That makes a lot of sense. "Same face syndrome" is very common, particularly so among female character designs.
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Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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I always thought it was amusing that they managed to get the faces different for the younger female characters in Origins and the much-older Wynne, but supergran still had the same buxom character build. Did they just have one frame for 'Male human' and one for 'female human' or something? Admittedly the vast majority of the human cast are young adults so perhaps they didn't think creating a new frame for individual outliers was viable, but even so, a bit more care with a main party member would have been cool.
Making a new frame changes animation, and then you'd also need to do work getting all the different armour types to work right with the new body, I could imagine being a lot of work, specially when you can't forget the team is already having to make animations work for the different body types of humans/ elfs and dwarves, both male and female, already being done in the game. It seems to be really expensive, there was a reddit thread recently from Heaven Con, with some of the DA devs, and they talked about the expense of romances, and the most expensive ones, were the ones that required animations for both male and female, as well as the different races (I think they were talking a million dollars for one like that, which sounded like they were refering to Iron Bull). Anything with changing the animation does seem to increase cost alot.
I think that's why a lot claim they are unattractive when actually the faces are still way more attractive then you see in real life, cus gamers have got used to the same face shape reappearing again and again, so anything outside it is strange to them. I would also says it's the same reason people claim Aloy in Horison Zero Dawn is unattractive as well.
JadedWriter
Also really ? I guess she's more "plain" than some are used to but I guess people are just used to a particular look
Yeah, I thought it would be something like that, considering how many options were available.
I've seen alot of people on this very forum refer to her as ugly, I find it very odd as well.
Aloy is actually very attractive, she's just "imperfect" looking since I do believe they went out of their way to make some of her teeth crooked.
Makes sense with how big the games are they probably cut corners and hoped no one notices or borthers people
Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing. People are just used to seeing the flawless samey supermodel face over and over, so anything that falls even a bit outside of that seems jarring to people who, um, probably don't get out much. :D
Is Chloe from Lost Legacy considered unattractive? She looks...way different than most video game women.
which is why I put plain in quotes because she doesn't look like a supermodel or huge popular mainstream one
With hos big the games makes sense to not bother with that kind of stuff if deemed not important enough
I still can't believe Aloy is unattractive is a thing. She's got great eyes, nice freckles, killer hair, what's not to really like? It's weird.
Don't get me started on the Disneyfied concept design for Aloy that a lot of people point to, despite it clashing with the rest of the game's aesthetic.
I find it scary that people consider it "sexier" when it does make her look about 14 at most. It creeps me out
I have no issue with that, if anything it should be encouraged. As I said, with them making RPG's it only makes sense for them to have a rather large variety of characters you'd come across, both male and female. I was just responding to the initial speculation of them intentionally making female characters unattractive, which would be ridiculous. There should be room for everyone from someone like Miranda to Sera. Although I personally thought Sera looked fine. I was actually planning on going with her just based off appearance when they announced who you could date. Until I played it and realized she was unbelievably obnoxious. So I went with Josephine instead.
Oh, I know what you were doing, I was just confirming that they aren't making female characters intentionally unattractive. Like you, I don't find the female characters unattractive either in DAI (but then I'm a straight women so it's not my forte, still don't see how people can see them as ugly).
I find it interesting that it would be a rather unique art style for a AAA game, but at the same time I'm glad they didn't use it because I don't think the game would've been as popular if they had used it. And yes it would not have worked with the games aesthetic. It would be almost as if a Kingdom Hearts character fell into the game.
Peacock is SO good.I love me some Skullgirls, but I ain't gonna deny it's a whole lotta cheesecake. And the GG types are mad that the devs had the audacity to remove some of the more egregious and unrealistic panty shots.
Peacock's the best, though.
Wish more of the characters were like her.
I like the Cleopatra lady's playstyle a lot, and ironically she's also one of the less egregious of the cheesecake designs, despite wearing a very revealing dress. Her animations are just less... bouncy, I guess, lol
Anyway!! All hail Peacock.
I would hope not! But yeah obviously not all "unconventional" characters are considered unattractive, just that it seems to be a relatively common phenomenon.
Yeah, I remember that. Preferences are one thing, but there were some seriously discouraging comments in there too. :\
Nah, those people just didn't have the confidence to defend that shit in public back then. It was pushing back against it that gave them a banner to rally behind, a voice, a name. They gained the confidence to defend these things because they realised they were no longer alone.
It's not necessarily a bad design itself, but individual designs are hard to judge outside of an ensemble. An entirely Disneyfied Horizon probably would have looked pretty good. The problem is whenever Aloy's looks come up someone inevitable posts that concept art, which leads to a ton of posts praising that design and lamenting 'what could have been', not really recognising that good character design has to fit the rest of the aesthetic, not just chosen because someone finds one of the concepts more attractive. A series of well designed characters that don't fit together at all is worse than half-decent ones that do.
