A couple of questions to the CB staff about fluff direction and the Infinity fandom

I can't judge the Uprising content before reading it, but from what I read on the forums the big picture can be interpreted either way, depending of what we want to focus upon. Personally I'm in the "I'm not bothered by the fluff" camp, and if there's anything particularly bad in it I can simply create my own headcanon to get around it. It's a friggin' game.

Also, let us not kid ourselves. Most of us have committed some kind of atrocities or actual war crimes in games. Running over infantry with tanks in C&C? Choosing to kill your own friends in Far Cry 3? Postal? Not to mention the whole Total War series; what exactly do you think happens, when you order your army to loot or raze a settlement? Not to mention the options of killing/sacrificing/eating the captives in TW: Warhammer 1&2. Playing a bastard faction doesn't make me one, unless I'm getting into the whole identification thing way too much.

 

I know I'd definitely want to see stuff like redemption stories! And I'd really like to know CB's plans on the direction of the future YJ fluff.

 

Now that I have thought about it for even longer: I have to take back my statement that the JSA reminds me of WW 2 Japan. Even though the JSA is reverting back to feudal Japan and is willing to sacrifice lots of Japanese lives for this ideal, they are not invading other nations, committing atrocities there, etc. like the WW2 Japanese did. Of course, I would hate the Infinity Japanese society with all their hierarchies and demands that you die for the aristocracy, but it still ends up just as a dark grey factions, just like the others.

YJ looks pretty horrible on the other hand. Interesting that we are more willing to forgive real life nations more than fictional factions, but of course, the actions of YJ look irredeemable. I hope that some more background stories will be written in the future that shines a brighter light on the citizens and soldiers or YJ. Maybe they will fight valiantly in the next Paradiso offensive or Sun Tzu will step up and confront those who have committed the atrocities against Japanese cvililians.

 

You know, I am all for the idea of building your own characters within the setting and making them work, even if they don't fit the mold. When I started wargaming I heard and read a lot about how it was about "your dudes" and how you should make your own narrative with what you're given from the lore. I like that.

Yaogats are war criminals that shoot civilians in the back. My yaogat was a young sniper who wanted to prove he was a good hunter and then got his ass killed by an umbra samaritan. That's my history, it doesn't fit 100% with the game lore, but it's the one I made for my dudes.

I can understand the anger when you realize you're playing the bad guys when you didn't want to. But at the same time I don't think we should dismiss the idea that these are "our dudes and dudettes". If you don't like totalitarian Yu Jing, then why not make sure your dudes aren't like that? Make your own narrative.

I'm not saying it is wrong to question the decision of CB to take a whole faction to a direction that did feel a bit unexpected, what I am saying is that we don't need to let that narrative limit us.

 

Well I guess all this conversation made me look at it from different POV and suddenly I saw exact same thing as it was in FOW.

As I said to Hecaton, all these discussions made me to look at Yu-Jing from different angle. NOW I`m glad that JSA is separate from Quang Shi, it wasn`t such a problem before but it is a problem now.

I`ve just bought Frostpunk, game where you should exile people to frozen wastes and turn off houses heating at -70 C to make your city see one more day. It`s a bit uneasy but not unappealing. I guess too much talk is a point.

Still don`t have personal opinion on Uprising book, rough ETA 2-3 weeks at least. My seller is not a fast one)))

 

I think you are jumping to conclusions if you assume the the events of Uprising will never be talked about again. I think the fluff will continue, and Yu Jing will have to deal with this black mark. It is questionable interpretation that Yu Jing is put in a bad light to make someone else look good.

JSA does not look so good either. I just read the Ikari part. It is quite ironic that Ikari is the one who sees through all the propaganda and drew the conclusion that he should become a bastard himself. Imho it should not really matter for a Japanese which Emperor they are forced to sacrifice their life to, it is all just propaganda and force.

So I don't think you have that much to be bothered with.

Another interesting observation I made is that there is good reason for players to be more upset about this background than with the background of pretty much any other game. Everything is relateable. The atrocities in the 40k Universe are so over the top that we don't take them seriously.

In Infinity, however, we know about the cultures and feel for them, because they are our cultures. If some faction is looking bad, we wonder if the fluff may be racist or otherwise inappropriate. When we read about a bombing of civilians, we can think about Syria or another conflict. CB has to be much more careful with the background than other companies. I find this much more interesting than OTT fantasy stories.

Let's just take this fluff and understand that the Infinityverse is too close to our reality for comfort. In a weird way, the Infinityverse, even with the Uprising, is still much nicer than our world. There are less ateks, less genocide, less racism, less exploitation than in our time. It is good that people still get outraged about it.

 

*only* if you ignore the bits that don't fit your narrative, like Sun Tze's repeated objections, and Xi Zhuang letting kids play with his robots and only being concerned with 'his duty is to safeguard the safety and freedom of his compatriots, and the law is the only guarantee of freedom and safety there can be'.

 

Ah, Sun Tze, that multi trillion yuan Strategic Genius that nobody bothered listening to.

Truly a representative of Yu Jing.

 

He's still part of the faction. Making absolute statements doesn't help any side of the discussion when they're demonstrably not true.

 

So there two guys, one of whom is explicitly against killing everyone and one who probably is.

But noone listens to the first one, who happens to be a toaster made by Aleph, and the second one is being investigated for possibly being a traitor and working for the Combined Army.

