85 réponses à ce sujet

[AlexJK]

syllogi wrote...

Yes, Bioware did take things away, like female dwarves, shrieks, and cats, as I mentioned in my post, whether you think they're important or not.  Saying that things were taken away in the second game does not mean someone wanted an identical game.

You can repeat it all you want, doesn't make it true. The presence of an element in the first game does not make its absence in the second a "removal". Things which were not necessary for DA2 were not included in DA2. (The reason or lack thereof for their disinclusion irrelevant to my point.)

I really wonder sometimes if people who get ruffled at the thought of *any* feedback at all that is not completely positive realize how unproductive that attitude is.

Is that directed at me? Can't see how but I'll respond anyway. Constructive feedback is always good; general negativity is bad. Saying "please can we have feature X in DA3" is good. Saying "you're sexist for removing feature Y" is bad. 

Modifié par AlexJK, 13 novembre 2012 - 09:57 .

[hoorayforicecream]

DreGregoire wrote...

Isn't it more than just about creating a simple model? Aren't adjustments to animations necessary for a new model? Voice? Clothing? Hairstyles etc.? Even if hairstyles are already in the game they would require adjustment, I think.

I mean I can only think of one instance in DA2 where a female dwarf could have been used as a spouse and mother of the dwarves of a quest. I think it's obvious what the solution was for that particular scene.

Animation is the big one. Creating a model, textures, etc. isn't that hard. It's why weapon and armor DLC is easy to make. Animations take the most time to create. Even behemoths like world of warcraft are stingy with new animations, it's why there are so many reskins in their content patches, and new animations usually only come in their expansions.

[syllogi]

AlexJK wrote...

syllogi wrote...

Yes, Bioware did take things away, like female dwarves, shrieks, and cats, as I mentioned in my post, whether you think they're important or not.  Saying that things were taken away in the second game does not mean someone wanted an identical game.

You can repeat it all you want, doesn't make it true. The presence of an element in the first game does not make its absence in the second a "removal". Things which were not necessary for DA2 were not included in DA2. (The reason or lack thereof for their disinclusion irrelevant to my point.)

And simply saying that those things that weren't included weren't necessary doesn't make that true, either.  The game was billed as a sequel, and the story and lore isn't completely disconnected from DA:O.  As I said, as an example, it would have made sense to have shrieks on Sundermount.  Was it necessary to include shrieks?  You may not see it as so, but in order to have continuity and attention to detail, having them would have added something to the game.  Not having them does take something away from DA2, whether you personally think that something is important or not.

AlexJK wrote...

I really wonder sometimes if people who get ruffled at the thought of *any* feedback at all that is not completely positive realize how unproductive that attitude is.

Is that directed at me? Can't see how but I'll respond anyway. Constructive feedback is always good; general negativity is bad. Saying "please can we have feature X in DA3" is good. Saying "you're sexist for removing feature Y" is bad. 

Not that *I* said that anyone was sexist for removing features, but no, it's not a bad thing to be critical, even if someone is pointing out real world issues like sexism.  I don't see any proof that this is occuring here, but I do see you and others acting as though DA2 is immune to general criticism, like saying that it just makes sense to have female dwarves, if we're going to see dwarves as NPCs at all.

[Massakkolia]

David Gaider wrote...

Ria wrote...
This is the harsh, simple truth. No need to beat around the bush.

Sure, it's about resources but whenever something needs to be cut, it's easier to cut from (assumed) minorities than from your traditional target group. Bioware has done some admirable work showing support to different sexualities and creating great female characters but, in the end, they too continue to be plagued by innate sexism of game industry.

Honestly, cutting certain female models (who are not stereotypically sexy) from the budget is such a stupid move. Perhaps some day this industry realizes that young white male gamers alone are not going to provide the required improvement to their balance sheets in the long run.

So, yeah. Not being in Orzammar or any other dwarven settlement has nothing to do with it. We just didn't make female dwarves because we're innately sexist and think they're ugly.

