Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
I Like Orc Butt And I Cannot Lie
 |
As seen on Sara’s blog, a story that apparently stunned her into a punctuation mark: World of Warcraft has – brace yourself – it’s coming – are you braced – hyperidealized views of the female form. (I warned you to brace yourself.)
Good game design presents many challenges, not the least of which is to create interesting avatars that will resonate with your player base. While it is understandable that Blizzard would wish to do whatever it can to maintain its success, it is also important to look at the costs of that success.
From a feminist’s point of view, Blizzard’s decision to force all of their avatars into a narrow ideal of human beauty reinforces negative stereotypes that continue to perpetuate inequality through the normalization of a kind of strict binary sexual dimorphism that does not exist in real life.
From a player’s point of view, Blizzard has denied many people the ability to play a character like them, or a character they would like to be. The extreme sexual dimorphism in the races, and the way that Blizzard is quick to “fix” avatars that do not properly fit the ideal, has sent the message to those outside of that body type – not just women, but men as well – that they are not worthy of being represented, that their body types are not good enough for even one avatar in the entire game to represent them.
 |
Leaving aside for the moment that in a fantasy game, most people want to look like society’s assumed norms of physical beauty, there are in fact female avatars that aren’t as hypersexualized, such as the gnome, dwarf and orc females. The dwarf female especially is less overtly sexual – more short, squat and muscular.
In a strange coincidence, very few characters are dwarven females.
Of course, Blizzard, just like almost every other game developer, has female avatars that look like MTV models and wear about as much clothing. But the main thrust of the article seems to be that females are dimorphic – in other words, different.
Well, duh.
Avatar expressiveness is a key function of any MMO. In other words, people want to look different. One cheap and easy way to do that is to make men and women look dramatically different. The tauren in WoW are the best expression of this – I don’t think anyone sees tauren female avatars as sexualized (unless you’re, well, not going to go there). They look, basically, like anime cartoon cows, minus the udders. But, as the article correctly notes, but for the wrong reasons, they do look dramatically different. And in a game where there’s not a whole lot of character customization in general, that’s a very cheap and easy way for a character to look different from another. Tauren females are also somewhat rare, although tauren females get picked more than dwarves for gameplay reasons – the druid class requiring the character to be tauren, combined with people who, like myself, feel vaguely uneasy when playing an avatar of the ‘wrong’ gender. Whereas there are few gameplay reasons to pick dwarves, and most (such as racial spells for priests) aren’t commonly known to new players.
 |
Actually, though, women aren’t always the target of unfortunate fashion choices. For any male who’d like to feel some of the women’s pain, I give you Final Fantasy 11′s subligar, as seen in the image to your right. Subligars are common armor for new players, and a better motivation for levelling to a point past where they are used has yet to be found. Possibly interesting if you want to know what it feels like to wear avatar clothing you really, really, don’t want to. Unless, you know, you like wearing hot pants. Which is fine, really.
But is there a crying demand for players to have body types that look like themselves? Of course not. These are fantasy games. Whether or not you agree with society’s standard of physical beauty, expecting a computer game to challenge that is asking a bit too much of what, in the end, is entertainment. And while choices are always good, and more choices are always better, oddly enough, people tend to choose the prettiest choice available. It drove Blizzard to introduce a “pretty” race for the Horde as a form of crude racial balancing.
People want to look pretty. Who knew?
| Print article |
about 3 years ago
From what I remember of the Star Wars Online Beta (last time I played), fat, balding characters were rather rare, even though they were entirely possible to make (although there was one butt-ugly chubby Wookie dancer called Lard Of The Dance iirc). People like their escapism, and why not?
The ab(d)ominable armors that some games force upon you are another matter entirely. God I hated the Dark Elf bikini and the buttcheek-free trousers of EQ1. Don’t get me wrong: I love having the *option* of dressing my avatar sluttily if the mood strikes me. It’s the no-armor-but-a-napkin-with-dental-floss that gets me to cancel.
about 3 years ago
What if you already look like the hyper-idealized game model?
