I just don’t see how this game is likely to be good. Portraying social issues and including racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities isn’t going to be the game’s issue. The tabletop game (despite a somewhat checkered history in some areas) has a history of being welcoming to people and not flinching away from difficult and current issues, and that extends to its video game counterparts. What worries me is that none of the people who made the original what it was worked on this game. Then, it went through a tortured development process. I genuinely thought it was vaporware for years.

Video games (and basically all mass corporate media) are really weird. It’s like if the corporation that owns the rights to the Beatles’ library just made another band altogether, put them in similar suits and haircuts, and then just went, “these guys are the Beatles 2!” They have the rights to the Beatles’ songs, so they’re up there playing stuff from Sergeant Peppers, but it’s just a bunch of totally different guys. And then they start playing their new stuff - totally unrelated to the original band in conception, motive, etc. - and people are like, “you like the Beatles, right? That means you gotta like the Beatles 2!”