Okay. For the most part Yu Jing has been represented as being all in with being inhuman monsters, except for some isolated cases like the inhuman robot and the guy accused of working for actual inhuman monsters.

Better?

 

Sure. I've never said or claimed otherwise.

 

How about Yu Jing has stopped after a formal o-12 protest? How many UN resolutions have we had and the war in Syria is still going? Yu Jing was a lot nicer. They could have pushed it further.

Another way of looking at it is that the government of Yu Jing is a lot like the current Chinese one. It would be almost insulting to all the victims of the current regime to paint Yu Jing in a nice way after deciding that China still has a one party dictatorship. I think if a Chinese person would complain to me that Yu Jing is not portrayed in a nice way, I would just tell them that YJ is still better than their current regime. Or that they should have read the background of the Kuang Shi before deciding on collecting YJ.

Or, of course, you could get totally in character and argue the utilitarian way: If YJ does not act in the way it does, its empire will fall apart causing much more violence.

As much as I understand the disappointment of YJ players, I come to realise that you can't really play this game if you are overly concerned about the morality of your faction.

 

I feel like this lies at the heart of the argument. Some people think genocide or whatever you want to call the actions of Yu Jing/ ISS in Uprising are outside of the faction's moral spectrum and others just don't.

If we continue discussion along that particular line, I don't think we will get anywhere.

 

I am not sure that I would use the word genocide, but the actions described in the book are disturbingly realistic. In some passages, you would just have to exchange some names and you would get descriptions of real life atrocities committed in the 20th and 21st century. This is more brutal than any Infinity background I have read so far and, as far I know is unprecedented in this sort of gaming fiction.

No wonder YJ players feel suddenly uneasy about their faction. If YJ was my faction, I am not sure what I would feel, but I don't think I would be angry with CB. I think that eg. the Kuang Shi should have been an early warning sign. The real world tells us that any government that would allow Kuang Shi and an organisation like the ISS would answer with brutal repression to an uprising.

I came to the conclusion that I am ok with those descriptions, it is just more honest and maybe also serves as fodder for thought about the real world.

 

Is it the Grimdark roof or the Grimdark ground floor?

For me the Kuang Shi were the roof. "It gets this bad, but that's as bad as it gets and we're building the story under this roof." Right now this looks like a floor and they are just getting started on the walls and more floors to come. That's what I'm worried about is that the fences, the roofs, etc that the story is contained inside are now shifting outwards and in the wrong direction.
Just like some people are worried that a different part of the story's fabric would move the boundaries within what the story evolves in the wrong direction if some of these darker places got retconned, I am worried that the story will not only evolve but move the boundaries further astray from the universe that grabbed me - and I'm not even all that interested in the fluff I just don't want to play Elves or Fascists* and I was sort of interested in a universe that didn't automatically mishandle communism. But alas.

* Which means I am seriously considering dumping my JSA. I'm really not comfortable with playing Fascists. No, Yu Jing aren't Fascists.

 

This statement feels odd. How come you can't play the game if you are concerned with the morality of your faction? It was said time and again in this thread that people who play armies full of villains and that commit atrocities are not villains who commit atrocities themselves.

The theme I've seen repeated over and over is less 'Yu Jing is horrible' and more 'Yu Jing is horrible now' and I can get why that would be upsetting. Some players were attracted to Yu Jing's more noble or heroic aspects, and these aspects are being downplayed in the latest event, so these players are worried they faction will lose what they find interesting about it. It's a valid concern.

On the other hand, we are going through the changes right now, so I think it would be a good idea to cool our horses and wait until it is all over before making a decision to dump your models or something like that. I want to trust CB and hope they'll make a good story for all of us.

 

I agree. I guess I don't get what people have their knickers in a twist over. I know I don't crack a fat over some fluff in the game. It's just a game. The best part about it is that the end of the day and I've given a fair dinkum effort at it, I can just walk away from it. You don't have to play the game if the game is bothering you. If some silly fluff is bothering you, not seeing what going off heaps will do, but you can literally just play the game ignoring the fluff. The fluff really can be ignored entirely and the game just played. She'll be right in the end. Or, if you really are that offended, there are other things and games to play.

 

Welcome to "Humans - a 101 series"
Today, why they suck, why you can't trust them and how self interest drives them all to some extent.

Even people perceived as "good", just happen to get off on doing what society deems "good". Ultimately they only utilize doing "good" as their source of dopamin and means of self gratification.
"Evil" is just the other side of the same coin. Improving your own circumstances or simply feeling good about screwing people over is enough of a reason to be "evil".

Soldiers, Secret Services etc are never inheritly bad or good. They're just means to an end for gouvernments to achieve a goal. A goal a high ranking individual or several of them deems profitable for his position.

People in general like to cut corners and always direct fault and praise towards a specific target. For the most part they're too unattentive to question their own reasoning or to figure out if a puppeteer hiding behind another puppeteer might be the actual source of the problem.

We've had about ten (possibly more) threads about this "muh faction is so evil now" common theme and it has been pretty exhausting to deal with, ever since the April thread was closing in on a hundred pages. This also has gone full circle multiple times, after chewing through this thread I actually find myself asking "what is today's complaint again?" I've lost track at which point of the circle we're currently supposed to be.