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 carlos13th wrote:

 Lynata wrote:

Dreadclaw69 wrote:Which funny enough a lot of the female characters were/are until their circumstances changed based on the plot being advanced

And what makes you think that those are the focus of the criticism as opposed to ... y'know, female characters who don't actually look like sensible/serious fighters, but are clearly supposed to function in such a role?

If you are talking about how they dress then I agree with you. Female armour in games which is essentially bikini chainmail is frustrating as hell.

Is that what you mean when you say sensible serious fighters?

Biggest complaint about FF14:


Gotta love her, "stab me here please" hold in the armor.

nomotog wrote:
You can see this a lot when you look at women warrior designs. Most of the time when you see a female fighter she is either tactical or agile. You almost never see a hulking female fighter. Think about how many female warriors who use bows. Now think about how many use swords. Big swords? small swords? Now think about how many use an axe or a hammer.

Now think about your average male in a strength-based contest against your average female.

Waif-fu requires a hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Redbeard wrote:How much game development have you done, in order to claim that this is an easy thing?

I'm real tempted to answer this in more detail, but I'm under NDA. What I can say is that I'm not a professional 3D artist.

Think about it, though: If one would actually change body aspects individually, this would be more of an issue, as then you'd have to re-scale all the clothing to prevent clipping issues or floating bits of armour etc. However, if you simply scale up the entire model and all their accessories in equal measure, there's no need to actually change anything about the model's geometry or attachment points. Even hitboxes, if your game has them, would scale correctly, as long as they are connected.

Consider it to work like a zoom function. 3D graphics are just a simulation - your screen is still two-dimensional, there is not actually a 3rd dimension in your game; the client merely simulates distance by ... scaling models up and down in size.

If you want a practical example of what I was originally referring to - look at World of Warcraft. Every player character has the exact same size, and there's no way to change this for the player. NPCs, however, can be larger or smaller. The developer did this in specific cases to make a boss enemy or important lore characters stand out more (by being larger than their minions), or to create an entirely new breed of creature by recycling an older model, just with a slightly altered size and texture.

nomotog wrote:You can see this a lot when you look at women warrior designs. Most of the time when you see a female fighter she is either tactical or agile. You almost never see a hulking female fighter. Think about how many female warriors who use bows. Now think about how many use swords. Big swords? small swords? Now think about how many use an axe or a hammer.

Aye. For quite some time, there has also been a tradition of having women as casters and healers, and men as the damage dealers. Even today, there still is a notable tendency where you may actually have a girl in the squad, but then she's a medic or sniper rather than a grunt like the rest. There ought to be a few more Vasquezes, if you get my drift.

I think it's been getting better, though - we're almost at a level where you could say the medic or sniper was mere coincidence. DA2's Aveline was also a nice change, and a perfect example for what more games should endeavour to achieve.

Of course, every now and then we get a setback like this...

But hey, sex sells.

Seaward wrote:Now think about your average male in a strength-based contest against your average female.

Waif-fu requires a hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Groundbreaking thought: video game characters (or any characters, for that matter) are unique individuals, not "the average male/female". Especially in settings with military outfits that may actually impose equal physical requirements on its members, like some real world militaries do?

Perhaps you should stop lumping people into a box and treat them as individuals, before somebody finds statistics about what ethnic group is more prone to X and starts to argue about how that would warrant different treatment.

I'd play Scarlet Blade >_>

Visually it looks cool.

But I'm a guy so I want to play it because boobies.

You know WoW is a game that could easily easily fit in a height slider. (They have several different race heights already.) I think the reason it doesn't have it is because they didn't want to put any effort into customization.

There's nothing wrong with pr0n in general.

I'd have standards about the delivery, though.

 Seaward wrote:

nomotog wrote:
You can see this a lot when you look at women warrior designs. Most of the time when you see a female fighter she is either tactical or agile. You almost never see a hulking female fighter. Think about how many female warriors who use bows. Now think about how many use swords. Big swords? small swords? Now think about how many use an axe or a hammer.

Now think about your average male in a strength-based contest against your average female.

Waif-fu requires a hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief.

But what if we have burly men wrestling with equally as burly women. That was kind of what I wanted to get at. We can use some more big burly brutish female fighters to add balance to the huge amount of tactical and agile female fighters.

nomotog wrote:
You know WoW is a game that could easily easily fit in a height slider. (They have several different race heights already.) I think the reason it doesn't have it is because they didn't want to put any effort into customization.

