[QUOTE=Ragekipz;47279842]
I'm not saying "Don't add more diversity", I'm just saying "Don't FORCE diversity". Devs need to be confortable to deliver the game however they want, without people judging the merit of their games based on the diversity of the cast.
[/QUOTE]
What is the distinction between having a diverse cast of characters and "forcing diversity"? How is Zarya's pink hair and muscled physique forced? Could it not be possible that it's an original concept from the developer? The one you are judging? Shouldn't developers be comfortable to deliver the game they want, without people judging the merit of the games based on absolutely nothing but half-formed conspiracy theories about social justice warriors?
You folks whine about SJW's and feminists and tumblr and kotaku and laugh at people for trying to create "hugboxes" free of criticism but really you're no different. No one can complain about video game characters when they are bored of playing the same bland psychopaths like Aiden Pearce over and over and over again but by all means criticize Bioware and Gearbox for their "forced diversity". Devs need to feel comfortable delivering the game they want, unless the game they want scares me, or disagrees with my social views, in which case their creativity ends where my feelings begin.
I don't hate the character but... that hair color with that mechasuit? Mmmm girl... must be colorblind or something. Damn.
[editline]9th March 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Alrækinn;47278926]Nah man, I dig the pink/blue hair
SJW's have a childs understanding of how the world works, they're making this character different because they actually feel like it.
And if you're thinking they'd pandering to SJW's just take a moment to remember that there's a purple sniper woman who has the ability to make her ass bigger, that's literally one of her powers.
basically you're wrong is what I'm trying to say[/QUOTE]
I thought the ass-biggening was confirmed to be a model bug or something. It doesn't look like it was intentional in the gameplay trailer... it strangely expands vertically when she first puts her arm down, and then suddenly expands outward. Makes me almost certain it was unintentional.
This woman doesn't fit my expectations of what a woman should look like make her look like every other women plox
Not a fan of the neon pink, I think a darker shade or different color entirely would be much more fitting.
Not going to complain about anything else though. Muscle girls 4 lyfe etc.
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47280959]If anything, forced diversity will make your game feel forced and pandery.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Ragekipz;47279842]My point is that diversity didn't make Remember Me a good game. It's a bad game. It brings no social progress, it just tarnishes the credibility of the developers. They almost went under for that.
I'm not saying "Don't add more diversity", I'm just saying "Don't FORCE diversity". Devs need to be confortable to deliver the game however they want, without people judging the merit of their games based on the diversity of the cast.
Oh jesus fuck, the art talk. Art has very little to do with what is depicted are very much to do with how it's depicted. Video Games are a collaborative work, but the centerpiece will always be gameplay, because that's what make vidoe games different from other works of art.
And GOOD devs don't their game to be taken serious as a form of art. They want their games to be taken seriously as a medium of entertainment. They're not trying to make people rethink their view of the world, they just want them to have fun. Artsy games are boring and bland because they fail to deliver the GAME part of video game.
Besides, if you think games are art, you shouldn't try to dictate how people should make them.[/QUOTE]
Really not going to waste my time with you guys if you seriously think me critiquing games for not being diverse and asking for more atypical characters is "forcing" devs to do shit. They're free to continue to make the same fucking characters over and over and over again, while I'm free to criticize them online.
See, I have a big issue with this whole "it doesn't make the [I]game[/I] part better!" attitude that lots of gamers have. A lot of shit that goes into games, mainly graphical stuff, doesn't make the [I]game[/I] part better, yet you never see that stuff dismissed as often as character diversity.
And games [I]are[/I] art. Do you have any idea how many artists big development teams have? Without [I]artists[/I] and [I]art,[/I] games would all look like shit. Gameplay alone can't hold up a game.
And developers wouldn't be ~wasting their time~ by increasing the quality and diversity of their characters. Just like you said, they're a [I]collaborative[/I] effort; the artists would be the ones making the [I]tiny[/I] changes to the way they design characters, and the rest of the team would model, animate, and implement them same as they've always done. In the grand scheme of development, adding minority characters once in a while is fucking nothing.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;47285281]Really not going to waste my time with you guys if you seriously think me critiquing games for not being diverse and asking for more atypical characters is "forcing" devs to do shit. [/QUOTE]
Any design that is separate from the norm, that the designers, texture artists and model makers can't create without research, already existing animation rigs, already existing textures and already existing model bases that the artists already have in their collection without slight alterations is going to take up more time and more money. On top of this, the benefit of doing a out-of-the-norm character is outweighed by the potential backlash of doing a type of character incorrectly and being accused of misogyny by someone on the internet because someone, at some level, at some point of developing a very time-sensitive and cost-prohibitive project put a slider at 1.8 instead of 1.6. Consider Guybrush Threepwood from the Monkey Island series, throughout the games he gets all sorts of abuse thrown at him because the whole point of the games is that he is a worthless pirate protagonist who always gets himself into trouble. Can you imagine what would happen if Guybrush was a girl?
