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Haran Offline OP
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I very much enjoyed your previous games and I'm very excited for BG3.
A trend I keep seeing in CRPGs is having female characters be drawn or modeled in a sexualized manner. I ask that you please refrain from doing that in BG3.
I'd really appreciate it if my female heroes could look as capable as my male heroes. Having female characters look sexualized decreases suspension of disbelief and immersion for me. I'm a dude in his 20s and contrary to popular belief having sexy babes in a game does not make it more appealing to me.
Thanks for hearing me out smile

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Oh look, another one of "those" topics.
I for one enjoy the Human form. It is not about realism but about believeability.

Western RPGs never were sexualized to the point of not beeing believeable, not to mention it is an inherently unrealistic setting.

How about a different request from me: Please refrain from the modern WRPG genre convention of making all women ugly on purpose.

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51-year-old woman here who may view bikini armour as being a bit daft but would quite like her protagonist to look quite feminine. And I admit I had a bit of a sad at Original Sin's high heels and handstand-after-climbing-a-ladder being canned.


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The point is that its not one way or another.
You can make a character believeable and feminine.
Just because your characters look aesthetic doesnt mean you are a Korean MMORPG.
I personalyl detest the trend that modern western games have this obsession with uglyness. The last big budget RPG from the west that had aesthetically pelasing Humans was the Witcher 3.

Likewise, fantasy outfits for some reason all need to reflect game of thrones. Not actually realistic, brown, unaesthetic.
People need to stop equating beauty with something negative.

Or equating "realism" with something inhernetly superior, especialy if, like game of thrones, it is not actually realistic in any way.
One thing that always gets me as someone who dabbles in the visual arts, is the way scale is presented. There is a trend to a "realistic" scale rather than an idealized one.
and in the end, it just looks worse. Specifically with recent Bioware games, the scale seemed to have shifted from (realistic) 7.5 heads to 7 heads, for reasons i cannot point out.
Someone made a realy good infograph about that.

As for Heels, i personally think they work in the way Guild Wars or Witcher did it: Wizards can get away with blatantly impractical wear, once they hit melee they get molten instantly anyway, also they have a tendency of beeing vain.
On a melee character it has the tendency of making the animations look silly.
Unless you happen to be warhammer fantasy and have witch elves, in which case the blatant exagration is the whole point.

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Originally Posted by Haran
I very much enjoyed your previous games and I'm very excited for BG3.
A trend I keep seeing in CRPGs is having female characters be drawn or modeled in a sexualized manner. I ask that you please refrain from doing that in BG3.
I'd really appreciate it if my female heroes could look as capable as my male heroes. Having female characters look sexualized decreases suspension of disbelief and immersion for me. I'm a dude in his 20s and contrary to popular belief having sexy babes in a game does not make it more appealing to me.
Thanks for hearing me out smile


Either you are being naive or haven't been gaming. Most female characters on gaming since 2010 has been ruined by your kind. I said enough is enough you are not moral police and developers have been stupid meeting your demands ended up with bland and uninteresting characters design.

Meanwhile ignoring blood gore, fighting, killing have been part of gaming since the beginning. Pls leave and stop ruining games for your selfish hippocricy afraid being your child exposing to females.

We all know where this leads to. Larian let's not forget what happened to Divinity Origin Sins poster. And what changes you made to please these people. They certainly did not buy your games nor being your true fan.

Last edited by Archaven; 21/07/19 03:36 AM.
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cant believe im agreeing with you for once, but yeah, pretty much that.
I tried beeing more diplomatic about it. But realy, theres been a lot of censorship in gaming and it appears to come from a deep loathing for beauty itself.

Last edited by Sordak; 21/07/19 07:22 AM.
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Originally Posted by Sordak
cant believe im agreeing with you for once.

Same. One of the things I despised about DAI and MEA. Where tf did this trench of making female characters look unattractive on purpose come from and why does it have to exist is effing beyond me.

Talking about this is dumb. Maybe OP was just trolling. I vote this thread be deleted.

Last edited by Try2Handing; 21/07/19 10:01 AM.

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to be fair, theres plenty of places that almost exclusiveley talk about this sort of thing.
I think it started with an obsession with realism, realism lead to the absurd believe that "real" people are ugly.

DAI was funny in a very specific way, only the women were ugly, the men all looked generic, but had very specific male model like features.
MEA was just created by people with no talent whatsoever, so i dont know if i should attribute it to malice or incompetence.
but with Anthem, you cant tell me it wasnt on purpose.