I'm sure it would've been popular - just with a very different audience/demographic, even if the core gameplay remained identical.
Which is kind sad, really.
Yeah a good game does need to be cohesive aesthetically, otherwise it just looks like a chaotic mess.
Lost Legacy was quite honestly the best Chloe ever looked, the PS3 version of her didn't even look human at times, she was good looking yes, but I don't think they exactly knew what they wanted her to be.
I would like to think the current one would still get that Brave demographic and probably did. Aloy's popular, which is I'm assuming based on the amount of fan art I've seen of her.
Yeah, this, haha. Unfortunately, I was mostly being sarcastic.
Still, not having these kinds of people screaming across the internet sure was nice.
I hear a big thing about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was that a lot of its characters were designed by guest artists. To some people that sounds great, especially if the artists are well known. To me it sounds like a recipe for numerous aesthetics without a consistent artistic vision. Too many cooks etc.
I can't imagine that working for Xenogears for example, which aesthetically is a pretty cohesive game, minus that weird dog thing. I pretty much consider a game where they made sure every piece fit design wise and visually a labor of love and that's pretty much what HZD was. Even EpicNameBro likes that game and he hates games like that regularly.
I remember seeing these images and discussions/jokes about it every where last gen:
This discussion today is now a shit show. Catering to feminazi SJWs, white genocide, politics in my video games etc etc.
Multiple artists with multiple aesthetics is pretty much the standard of gatcha games these days which is what XBC2 was going for with it's gatcha blade system. Its a weird situation where sometimes I'm glad they brought on a certain artist to make a design and other times I'm not. It's a real mixed bag in general.
I remember seeing these images and discussions/jokes about it every where last gen:
This discussion today is now a shit show. Catering to feminazi SJWs, white genocide, politics in my video games etc etc.
The second one is definitely a joke, but I see something similar to the first image a lot even these days, usually when criticising Western character design for realistic aesthetics. They're not wrong, but it's usually out of date, included several custom characters and compared disfavourably with characters whose differences only lie beyond face and body shape.
I'm sure you'll find some that says she's unattractive, but she's absolutely intended to be attractive
I'd say the same holds true for Nadine. Although I guess one difference is that she's rather muscular and some dudes are intimated by muscular women.
Both her and Nadine are hot AF, Nadine is more muscular though. I prefer Nadine more in Lost Legacy personally. More so because they softened up her personality more in that game.I'm sure you'll find some that says she's unattractive, but she's absolutely intended to be attractive
I'd say the same holds true for Nadine. Although I guess one difference is that she's rather muscular and some dudes are intimated by muscular women.
Thanks for providing some insight. I'll admit I'm absolutely not in XBC2's target audience so I've only has half an eye on it via the various dramas its character designs have spawned across Era. Are all the characters from different artists? Because half look fairly consistent and the rest seems to deviate wildly. I assumed that some artists were given a brief or some direction while others were allowed to go wild.
Yeah, it seems like Lab Zero has been gradually moving away from the cheesecake stuff. Eliza and Fukua were the only fanservicey characters in the Skullgirls DLC, and Fukua only because she's based on Filia's existing animations. If you look at Indivisible, the only cheesecakey character in there is Shantae. Maybe they just feel the fighting game genre is more open to cheesecake (and that's another bag of worms), but I dunno, I see it as a trend for the studio.
From what I've seen on various games, directional oversight is more than you think, but less than you'd hope. Something that varies wildly tends to be from a famous artist from a different work and they are selling it to fans of said artist.
Wha? She seems attractive to me in an extremely conventional way. O_o She could be the poster girl for Raven Haired Beauty. I never played Uncharted but whenever I saw her design in threads she seemed like the Catwoman-style seductress / rogue type.
Personally I don't like to see sexualised female designs that don't make any sense but as someone who appreciates a wide range of games it's something that I've either grown accustomed to or learned to ignore/tolerate because some of the games with those sexualised female characters are some of the best in the industry, or some that appeal to me immensely.
On second note there are games in which the female characters are sexy in a context that makes sense and sometimes there are series that both have fan-service senseless sexualised designs/characters but also sexy strong female characters that are attractive not just because of their presentation but also because of who they are. Take Dragon Age for instance.
In Dragon Age Origins you have Morrigan who is not only ridiculously dressed also accepts having sex with the player character on almost the very start of the game if the player so chooses.
Then you have Isabela in Dragon Age 2 who is obviously sexualised but has a lot better writing supporting her. She's a rogue pirate captain and although Dear God they could have fallen into so many cliche pitfalls with that concept she remains one of the most memorable characters of that, writing-aside, train wreck of a game.
