while attractiveness is certainly subjective,theres a few things that, lets say in the general western world is considered attractive.
For women it is ofthen large eyes, oval faces, femine hairstyles, a beautifull smile, a button nose.
Whats generaly not considered attractive are dumpy faces, wide noses, manly jaw lines or small beady eyes.
And you might say ok, maybe the developers didnt know any better, but then why do all the male characters have that generic male model look? with pronouned cheekbones, a pronounced jawline , masculin chins, straight noses (besides the dwarf, obviously) and beard stubble that was common at the time before hipstes became truly cool.
Its funny how conventional aestheitcs of western beauty were applied to one gender, while the female characters all went "unconventional", to say the least, i personally would only consider cassandra an attractive woman out of the party characters, and shes a quite masculine tomboy, while the only two truly conventionally attractive characters, are those two that come from the first dragon age game and had an established look already.
Theres also some more subtle things especialy in Mass Effect Andromeda.
I dont have the image anymore, but in mass effect 1 and 2 at least, the Human models had slightly exagrated proportions.
Generaly, the normal proportions of a Human are considered 7.5 heads / body height.
In short, if you stack 7.5 heads of the character, it should be about the height of the figure.
In Media, 8 heads are commonly used, this is kind of an "Idealized" image of the Human Body (super hero comics ofthen use 8.5 to realy exagrate proportions).
The older Mass Effect Models used idealized proportions for the Human models, kind of 8 heads tall.
While Andromeda had about 7 heads, making the Human models look stunted and Childlike looking in comparison to the athletic imposing figures usually used in idealized art.
Anohter strange one that makes you scratch your head is that Mass Effect Andromeda, on launch, didnt let you pick light skin colours during character creation, for no apparent reason. The lightest you could do was an obvious tan.
Its just strange stuff like that that realy makes you question the art design of that studio
EDIT: i actually found the image on Reddit, so you can see for yourself.
now, some people might make the argument that the image on the right is more realistic, i counter that, that realism is filtered through the lense of the Human brain, and that Unrealistic images can ofthen come closer to the "Feel" of the real thing, than a realistic depiction.
[img]
http://external-preview.redd.it/r5s...a26d13e89c23f4fc9a91cc384931f12d2b56eb17[/img]