Also i dont think OP is trolling here, this is a very popular sentiment. A lot of people on certain Forums virtue signal about this all the time.
I guess its different here because people here played older CRPGs, where this wasnt the case at all.

Last edited by Sordak; 21/07/19 10:28 AM.
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I think this is one of those areas where it's probably a good idea to be open-minded and to debate things fairly. People can have valid concerns with some of this sort of stuff and not everyone is trying to play the SJW card. And in case anyone thinks it's aimed at them, I'm also thinking of my own inclination to get a bit shouty about this sort of thing so my comment is also a bit of a reminder to myself at least as much as anyone else. So I shall remain uncharacteristically unopinionated on some of the matters raised. Though Sera is still my bestie in spite of things including her fingernails-down-the-blackboard voice. Hmm, in spite of or because of...? She wouldn't have been half as interesting had she sounded... well, like anything else.


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i think people tend to be wary because tolerance towards extreme opinions tends to lead to them inching furhter and further in their direction untill you got nowhere left to go.
Maybe im particularly biased against this because some communities ive been part of have been split because of those issues.

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Well yeah, there is that. I'm somewhat loath to presume someone's intent because btdt and often found I was wrong (more than once... seems I was being a bit empirical about the contention du jour. Or perhaps just argumentative and stubborn) but I am aware that there's also a bit of a tendency for various classes of Flame Warrior to congregate around subjects like this. Or possibly coagulate, or congeal.


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Originally Posted by Sordak
i think people tend to be wary because tolerance towards extreme opinions tends to lead to them inching furhter and further in their direction untill you got nowhere left to go.
Maybe im particularly biased against this because some communities ive been part of have been split because of those issues.


A lesson most lawmakers should learn.

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Male characters in video games aren't sexualized? DO:S heroes particularly had pinky muscles bigger than my thighs.

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This is a relevant subject and one I just discussed with a friend of mine who's gamed with me for decades. We Do miss the old style 'uber-feminine/masculine' characters we remember from the early days of gaming and can't understand where the current trend to make modern avatar artwork so unappealing came from. Whether it's agenda driven or not, maybe it might help to step back and ask one simple question - Why can't we have both?

It would require a little extra art direction, but if games were released with numerous options (both "sexualized" and "empowered") then everyone Should be able to select the character portrayals that will help them enjoy the game most?

Time to get past the 'my way or the highway' mentality, perhaps.

Last edited by Elgalad; 27/07/19 09:07 PM. Reason: grammar
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Originally Posted by BlobbyBlob
Male characters in video games aren't sexualized? DO:S heroes particularly had pinky muscles bigger than my thighs.


Did they?

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Originally Posted by BlobbyBlob
Male characters in video games aren't sexualized?

Yeah well it's one of those areas in which gender equality doesn't work.


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It actually does tho.
its mostly just seen in a wrong way.

The dogma ofthen goes sexualization vs power fantasy.
but that kind of disregards the fact that powerfull men are seen as attractive and attractive women are seen as powerfull.

Power and attractiveness are virtually the same thing in human perception. At least the apperance of power, not power in terms of money or political gravitas.

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I'm a game developer FWIW, my intent when creating characters isn't unlike if I was a novelist or a film maker I imagine. I want them to be believable, and if appropriate heroes. It's hard to make an avatar heroic. With a screen actor it's easy, <insert famous actor> can get up there and convey so much that we easily see them as heroic, or whatever. But getting a bunch of pixels to look that way, when you have limited ability to voice (even with budget) that you have to overcompensate in other ways. Visual and music being the easiest. So yeah characters, male and female, exaggerate to try to reach the player. Women are curvy (e.g. Sebille in D:OS2) and men are muscular (Ifan). But I think Larian did it tastefully in this example, Sebille is pretty sexy visually and voice wise, but she's also a crazy powerful assassin, so she has strength too. And Ifan has a complex history behind him and is not just a muscle head, his origin story has a lot of emotion in it.

So meh, I don't get the modern obsession with trying to find fault in every characterization of women, or men for that matter which nobody seems to care about.

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Its a purity spiral.
The problem with purity spirals is that while they might start well intentioned, they end up promoting the most extreme up their own arse version fo any given idea, because "purity" is gained from one upping one another in "the good thing".

For what its wroth, im personally sick of the "powerfull" thing aswell. Why? power is derived from how the player acts.
I think showing some weakness for once would actually lead to more interresting characters..

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Playing Whorecraft, the video game ? Why not, only if male characters have the same kind of sexy armor.

Is there any compelling reason to have women be the only ones to have bikini chainmail (if anyone should have one) ?
Either do both or do none, I'd say.

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