Actually it is for PvP recognition purposes. Each race(and earlier on, each class but as the armor set design methods have changed this became less notable) has a visually distinctive "profile" at a distance. It is why each race had a very different kind of 'relaxed' posture when you were not moving.

 Redbeard wrote:

 Lynata wrote:

Body height alone is a huge thing. Considering how easy it should be to just scale a 3D model down by a few percent, it's crazy how many games still have everyone be the same height.

How much game development have you done, in order to claim that this is an easy thing?

It's extremely easy (when time is taken to actually set it up). Taking the points that make up a model and warping them is a simple procedure. The limiting factor isn't really the 3D model though its textures, object collision, clipping etc. Getting everything to look good all at once when you allow models to be rescaled can be messy (Skyrim for example has a very simple rescale but it can cause a ton of clipping issues in the game with various armors). Another example is Guild Wars 2, where textures on large Char and Norn models are noticeably less pretty than they are on smaller Sylvari and Human models.

So yeah. Scaling is easy. Its all the other stuff thats hard.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

 Lynata wrote:

Body height alone is a huge thing. Considering how easy it should be to just scale a 3D model down by a few percent, it's crazy how many games still have everyone be the same height.

How much game development have you done, in order to claim that this is an easy thing?

It's extremely easy (when time is taken to actually set it up). Taking the points that make up a model and warping them is a simple procedure. The limiting factor isn't really the 3D model though its textures, object collision, clipping etc. Getting everything to look good all at once when you allow models to be rescaled can be messy (Skyrim for example has a very simple rescale but it can cause a ton of clipping issues in the game with various armors). Another example is Guild Wars 2, where textures on large Char and Norn models are noticeably less pretty than they are on smaller Sylvari and Human models.

So yeah. Scaling is easy. Its all the other stuff thats hard.

That's kind of my point. Just because it's easy(er) to do one thing does not mean that all the things that have dependencies on that thing are quite as easy.

I'm still a believer in market-driven upgrades. Changing model heights is unlikely to sell many more additional copies. If you ask 100 players what they're prefer, a resizable avatar, or more content, 98 will ask for more content. That means that, unless it is trivially easy with no complications, it is not worth the effort to include this feature.

Games are different than a movie.

You have to make or buy the 3D models or sprites for each.

I would be very interested to see how a conversation with a natural 5' character and another 6' 3" would go.
The camera angles would be comical.

It all boils down to cost savings and if there is perceived value in giving all that choice for either sex.

Skyrim made a very good attempt of giving all the variety you would want but there was some height restrictions.

My wife has a friend that is 6' 5" in height and she is proportionate to her size (not a stick). Let that sink in for a minute. She is super strong and is enormous up close. Torso is a bit intimidating (or impressive depending on your outlook) since it is at typical face level and proportionate to her size. Give her a warhammer and she would scare the heck out of any would-be warrior.

People come in all shapes and sizes this character is a bit over the top (Vasquez from Aliens) but she knows how to make the other guy look like a wimp:

LordofHats wrote:The limiting factor isn't really the 3D model though its textures, object collision, clipping etc. Getting everything to look good all at once when you allow models to be rescaled can be messy (Skyrim for example has a very simple rescale but it can cause a ton of clipping issues in the game with various armors).

That really shouldn't happen, technically. I can only assume that they "attached" said armour not to the model's actual center but some other point.

If everything on the model is attached to the same centerpoint (in terms of position, not movement), then it should scale flawlessly, as it'd be somewhat like upsizing a singular model. All the individual factors like distance to center and overall size should share the same ratio, after all?
Think of how a 3D engine simulates distance - by making a model smaller. So all you need to have the engine do to simulate different body heights is doing this without actually changing the character's position.

Textures can of course be an issue, because unlike with a model that's zoomed out you can actually inspect them from up-close, but then again I'm not sure this has to be a problem when we consider that the heights of characters from a single species must not differ that much from one another. There's a lot of games where this technology works, it just isn't an industry standard yet.

Without having played GW2, it sounds as if the studio simply applied the same textures to Char and Norn models as they did on smaller Sylvari and Humans - but made the mistake of developing them from the latter rather than the former. If they had switched this, Sylvari and Humans would still look good, and Char and Norn would look better.
That being said, especially with MMOs there is of course always the question of what system specs you can ask for, and higher quality textures mean less people will be able to play your game...

Redbeard wrote:I'm still a believer in market-driven upgrades. Changing model heights is unlikely to sell many more additional copies. If you ask 100 players what they're prefer, a resizable avatar, or more content, 98 will ask for more content. That means that, unless it is trivially easy with no complications, it is not worth the effort to include this feature.

