Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General RPG rules: Armor Bikini vs Walking Tank

The game Severance: Blade of Darkness had very realistic combat (even the most weak enemies could kill your character in one or two hits) and featured a barbarian and amazon character who bought used very little protection but were more mobile in combat (and used weapons with long range) compared to the knight and dwarf character who both used shields and heavy armour (and were very slow in comparison to aforementioned characters).

It handled armour well without it becoming ridiculous.

I maintain that for adventurers in fantasy games who trek through various landscapes and usually are involved in much smaller scale fights, studded leather or chainmail would be most practical. Full metal armour wouldn't be at all practical outside battlefields where blows can come from all directions.

There is a whole generation that is still out there playing video games, and that has been heavily influenced by very scantily clothed pin-ups posing in front of cars on the first page of their magazines. One could attempt to hypocritically deny it, or blame marketing all day long, but as a matter of fact, female characters in rather revealing outfits used to contribute as a strong selling factor in the industry.

For the sake of integrity, I need to state that I am a male in RL, and probably belong to the aformentioned generation. Like any other heterosexual male, I keep a pronounced liking for the female anatomy, but it's been a while since I expected video-games to limit themselves to such trivial standards before catching my interest, and motivating a purchase. The same for novels, movies, magazines, etc.

Video-games need to evolve, like society has, like the population of their players has, no doubts. I would absolutely hate it though that we couldn't find some kind of sensible middle-ground in doing so.

Females characters in bikinis, with submissive psychés hiding in the background of the archtype of a Conan-like superhero belong to the past, but so does the stereotype that the slightest nipple showing would be inadmissible.

Female characters need to remain feminine, male characters masculine, as a whole (in their physical and psychological features), lest to portray everyone as some kind of horribly dull and boring asexual robots in our games.

I agree, but I disagree with your last point. The "right" way is to design armour that fits in with the aesthetics of the game world. Many fantasy games exist within a European world - therefore it's reasonable that the armour would also fit the European style. If a game was set in a world inspired by, say, Africa, then you would expect to see various African influences in the clothing and armour styles.


If armour isn't all that important then it wouldn't exist on the scale it does in video games. You wouldn't have most of the characters wearing it, because it's largely obsolete. But even then, if it is just to cover more sensitive spots - why an armour bikini? It doesn't make sense. Why would a character walk out just in that? Would they not wear the protection underneath their clothing (like how male sports players wear cups)? That makes more sense.

Bikini armour isn't "entirely irrational", perhaps. But I personally believe that only a minority would - or should, even - be wearing it. A particularly self-confident or flirtatious leader, perhaps. She could wear it to enhance the sexual characteristics of her body and so on - it's a similar tactic to the explanation of Red Sonja's chainmail in Peter V. Brett's Red Sonja: Blue. But that doesn't work for every character.


Considering how close we are to the characters - even in games with cameras like NWN or Original Sin, it doesn't make a difference. Why do you need to know the gender/sex of the other characters anyway? And it's often very easy to tell the differences if the animations and models are constructed correctly. In Skyrim, for example, gender differences in armour are minimal for the most part (though there are feminised armours, and even a boob armour piece - Steel, I think) and you can still tell the difference should you need to.


Just because something is demanded, it doesn't mean it should be implemented. Just because something isn't demanded, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be implemented. It isn't about "demand", it's about getting rid of these stupid, unfair, imbalanced, contradictory and even sexist (again, not saying Larian are sexist) differences in design and implementation.


Okay, you go into any women's clothing store and tell me it's easy to buy a wide range of clothes that don't reveal, whether it's by their tightness or by being cut to show cleavage. It isn't a choice, trust me.


I agree with everything but the very last paragraph. Why can we not have more feminine males in games? More masculine females? Not every woman is feminine, not every male is masculine. We need to show that you can be a strong woman and still feminine, yes, but it doesn't mean we can't also have - say - a tough, masculine woman who holds her own.

This "who knows ?" is not necessary : Everyone KNOWS that development teams are mainly consisting of male people. So why would a man want "revealing armor" items for men ? Unless they are gay, maybe ...

Point is, most RPGs are just written so that they are written for male protagonists. See the Gothic series, for example.

Even neutral, gender-irrelevant RPGs are relatively seldom to find.

RPGs are mainly written so that they represent a kind of "rite of passage" or "Hero Jorney" for men - and not for women.

No-one in the industry knows wht a women's "rite of passage" or a women's "Hero's Jorney" would look like - because there just don't exist stories or even social scientifc studis for them.

