Splash Damage

Merely two weeks after awarding Dragon Age: The Veilguard a 9 out of 10, IGN published a long critique of the game’s writing, worldbuilding, and roleplaying, which account for about 99% of what makes RPGs RPGs. We also discuss the game’s likely poor sales and Jason Schreier walking back a mocking tweet about the game’s critics along with news that Alyssa Mercante no longer works at Kotaku and Ubis...

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is finally out in the wild, and it’s already stirring up cringe from its terrible writing and voice acting, stale character interactions, and incredibly preachy woke nonsense. We discuss its success (or lack thereof) so far, reviews, and examples of embarrassing moments along with Concord’s official permanent death, Thomas Mahler’s reaction to Alyssa Mercante’s insults, a...

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed to February, no doubt due to criticism against playable character Yasuke, a black samurai in a feudal Japan setting, and the announcement of Ghost of Yotei, a sequel to a game that actually did a historical Japanese setting justice. We discuss how the final game might look along with Ubisoft’s awful response to criticism along with Kotaku complaining about...

Preorders for Dragon Age: The Veilguard are apparently poor. It might have something to do with the fact the game is now basically a cartoon, the character creator looks like trash, and the devs don’t even know characters from the series. We discuss this train wreck of a sequel along with The Gamer actually admitting the protagonist of Star Wars Outlaws is ugly, a Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts...

Concord will go down in video game history as one of the most colossal failures of all time. The game, filled with ugly character designs and pronouns for each one, lasted barely a week before the developers announced they would take it offline and refund everyone who bought it because it sold so poorly. There are others like it, including Dustborn. Will developers finally see the truth that no on...

The Dead Rising remake is making some notable changes, including changing the race of one of the baddies from Asian to white guy and removing the feature that would reward players for taking risque photos. We discuss the censorship along with the death of Game Informer, Black Myth: Wukong’s alleged lack of diversity, Scientific American’s take on D&D removing the term “race,” rumors about the deve...

Capcom announced they want to increase female representation in management roles to 15%. Surprisingly, even the far-left sides of the internet disagree with the idea of hiring based on sex. We discuss the terrible effort that is DEI along with Ubisoft “apologizing” to Japanese fans over Assassin’s Creed Shadows and wokies upset that Genshin Impact is too white.

The Kotaku brand is one step closer to death as Kotaku Australia shut down last week. We celebrate this fact and also discuss a D&D creator’s reaction to inflammatory remarks about the game’s origin, Japanese players petitioning for the cancellation of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, The Boys showrunner being a hypocrite when it comes to handling sexual assault on the show, and more.

Elden Ring’s expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, arrived to stellar reviews, but a Kotaku writer couldn’t help but use her article to compare her life of mean tweets to the brutality of the fantasy RPG. We discuss this ludicrous take (and our impressions of the DLC) along with the developers of the upcoming Black Myth: Wukong rejecting DEI consultants, woke devs finally realizing video game women ar...

Ubisoft is finally making an Assassin’s Creed game set in feudal Japan, so who is the protagonist? A black samurai. We discuss the controversy around this decision along with Shift Up releasing uncensored versions of the Stellar Blade outfits they originally edited and how far Tomb Raider has fallen.

The developers of Farm Folks took to X to ask for fan input on breast physics in their game. The woke, of course, got offended, and the CEO apologized, starting a series of events that will likely end in the game’s failure. We discuss why you should never apologize to the left along with Sony’s attempts to ruin Helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima, Microsoft closing several studios, Kotaku firing a...

A few days before release, developer Shift Up promised their highly anticipated Stellar Blade wouldn’t be censored. Well, even before official release, fans discovered a fast one was being pulled: Several costumes and gore have indeed been toned down, and the developers tried to sneak it by gamers. We discuss the ramifications of such a game opting for censorship. We also talk about Kotaku’s hypoc...

