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Uncharted 4
Diving into UC4
Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/ineeddivgames
Hi all,
We played some UC4 on our Twitch channel, here's the video and commentary we posted over on Patreon.
SPOILERS FOR THE GAME - READ AT YOUR OWN RISK So Uncharted 4 is out, and we played a few hours of it with commentary above in the YT upload from our Twitch channel. We wanted to share those thoughts with you first before letting them out to the wild.
First, the Uncharted series is a very white game. Scruffy, brown haired, blue eyed white dude protagonist that gets the blonde white woman in the end. He's the every man that happens to be able to parkour his way out of almost every situation, barring that he kills people. Lots of brown people usually.
Nate has always killed people, but nothing ever seems to stop him from going through three games worth of mass murder for trinkets. The first Uncharted bothered me (TD) a lot because it was basically go to other country, slaughter brown folks, profit. UC 2 and UC 3 did marginally better with that trope. However, even as a settled, married man he shows no remorse for the lives he's taken.
Now here's UC4 and we finally get a black character but she's a trope too. Nadine Ross is an antagonist to Nate and Victor "Sully" Sullivan, who has encountered her before. She's also physically imposing, very muscular, and goes toe-to-toe with Nate in an early encounter in the game. We're hoping she develops beyond this trope but it's hard to overlook such a first impression. There's the additional issue* that she is voiced by a white woman (as well as her accent being all over the place according to SA reviewer Tauriq Moosa)
She's literally a strong black woman, who beats Nate rather soundly in their encounter and flings him through a window. We don't see that with other women (few that they are in the franchise). Elena often comes to Nate's rescue, and Chloe Bennett is the competition his affection against Elena. But the pretty blonde girl gets the guy, and the ambiguously brown woman is left to continue a life of crime, as we see in memento's from Nate's past that he revisits in the beginning of UC4.
The other thing we noted during our play, is that while Nate and brother Sam are in a Latin American prisons, most of the prisoners are fairly light skinned and/or white passing. Especially the boss that Sam makes a deal with looks like every other game mafioso except for his ridiculous accent.
So this is a very preliminary look at the ways in which UC4 has failed a diversity check by our humble standards. Updates as we play through more of the game on twitch.tv/INeedDivGames




Great video! Be sure to post more :-)