Media coverage has gotten real lazy and sloppy, so they're pretty much pulling their stories from Twitter now. "Conservatives" could be like 100 people, max. Obviously it's whatever gets clicks, and hey, here's somebody from Lemmy, driving traffic to the site for free.

Starfield has been a real experience from the outside. My stepfather started playing it religiously (Xbox) as soon as it came out. I get the very strong impression that he's not alone. Much sleep has been lost over the newest Bethesda game. It looks like a hit for ol Todd.

So the actual players are too busy playing the game to be part of this conversation. That leaves people with no real involvement to be responsible for all this jabberjawing.

Complaints about the game not being good enough are pretty much not real, and are coming from people who aren't playing it.

This "conservative backlash" is legit fake news, and is probably a handful of nobodies on X pissing and whining about it performatively while some useless journo fills up his quota acting like it's a story.

It's a Bethesda game, and they really aren't known for pushing a lot of political boundaries, even things like the Fallout series ultimately boil down to "nuclear war bad" as a political statement. Edgy. I don't think there's much to talk about with Starfield other than the game having the very broad character creator with lots of options that people have come to expect from a modern RPG. There's nothing here.

Blue hair and pronouns? Sir, you could be a lizard in Skyrim.

Ultimately it just kinda shines a light on how bad things have gotten, lately, and how much journalism is pure filler, probably written by ChatGPT now. None of this is happening. There's no story here. That's the "real experience" I'm on about. This game isn't terribly controversial in any meaningful way, so it's very glaring how much babble is going out there trying to MAKE a controversy where the subject just refuses to support any of that.

Except for the poor optimization turning everyone's 3080 into a lump and making even the newest GPU struggle, even though the game is not throwing anything at the screen to justify all that. That controversy has some real heat to it, I'll admit. Anything else is trash noise to be ignored.

My impetus for posting it was seeing someone on lemmy posting links to where to get the mod to remove the pronouns from Starfield because Nexus Mods won’t host it. They posted to two gaming communities, and both had about a 2:3 like to dislike ratio as of last night - meaning a lot more people were quietly liking getting those links but weren’t saying anything in the dumpster fire comments sections. It was still on my mind when I saw this article right after I went over to Mastodon to check my feed there. So yeah, not in person, but these folks really are out there.

Tbf most conservatives probably haven't played BG3 or know much of anything about it/forgotten realms. They aren't exactly the target audience

I remember back in 2016 conservatives screaming they were going to boycott Hamilton because of the cast making an appeal to Pence at final curtain, and people laughing hysterically at them because back then, there was no way any of them claiming they were going to boycott would have been able to get tickets in the first place.

The temptation is sinful to them in the same way that their murders and violence are righteous.

They don't realize the God they worship is Mammon.