The upcoming Tomb Raider: Shadows of Truth won’t be a Tomb Raider game at all, considering the developers are flipping the entire premise of the franchise on its head in the name of wokeism. We discuss this IP-killing move along with Microsoft’s guidelines for devs on how to design female characters, Kotaku sticking to “news,” Star Wars Outlaws' uglified protagonist, a couple community managers wh...

An ex-Sweet Baby Inc. game developer working on the upcoming Black Panther game openly admitted to not hiring white people while working on an indie game because they make her feel “unsafe.” We discuss this blatant (and illegal) discrimination while highlighting all the ongoing Sweet Baby Inc. drama, including an interview with the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected page on Steam, Kotaku writers and develop...

Smaller games like Palworld, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Helldivers 2 are becoming increasingly popular while major studios are seeing major layoffs. Could one of the reasons be that these games aren’t tainted with the woke mind virus that seems to permeate the gaming industry as a whole? Sweet Baby Inc. is one example of a company determined to make games worse by inserting specific political ideologies...

Crystal Dynamics remastered the original Tomb Raider trilogy and included a long trigger warning about how racist the games are. We discuss this virtue signaling along with the creator of Stellar Blade’s based opinion about attractive characters in media and the Xbox news that came about after a week’s worth of rumors about the end of the brand.

A Ubisoft executive recently said in an interview they want more players to get comfortable with the idea of not owning video games, instead turning to subscription-based models that have proven time and again to be detrimental to the fans. We discuss this growing trend along with bureaucrats telling Japanese developers to censor their games, Stellar Blade doing its best to ignore such advice, and...

A Final Fantasy vocalist was going to appear at a convention, but when permanently online Twitter users discovered she had merely liked certain “problematic” tweets, her appearance was canceled. We discuss the ludicrousness of this decision along with the double standards in sexy mods, Snow White having dwarves again, and reactions to South Park: Joining the Panderverse.

The developers of the highly anticipated Spider-Man 2 game, Insomniac, have proven themselves to be the ultimate hypocrites by inserting an absurd amount of woke messaging into the game but censoring it all in the Middle Eastern version of the game. We discuss the irony of this decision along with League of Legends developers being equally hypocritical with their ogling of male characters, voice a...

Developers are bad at their jobs, so naturally, fans are going to mod games to their liking. However, certain mods, such as one to remove pronouns in Starfield’s character creator, are being banned from hosting platforms. We discuss wokies trying to control what others enjoy in their games along with the inevitable censorship in the upcoming Lollipop Chainsaw remake, Bungie getting blasted on Twit...

We spend a lot of time on this show pointing out the ridiculous cultural trends of video games and other nerdy hobbies, but that’s only because we love it all so much. To celebrate our 100th episode, we discuss some of our favorite games, books, and shows and why, at the end of the day, they’re worth fighting for.

The Witcher TV show is likely going to be canceled, and Feminist Frequency is finally ending. We discuss both and how their deaths are well deserved along with the controversy surrounding Skullgirls and the weird wokeness prominent in players of games like Dungeons & Dragons.

In a confusing but unsurprising move, Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed game based in feudal Japan is rumored to feature a female samurai and a black shinobi as the two playable characters. We discuss the odd choice to shoehorn in genders and races where they don’t make historical sense along with the increasing price and decreasing quality of AAA games, Call of Duty changing an operator’s name...

Some reviewers are panning the recently released Final Fantasy XVI for a pretty dumb reason: Apparently, despite it being an entirely fictional fantasy world based on Medieval aesthetics, the cast is too white. We discuss what a stupid critique this is along with the new Prince of Persia being black, streamer Nickmercs’ comments on Pride, diversity hires in the new Harry Potter show, and more.

Blizzard is virtue signaling hard this month, creating a month’s worth of LGBT pride content for Overwatch 2. The game now includes personalization items reflecting every imaginable sexual orientation, and a map that has been “pride-ified” has replaced a cop car with a standard vehicle. We discuss all this plus Capcom not censoring booties in Street Fighter 6 and Magic: The Gathering’s awful race-...