Tag: battleborn

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Tidy Up #86

More notices that wouldn’t make up individual posts, but are worth sharing wholesale here!

We’re sorry to inform our alleged readers that the previous Tidy Up Tuesday post requires to come in with basic reading comprehension. As does the entirety of our blog. Keep that in mind next time before responding.

We were sad to learn that not just Battleborn, but every other game we mentioned as a positive in our last throwback, is either dead (Gigantic), discontinued from further development (Dirty Bomb) or practically dead due to near-zero player engagement (Battleborn). 

Makes it even worse that the only successful diverse mainstream hero shooter multiplayer out there is Overwatch, which seems to have concluded that they already met their melanin and body type variety quota. 

Overwatch fans, please push Blizzard to actually do women better and to stop releasing more

white

skinny conventionally attractive female characters! Have Overwatch take responsibility for what it set out to do!

Praising media creators for doing things they should have been doing for a long time, let alone the bare minimum of it, won’t get us anywhere. There’s a difference between actual progress and finally getting to something that should be a given, like decent representation. 

There’s a reason we have both an “improvement” and “improvement?” tags.

Addressed before: 

~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

@lauraelyse submitted:

Same character class, same style of game, three different takes on it.
Stylistic choices don’t exist in a vacuum.

Dirty Bomb really doesn’t get enough credit for it’s walking the walk when it comes to egalitarian character designs and commitment to diversity.  Every mercenary has a story, a personality and gear that is suitable to them – on top of that, they’re not afraid to let things get ugly.  Have a look at how Proxy (basically their equivalent of Tracer in terms of personality) looks lately:

image

Needless to say Sparks as a white-clad medic who’s only thoughts on her profession is “Call me Sparks. I heal. I kill. Is ironic paradox. Yadda Yadda.” is a wonderful breath of fresh air in games.

Ambra from Battleborn is certainly not ideal, but as we’ve discussed before her design reeks of the Creepy Marketing Guy influence – but they at least made her a unique character and worked in no small amount of entertaining quirk.

image

Mercy… oh Mercy.

– wincenworks

Before anyone comes to say we’re taking things out of context or comparing apples to oranges, yes, all those games have their own aesthetic and we should should judge how each character looks within it.
Dirty Bomb is quite realistic, Battleborn is very cartoony and Overwatch lies somewhere in the middle.

Overwatch, out of the three, is the one which suffers from disparate stylization:

image

And with female cast already less diverse than male, boobplates, the staple of unrealistic ignorant female costume design, look jarrigly cartoony there.

And we’re still not okay with boobplate on Galilea, even though Battleborn is more heavily stylized.

Speaking of ensemble games with cartoony aesthetic, let’s not forget about Gigantic, which while not boobplate-free (on their healer character, no less), does really good with gender and age balance among their cast.

~Ozzie 

This week’s throwback: a reminder that Blizzard’s bland approach to female character design really pales in comparison to competition.

Also that Battleborn never had to be asked to deliver Black (or Black-coded, considering the sci-fi fantasy setting) playable women.

image

R.I.P. Battleborn, a potentially great game that committed a pre-emptive suicide by getting released shortly before very similar product from Blizzard while having barely a fraction of huge marketing power and none of religious fanbase devotion that Blizzard both has.

~Ozzie 

Posted on

@lauraelyse submitted:

Same character class, same style of game, three different takes on it.
Stylistic choices don’t exist in a vacuum.

Dirty Bomb really doesn’t get enough credit for it’s walking the walk when it comes to egalitarian character designs and commitment to diversity.  Every mercenary has a story, a personality and gear that is suitable to them – on top of that, they’re not afraid to let things get ugly.  Have a look at how Proxy (basically their equivalent of Tracer in terms of personality) looks lately:

image

Needless to say Sparks as a white-clad medic who’s only thoughts on her profession is “Call me Sparks. I heal. I kill. Is ironic paradox. Yadda Yadda.” is a wonderful breath of fresh air in games.

Ambra from Battleborn is certainly not ideal, but as we’ve discussed before her design reeks of the Creepy Marketing Guy influence – but they at least made her a unique character and worked in no small amount of entertaining quirk.

image

Mercy… oh Mercy.

– wincenworks

Before anyone comes to say we’re taking things out of context or comparing apples to oranges, yes, all those games have their own aesthetic and we should should judge how each character looks within it.
Dirty Bomb is quite realistic, Battleborn is very cartoony and Overwatch lies somewhere in the middle.

Overwatch, out of the three, is the one which suffers from disparate stylization:

image

And with female cast already less diverse than male, boobplates, the staple of unrealistic ignorant female costume design, look jarrigly cartoony there.

And we’re still not okay with boobplate on Galilea, even though Battleborn is more heavily stylized.

Speaking of ensemble games with cartoony aesthetic, let’s not forget about Gigantic, which while not boobplate-free (on their healer character, no less), does really good with gender and age balance among their cast.

~Ozzie 

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0rendi:

taunting-carnifex:

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[ The important difference between Ovrwatch and Battleborn. ]

 This so perfectly encapsulates approaches to character roster in both games!

Character creation assignment: Add a mecha pilot to the cast of your multi-player FPS. Who will they be?
Blizzard: How about… a young, thin, conventionally attractive girl? Something we totally don’t have a surplus of in the game! 
Gearbox: Hm… A cute and BADASS engineer penguin!

Truly, Overwatch are the masters of creativity and diversity!

~Ozzie

more on Overwatch | more on Battleborn

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Okay, so Battleborn is out of open beta and fully available, it’s probably a good time to talk Galilea (who was accidentally left out of the original post) and how her attire is both a great and very negative example.  Breakdown below:

Now I must stress, the overall design is pretty great – except for what looks like the boobplate/gorget combination that actually invites and assists people in hitting her in the heart.  And it seems for the most part the developers agree given how often she hides it from the viewer:

Why do I suspect Creepy Marketing Guy had everythingsomething to do with this happening in an otherwise awesome outfit and lineup?

– wincenworks

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Battleborn is currently available as an open beta on Playstation 4 – and while there’s still issues with some of the designs it is kind of amazing to see a game released with this kind of actual variety in female characters.  Particularly since every one of them is given the same level of personality as the guys.

Now if we can just get Ambra to get something that’s more priestess robes and less novelty cocktail dress.  She is a lot more tolerable as an exception though rather certain other games where it’s the standard and pat themselves on the back for having a couple who are different.

– wincenworks

(edit: Shayne is included here largely due to the game’s use of the female pronoun, however the concept artist encourages people to feel welcome to embrace alternative interpretations of Shayne’s gender. h/t: @makorutledgebuttavenger)