Too fucked up and funny for contemporary audiences.
You can have a commune of wiccans represented respectfully in the game, with a soup making minigame, a small patch for planting and harvesting vegetables you can use, and a short quest chain featuring a little “theatre” performance event near the end, where you get to play the role of one of the fae. You even get a “play dead” button. The commune will feature interesting and iconic characters with appropriate jokes.
Yeah this new stock of devs just don’t have it in them to deliver anything great. Their values and language likely prevent them from even considering something more visceral. Wouldn’t be surprised if most of them have lived such uninteresting lives they have nothing to draw from. That’s at least what they write like.
Seems they don’t know why their hero kills, they don’t believe in the culling the player enacts. They’d probably rather he didn’t.
They seem like they’d prefer to make Animal Crossing in space, they don’t really want to write about empire, conquest, terrible crimes, deep-seated hate. Ending threats.
They don’t even want to know how the tools of the trade work. Just look at the animations for the models, you can tell that whoever worked on then feared being put on an FBI watchlist if they looked up a video on how pump action shotguns work.
These kinds of dev teams are fully incapable of writing good villains and a cast of characters with wildly different moralities that are grounded in something real.
They’re not interested in combat games. They shouldn’t touch them. They should leave and make room for those who want to.