Do you believe one cannot make a living off of by way of generating revenue or am I reading your reply too heavily and you strictly mean you dislike making games with the primary goal of making money?
I find capitalism contemptible at best, but there's not really a better alternative since everything else is just as shitty. Whatever economic system you have, you should never put social status (e.g. more money, more fame, etc.) above the quality of the project that you're producing. This is true for any media, and why most media from all sources are shit - because people pride the revenue over the quality of the title. So in this case, I think that having
any kind of goal (primary, secondary, tertiary) involve money is enough to condemn a developer because as soon as you monetarily involve your project, you give up the privilege of being unbiased. Suddenly, tens of thousands of outside stimuli affect your game (you can't say this in your game because it will affect sales; you can't put this in your game because it will affect sales; you must make this blatantly apparent in your game because it affects sales; etc).
I would like to inquire why "acceptable premises" matter, or to what degree and how you define it, if the creator of a game should have the primary say in the story of the game. (I only ask since "acceptable premises" can float into really strange territory sometimes.)
"Acceptable premises" is a loaded term if you don't define it, and I can see that I forgot to do that in my first reply. When you look to story design in any form of media (book, movie, game, comic, et. al.), it's very easy to come across concepts that simply don't work. Tropes like Space Catholics in Warhammer 40,000 or having a Big Tough Protagonist that's uninteresting because they're practically unkillable or have ludicrous power levels without proper in-lore justification (Kerrigan, Kratos, Master Chief, Samus) are examples of this. These premises are unacceptable because they result in a story that, from the get-go, is flawed. Acceptable premises are concepts that
could work, if they are executed properly by the developers. These are far more difficult to find, but the most rare gem of them all is finding a story that not only has an acceptable premise, but has proper execution behind it. This reiterates the point I make later in my post, which you quoted below.
LOL! All right, fair enough, but this also mean it wouldn't matter if the cast was diversified since either way it will be shit, no?
From a storytelling perspective, no, it will not matter. This is because developers are retards and can't differentiate between showing and telling, something we learned in kindergarten. They'd rather hand-hold the player through things and cut out communication between the player and the game, instead literally 'telling' them everything they need to know. This is found in tooltips or very obvious floating text, like in the latest Castlevania games where its floating text says "Even Goblin grenades can't break this door down!" instead of having the character say, in dialogue, "This door is more fortified than the others I've come across. I'll have to find another way to breach it!" A simpler example can be found in StarCraft: Brood War's campaigns, where they communicate to the player using tips (e.g. "You can construct a ComSat Station to use Scanner Sweep!") instead of using dialogue.
From a perspective that prides diversity over actual quality (this conversation), I would say that it does matter if the cast was diversified. I was just commenting on the fact that a developer with a diverse cast in their game is no more likely to succeed than a developer with a cookie-cutter cast. In fact, since developers can rarely handle anything more than cookie-cutter, it's likely that a diverse cast will draw too much energy away from other important aspects of the game, like making sure there aren't any bugs in it and making sure its production values aren't that of Demon's Souls. Basically, regardless of which way you rotate your asshole here, you're gonna have to take a shit.
All games should let you make your own character. That's why Elder Scrolls, Saints Row, The Sims, and Mass Effect are top tier diversity. I'd rather go about as a character I love and have connection to because I took the time to create them. It's like being God...
The problem with this mindset is that nothing in the games you mention actually changes. Your playstyle doesn't change, your story doesn't change. Nothing is different about playing Mass Effect if you're a woman or a man - only minor, trivial contrivances, like 'this character wants to fuck you instead of this character'. These are things that ultimately don't have a shred of impact on the endgame or the metagame. So sure, you get to play the game from a different 'perspective', but is it really that different if you're playing the exact same game? I don't see any diversity in games like these because there's literally nothing diverse about the way they play. They're all the same boring semi-open-world super-limited westernised RPG that failed to catch my attention three console generations ago and still have nothing to offer the genre or the industry as a whole. They're like the hipsters of the gaming world, except they're not alone in why the industry is turning to shit.