Game developers stick with stereotypes because it's easier to do so without putting off their audience, they're as acceptable as possible and don't cause you to have some random person on the internet cry foul and have your entire company shut down. Only larger companies and very small indie projects that appeal to a very small niche group can afford to do otherwise. Stereotypes are safe because people know they're stereotypes. Games aren't books or movies and most game developers can't afford to miss sales because of the extreme amount of time and money it takes to make one.
WOW what's next for oversjw? a MUSLIM?
I hate it when discussions turn in to ones about "diversity".
Characters made specifically to pander to the crowd screaming diversity (rather than, say, creating a good character) is just as bad as a a bad character, assuming that the end result is not a good character. Gender, race, sexuality, hair color, religion and how a characters fart smell isn't something anybody should be bothered about, as what matters is the [I]quality[/I] of a character. I am not so narrow minded that a gay black one eyed transotherplant-kin character is awarded points just because they're different from generic middle aged brown hair dude #162334. The appearance of a character doesn't matter nearly as much as how they're written and how well they perform in their part of a story. I understand and agree with the argument that simply changing a characters appearance does not matter unless it improves the game, but that is because diversity matters in a number of games; primarily RPGs.
Frankly I find altering the gender or skin color etc of a character simply for the sake of diversity to be insulting, because it then turns the characters in to binary checkboxes; with creators being more concerned with outcry because they have more males in their cast than females, or more white guys than black guys, rather than outcry because their characters are badly written.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;47285281]And games [I]are[/I] art. Do you have any idea how many artists big development teams have? Without [I]artists[/I] and [I]art,[/I] games would all look like shit. Gameplay alone can't hold up a game.[/quote]
Just a bit of nitpicking, but yes, gameplay alone can hold up a game. If the gameplay is good enough. I've seen people try and argue with you before so I'm not going to attempt the task myself, but there's an entire genre of games (roguelikes) that function off of gameplay alone, with incredibly rudimentary graphics generated using symbols and characters.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;47285281]And developers wouldn't be ~wasting their time~ by increasing the quality and diversity of their characters. Just like you said, they're a [I]collaborative[/I] effort; the artists would be the ones making the [I]tiny[/I] changes to the way they design characters, and the rest of the team would model, animate, and implement them same as they've always done. In the grand scheme of development, adding minority characters once in a while is fucking nothing.[/QUOTE]
Okay, I don't know how much you know about how much work is involved when creating characters from just the perspective of the artists, but those "tiny changes" can take dozens of hours per character, and this is just from the perspective of the artist. Unless you're doing a simple skin color swap (which is an entirely different discussion in and of itself; you can't just make a characters skin black and be done with it) then you have to create an entirely new face structure at the very least. This is because different races have different traits associated with them in facial structure alone, and an artist will have to draw this numerous times to get it right, clean it up, offer it for approval, create a finished project and then send it on to the rest of the team for further edits before it is actually rendered on model. What I described is vague as different studios and developers will have a different process, but at the very least an entire face has to be made from practically scratch and finished to a high standard.
Does this take an extraordinary amount of time? No, it does not. But it is by no means a "tiny change" if you want something resembling even a quality project that other people have to base their work off after it is approved.
As a final, sort off side note:
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;47285281]And developers wouldn't be ~wasting their time~ by increasing the quality and diversity of their characters.[/quote]
I don't see anybody actually arguing that increasing the quality of characters would be wasting time, people seem to disagree that [I]diversity alone[/I] improves quality. Your wording makes it sound as though simply making a few characters black, a few more women and some peg-legged pirates actually affects the quality of a product. It does not, and actually tallying up the existence of them in such a way is, in many ways, simply fetishizing and objectifying them.
Nobody wants token black guys to start coming out of the wood work just for the sake of diversity. What people want is more good characters. Whether they are racially, sexually or religiously diverse should not matter. Does this mean I don't want to see diversity? No, of course it doesn't. What it does mean is that you should not be fetishizing diversity or rating characters based off of their appearance or beliefs. As it stands, you sound like you'd rank a black character above a white character simply because one was black and the other was white. Again, refer to the part about objectifying and fetishizing.
Having said all that, I will definitely agree on a point you've made earlier in the thread in regards to Remember Me, and that is developers shouldn't have to worry about backlash from their peers or buyers simply because they've created a black character, or an asian character or etc etc etc. You need to keep in mind that statistically speaking the incredibly generic concept of a middle aged white guy with dark hair came to be so overused simply because it was the safest option to go with when marketing products. There would have definitely been the odd racist fuckhole in a higher up position in the rare studio, and hopefully those kinds of people are growing smaller and smaller in numbers rapidly because it's such a ancient view to have on the world, but the reason most characters were white middle aged dudes with dark hair was because it was what the largest number of people would buy in to, not because artists weren't able to draw diverse people or because modelers were too lazy to paste on a new face and slightly alter a body model.
The root of that issue is the [I]customer[/I] and marketing statistics. Thankfully however, the market has been changing over the last few years and characters have been becoming more and more diverse without simply being token different/non white dudes. It will also continue to do this, as has been evident by anybody that has kept in touch with games over the last few years beyond buying in to solely casual things or the odd non triple A FPS game.