The "Hero's Journey" is basically a male tale. There just doesn't exist a proper female equivalent to it - and most designers just don't care, since dev studios are male-dominated anyway, so why should they bother ?

Venetica and Kult are rare exceptions. And yet men decide "not to play games with "only female protagonists", meanwhile greatly ignoring that 99 % of ALL RPGs have "only male protagonists". That's sexism in just aother form.

And good-looking female in games meanwhile bad-looking males in the same games - tht's a form of sexism, too.
Or even lookism.

Rhoda/Rhode should imho have been the blonde from the early screenshots - because that would hve broken the sexism. A good-looking AND highly successful hunter ? Well, that wouldn't have been expected. But instead the blone became a waitress in the local tavern. Quite a return to the old cliché. And she even complained about men string at hear - meanwhile a blonde Rhode would have just landed her fist into the face of a man staring at her.

A development studio comprised solely of men is not an excuse for sexism in games. At all. And the thing about men not playing games with female protagonists? Completely debunked by Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, Portal, The Settlers 7, a large chunk of the adventure market, and that's just off the top of my head. There are plenty of men in the creative industries who can draw, write and create women without resorting to sexist ideas.

Dev studios should bother because women are almost half of the gaming community. Women are fighting tooth-and-nail to be taken seriously as gamers in the face of sexism from development studios (intentional or otherwise) and some extreme sexism from the gaming communities themselves. They should bother because this is the year 2012, and we should have left many of these ideas behind.

But even Venetica wasn't perfect. Performance issues aside, many of the armours were overly-feminised/sexualised. They weren't particularly practical. Looked great, sure, but weren't as functional as they should have been.

This is indeed a problem for the industry, and I find it really bizarre that there are so few story-based RPG's that have a female character as the protagonist. "The Hero's Journey" may be what they're following as a guideline, but I don't know why in this day, it's so rare for a game to have a woman take that journey, other that "the developers don't care or it never occurs to them".

It's something that the industry as a whole should really work on fixing.




I didn't see those early screenshots, so I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. (For one, you're apparently not including Rhode as "good-looking" ).

I also don't see your point. I think Divinity 2 was much better than many other RPG's when it came to gender fairness, and Rhode is a good example. She's basically the most powerful person in the Dragon Slayers, she starts out as the player's boss, and is well respected. She takes down Talana.

Half of Damian's generals are women, there are many female soldiers on both sides of the fight, and Ygerna managed to trap the Divine. There's also the bit with Ursula in FoV who complains about the sexist way the louts of the Prancing Pony treated her that shows some self-awareness.

The existence of the sexy barmaid Elsa doesn't negate Rhode. I don't see anything sexist about her not wanting to attack four professional soldiers with her bare hands, that's just common sense. If Louis didn't interfere, they'd have wiped the floor with the Dragon Slayer - who's supposed to be an even more elite soldier.

No, Divinity 2 isn't perfect in the way it treats women, but it does a lot of things right.



Well, if only for gameplay reasons, being able to identify the gender of an NPC from an isometric perspective would help if you're looking for a specific person. There are ways to differentiate armour without making it skimpy or overly exaggerated, though.

Skyrim is not a great example, though. it depends a lot on the armour type. For example, Lydia in her default Iron/Steel plate doesn't have "boobplate", it looks basically identical to male armour. But a lot of armour in Skyrim is just embarrassing to put your female companions in, like Forsaken or Fur armour which is shamefully skimpy. It makes the "boobplates" in Divinity 2 look more reasonable in comparison.

It's the Steel Plate (I forget the exact name) Armour that has a boob variant. The others (bar Dwarven) are slightly different for female characters, but not significantly so. As for the fur armours? Well, they're probably equally revealing, I think. It isn't quite a solid rule (I think the Vampire robes in Dawnguard show more skin for women), but Skyrim gets it fairly right. Or is at least a major step forward.

But again, I can easily just counter your point and say if an NPC is important, there are other ways to make their placement significant or to make them stand out. Put them in a prominent position (e.g. that guard talking to a group on Lanilor Lane), name them or do something else. It doesn't have to mean they wear more fitting armour.

As for Div 2's treatment of women? Pretty good, in that I think it's a parody of stereotypes and tropes for the most part, but it did have moments where the jokes/attitude just didn't quite work. Not many, though.

How about those armors for males ?
http://fr.guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Armure_de_Parangon

Which style is considered to fit in with the aesthetics of the game world will vary from player to player, however. That's why I wrote there is no "right" way to design armour. There will always be people who think a given style fits and others who think it doesn't. Combining influences from different parts of the real world can also lead to a mixture that is both interesting and convincing, though the chances to fail might be higher than when you take your inspirations from just one region.



