5 réponses à ce sujet

[Brass_Buckles]

Consider this my open letter.

Bioware,

If there is a possibility to make Hawke female, many of your female fans would greatly appreciate it if you did not solely promote the male version.  I am aware that there aren't as many female players as male players overall.  However, Bioware seems to have a large number of female fans, and we tend to feel left out when only male Shepard, and now only male Hawke, is referred to in advertising and interviews.  While I, and I'm sure the other females who play the games, don't demand a "he or she" every time you reference the character, is a little cover art of the default female too much to ask for?  Please?

Many of your Dragon Age fans are unhappy about the decision to disallow choice of race and origin--the very thing that made Dragon Age:  Origins so unique.  By including, at least in some small way, the female version of Hawke during promotion, you might at least make a few of us feel a little better about the series, albeit for an entirely different reason.

As a gaming company, you've done a lot of good for female characters and female gamers.  There have been some instances where I wanted to roll my eyes at what you did with this or that character, but for the most part, you've made it welcoming to female players--at least, when we actually start playing the game.  The problem is that we kind of feel excluded beforehand.  The female storyline is rarely if ever the canon one.  The default female characters don't get added to the box art.  In every interview, the main template character is male.  While I'd very much like to see a main character in some future Bioware game be female and advertised as such (with the secondary gender being male for once)--and not the oversexualized female typical in video games with the aim of attracting hormone-raging male players--I'm not asking for that, or even for the interviews to change from the "boys' only club" stance for protagonists that you seem to have taken.  Just please give a little official acknowledgment to the female storylines.  You may even find that you attract more female gamers that way, and I really doubt that having the male variant of your protagonist share the cover with the female will do any harm to sales.  Most guys, I have found, enjoy looking at pretty girls, even if said pretty girls aren't overly endowed or standing around in skin-tight suits or  their underwear.  We women do not like to feel like the option to be female in a game was tacked on as a mere afterthought.

 Thank you.

[David Gaider]

There's already a thread on this very subject, but I'll respond to it with my thoughts:

I'd love to see a female iconic character. I adore female action heroines-- maybe it's a Ripley fixation from watching Alien/Aliens when I was much younger, I don't know.

That said, I can kind of get why we might choose an iconic male character. For an RPG we're talking about putting forward a character that you'd like to be... and as much as a female player says that they can't identify with a male iconic character, if that's true it would also be true in reverse with a female iconic character for a much larger portion of the fanbase, no? You can't have it both ways and say that male players will enjoy looking at a female player character and don't need to identify with her.

I also suspect that if we did put forward a female iconic character (a la Aribeth) the response could easily be that we made her too sexy. A bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", perhaps. Hard to say, but we're going to always have to pick one, and the idea is to be eye-catching and sexy-- as opposed to politically correct. I'm no marketing guy, but that seems to be pretty much a given.

That said, I hope you enjoy the character and the game for what it is, rather than dwelling on what you perceive it might have been. You do get to play a female character, and as always we make plenty of options to accomodate female players in the game.

Hope that helps. Cheers!

Modifié par David Gaider, 09 juillet 2010 - 12:46 .

[David Gaider]

Stexns wrote...
BioWare should be able to fit the story quite nicely for both possibilities.

A TOGGLE! THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION TO ALL DESIGN ISSUES!

[David Gaider]

octoberfire wrote...
You did fine with DAO's blood spatter dragon shape. Why have an iconic character at all on the cover, then?

I imagine it's considered beneficial to have a "face" for the game that is identifiable, part of the branding in the same way that a logo would be. The people who come here certainly don't need any help identifying what Dragon Age is-- naturally-- but then again they don't particularly need marketing in the first place. All you guys want is information.

[Stanley Woo]

Oghren thread UN-redirected here. Apologies for the interruption.

[Stanley Woo]

And that seems like a good way to end this thread without any hard feelings on either side. Thanks, everyone.



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