ZzZzzZz.
I actually do think that the male gear that has been datamined looks really boring too tho.
But the female gear looks great, minus some parts that I think are straight up missing like shoulderpads and the lower part in one or two sets. Some are clearly unfinished.
+1 No absurdly large pauldrons, no spiked couters that would only serve to knock the pints off the table at the local tavern. In short, not immersion breaking elements.
I'm all for adding gilding, etching and various symbols not things that say "that guy's shoulders are so broad he wouldn't be able hrough a door. This is something PoE did pretty well.
In PoE you spend most of the game wearing frying pans and bowls lol.
It was one of my biggest problems with the game.
I do like PoE a lot, but there's almost no sense of progression visually unless you buy MTX.
Plate armour was an artform in itself. Even should a developer keep to historical examples (which is, to my mind, a good idea) there are plenty of really beautiful suits that could be portrayed.
Naturally, plate armour in RPGs is a compromise. Picking up an 'off-the-peg' suit of plate is simply not going to happen if strict historical rules are followed, and the armour ought to offer a great deal more protection that it does. The limitations of playability and the D&D combat system, however, mean that D&D's armour is necessarily unrealistic in many regards.
Appearance, by contrast, is not limited by the game system, and so game designers and developers could make attractive armour without straying from the historical path.
Not to mention that this is a fictional setting.
The history of this setting is not the history of irl, armor developed differently and the cultures are different.
One of the things I've brought up before is how women being normal as soldiers for example would result in more feminine armor design as you can see in the datamined gear
Armor was historically always seen as a masculine thing and designed to emphasize masculine ideals of any given time, so if women weren't the extreme rare exception and were actually a common occurrence then it makes sense that in that setting armor would be influenced by that and emphasize feminine ideals too.
Because war would not be seen as a boys club.
It wouldn't be '' historical '' outside of some few exceptions and some '' what if '' depictions from medieval artists that actually did depict women wearing feminine armor explicitly made for women ( which proves that it was something they did think about back then too, lots from Ancient Greece too ).
But it makes sense in the setting that the game takes place in which is ultimately what matters.
I mean it's sorta like complaining that guns aren't historically accurate in a setting that takes place in an alternate universe with fictional races and magic, why would they be lol?
Like there's no law of the universe that deemed that '' this is what armor was meant to look like '', what it looked like historically was completely driven by the very specific cultural norms and context of our history.
Things that don't apply to Baldur's Gate at all.
Edit:
I know functionally it's dumb, but I really do like me some "bikini armor".
Thematically it doesn't make sense for Fighters and Clerics for example, but Barbarians already wear loincloths most of the time.
It's not even that dumb or '' unrealistic '' depending on the context, warriors that fought straight up in the nude fought and defeated heavily armored warriors historically before too.
It's all about context and things like climate, wearing a full suit of plate armor 24/7 makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for a traveling adventurer either.
And while people are right that armor wasn't as restrictive as you often see it portrayed as in video games where people become slow-moving tanks.
It still was more restrictive and caused severe problems with heat exhaustion, if you didn't actually have to stay and fight in a single place and could '' kite '' and use other tactics like that then the armor could work against the wearer and it was done historically.
More wasn't always better, warfare in the medieval ages in particular just operated in a very particular way more suited for it.