Sigh.

The argument itself is fine, and there's certainly a lot of reasons to keep an eye out for sexism-- even from BioWare. To use it in this case, because we didn't need female dwarves for the DA2 story and you happen to like them, is stretching it a bit thin. Why not just say "I liked female dwarves in DAO and would like to see then in a game again". Would that be so terrible?

I didn't say you think female dwarves are ugly. I meant that there's an innate, subconscious mechanism working in game industry that prefers female characters that fulfill traditional frame of a sexy woman (defined by Hollywood and porn industry). Women have always been an endangered species in games, especially those women who look different from your average game lady.

You said that you originally intended to put female dwarves to the game but they were easy to scratch from the list because you didn't intent to use them much in the story anyway. That alone I find kind of disconcerting. Why didn't you include dwarven women in the story? Sure, there was no Orzammar but there was the Carta, there was the Dwarven Merchant Guild. Surface dwarves were certainly present, and I don't remember any viable lore reasons why these factions would be male only.

Perhaps I just missed something, but I found the lack of dwarven women outright bizarre. The only reason why it didn't make me that angry was that the rest of the game was pretty much the best presentation of women in Bioware games by far. Still, I don't think that a significant, established social group should be cut from the budget plan ever. Not men, not women. I'm very aware of budget limitations and how you must have had to make many difficult decisions with DA2 with that schedule. I just feel this particular cut is discriminating and I wasn't given a strong lore reason to feel otherwise.

Would you have been ok with it, if Varric had been woman and thus all the rest of the dwarves in DA2 had also been women? Or would that have just felt strange to you? Well, that's how I felt. The bizarreness of cutting a whole sex (of one race) out of the game seems to become obvious only if that sex is male. That I find problematic.

I vaguely remember having this same discussion with you before here on BSN. I do respect your approach to writing and think you've done a tremendous job making the game industry more welcoming to all kinds of players. I guess this particular issue is just something we have to agree to disagree.

Modifié par Ria, 13 novembre 2012 - 10:20 .

[Direwolf0294]

@Gaider

I certainly get the resource thing, but for me it is sort of a sexism issue in that it's always the male models that are made first and the female models that are never made when there's not enough time or money. You'd see this in Mass Effect as well, most noticeably with Turians. BioWare isn't the only one who does this of course, Blizzard does it a lot for example, as someone pointed out on the WoW forums a while ago, none of the new non player sentient races in the new expansion include female models, but that's part of the problem. I can't recall ever having played a game that only developed the female models of a sentient race/species and not the male ones, a game that only featured female elves for example with the males no where in sight. And before anyone says it, no, Asari don't count because males don't exist within their species.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Ria wrote...

You said that you originally intended to put female dwarves to the game but they were easy to scratch from the list because you didn't intent to use them much in the story anyway. That alone I find kind of disconcerting. Why didn't you include dwarven women in the story?

When you're looking for things to cut, you look for things you don't need.  They didn't ever intend to add anything to the game they didn't think was valuable, so that they originally planned for female dwarves tells us that they thought female dwarves were valuable.

But it could be that, as they went through their design looking for expendable features, theuy found that none of their female dwarven characters needed to be both female and dwarven.  Some of them mighted have needed to be female, and some of them might have needed to be dwarves, but as long as none of them needed to be both then the female dwarf model wasn't strictly necessary.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 13 novembre 2012 - 10:33 .

[ShaggyWolf]

If Bioware was sexist, or only cared to include beautiful female models, then Meredith- the most powerful person in Kirkwall- wouldn't have happened XD

Here's the thing. They didn't have time to make a model of Isabela with her clothes off for the romance scene. They recycled dungeon models, and indeed, they reused the same plate armor model more times than I care to count. There was barely any variety to the enemy units we fight. They barely shipped the game with the model variety they had, how were they supposed to manage having female dwarves, just for the sake of having them?

