PeauDouce wrote:By "not demonising China" do you mean "not making any reference to China that could make someone think that, at some point, in that fictionnal timeline, they've done something that might be, in some way, questionnable" ?
If not, I don't know why you're afraid that a demonisation of China might happen.
Well, we all know they're awful people but so far no link to Satan has ever been confirmed. I'm sure they will respect the presumption of innocence.
Well to be honest China is also building up a substantial offensive military force. Not to mention that their desires for a higher standard of living put them into direct competition with nations like the US. Market aside, there is only so much wood, oil, metal and other resources out there, and as enviromentalists have pointed out we're already stripping the planet. It's not a matter of gathering enough resources for everyone to have a decent standard of living, when the supply is finite to begin with, and we're already taking more, faster, than the planet can replentish.
There is no real "good" or "evil" it's all a matter of point of view. The bottom line is China represents like 1/3rd of the world's population and is heavily poverty stricken, what it takes to improve it's own people's standard of living comes at the espense of resources that go somewhere else. This competition raises prices, but the economy and market situation is only a short term situation to something that ultimatly boils down to "us or them" with China, and the US and it's allies both deciding "Us" for obvious reasons. This before going into things like vengeance against the west for
"the opium wars", and everything else that also still influances the relationship.
The point here is that as things stand now if we're going to present a viable post-apocolyptic war scenarion, China is the only group that currently forms a viable "other side". That's not demonization, so much as it is reality. As much as people in the US want to be politically correct, political correctness happens to be wrong in most cases even if it's polite... and even if it wasn't, being too scared of using real people or groups in games like this is exactly why we have such an over inflation of things like zombies and aliens that can present a "victimless" enemy for the politically correct, as tired as the whole thing is getting.
That said, given that this is "Wasteland 2" it's probably a moot point. "Wasteland 2" being based on an 80s-esque scenario as opposed to a current one. As a sequel it could be considered retro to a somewhat differant era than say "Fallout". After all in the bunker in needles you found the ruins of a "Reagan Class Hover Tank" or something like that, which was part of the atmosphere (as tongue in cheek as it was).
I have nothing against being quite frank about enemity with the Chinese nowadays, in fact I tend to think denial is one of our big problems, as is putting letting economics cloud people's view of reality (The Romans believed they would never be taken out because the world needed them too much, they were the center of trade, and who else would maintain all those roads... in the end the Barbarians didn't care, wanting what they had, with the Romans being in denial of reality up until the very end which is where the saying "Barbarians At The Gates" comes from because the romans LITERALLY did nothing as armies formed outside the walls). I do however agree with you that it might not be the right move for this game, because it doesn't fit with the lore we're working from.
The only situation where The Chinese should be the bad guys is if the dev team (especially now that Obsidian is involved) wants to link Wasteland into Fallout as there have already been nods back and forth, with "Fallout" being the spiritual successor to Wasteland. Given the statue of the Desert and NCR Rangers linking up in "New Vegas" we might very well see the insersion of Fallout lore (if you don't believe there were always intended links), in which case it's a given that it was The Chinese who started World War III. Barring that, it was the Russians as per wasteland.
Being set in the real world, like it or not someone was going to have been on the opposite side and there are only so many viable groups. Hence why "post war apocolypse" has largely died at the hands of political correctness and been replaced by "Zombie apocolypse" along with everything else going "zombie" as well.