Bioware has more misses than hits in terms of how they portray female characters in my opinion but I find that most western studios nowadays have more tact when it comes to portraying strong female characters without objectifying or sexualising them (Sony's studios have made two of the most memorable female protagonists in recent history in Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn) but when it comes to Japanese games you continue to either have cute, sexualised or excessively sexualised and while I wish they would change that the few games they produce that I appreciate as so few and far in between that I feel I would be missing out on a lot of great games if I took that to heart.
On second note there are games in which the female characters are sexy in a context that makes sense and sometimes there are series that both have fan-service senseless sexualised designs/characters but also sexy strong female characters that are attractive not just because of their presentation but also because of who they are. Take Dragon Age for instance.
In Dragon Age Origins you have Morrigan who is not only ridiculously dressed also accepts having sex with the player character on almost the very start of the game if the player so chooses.
Then you have Isabela in Dragon Age 2 who is obviously sexualised but has a lot better writing supporting her. She's a rogue pirate captain and although Dear God they could have fallen into so many cliche pitfalls with that concept she remains one of the most memorable characters of that, writing-aside, train wreck of a game.
Bioware has more misses than hits in terms of how they portray female characters in my opinion but I find that most western studios nowadays have more tact when it comes to portraying strong female characters without objectifying or sexualising them (Sony's studios have made two of the most memorable female protagonists in recent history in Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn) but when it comes to Japanese games you continue to either have cute, sexualised or excessively sexualised and while I wish they would change that the few games they produce that I appreciate as so few and far in between that I feel I would be missing out on a lot of great games if I took that to heart.
That is what she is though. I think I remember people complaining about her being Indian in the new game, I'm actually glad they finally said it. She never looked white in the previous games she was in.
While there may things to be said about Morrigan, I do dig the sultry-evil sorceress type (see avatar), so I find her fine.
Isabela in DA2 however, I honestly felt was a parody of the sexualized character. Here's the thing, I love me the hell out of some fanservicey content, but even I felt she went too far at time with her characterization. Virtually every line that came out of her was about sex, and in fact, the one main line I remember from her was her saying goodbye to someone, and then saying "Wait, what about sex?"...
There were several camera angles in Lost Legacy that focused that ass, plus, she spends a good chunk of the game soaking wet while in tight jeans
I feel like SG's problem in my eyes is that a lot of the deisgns are bit more focused on trying to be sexy rather than like , being good designs. And results in a lot of bad designs that seemed like they weren't as sexy as first, and then someone forced the sexy onto them. Peacock, BigBand, Eliza and Sqiggly end up as diamonds in the rough so to speak. Along with skull girls's ... just thematic clashing.I love me some Skullgirls, but I ain't gonna deny it's a whole lotta cheesecake. And the GG types are mad that the devs had the audacity to remove some of the more egregious and unrealistic panty shots.
Peacock's the best, though.
Despite indivisible technically being... literal thematic clashing for a purpose, I find a lot of their designs a lot more well done. And a lot of their more sexy designs more well done too. Its like Skullgirls was an artistic prototype for it and it benefits from reflection and introspection
Eliza is a pretty neat take on cheesecake as each move she does revealing more skin, until we get to the point where it's straight up flesh removed. A pretty neat take on doing sexy and horror in the same moment.
I get why people don't like SG, but I think it's doing amazing things with its visual style. There's a lot of sexy over the top stuff, but it's done with thought and intent, rather than just a being yet another project copying the same pinup poses over and over.
I mean, Skullgirls was originally a gal fighter, it's not hard to see why they would want to go sexy by default with some of that stuff. As time went on and it got popular, moving away from that stuff made more sense. Indivisible is something very different, so it's not that strange to see them moving away from cheesecake enmasse.
If Skullgirls 2 ever get made, I wouldn't expect it's visual styling, cheesecake and all, to change that much.
Given that their current project is based on Valkyrie Profile, I'd say the studio is probably looking to evolve beyond fighting games.
Which is a good thing, and a great thing, I think, for an indie studio. I think indie studios only thrive when they're constantly trying to explore new things, rather than retreading old ground.
Which is a good thing, and a great thing, I think, for an indie studio. I think indie studios only thrive when they're constantly trying to explore new things, rather than retreading old ground.
That's precisely why I liked her as a character. Everything from her design, story, writing and mannerisms was consistent. There was no false pretense.
Despite Morrigan seeming like the more sultry and maturely-written character, she has sex with the main character within hours of first meeting them. Isabela, whether you like her or not, requires that you build a relationship with her throughout the course of the game depending on how you talk with her and the decisions you make throughout the story (and while there's criticism to be laid against gamifying romances the way Bioware does that's a subject for a different topic).
The biggest difference between her and Morrigan is, in my opinion, disingenuity.
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That pan up is giving me flashbacks to a more innocent era of freemium games...
I never thought I'd be seeing the Evony ad in 2018 lmao. This ad was always ended up as the butt of every joke.
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