Social Justice Warriors have been demanding more homosexuality, more racial diversity, and less masculinity in games for a while now. Sometimes, there are token gestures, like how Skyrim let you get gay married despite that being jarringly out of place in its pseudo-early-medieval Northern Europe context. Sometimes, it's outright denial, like when the makers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance refused to throw token black into its game set in medieval Bohemia, despite angry bloggers insisting medieval Europe was as diverse as modern New York City.
And sometimes, it's total embrace.
In case you've been out of the loop, Bioware hired a social justice warrior who doesn't actually like video games to be one of the lead designers for Dragon Age. Now, on a fundamental level, story really doesn't make or break a fun video game. Dark Souls is one of my favorite RPGs, and the plot is barely even present. The problem is that when something other than making a great game is the focus of the company, everything suffers.
People have focused on the imbalance of love interests (25% of the main cast is gay...just like real life!), but the real problem goes much deeper than that. Senior management at a company has limited time and energy. If they're true believers in the social justice agenda, it affects the entire company. It means the very limited, valuable time senior leadership has is at least partially taken up by social justice nonsense. An overt political agenda places a damper on the office environment. People who don't believe in a company's mission won't last long, and when that company's mission is extreme politics, there's an awful lot of talent that becomes unavailable. And of course, senior employees who don't like the new direction will leave. David Gaider isn't just indulging a bit of SJW nonsense to make people happy. He's a true believer, and Social Justice has become central to Bioware's activity as a company.
The result is obvious in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The artwork is great (it's not hard to find radically left-wing artists). Great care was put into the plot line about helping a homosexual come out to his father. A lot of attention was put into the transsexual NPC. There was plenty of lore scattered in the game world dealing with sexual politics. However, it was clear that Bioware had no such interest in making sure the combat was fun, the pacing worked, or the gear was worthwhile...in other words, the actual game. Not to mention that the game was full of bugs on release. But even after patches, the game is simply not fun to play. It's not broken or awful. It's just boring. The whole game is practically on autopilot, side quests are pointless, and the difficulty tends to be heavily imbalanced in favor of the player. This isn't a coincidence. When the focus of a company isn't the product, quality suffers.
