I literally got stuck in the first area of the new Indiana Jones game because I just couldn’t stop dropping my disguise so I could beat the shit out of Italian fascists.

Fair enough. I don’t recall people getting angry over the existence of black people in RDR2 but I also mostly just tune out the folk who can at all stand the controls of that game (one day I’ll try again).

Because I do think having actual people of color with even a modicum of agency makes a huge difference. Like, going back to RDR1, Bonnie is basically the epitome of “strong woman written by men”. There are so many hints that she is kind of a badass and she definitely has her moments, but basically anything of import is done by John and she increasingly is depicted as someone who needs her big strong outlaw to save her. Which is the same thing when you have Steve Rogers punch a klansman versus having Sam Wilson get his punch on.

Which, to get back to AssCreed, is funnily enough a recurring problem with the games from basically the end of Desmond up until Odyssey. AssFlag was a really fun game with really cool characters but it increasingly became obvious that Whitey McKenway (I am too lazy to look up his name) is almost a secondary character in the story about Mary Read and Anne Bonny and even Adewale (who did get a DLC that nobody played). Like, here are characters who have VERY personal stakes that can explore the societal problems inherent to the world and… we get snippets of their story while Whitey just works toward knocking someone up because he is Connor’s ancestor.

And that very much continued with the Egypt one where The Wife was a MUCH MUCH MUCH cooler character who actually drove the story while we played as The Husband whose claim to fame is he chopped off his finger to go back to something that had already been borderline retconned out of the series.