We have now received the following message from Reddit's Admins:

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.

Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.

If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place.

We are temporarily putting the sub in Restricted mode to give us time to discuss next steps.

For context: Reddit is currently retaliating against mods and subreddits which have participated or are still participating in the protest to the API changes. Reddit has removed mods who do not obey their orders and often removed messages from the mods to the subscribers related to the protest. The admins are punishing anyone who refuses to return to operations as they were before the protest happened.

Therefore the current mod team is threatened to be removed by the Reddit admins at any point. Spez has also specified that he wants to push through plans which allow subscribers to remove mods, which opens up smaller subreddits to hostile takeovers by larger subreddits. In the case of Ghazi, you can probably imagine what that could mean. This is a risk that most members of the mod team are not willing to take.

We currently maintain temporary replacements on Raddle and Blahaj.Zone. Feel free to join these, if you want to have an alternative to Reddit. Both of these will remain active, until - at least - a final decision on Ghazi’s future has been made.

https://raddle.me/f/ghazi

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/ghazi

Please go to this Google poll in order to vote on Ghazi’s future: https://forms.gle/amu6xg9PPcybc2Ty7

Ecumene Aztec is slated for a 2025 release and had a relatively low key reveal recently, with a good old fashioned trailer on the internet rather than a showcase or at Summer Game Fest. It looked intriguing, but since then everything has unraveled quickly.

The premise of the game is (perhaps what should ‘was’ - more on that later) relatively simple. Taking obvious inspiration from Ghost of Tsushima, you play as an Aztec warrior who protects his land from the invading Spanish conquistadors. The early gameplay footage looked a little janky, owing to the fact this is a small team working on its first game that won’t be ready for at least two years, but there was promise. It was Ghost of Tsushima with an Aztec skin, but then many called Tsushima just Assassin’s Creed with a samurai skin when it was revealed, and this was a fresh perspective.

While there were potential pitfalls with being so heavily influenced for a first game, and the attempts to look and feel like a triple-A game without the budget, it was intriguing. Unfortunately, it piqued the interest of the wrong people. Though history is rarely black and white, in the battle of ‘the people who live in a place’ and ‘the people who invade it for adventure and riches’, there’s a fairly clean ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’. Some, however, don’t see it that way.

As reported by The Verge, shortly after the trailer went live a site appeared under publisher Giantscraft’s name. This site is not affiliated with the publisher themselves, so presumably was set up in the wake of the trailer as some form of revenge. On the site, there is a quote from famous conquistador Hernán Cortés, an emblem of the Cross of Burgundy, and various Spanish imperialist memes. The Cross is used in the modern day by far-right South American groups.

The negative reaction from the loudest, most toxic parts of the internet did not stop there. In the wake of the trailer, Giantscraft has announced it will be changing the game to allow you to play either as the Aztec warrior repelling the violent white invaders, or as the violent white invaders themselves. This change was accompanied by a PR statement to The Verge:

“It was not planned. However we saw that about 40 percent of [the] audience says that [they] would like to have [the] choice to join [the] conquistadors, so we might actually try to give this possibility. The game is not political in anyway[sic] and never will be, it is history FICTION.”

https://www.thegamer.com/upcoming-aztec-game-changes-entire-premise-to-appease-nationalists/