…
Just saying.
about 3 years ago
I commented on this back at my blog too, but the long and short of it as I see it is this:
The author of the paper makes a good point. These are fantasy worlds. Whatever your concept of idealized beauty is, and whether or not you find scantily-clad barbie-esque character models attractive, why the hell can’t we make whatever character we feel like making in these games? Limited options in character creation is something the industry has been struggling with ever since we got away from MUDs and the unlimited potential of text.
There has to be a way to provide a robust character creation system with a whole spectrum of body shapes and sizes without driving your art budget through the roof. We just need to find it and do it.
about 3 years ago
A ton of people play female gnomes. Less so fem dorfs, but dwarves are the least popular race in the game. There are HALF as many dwarfs as Draenai 60 right now…
It’s one thing for a movie to resonate with the audience via an “everyman” character, but do you really want to BE the everyman? 99.9% of us are already the everyman, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to conclude that idealized images are, well… ideal.
The system in SWG allowed for comedy avatars. People choosing off-the-wall stuff because they could and it tickled their fancy to do so. Good on them. People have nearly the same flexibility in City of Heroes but the non-ideal avatar is still incredibly rare. Why be you, when you can be new?
When I craft avatars in any game I always build something that makes me either smile or say “awesome”. It’s not just the avatar others see, it’s the avatar *I* see. I’d like it not to be fugly or average.
Now if there’s some sort of petition we can start to stop Blizzard from creating shitty armor sets for paladins, I’m all ears. Between the voltron set and the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert getup it’s just plain crappy.
about 3 years ago
Ugh, I literally just spit coffee on my flat screen after reading the “people keep aiming at my navel” inset. Thank god this thing is covered in plastic.
about 3 years ago
I have 2 Dwarf female characters, and it is always fun for the uniqueness factor. Prior to Burning Crusade, I could proudly say I was the highest ranked Female Dwarf Hunter on the server …. of course I was one of the only Female Dwarf Hunters PvPing. I picked her for more of the powergaming reasons, Dwarves are hard to hit in the battlegrounds due to being small (as opposed to my Tauren hunter who could be picked out halfway across the map.)
The only character model in game I really have ever had a problem with is the Night Elf Female. The whole look, combined with the stripper /dance and the “boob bounce” idle animation has always irked me, and the only nelf char I have is an AH alt.
I can certainly understand a desire for more diversity in character customization, but World of Warcraft has a specific graphical style that carried over from the Warcraft games, and I think that is why there is less room for customization.
about 3 years ago
The sexual dimorphism between the avatars is one of the reasons I’m not particularly fond of WoW’s avatar style. Once you choose that path, there’s really no way to get good-looking female avatars to match the absurd proportions of WoW’s “other” races (taurens, orcs, trolls, etc), and even *with* the sexual dimorphism they *still* had problems making with the female avatars being ugly (see: the Horde). In a more realistic game this isn’t really as much of problem, you make orcs buff bodybuilders, elves anorexic heroin junkies, and humans the everyman (except hot). Males and females in this case are more or less equally exploited (at least until the armor goes on) *and* you have a choice of body types.
Nobody really wants to have a fat or ugly avatar except as a joke, but it WOULD be nice to have female avatars that stood up on their own right and didn’t look like someone tried to turn the male avatar models into female porn stars.
about 3 years ago
The sexual dimorphism between the avatars is one of the reasons I’m not particularly fond of WoW’s avatar style. Once you choose to go with that style, there’s really no way to get good-looking female avatars to match the absurd proportions of WoW’s “other” races (taurens, orcs, trolls, etc), and even *with* the sexual dimorphism they *still* had problems with their female avatars being ugly (see: the Horde). In a more realistic game this isn’t really as much of problem, you make orcs buff bodybuilders, elves anorexic heroin junkies, and humans the everyman (except hot). Males and females in this case are more or less equally exploited (at least until the armor goes on) *and* you have a choice of body types.