I agree. It would be silly to have all or most women in a game wear armour bikinis. "Would be" because I don't know any game in which this is the case.

In sports, both men and women wear protective cups underneath their clothes, but they don't face the risk of their clothes being cut with swords. If you want to protect a certain part of your body and your clothes, you'll probably wear clothes underneath your armour. I think it's also more comfortable to wear clothes underneath metal armour, not vice versa.



It's not always necessary to know an NPC's gender, or race, or anything else about him/her, but those informations might allow some more educated guesses concerning the NPC's possible motivations. And if you're looking for a male deserter, for example, you might not need to talk to armoured women at all (as long as you can tell them apart from armoured men).



You're right, not everything players want can and should be implemented. But if a company wants to stay in business, it can be dangerous to ignore demand.

Maybe you should make it a little clearer what exactly you consider "stupid, unfair, imbalanced, contradictory and even sexist". I can agree that these adjectives would properly describe a game in which all women wore bikini armour while all men wore full armour, though I don't know such a game. If the only difference is that women's armours have boob cups, however, it's on the same level of non-functionality and "stupidity" as giant spiked shoulder pieces.

Imagining the opposite situation, I can say I'd call a game in which all men wore loincloth armour while all women wore full armour "sexist". I'd find it strange if men's armours just tended to be more revealing than women's armours, and yes, it would probably not be very convincing unless the developers provided a good reason, but "unfair" or "sexist"?



Maybe your experiences are different, but when I go shopping with my partner, it's not terribly difficult to find clothes for her which are neither tight nor cut to show cleavage.



Don't you think you overgeneralize? You sound as if almost all games were sexist and women were almost completely ignored by the games industry. As far as I can tell, that's simply not the case. So which ideas should we have left behind?



In my opinion, isn't such a great example. Rhode may be a strong woman, but the most powerful people in the game are Zandalor, the Divine One, Damian, Bellegar, Behrlihn. All of them men. Moreover, there is a greater variation in the appearance of male characters. To put it bluntly, almost all of the women looked the same to me - big-breasted Barbie dolls with model-like facial features, just with different hairstyles, eye colours and clothes. I would have preferred greater variation: more stout women, more old women, more plain-looking women. Though I see that extending the range of character models is a significant cost factor.

Within the early screenshots there was one showing a kind of "Proto-Rhoda" having the same hair as the waitress in the inn of the first town has.

I've been looking for this screenshot, but cannot find it anymore.

You left out Ygerna. She was definitely one of the most powerful people - she was the final boss of the entire game, for pete's sake, and trapped a demigod in an alternate dimension from beyond the grave

There's Rhode, too, of course, and while the player never witnessed Rhode in combat, she's widely respected as the most powerful Dragon Slayer (the elite of the elites), and her mortal-wounding of Talana (herself centuries old and a killer of many Slayers) is proof of that, I think.

I specifically said that Divinity 2 wasn't perfect in its use of gender roles, but the series does have its bright spots. In Divine Divinity, 3 of the 5 black ring members were women, and a woman was in charge of the entire army. In Divinity 2, half of the Black Ring generals were women.

Yes, the game didn't have a lot of variety in character models. Most of the men were basically the same body, no stout men, and even the grey-haired men in their 90's looked pretty good still. To me that seems less like a gender issue and more like a budget/resource allocation issue.

Dwagginz, I can't believe that "Skyrim got it right" just because one or two of its armour sets look the same on women as men when many more of its armour sets are literal fur bikini's in the frozen wasteland of the north that show far more skin than anything in Divinity 2.

Well, you're right, Ygerna is a powerful woman. I haven't included her because Damian has played a more prominent role in Rivellon's history. It was my impression that Ygerna's powers didn't match Damian's ... that she wasn't really on par with him. This impression might be wrong, though.

You may also be right with the budget/resource allocation issue. As we know, a lot of content was cut, and it may simply not have been possible to implement character models of many different physical builds and ages.

I didn't mean to say was a bad example, but I think that the male character models looked more diverse than the female ones. In my eyes, is a better example for gender fairness.

Oh, the old debate... After a quick glance at a few of the replies so far, I have to say I agree with those who say neither. Armor bikini is right out, makes no sense and it's, well, demeaning (and I'm saying that as a straight guy...), but the walking tank is inappropriate for an adventurer too. The "tank" look MAY happen later in the game, with heavily enchanted armor that weighs much less than it should by the looks of it, but should still be put together in such a way as to not hamper movement too much.

Wrote a post about this once, though that was after the issue stared me in the face in an MMO (one of the few I tried, didn't last long of course) and I approached it mainly from that perspective, the general idea applies anywhere.

