To be honest with you, I think we are kind of speaking on different levels regarding the armour thing; I question whether showing us twenty or so different armours was a better choice for a video about customisation, when you could have shown us 10 different armours on two different genders to show us the breadth of the customisation. Surely it would require the same amount of work? (Or, even, less considering the fact that they would know exactly what they *wanted* the armour to look like already).
Well, the thing is that one of the issues many people had was specifically the lack of armor customization. So on some level, it was done
specifically to address that point.
As for the second point, I think you're still looking at it as "concept art being for marketing" instead of "concept art so we have concepts for how things may look."
Yes, creating 10 men and 10 women may be easier if you're concepting 10 pieces of armor and, as you say, you already know what it looks like. Now, if we're literally doing concepts for just armor, it could be argued that this only gave us half of the variations on armor (it should be noted that I don't know how many failed concepts were created that I never get to see, let alone what the fans never get to see).
If the goal is to concept how
particular armor pieces may look on both men and women, then that makes sense. If the concept it more purely "give me a lot of different armor types" then you're going to get something different.
In all honesty I don't think people would have complained if we'd lost 10 blurry pictures of new armour from the video in return for seeing what the vision for the female protagonist is.
No, but it may mean that, internally for our own development, we have less iteration on armor styles in general.
brushyourteeth wrote...
But like motomotogirl said, why is it something they'd have to get around to, rather than something that feels just as natural as designing and showing off the fellas?
It's possibly for the same reason that you notice it so readily. Unfortunately the process of changing how people approach these things isn't going to change rapidly. Which, if I can muster a hypothesis, is on some level what the concern is.
I making the
assumption that women here don't typically feel that BioWare themselves genuinely look down upon women and see creating female characters as irrelevant and so forth (since my assumption hinges on the fact that people wanting this stuff wouldn't continue to follow it if they were feeling insulted/disrespected by the content they are improving).
So you're possibly taking someone and saying "Go make me some concept art for whatever" and they will run off and make concept art, like they always have. Except, unfortunately, they have historically (for whatever reason) just defaulted to doing whatever concepts on a male avatar. So then some people on the internet see said concept, they (fairly) go "Hey, I notice there isn't much women in these. In fact there's none! This kinda sucks you know."
So then there's a dev like me: "Oh crap.....we done goofed."
The next time that concept art request comes around (which may be some time later), there's going to be situations such as simply forgetting (whoops...), or having some and then realizing after the fact that there is a heavy male focus, so some
extra time ends up getting spent to "mix it up a little" since the implicit observation is made.
I feel on some level, especially with concepting, hoping for a fully diverse and inclusive set
for any given request will have some challenges. That isn't to say "It'll be white male, so deal with it." I'm saying that, whatever we go with, there are workflow advantages, especially early in a project, for picking one and sticking with it. Especially with character models, because if the task is "create dozens of armor models" my focus is more on creating as many armor concepts, and when there's a deadline coming up and teams are waiting on these concepts downstream, making sure you're mixing up the gender, body type, race, skin colour, and so forth, on top of the actual armor focused work, it's going to create overhead.
Now maybe that overhead is worth it in the long run, because the concept art is better suited for marketing so there's some longer term benefits for those shorter term costs. Although since I'm just hypothesizing, maybe it isn't worth it? I don't know. In part because I don't know how much benefit it may have, nor how much cost there is either. It's easy to logically construct that it IS beneficial, however. But I think that that is easy to say and more difficult to implement in practice. And not even because there is resistance, but simply because some decisions will be habitual and subconscious.
So it's fine to be all "hey you guys.... you done goofed" since that keeps working as a reminder. You're starting to see some of the benefits of that, from increased focus on FemShep for ME3, as well as some concept work that shows female protagonists.
I'll admit that I can initially take things a bit too personally and misread what others are actually saying too, which can cause me to respond in a way that may appear callous. I mean, I hear about a video that's just been released, and has some stuff in it that I think will be super exciting and whatnot, and then I come in and see that people feel offended by it and suddenly it's like "Whoa! Well.... crap... that certainly wasn't the case...." and people ask "Why?" (with varying degrees if intensity) and if I make an attempt, sometimes I'll take the exchange in a way that makes me feel as though that someone feels marginalized is blaming BioWare (and by extension me) for acting in a malevolent way. Which isn't fair, so I do apologize, because it will put me on the defensive (rightly or wrongly) simply because I'm human, and will always make mistakes, especially when attempting to actually try to do the right thing.
I can't speak for BioWare of old, but I do know that internally discussion do include things (I personally have asked questions about things such as a female protagonist focused ad campaign in franchise meetings), because I thought that FemShep's focus was a good start and think it's interesting to try to break out of the box. But sometimes, yeah, I'll see a video that details a wide variety of armor types and to me it's "Ooooo, look at all those armor types. I'm curious what the BSN sees" while not actually recognizing "They are all on male characters...." simply because I'm just not used to thinking that way.
I do think I'm getting better, but the mind is an interesting thing, and I think on some level it's still going to require a transition for me to get there. And frankly, there's just sometimes obstinate stupid human cognitive dissonance protection and my one friend (the one that actually plays the Female protagonists) points something out to me that may be biased or whatnot, being human (and therefore somewhat stupid) on some level there's just the barrier of "I've done that, and I don't think I'm a monster... therefore <resistance to criticism>." Upon reflection, depending on the topic sometimes my mind changes, and other times it doesn't. Though they are usually interesting philosophical discussions. He's a good friend like that
Anyways, the Administrative Republic of Germany won't dominate central Europe without me (EU4). But I do appreciate, brushyourteeth, that you "always felt very cared about" because as a dumb human, sometimes I misread the (valid) commentary of "You should show more women" as "I feel BioWare disrespects me!!!" which is very, very, rarely the impression I want to convey to people.
Cheers.
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