Nobody really wants to have a fat or ugly avatar except as a joke, but it WOULD be nice to have female avatars that didn’t all look like someone tried to transform the male avatar models into female porn stars.
about 3 years ago
I don’t really care that players like to play idealized avatars or that females tend to look like Playboy bunnies. It is, as you say, fantasy, and fantasy usually involves ideals. What I am disappointed with, however, is even though game designers/programmers/artists have the ability to provide us with the ability to tailor our avatars to our *exact* specifications, it is rarely done. SWG did a great job of this, Second Life allows insane possibilities, and City of Heroes does it well also. Why this isn’t the norm, especially in a game with 8 million players, is beyond me. As Raph Koster said (shameless linkage) “like snowflakes, they all want theirs to be unique and different and completely indistinguishable from anyone else at a distance of five feet.”
about 3 years ago
And your preview button is too close to your post button, but I’ll stop talking now anyway.
about 3 years ago
“Why this isn’t the norm, especially in a game with 8 million players, is beyond me. ”
Because it’s a lot of work to have different bodytypes. A LOT of work. You have to get every possible variance to work with all equipment, armor, and animations. Nobody wants to see your stubby legs clip through your pudgy belly doing Super Extreme Backflip Attack… and even after doing all that work the result can be ugly, because human bodies aren’t really made to scale in easy, mathematical ways.
It’s easier when you have one race (or if your races are simply headswaps), but if you’ve got multiple races, you can multiply the amount of work.
In addition to that, it’s more bones and/or polygons, which means more performance problems.
It’s also the reason many games have female avatars which are males with boobs and ponytails stapled on.
about 3 years ago
Yeah, there’s a very good reason WoW has limited options. It uses extremely low poly models compared to all the other major games out there, which allows it to run on a wide range of hardware. Less polygons translates directly into less ways to stretch and fold those models and not have them break.
about 3 years ago
I thought the observation that there aren’t any ugly heroes in a fantasy world was interesting.
Anyhoo, armor design just depends on how “realistic” the setting is, I guess.
about 3 years ago
I declare bullshit on this one. There’s nothing sexist about it at all. The only way that could be the case is to declare that the female avatars are modeled after some idealized form (mostly true) while the male avatars are much more typically shaped like the average male (here’s the BS). Male avatars in WOW are ripped, muscular god-like beings, except the trolls which are more the scrawny-yet-toned type. Hell, for the guys even the dwarves and tauren are well beyond the norm, so if anything it’s marginally misandristic.
Some people only ever see the world through the prism of their own personal issues. For Al Sharpton everything is always about race, even when it’s not. For some others it’s always about misogyny, even when it’s not.
PS: I must admit, I find the orc gals rather hot. They look a lot like my ex-fiance. Yes, even in the face.
about 3 years ago
I fully support games letting players look frumpy or even ugly. It ought to let female players avoid unwanted advances, for one, but ultimately the issue is whether anyone realizes they r fem irl, lolz.
I’m pretty sure Shadowbane would not have been more fun had they ever actually implemented the topless Succubus.
about 3 years ago
On the subject of Warcraft, I give you this picture and the words “Holy crap”. This is one reason why you may have to quit raiding…
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/250/535549315_2daf5f2e6a_o.jpg
about 3 years ago
Minor sidebar – The issue with WoW may be a design {flaw|feature} with their equipment models. I don’t recall where I read it during beta, but it was some blue-post that stated specifically that they model each variant by hand which meant that even minor changes to a graphic resulted in work for male and female models for each race in the game. One could only imagine the unpossible nature of that system were there to be “body” customization at the players beck and call.
IIRC it was in partial response to why there will “never” be player-tinting for armor.
about 3 years ago
Most people who play fantasy games want their characters to look like heroes. The stats of most-played race/gender combos in games like WoW and EQ2 illustrate this clearly. Sure, there are exceptions (I work with an artist who loves to make rolly-polly avatars), but for the most part this holds true.