I say that for the basic armor you should take real armor designs that fit with the game's world design, maybe make a few small changes to improve that fit even more, and leave it at that, without unnecessary differences between male and female models. So same armor for both sexes, just with the necessary alterations for the obvious physical differences, but largely trying to make said differences less noticeable (and definitely keeping it looking useful, as in not deflecting blows to face, as somebody pointed out).
And, of course, again as others said, at least the regular adventuring armor types should stick to light and at most medium armor (but please, something that makes sense, no "studded leather" (about as protective as plain leather, only much heavier) or "ring" (anything pointy goes right through), and "chainmail" is a misnomer, it's just mail...). Later, when it comes to enchanted armor, as enchantments lower weight you can go to heavy and/or start embellishing it to make it also look cool while still remaining functional.

Bottom line, armor should protect your body without sacrificing too much of your speed and mobility, so make it look like it does just that. There's a real dearth of reasonable armor in games (or fantasy art for that matter).

A few links on Sexism in games and within the games industry :

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...sexism_in_game_industry.php#.UMnv7CA0NI5

http://kotaku.com/5917400/youll-want-to-protect-the-new-less-curvy-lara-croft
The comment there is the point there.

http://www.trredskies.com/tag/sexualization/

You're comparing two sets of armour, though. Heck, two completely different sets of armour, not to mention you're missing my point.

My point with Skyrim was that it, roughly, got the design balance right. You could tell at a glance (bar Dwarven armour, IIRC) what a character was, because the armours looked slightly different. Sometimes the differences were a bit silly (e.g. the boob plate steel stuff), but largely it was a case of slight changes and tweaks to fit a different model. The fur armours you describe? Well... look at the male and female ones for each kind. The female stuff typically only covers a little bit more (the breasts) - but even in the more covering fur/hide armours (there are a few variations) are still pretty balanced in that respect.

Yes, they were a bit revealing for such a cold area (regardless of gender), but I don't think it was much of an issue within the game itself. It didn't go against the aesthetics of the setting. They didn't stand out as being out of place, instead they seemed to fit in fairly well. But regardless of how silly they were or weren't, they were fairly equally made for both genders.

To contrast, if "bikini armour rules" were in effect, the male fur armour would be fairly covering and sensible, whereas the female armours would leave a lot exposed.

I'm a man. I love looking at ladies, the less clothes the better!

...

With those things said I hate the iron bikinis in video games. They look silly, they do nothing for me sexually (sorry, I like looking at real females), and IMO they make the games they are in seem more immature.

What I'm getting at is it really has nothing to do with silly claims of sexism or anything like that (who cares about that crap?). What it boils down to me is the majority of the time the iron bikinis and half dressed females in video games are done in such a way that it just makes it silly and immature. There are plenty of examples out there where female warriors and dressed in functional armor...and they are examples where they even retain some of their femininity. I think it's totally possible to have female warriors in functional armor, retaining some femininity, while not having them look like silly warrior hookers designed to make 12 year old boys drool.

Kein posted a great example. The armor looks great, but you can clearly see it's designed for the female form.

This is why I stopped participiate in this thread, I knew it will come to this, I got fed up with this bs in 2012 already, we have a goddamn Kickstarter for that, isn't that enough?

Just for the sake of humanity I asked my gf which outfit she would prefer to wear in battle (hypothetical situation) and showed to her pic from OP post. She said the left one (but more covered - there she mentioned example from Jeanne d'Arc movie ). When I tried her to explain the point behind my question and whole "bikini thing" she said she understand but right one feel way too heavy and immobile, she did rather prefer has advantage in speed and, well, aesthetics and comfort.

There is no morale of this story. Nor there is a point in this argument, It just dumb.

"Sexism". Blargh.

Not sure why you quoted that word...my entire post indicates that my opinion is NOT based on claims of sexism or anything like that.

Apologize ahead of time if you are really not quoting me, but you did quote that word from my post and the reply topic is "Re: Knucklehead".

Actually, if you just type in the Quick Reply box, the last poster in the topic will be listed as who you are replying to, and you can manually add quote tags (a Quick Quote will include the name of the poster being quoted).

Well,

getting back to the topic, i would prefer some armours for the eyes.
But normal armour (which looks like it protects something at last) is definitly needed to stay serious. But btw i would love the possibility to have some really strange armours (not only sexy), mainly bizzare ones that just shout in youre face : Damn im ugly but hard and unique as shit!

So Larian, you shall make sexy armours, normal armours and some bizarre armours too.

Let me see the outcome