That's the thing - it is trivial. Every 3D game already comes with this function built-in - it's how the engine is even able to simulate a three-dimensional space in the first place!

A game that would be unable to make models larger or smaller would be incapable of showing objects at different distances.

nomotog wrote:
But what if we have burly men wrestling with equally as burly women. That was kind of what I wanted to get at. We can use some more big burly brutish female fighters to add balance to the huge amount of tactical and agile female fighters.

I suppose, but the realities of sexual dimorphism are what they are.

I'd be intensely curious to see how many women would actually want to play a burly she-hulk. Every female gamer of my acquaintance, when customization of appearance is an option, goes for what they feel to be the cutest look, not the most brutal.

I imagine the argument for "more brutal female characters pls" would not be made if everyone just wanted cute chicks, though.

Think of how a 3D engine simulates distance - by making a model smaller. So all you need to have the engine do to simulate different body heights is doing this without actually changing the character's position.

How models are drawn on the screen is separate from how a model is actually scaled in a digital 3d plane. The game actually stores the models in a 3d space and then takes a picture of that space and prints it onto the monitor. Its a very different process from actually making a model larger or smaller or wider or taller.

Granted I agree with you. A little clipping didn't ruin Skyrim and the textures on the Char and Norn aren't terrible by any means. I was just trying to give an answer to a technical question from memory.

If a developer is really trying to not spend anymore than they have to though, this kind of stuff probably gets stuffed in the trash in favor of being able to make models and reuse them. For example Bioware is on record saying that the reason we saw no female Turians (in ME1) was because they didn't want to spend time making a female Turian model (and you'll not that every Turian uses the same model, even Saren who simply wears a different armor skin and has different textures). The Asari were even made all female because the developers thought it would be weird to have no female aliens (and the Asari models were not hard to make either, just change the head of a human model and give it a different texture).

It's all about cutting whatever corners can be cut.

 Seaward wrote:

nomotog wrote:
But what if we have burly men wrestling with equally as burly women. That was kind of what I wanted to get at. We can use some more big burly brutish female fighters to add balance to the huge amount of tactical and agile female fighters.

I suppose, but the realities of sexual dimorphism are what they are.

I'd be intensely curious to see how many women would actually want to play a burly she-hulk. Every female gamer of my acquaintance, when customization of appearance is an option, goes for what they feel to be the cutest look, not the most brutal.

Honestly not many and not on their first choice anyway, but some will and more will on their second choice and you know if you have 5 female characters in your game or story might as well get as much diversity as you can, The big word is verity. (If you wanted one word to explain this whole point it of this thread or that video or almost any feminist complaint would be diversity. Want two words. Diversity good. For the third word add an Is in the middle.) You know. I don't have a problem with starting with the basic female wizard or generic female fighter, but it can't be the end point. You want to move on to try out as many character types as you can.

 Lynata wrote:
I imagine the argument for "more brutal female characters pls" would not be made if everyone just wanted cute chicks, though.

I'm not hearing that argument outside of small, selective segments.

CN's new show "Steven Universe" has three female protagonists that seem pretty cool, in terms of design and personality, and have diverse body-types:Good example of non-derivative female characters in my book.

Like most of the shows derived from the people who have worked on Adventure Time, I'm pretty sure the concept of Steven Universe was developed during an acid trip

Seaward wrote:I'm not hearing that argument outside of small, selective segments.

Of course not. Perception is important. If this argument would be made more often, we would not have this thread.

But you commented on it, so I commented on your comment.

 LordofHats wrote:
Like most of the shows derived from the people who have worked on Adventure Time, I'm pretty sure the concept of Steven Universe was developed during an acid trip

But it was a very good trip.

Hey, if you're gonna get high might as well go for broke

You know. Adventure time is kind of a good example of varied character design. Ana might complain how almost every female character is a princess and how most need fin to save them, but there is so much verity in their designs and personalities.

Adventure Time and for that matter all the shows derived from its crew seem to revel in toying with audience expectations. They adhere close enough to standard formula enough that you expect what will happen only to typically have it thrown back in your face by the ending.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Galdos wrote:
Well im just going to add that Im all for games that have female characters when it makes sense (Outside of Resistance movements or the Eastern Front, no WW2 game should have them)

In other words, when it makes sense in context and/or when the need or desire for a female protagonist grows organically from the story being told, then that is the right time to have a female protagonist (as opposed to shoe-horning one in as a form of tokenism).