Considering the expense of player avatars from a technical standpoint, what’s a gaming company supposed to do? Spend extensive creative resources accounting for any possible look a player could want and allow the client to draw all that on screen, or streamline to account for what the majority of players want and thereby give better performance to everyone?
In game design (and MMOs in particular), nothing is free. Every choice has an expense. Part of being a responsible designer is making choices that have the biggest win/cost ratio, or if not then being realistic about what the cost is and what you’ll have to give up in return.
All this is not to say MMO makers should ignore those who want a lot of customization diversity. But what I am saying is that the choices that have been made so far are almost certainly not made out of sexism or a desire to limit players, but rather to offer what will appeal to the majority and provide a certain level of performance to the mainstream audience.
about 3 years ago
Honestly, I think Dwarf Females look pretty nice, possibly nicer than the rest of their alliance counterparts. Real women have curves, and all. >_>
about 3 years ago
Quite epic for what was basically just an art asset decision in regards to how armor skins stretch onto varying body types.
about 3 years ago
You can definitely make ugly characters in WoW, its just limited to facial only.
about 3 years ago
We’d all be ripped if we regularly ran across entire continents on our way to work.
about 3 years ago
Moorgard put a finger on it right there.
When I play a fantasy game, I do indeed want my character to look like a hero. I want Jirel of Joiry in her full plate, or at least Red Sonja the way she was in the book. Instead, I get Britney Spears risking frostbite.
I want a character that looks like a hero, not like a prostitute.
The biggest problem is not technical, nor even artistic. The problem is the designers’ perception of who their target audience is, and, further, their perception that catering to that audience’s presumed desires will increase game sales.
The male models are designed to look like the person male players (especially stereotypical pasty-faced, cheetos-bellied game nerds) wish they could be. They have heroic characteristics: they are tall, muscular, obviously strong and competent. They wear armor suitable for their heroic battles, armor that will protect them from enemy attacks.
The female models are designed to look like the person male players (especially stereotypical virgin game nerds) wish they could have sex with. They have sexually appealing characteristics: they are short, slender, have no apparent musculature and extremely exaggerated breasts, obviously weak and sexually receptive. They wear armor that resembles the costumes worn by strippers, a hyper-sexualized version of whatever it is based on, but clearly only a costume, not practical for anything.
WoW faces are nothing to write home about to begin with, but when you flip through the selection of human and elven female faces, there are no options that look strong and resolute. None that look heroic. The only faces provided have varying degrees of the sultry, pouting expressions that you expect to see on the face of a porn star, not a hero. This is not something that would require any changes to the models; they’re only textures. Yet even here, where they could provide a serious character face with no additional load, they choose to provide only faces associated with that sex-object stereotype that has guided all the rest of their character design.
In short, both male and female models are exaggerated caricatures of real physical forms. That is not the issue. The issue is that the males are exaggeratedly heroic, and the females are exaggeratedly sexual. We want to be heroes too.
Women have a number of responses to this. There are some, like me, who just duck the whole issue and play male toons. My main looks like … well, what I’d like to look like if I was a man. At least he gets to wear clothes. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve met women who would not play WoW because they felt uncomfortable playing a toon that looked and moved like a slut, and also felt uncomfortable playing a cross-sex toon so my solution wouldn’t work either. Then there are also the women, usually the most hardcore gamers,who don’t really care what their character looks like, only about its performance; they’d play cubes marked “mage” and “warrior”, or stick figures, or undead and trolls, with equal disinterest, and they don’t /dance.
I’m not arguing against the idea that there should be some variety in characters, or that the male models should be larger and more muscular. Obviously there should be, on both counts. But this does not require building the female models to reflect, not the heroic ideals of the female players, but the wet dreams of the male ones.
