Rascal News article on "Pirate Borg’s fundamental flaws"
I'm sharing this article in the hope of starting a good-faith conversation about critique of Pirate Borg. I hope everyone here can stay civil and read the article before they comment. I'll fully admit that I'm an outsider to this community; I've read PB a while ago, but not played it myself.
Two days ago, Rascal shared an opinion piece titled "Down Among The Dead continues to suffer from Pirate Borg’s fundamental flaws," and I found that I agreed with much of what it said. I strongly recommend you read Murray's thoughts in their entirety, but in brief: the writer takes serious issue with the absence of indigenous characters within Pirate Borg's setting, the decision to avoid wrestling with painful history by effectively killing off everyone native to the real-world places used as its sandbox. Historical empires are absolved of the colonialism that's the entire reason they were in the Caribbean in the first place, given conveniently-abandoned lands to exploit where there are no locals beyond undead, talking apes, and evil snake-men.
To put it simply, I think wiping out native peoples so you don't have to think too hard about them... sucks! Similarly, I take a dim view of playing with imagery associated with Mesoamerican cultures and Voodoo/Vodoun while shying away from ever depicting the cultures those symbols come from. Creating a world where all the pirates have European names is infinitely more limited than the alternative. Have any products pushed against this impulse from the official materials, depicting native or post-slavery factions? Have the devs ever been questioned on these decisions?