The problem isn't that there weren't female dwarves, the problem is that their development time was so short that the game as a whole wasn't as thorough and detailed as we- and probably even Bioware themselves- would have liked.

If you're going to jump to conclusions, jump to ones that make sense, instead of saying Bioware is sexist when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[Wulfram]

Direwolf0294 wrote...

I can't recall ever having played a game that only developed the female models of a sentient race/species and not the male ones, a game that only featured female elves for example with the males no where in sight. And before anyone says it, no, Asari don't count because males don't exist within their species.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure there were only female Quarians in ME1.  More precisely, there was just Tali.

[The Elder King]

Direwolf0294 wrote...

@Gaider

I certainly get the resource thing, but for me it is sort of a sexism issue in that it's always the male models that are made first and the female models that are never made when there's not enough time or money. You'd see this in Mass Effect as well, most noticeably with Turians. BioWare isn't the only one who does this of course, Blizzard does it a lot for example, as someone pointed out on the WoW forums a while ago, none of the new non player sentient races in the new expansion include female models, but that's part of the problem. I can't recall ever having played a game that only developed the female models of a sentient race/species and not the male ones, a game that only featured female elves for example with the males no where in sight. And before anyone says it, no, Asari don't count because males don't exist within their species.

Tali says hi to you.

[Massakkolia]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Ria wrote...

You said that you originally intended to put female dwarves to the game but they were easy to scratch from the list because you didn't intent to use them much in the story anyway. That alone I find kind of disconcerting. Why didn't you include dwarven women in the story?

When you're looking for things to cut, you look for things you don't need.  They didn't ever intend to add anything to the game they didn't think was valuable, so that they originally planned for female dwarves tells us that they thought female dwarves were valuable.

But it could be that, as they went through their design looking for expendable features, theuy found that none of their female dwarven characters needed to be both female and dwarven.  Some of them mighted have needed to be female, and some of them might have needed to be dwarves, but as long as none of them needed to be both then the female dwarf model wasn't strictly necessary.

But that presumption includes the idea of males as the default sex. Women are an afterthought. Doesn't that bother you even a bit? Frankly, excluding males and including only females doesn't really strike me as a better solution. In this case they should have found something else to cut. Having a fully developed population is an important aspect of a fantasy universe. This is something that should be maintained.

Admittedly, in the case of DA2 I understand that Bioware was forced to make some tough choices. That game was clearly skin and bones when it shipped. I suppose many other important aspects were cut as well.

[David Gaider]

Ria wrote...
But that presumption includes the idea of males as the default sex. Women are an afterthought. Doesn't that bother you even a bit? Frankly, excluding males and including only females doesn't really strike me as a better solution. In this case they should have found something else to cut. Having a fully developed population is an important aspect of a fantasy universe. This is something that should be maintained.

We had time to make one model. If we'd said "let's make female dwarves instead of male dwarves" we could indeed have done that... meaning Bartrand would have needed to be female, we couldn't have had Sandal or Bodahn and all dwarven merchants or carta members you met would be female. That seems stranger, to me.

Or we could have kept female dwarves, even though we weren't planning on using them for more than some random characters at the time... and cut something we used far more prevalently. If someone wants to hold the position, however, that everything from DAO should have already existed in DA2 automatically... that we shouldn't have needed to do any work whatsoever, that the sheer rightness of it existing should have >poof!< made new models appear and that we had to physically remove them in order to not have them in the game... well, that's awesome. And probably why fans are not the people who get to make these decisions as it has no bearing on reality.

Again, it would have been nice to have more models. But recognizing that we had to make such tough decisions and actually giving us credit for having more reason behind not making a specific model besides sexism seem to be two different things.


AND... ONCE MORE... THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DA3.

If someone wants to whine about there not being enough character/creature models in DA2, please take it to the DA2 forum. As for DA3, we'll make whatever models we need. We're not talking about what that will be, yet. And that's the final answer on the subject, jeez.

Modifié par David Gaider, 13 novembre 2012 - 11:01 .