As far as variety goes, having options for tall, medium, and short characters would be easy. Just apply a scaling factor to the entire model, the way they do for the use of things like size-changing effects in the game. Except for gnomes, they’re hard enough to target already.
The armor and clothing issue, though, is the real problem for me. Men dressed in serious armor while women are dressed in chainmail bikinis is saying “men are heroes, women are toys”. I’ve spent a lifetime of dealing with that attitude in the real world; I don’t need to have to deal with it in my escapism, too. Would the male players really not want to play WoW anymore if the females could wear armor that didn’t leave them at risk of frostbite, or of an all-over sunburn?
I’m a KAES. I want to look like a hero, not a ho. Is that really too much to ask?
about 3 years ago
Well since most players want to look a certain way, that should mean all players should look that way. You know, because individuality is hard.
about 3 years ago
Well said, FemaleGamer. I think you have summarized the actual problem much better than the original paper from irisonline did.
As a side question, have you looked at the female faces available in Lotro? Some of them are what I would call “handsome” as opposed to “cute,” if you know what i mean. Strong jaws, stern expressions on the faces (at least, they look so w/ my graphics settings), and so on. The bodies are still pretty barbie-ish, but at least the armor covers the throat and belly areas.
about 3 years ago
I think orc females are pretty hot, I mean, if a woman had a muscular athletic body, she would be. Am I the only one?
At least they have realistic bodies you’d expect a hero to have.
about 3 years ago
Boobies.
Okay … sorry.
about 3 years ago
It was one of the things that Dark Age of Camelot got right.
about 3 years ago
The fact that many of the DAOC artists were female, and one in particular was not shy about referring to her knowledge of melee combat involving pikes: not a coincidence
about 3 years ago
The “most of us want to look like a supermodel” argument may be a good reason why games tend to offer us exactly that, but it’s a horrible reason to not have alternatives in place. I can appreciate the manpower that has to go into designing armor for all the races (though Blizzard kind of painted themselves into a corner by giving us new armor sets every 6 months), but as joe average consumer, I shouldn’t be expected to care. I want my individuality, and if that involves a beer gut, let me have it.
When picking a character I generally go for whatever is least played. My rogue was a dwarf female, my priest is a troll.. about the only times I took the “popular” choices was when I had none; druids and paladins being examples.
None of the models in WoW are poorly done, and it’s nice to see some variety in the landscape. It’s my personal mission to make sure people see that variety!
And yes, DAoC really got models “right”. Lot of lessons to be learned from that game, that appear to have gone unlearned.
about 3 years ago
I like sexy avatars. So does my GF.
If you don’t like sexy avatars, don’t play one.
about 3 years ago
I know that Anarchy Online had many many issues, but one that bugged me the most was all the self-body clipping issues with anything but the skinniest models. It’s a shame really, because AO was one of the first games that allowed dramatic differences in body type.
On a related note: I had a fat Calmari on SW:G. Named “Mudd Flats” I RPed as a down and out blues musician. The most fun I have ever had RPing, and a large part of the fun was the non-standard bodytype. I didn’t do it to be “funny” or “ironic”. I set him up so that he looked the way I felt a down and out musician SHOULD look. Its a real shame that SW:G was so profoundly broken in all other respects.
p.s. Female dwarfs are hot. Gnomes are actually too small. Most of the clothing textures are too compressed (and don’t get me started on their inability to bend their legs when they run) In fact, I find aspects I like with all the avatars (male and female). Which is why I have so many damned alts. The only exception is the Belfs. I cannot even get out of the newbie zone before I want to cut off those damned boucing ears with a pair of rusty gardening shears.
about 3 years ago
CoH, not being a Visible Equipment Game, can get away with a lot of customization.
Which means you can do this, and also do this.
In your Visible Equipment Games these options may not come up, though one possible avenue is to allow you to customize your look at various armor levels – for example, you can create unarmored, light-armored, medium-armored, and heavy-armored looks for your character, with more potential unlocking as you complete various game objectives.
