the gore. Terfenstein, like Ethnic Cleansing, is mechanically competent only so far in that it functions, but in all other ways, is a testament to complete incapacity, just like Ethnic Cleansing itself was - a migraine-inducing skitter-fest with terrible gunplay and prone to frequent crashing, relevant only because the developers literally wanted to make a game series based on the Turner Diaries. Terfenstein is equally inept, featuring gameplay bugs visible in, of all things, Operation Body Count (your bullets hit open doorways), and born from the same poisonous mindset - trhat the only thing that mattered was purity of the cause - in this case, a desire to brutalize women that don't believe Troons should be allowed in female spaces.

It is the proof-in-pudding as to the truism of Horsehoe Theory, and I don't think it would have hit as hard for me if I hadn't already previously played games that were this fucked up to review them for laughs.

 

[BTS4Lyfe]

Null has streamed more.

 

[AnOminous]

A work that has a few themes that are woke or woke-adjacent or a game that has some of that shit forced on it by mandate isn't really on the same page as some of the worst offenders.

I don't really consider woke an ideology because it is deliberately amorphous and constantly introduces new shibboleths that have to be echoed to prove your loyalty to the "movement," which isn't even really a movement because it has no ultimate goal except control, and not even of actually socially important things, despite the parroting of phrases like "social justice."

Other than a few very basic things like all blacks are oppressed since it apparently comes along with the melanin gene, all whites are oppressors racially guilty of sin, etc., everything else is up for grabs including whether blacks are currently more oppressed than troons or whatever dumb shit a handful of opinion leaders all started dittoing each other on last week.

However, much like Jack Thompson and Congress during the PMRC years, they sincerely believe that dumb shit like vidya or rap music turns people into whatever the game is portraying. So much like Doom would turn people into school shooters, they believe that if they control vidya and get people to play as fugly ass troons or whatever, the world will undergo a sea-change into their version of Utopia.

And they get extremely angry when society is instead more like no, fuck you, go away, put this shit in another man's face.

But there is one game genre I noticed that we played with full intention of tearing it to shreds, and it was shit like Ethnic Cleansing where you have a game that's fundamentally broken made by people who don't understand game design but believe the purity of the cause trumps absolutely everything. It's here that, ironically, you see some overlap with the wokiest of woke trash, specifically via the likes of Terfenstein.

The problem is they don't get that delivering your message in an incoherent, shitty way with no actual hook that justifies consooming it doesn't actually push your ideology. It makes people HATE it. It makes you look STUPID.

 

[Snekposter]

Null has streamed more.

I'd be MATI too if I had to play this game.

 

[Xenomorphs Are Cute]

Looks like someone's been editing the wiki again and hasn't gotten caught yet. Mostly just image edits, but there's a few good text changes too.

I hope someone has that archived.

 

[ratnoid]

The fact that the EU funded a game about America and how “bigoted” it is shows a lot about how they think about us. Europeans honestly need a stern reminder that they are America’s bitch that would literally be a shithole without us.

Especially the whole spiel about how good and safe Europe is to move into, or the whole "oh Europe wouldn't care about THIS dump" statement when responding to EU attacking US. If there was tech to just silence and strangle the opposition, then EU would be on the very top of that.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Been watching null's let's play.

Man the devs really loved to make games and addthe mechanics and stuff; there's all these small details. There's a team there that would love to make a great game and there's talent, but it's trapped under a DEI designer, only able to get grants for politislop. Sad.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Null streamed some.

Is there a full list of MATI vidya streams, separated by game?

 

[Jeb Bush]

Is there a full list of MATI vidya streams, separated by game?

Not anymore, but if you're looking for Null suffering through all the other walking simulators, he was subjected to over the years + some one-off game streams, check out this playlist.

And for those wondering what happened to Noam, after leaving the Dustborn team, they get reincarnated in the 2023 Cluedo digital edition remake.

Find it funny, how all these "diverse characters", always look the same.

 

[Jaimas]

Not anymore, but if you're looking for Null suffering through all the other walking simulators, he was subjected to over the years + some one-off game streams, check out this playlist.

And for those wondering what happened to Noam, after leaving the Dustborn team, they get reincarnated in the 2023 Cluedo digital edition remake.
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Find it funny, how all these "diverse characters", always look the same.

Eternal resting bitch face

 

[invisibult plus+]

It's ogre.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

Bit late, but someone did a rather solid review on Dustborn a few days ago:

Think it hits the main issues of the game pretty well. Agree? Disagree?

EDIT: Spelling mistake.

 

[#1 Hot Sauce of Kiwi Farm]

It's ogre.

Funniest part of the playthrough was how the game justified Josh hate towards Sai as she is both useless and a traitor.