 Galdos wrote:
she did a lot of back door stuff)

She did what now???

yes exactly

and feth off lol. I meant Behind the scenes, changing the story while off screen stuff lol

You'll also notice in Adventure Time when they reversed the sexes of the characters that is essentially all they did. Fionna wears the same thing as Jake, and doesn't have a pink bow or heavy makeup. Same goes for Prince Gumball, who is still in pink, just as Princess Gumball is.

Fionna wears about the same thing as fin. Except for the mini skirt and stockings. I think she also has a different sword. Also cake is a cat well Jake is a dog. (It's funny how entrenched that cat=girl dog=boy thing is. My mom keeps calling my male cat girly.)

Oh an recall my post about burly female warriors. Adventure time has two. Muscle princess and Susan are both big strong women.

(Huntress wizard is the design I like the best though.)

Oh noes this woman is showing cleavage!!!! That's so sexist!!!
To give an example I've never understood why people would pick on a character like Mai Shiranui for the wrong reasons. Kunoichi always dressed in revealing attire, and they overpower powerful men by using a weakness women don't have (women have far more control around the opposite sex). Shouldn't that be empowering?
Look at Dragon's Crown. Yes the Amazon spent way too much time on the leg machine, and yes the Sorceress is a GGG cup. But the Amazon has by far the most DPS, and the Sorceress has by far the most versatility. Revealing attire wearing, generally well endowed characters aren't sexist inherently. Characters being dramatically weaker for being female IS sexist.

Supposedly the place where Olympians stay during the Olympics is like a super major orgy on Viagra and steroids. Lucky b*stards get all the fun.

Hard to say the athletes are completely even. I think if we saw each sport's athletes it'd be infinitely less diverse. It only makes sense though. Some sports require certain things. The woman for high jump is pretty tall as I guess that could give an advantage. For some reason more of the gymnastics people are short or at most average female height. If we're going for the fact that the Olympians are diverse then yes but they are all strong and talented in different ways.

 ThePrimordial wrote:
Oh noes this woman is showing cleavage!!!! That's so sexist!!!
To give an example I've never understood why people would pick on a character like Mai Shiranui for the wrong reasons. Kunoichi always dressed in revealing attire, and they overpower powerful men by using a weakness women don't have (women have far more control around the opposite sex). Shouldn't that be empowering?
Look at Dragon's Crown. Yes the Amazon spent way too much time on the leg machine, and yes the Sorceress is a GGG cup. But the Amazon has by far the most DPS, and the Sorceress has by far the most versatility. Revealing attire wearing, generally well endowed characters aren't sexist inherently. Characters being dramatically weaker for being female IS sexist.

I am not going to comment on dragon crown's designs because I hate them all. The sorceress, the elf even the dwarf and the warrior. Hate it all. I get the style and what the intent. I just don't like them at all. It's mostly a matter of taste for me.

I'm honestly not the best at explaining why one character is objectified well another might not be. The first thing to understand is that is honestly has little to do with cleavage. A character can be empowered and naked or objectified and fully clothed. One general rule would be to look at a image and ask yourself what they are trying to do, why they are trying to do it and how they are feeling at the time.

I looked at a few pictures of Mai Shiranui some are quite bad, others aren't that bad at all. (A few I couldn't even show on dakka because they are borderline erotica.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Mai_Shiranui.png
This one was the one used on her Wikipedia page, so I am going to assume that it's a common depiction of her. (There was an animated version on the page too, but I'm already worried this one might be too much.) Lets ask the question, What is she trying to do in this picture? As far as I can guess, she is trying to seduce the viewer. Notice that she is looking towards the viewer well displaying her breasts to the viewer. You said she might use her sexuality as a weapon in battle, but notice that isn't what is happening here. She isn't fighting anyone. This whole image is about her being sexy for the viewer. On the upside at least she is happy about it. She looks like she wants to be sexy. The fact that we can see her expression and see how she feels makes this less objectifying then if they cut out or obscured her face.

http://levelmais.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/wallpaper-7240121.jpg
That one is a wallpaper image so it's rather big, but I wanted to include it because it's not the same as the first image I posted. First of all notice that she is now interacting with chun li. The two are having a staring battle. Trying to psych the other out before a fight I imagine. Her fist is clenched and fer expression is one of steely determination. I this image she is tough and she is about to show it. She looks like a fighter in this image. It's completely different then the image I posed before even though she is still wearing very little clothing.

Take note that I said I'm not an expert at examining images. I'm barely an amateur. Someone better might can likely point out other things I may have missed both positive and negative.