–GF
about 3 years ago
“The problem is the designers’ perception of who their target audience is, and, further, their perception that catering to that audience’s presumed desires will increase game sales.”
Regardless of who you were trying to reel in when you decided on a target audience, if that audience turns out to have 8 million people in it, I’d say you’ve pretty much nailed the “presumed desires” of somebody.
about 3 years ago
Dwarf Chicks are friggin’ awesome.
http://www.thenonentity.com/non-wrathshoulder.jpg
My first character in retail WoW was a dwarf girl. I wish I could be my dwarf girl on the horde.
about 3 years ago
I’m just glad that MMO’s have reached the cultural saturation point that they even merit discussions of this nature. Its good for the validation of gaming and it legitimizes it as more than a kid’s hobby among those unfamiliar with the true underlying complexity of today’s games.
about 3 years ago
Were you on Naritus, by chance?
about 3 years ago
This discussion has been going on long before the “cultural watershed” that is World of Warcraft. Everquest is the first MMO I recall this being an issue in, but I’m positive it was being discussed/lamented in the realm of offline/SP games as well. “Why does the damsel in a dress always look like a whore?” Or the always fun, “why is the damsel a damsel?” This, of course, was in a era where there were no radio buttons to choose your gender.
As an aside – my NELF rogue looks amazing. If you call her a whore she’ll stab you in your frakking eye. My avatar is graceful, powerful and is the idealized fantasy HERO I want to play. Except for that tittering stuff, but my volume is usually low and you don’t bounce in stealth. In WoW robe and leather graphics are rarely non-covering. It’s only the mid-to-high mail and plate graphics that take a turn for the slutty.
As for the rest of the fem-angst diatribe, talk to Paris Hilton and her “fans”. Talk to Kate Bosworth, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and the hundred other famous women parading around the big and small screens. Explain to them that the world will not end if they eat a goddamned sandwich. Tell them that there are millions of beautiful women from all over the world and across the entire physical spectrum from athletic to pleasantly plump, from busty and voluptuous to petite and demure. Tell them that knowing who wrote Animal Farm or what NaCl is or who painted The Birth of Venus are just as important and attractive character traits as a pair of 36Ds.
We’d love to help you out, but we’re guys. So when the next young and talentless whore starts shaking her stuff in our direction it’s the equivalent of shiny gingling keys. Sorry.
about 3 years ago
I really disliked the night elf male…too many muscles. Why can’t we have skinny, bookish elves? Even the BEs got pumped up somewhat.
Now, given, my main is male gnome…when you’re a gnome, your gear is somewhat less obvious because it is also small…as are you… But I don’t see the armor in WoW as being overly revealing for females, either.
My next-most-advanced character is a warlock, female human. She manages to look quite scholarly in her robes. No cheesecake, no pouting…
I’d love to see every game with CoH/SWG level character customization, but I don’t think WoW is sexist. I think people tend to see what they want to see.
about 3 years ago
Have you guys ever played Sims and gone through the character customization? This is my 9 yo daughter’s favorite part of the game. She’s modeled our entire neighborhood and put them in houses. She never actually plays or develops them, but she enjoyed going through the setup. It’s not too different in MMOs – character creation can be an interesting and engaging a part of the experience as anything else in the game.
Me, I click through that stuff as fast as I can to get to the pvp.
about 3 years ago
I have issues with a lot of the male toons for WoW. I wanted to play a human male mage but I kept looking at the fact my character did not look like he had been raised reading books, but fed on steroids and hauling boulders around. I understand why WoW only gives one bodytype to each gender/race combination, but I find it rather annoying they went to extremes for each of them. A sound business decision but rather annoying.
In the end, I’m really waiting for a next generation fantasy MMO which allows for a higher level of character avatar customization, from base bodytype to redoing the gear. That would solve a lot of arguments right then and there. If someone wants a realistic character with realistic armor, that would be their choice. If someone wants a Red Sonja in chainmail bikini or Conan in loincloth, that’s their option.
about 3 years ago
Seconded on the mage point, Mutant for Hire.