[QUOTE=DeeCeeTeeBee;47285734]The post right above this one[/QUOTE]
Yea, and I think what I was saying could've been worded better, but it's basically this. A lot of work goes into making characters for these games, even slight changes involve hours and hours of work. A lot of people don't seem to understand just how much game development costs.
Wow, way to check those boxes Blizz! What's next, some disabled black person who comes from some overwhelmingly white country like Scotland or something??
[QUOTE=Higginz511;47284429]Zarya has pink hair because Zarya is Tamara Bakhlycheva, a Blizzard employee.
[img]https://31.media.tumblr.com/3fba2fc396ab7137454bb362f9e587f7/tumblr_inline_nkvebxT3VI1sqom29.jpg[/img][/QUOTE]
I find it funny but awesome that she's a Blizzard employee yet has a Aperture Laboratories tank top :v:
so what's the problem here, in this thread
i do not get it
[editline]9th March 2015[/editline]
it is a big russian lady ? big russian ladies have been used in many mediums of fiction as well as real life
the only weird thing is pink hair but the character is base off someone with pink hair
?
I'm just not a fan of the pink, I feel it clashes too much
[QUOTE=CheeseMan;47286272]so what's the problem here, in this thread
i do not get it
[editline]9th March 2015[/editline]
it is a big russian lady ? big russian ladies have been used in many mediums of fiction as well as real life
the only weird thing is pink hair but the character is base off someone with pink hair
?[/QUOTE]As well as real life? I'd like to see some big Russian ladies then.
[QUOTE=Banned?;47278550]I don't believe this for a second. Making a character "outside the norm" takes more time and effort [/QUOTE]
Look at me.
Just look
I'll call this character Shale. Shale is a white young man in his early 20s who loves tall blondes and kicking ass in World of Warcraft PVP Arena.
This character here? Amiga - a transexual girl who likes going to D&D session with her friends on weekends and enjoys skiing.
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;47287335]Look at me.
Just look
I'll call this character Shale. Shale is a white young man in his early 20s who loves tall blondes and kicking ass in World of Warcraft PVP Arena.
This character here? Amiga - a transexual girl who likes going to D&D session with her friends on weekends and enjoys skiing.[/QUOTE]
Ok now go sketch up a concept that shows that she is trans, likes DnD and skiing but don't make it too obvious or the entire focus of the character.
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47287360]Ok now go sketch up a concept that shows that she is trans, likes DnD and skiing but don't make it too obvious or the entire focus of the character.[/QUOTE]
That'll be $3000
Fan fact: She was originally a male in Titan, but running through five art teams over a year in the effort to change the character to female was too much and they had to cancel the game. Making the hair pink alone took four months, and resulted to two artists committing suicide under the strain.
[QUOTE=MegaJohnny;47276185]Even if you think it looks like a man with tits, what's the problem with androgynous characters?[/QUOTE]
People don't like answering these statements because they can get slippery real quick.
But its probably because some people may consider them ugly, best to my understanding of the term androgynous it can also apply for men. I don't believe anyone wants to play a character that they find ugly or disfigured, the pink hair on Zarya with the hairstyle I would guess threw a lot of people off upon what they expected. This is evidenced by the color pallet swap ,posted above you, being highly liked with little negative feedback.
I think she looks fine now the initial shock of the hairstyle is gone, im sure others think the same
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47287360]Ok now go sketch up a concept that shows that she is trans, likes DnD and skiing but don't make it too obvious or the entire focus of the character.[/QUOTE]
[t]http://s10.postimg.org/q3nvto7uh/Untitled.png[/t]
bite me
Honestly I don't see how threads like these that have nothing to do with transgender always ends up being about them. Is it because she has muscles?
[QUOTE=Sally;47289689]
Honestly I don't see how threads like these that have nothing to do with transgender always ends up being about them. Is it because she has muscles?[/QUOTE]
Probably. Because we all know women can't be muscular...
[QUOTE=Sally;47289689]
[t]http://s10.postimg.org/q3nvto7uh/Untitled.png[/t]
bite me[/QUOTE]
Don't worry, you can be the community manager of an upcoming Mega Man spinoff I'm making :).
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47291974]Probably. Because we all know women can't be muscular...[/QUOTE]
dude you are beiing a little disingenuous here, not just to the other posters but to yourself
yes, lacking testosterone does make it immensely harder to build muscle than it is for dudes
people are biologically coded to think super-muscular women look weird. they do look weird. there's nothing wrong with saying this. it's not a flaw in the character necessarily, it just makes it hard to take her seriously because you know they're doing it to overcompensate for women being otherwise portrayed as weak in video games.
you know how that one female marine character in 'Aliens' makes you want to turn the television off because she's so mindbendingly over-macho, and it grates upon you how much of an overcompensation this is? it's the same thing in milder form with this character.
aside from all this, she is basically a carbon copy of a tf2 character who's been ran through the overwatch filter of bland futuristic scifi shit and pandering (like most of the overwatch cast)
[quote][img]http://a.pomf.se/kvnfag.png[/img][/quote]
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