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Brass_Buckles wrote...
I think more variety in general would be welcome. Not just for female characters, but also males. Male characters tend to fall in line with the idea of the "male power fantasy"--huge, burly muscles. To all the guys who think the males in DA are eye candy for the ladies: Most women prefer a slimmer, more lithe build. Not all--we ladies are not a hivemind who agree on everything. But that's probably why, while some women thought Sten was hot and some even thought Garrus was sexy (not I, although I played his romance repeatedly because I liked the character), most of us would lean more toward Fenris or Alistair or Anders types. Muscular, but not body builders. Guys seem to prefer the body builder look for their characters. Again, not all guys. Men aren't a hivemind, either.
There are a lot more of us lady gamers than some guys want to admit. Unfortunately, if you're in a multiplayer game as a woman, you can get some serious harassment from just speaking on voice chat. I've heard horror stories especially about console games; I've experienced some downtalking and the like on PC on ME3 multiplayer myself. I was even mistaken for a child once (Really, dude? You never heard a woman speak before?). And so, most women won't speak up on multiplayer, and a lot won't admit to being female even in text. It's an open invitation for harassment, in most gaming circles. Don't believe me? Go to any gaming site, and read the comments in any given section relating to women or female characters in gaming. Anyone who admits to being a woman and agrees that women need more presence in games/need to have less skimpily dressed characters/etc. will be attacked. Only if she likes having a lingerie-decked character (which is totally okay if it's her CHOICE and she's got other options!) with oversized breasts, will she not be attacked.
I don't think "deal with it or get out" should be the attitude. And honestly, to those guys, why don't you want more women gaming? I'd think you'd want more women around with something in common with you! So why don't you want the game characters to be less offputting to female players? Sure, some of us don't mind the lingerie look. There was a time when I didn't--because *it was all there was*. Now that I have choices, I tend to avoid any game that puts the lady characters in lingerie and I detest developers who think it's okay to give no choice in the matter, especially in online games where women have an increasing presence--most women prefer to play female characters. I also generally avoid games that don't include women at all. I play male characters now and then and I don't mind characters where the only protagonist is a guy, but by and large, I'd prefer to be female.
Developers can argue until they're blue in the face that "adding women/female characters costs more." You know what? It does. But this is also basically stating a position of, "Males are default. Females are an afterthought and just cost more money to add." Guys out there--would you like it if there were a really awesome game coming out, and it only had women? And then the developers said it would cost too much to add men? Before you say "Oh sure I'd love to stare at their 'assets,'" let's also add the condition that the women are so covered-up they are shapeless. Or their body shape is not particularly feminine (they are burly with no breasts, or they are super-skinny with no real shape, or they are outright rotund/obese). And yet, despite all of these varieties of women in the game there are no men, because "it would cost too much." That's what we women deal with all the time, in reverse. And when you consider the variety of aliens in Mass Effect, also remember that until the very last game we never even saw a female turian or krogan or salarian. We still haven't seen a female drell. For that matter, I have yet to see a female kossith qunari in a Bioware game (I expect that to change in DAI). So Bioware isn't immune. Male shouldn't be the default; females should be developed alongside the males and we shouldn't have been left hanging as to what they look like.
I'm not speaking out of anger here. In the real world, a room of 100 people off the street would contain about 51 women, and they'd probably all look different. So while I can understand if every NPC has the same default body type for their race, it'd be nice if the player and/or the party or squad members got a bit more variety, rather than just saying "guys deserve something sexy to look at." Sexy is okay. Sexy is fine. Women like sexy dudes too, and we often like to play sexy characters ourselves because most people, male and female, like to put themselves in the shoes of that hot avatar they made to play on their screen. But most of us ladies don't want to play lingerie models (seriously, people, a character doesn't have to be nearly-naked to be sexy--sexy clothing is fine, but sexy armor is not, and I don't want my character running around in her skimpiest set of underwear--edited to add: underwear is not the same as clothing so don't say by saying "no underwear as outfit" I'm saying "no sexy clothing"--a little cleavage or midriff or tight pants/skirt is not the same thing as wandering around in a thong or bondage gear--and even then there's a limit on HOW sexy sexy clothing can be, before it basically becomes lingerie, or otherwise unreasonable to run around in public wearing, too.), and some of us wouldn't mind being more curvy, or skinny and scrawny, etc. depending what kind of playthrough we are going for. A few body type options would not go amiss, even if they only encompassed weight. There is not just one singular sexy body type.
I get it if it's too much cost to develop different bodies for absolutely everyone, or too much time, money, and effort to develop a system to make your player character have a morphable mesh so he/she can be fat, slim, busty, etc. But like the OP, I'd expect a bit different standard shape for female elves, qunari, and dwarves as opposed to human, and older people as opposed to younger; the differences in practice weren't all that big compared to humans (or to males of most of those groups). And again, male shouldn't be default. Even with the qunari warriors, given how their society is set up, I'd have expected at least a few women in their camp to attend to "women's duties" as viewed by the qunari. Or even a few female qunari mages.
Because media bombards us with mostly-male groups in TV, movies, and yes, games, we tend to think "enough" or even "one quarter of enough" women (Edited: enough being about 50%) are too many. Another edit: It makes sense to limit female presence in some settings--i.e. modern setting warfare games, because while women do exist in the military, there are far more men. Bioware's pretty good at putting quite a few female background NPCs (and female party NPCs) in the games, but again, they aren't immune. Money, time, and development costs should never be used for excuses to exclude an entire gender--especially in cases like in ME1's codex, where we are told turians are an egalitarian society. And then for most of 3 games we proceed to never see a female turian, even though in an egalitarian society with about 50% females, there should have been just as many turian ladies wandering around/being mercenaries/etc. as turian gentlemen. If you want more women to buy your games and play them, you're going to have to treat women as people, and not as an afterthought or a prerequisite to get male players hot and bothered. Bioware's pretty good at this most of the time, though there have been lapses. Sexiness in any given character should be incidental to character--and in some cases, the character's personality should maybe be the biggest reason why people think he or she is sexy, even if the character also has a generically sexy body type. Lingerie or loincloths shouldn't be a requirement to make a character attractive; we should also still be able to find a character whose body type is not the "perfect ideal" pushed at us by media, attractive--it doesn't even have to vary much from that ideal. And we also don't need a character's behind flashed at us all the time to remind us how sexy he/she is.
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