WoW does have a problem with stereotyped models, but it’s not the female ones. People are just so used to flapping their jaws- they’ve been doing it since the first Everquest box eight years ago- about misogyny and boobies and sweaty virgin geeks in MMOs that they don’t realize that WoW’s female models are rather low key in comparison. Four of the original races are “attractive,” at least 7s on the 10 scale, but another four- Tauren, Orcs, Dwarves, Gnomes- are unattractive. None of them are so because of an EQ-sized rack and you rarely find a piece of “armor” that wears like a bikini on females.
The “problem,” such as it is in WoW, is with the male models. All the models, except gnomes and undead, are roid-raging ‘ceps-and-pecs machines, which makes it difficult to “fully realize” most fantasy archtypes. Sure, I laugh with the best of them at the anime fans and greasy goth teens who are dismayed at their inability to play an angst-machine or a Japanese paragon, but even I’ve been frustrated at the lack of range in Blizzard’s character palette.
The fact is, WoW is the way it is not just because of pervert marketers, but because it is a Warcraft game. Warcraft has a certain artistic style to it, which involves massive muscles, mag-shoulders, and meat-cleavers. Females are smaller. Blizzard didn’t pay attention to “the industry standards” of realism when they were designing their cartoony landscape, so I don’t see why we should expect them to either enforce taste or enable a vast psychological rainbow in their character creation. Boot up WC3 and look at that poorly split baguette hanging off Jaina’s torso, and be glad they muted the style as much as they did.
about 3 years ago
I disagree with the above posters who say this is one thing DAOC got right. I prefer Blizzard’s female models to Mythic’s – at least there are alternate choices to being plain. While I understand some women preferring the less idealized/less sexualized models, I want to be able to choose the hyper-idealized models as well.
When I was younger, I probably would have played a Dwarf female, or a Tauren. Now, though, I don’t want to play a dwarf female because, frankly, if I want to watch a dumpy female running around, I’ll go out and run around. The more I resemble the plainer models irl, the less I want to play one in a game.
about 3 years ago
I can see merit in both sides of the argument.
I would like the choice between playing a HERO and create an Avatar that resembles Conan or whatever, but I would also like the choice of creating a toon that resembles myself or a family member.
DAOC and Asheron’s call had the toons that tended to look the most realistic. WOW and EQ are at the other end of the spectrum.
But then look at society and how we really view beauty/ugliness. The best example I can think of is the TV show “Ugly Betty” where the girl is actually quite pretty and they make her “ugly” by giving her braces and glasses.
about 3 years ago
Make all kinds of different body models? Hell, the gear already doesn’t work right on the default troll male body. I remember on the first Halloween in-game, the masks looked like hideous baby bonnets because their faces would project through the mouth area.
If they can’t even get all the base models right, they have absolutely no business trying to make everything work for dozens of different variations upon the base models.
about 2 years ago
I play WoW, and I enjoy playing it. Nonetheless, I’ve got a laundry list of minor gripes, very few of which are even about character design at all. (Yes, the chainmail bikini effect of certain armor on female characters bothers me a bit. And based on how *male* draenei look, *female* draenei should probably be built more like female orcs. But I feel compelled to mention that the female night elf /dance is *not* a “stripper dance”—it’s based off of Alizee’s “J’en Ai Marre” video—and it *is* possible to put a rather forbidding expression on the face of a female draenei, dwarf, blood elf, or even night elf.)
Back to the subject at hand: It is nearly impossible to prevent males of Alliance races from looking either grim or haggard—and even if you manage, they tend to look vacuous. It *is* impossible to make males of most Horde races look less than grotesque: Although blood elves are an exception, they have the same issue as Alliance males…with the added option of looking *petulant.* So I would argue that the design issues aren’t limited to female characters.