Cipher wrote: ↑
April 23rd, 2024, 04:15
It had a lot of woke changes.
The art and the writing for the basic campaign, the one with the Prince in exile, was retooled to present the girl with new art that makes her look more bulky and lines that make her more "EmPoWeReD". The good thing is that you can still decide who becomes the ruler of the realm by giving the fire staff to the one you want to become the ruler.
Then, the art and sprite work for the desert elves in the post-apocaliptic future campaign "Under the Burning Sun" were change to be more pajeet-like. In the original, they were regular fair skinned and blonde elves. Now, they are pajeets. This is a very good, hard and fun campaign so its a real shame.
By comparison to Sweet Baby Inc-ified games, yeah its great but as much as I like Wesnoth, it has been wokefied since its humble origins. Still a great game and the good thing is that its fairly "simple" to create user generated content so a lot of campaigns are very interesting and do not have any wokeness at all.
And then there's also the skirmish mode, either against bots or against other players online and the core gameplay loop is rock solid.
I decided to show some comparisons:
Li'sar, the female deuteragonist to Konrad's story:
Original
Redesign
Yeah, the new art is more detailed but, she is supposed to be the same age as Konrad or a little older, but still a very young woman. I don't remember the age exactly, and this may have been changed, but both Konrad and Li'sar where supposed to be late teens, definitely younger than 20 years old.
Also, I found this:
Before version 1.11.5, she was elusive but fragile and had the same movetype and resistances as Assassin or Fugitive.
From version 1.11.5, she is less elusive but more sturdy and has the same movetype and resistances as Royal Guard.
Which makes sense for her age and old art. You could argue that the new art reflects her new version more, but I would say this was done after the fact. I remember the comments in the forums of people praising the new art for looking "like a REAL (TM) woman".
Same with her sprites:
Original
Redesign
At least Konrad, last time I played the Heir to the Throne campaign, wasn't a cuck like modern media protagonists. He starts out as naive but he develops into a great commander and a worthy hero alongside the newbie Player.
Now, let's look at some of the elves of the "Under the Burning Suns" campaign. The art here for the originals was extremely rough, as this was not a "mainline" campaign it was add-on that became so popular that they decided to add as a main line campaign but that meant the elves had to become desert pajeets:
Original desert elves:
Kaleh (the Hero)
Nym (his childhood friend/romantic interest)
Redesigned desert elves:
Kaleh
Nym
Couldn't find the original sprites only the new ones.
I remember back in the day in the forums this was the same thing as the changes done to Li'sar, that it "didn't made sense" for the elves living in the desert to be blond and have blue eyes and fair skin, even though the original Kaleh and Nym have tanned skin because of course they would but still had blonde hair and blue eyes.
As I said, compared to modern media this is nothing but let it be known that these changes were made and that the idea was about Li'sar, the female hero of the main campaign becoming a stronk woman that also looks like a "real woman" and to have diversity for the elves since, of course, no other campaign has dark skinned main characters or even rosters. So it wasn't due to "muh realism" it was basically "updated for modern audiences" since the game started to become more popular. Does this destroy the amazing gameplay loop? Of course it doesn't but it detracts from what could have been. The old sprites were rough and needed an update, the "artistic license changes" however, where unwanted and unneeded.
I still recommend the game by the way, last time I checked it was still free so... nothing to lose to try it out, really.