Tag: Blizzard

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This week on Blizzard Does Women Better, Watch as they introduce a new hero to their free MOBA Heroes of the Storm via sexy demon skins for the ladies! How Original™!

The three lucky ladies are Jaina, Zagara and Sonya (from left to right):

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(Though, don’t be fooled by that awesome concept art of Sonya, her in-game model is of smaller frame and has no defined muscles.)

So let’s take these in order, shall we?

Jaina is an ice wizard (basically) whose regular outfit just looks really stupid, besides not making any sense. Her demon skin replaces her 70s pants with booty shorts, and while she does gain “armor,” it’s in the laziest possible way. [x]

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Her design brings to mind the Draenor, rather than demons. It’s so generic, I don’t even have anything to say… And what’s with the colors?

As for Zagara, you may notice that she is not even a person. She’s the “Broodmother of the Swarm,” an “ant queen” type of creature; she doesn’t even have a face, despite that strange exoskeleton boobplate. The maw in the front of her bug abdomen spews various things in combat. So of course her demon skin makes her Hot Bug Lady. [x]

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I mean, we know she has weird bug arms and huge bubbling pustules on her insect-like abdomen, but look at those titties! This is the second Zagara skin that gives her a sexy face, but why include her in this particular promotion at all, for the release of a lich character from WoW? Do they think their zerg-birthing monster needs more sexy lady skins to even out the fact that she’s a bug? ಠ_ಠ

Finally, we have Sonya, the lady barbarian from Diablo III. Her demon skin still reveals about as much as her regular, although for some reason she has platform shoes now? This is called the Death Knight. Much spooky. [x]

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Also, the design screams “we didn’t know how to make her demonic.” There is a skull on every piece of armor she’s wearing, and her weapons! This is even more baffling when you realize that this skin came out concurrently with the Deathbringer skin: 

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It’s the exact same skin (save for the weapons), except no spooky scary helmet, and actual padding under her armor… so why?? Why did they take the padding away from the Death Knight skin? I thought they were just doing the typical fantasy barbarian thing, where they sort of wear kind-of clothes, but apparently not!

Doing women better, though.

-Icy

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

privatesuintor:

banshees:

ana amari’s tea time emote

Ohmygoshohmigoshohmigosh!!!!!

A female character well over 50 that is NOT SEXUALISED AND STILL BEATS ASS!

I’m excited ^^

Oye, @bikiniarmorbattledamage, a positive example among the widowmakers and tracers in that game ^^

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It’s very exciting to see Blizzard has started work on making the game that they said they wanted to make shortly after announcing Overwatch!

Ana Amari certainly looks amazing and greatly boosts representation for badass mothers and older women of color though I notice something.

Of her eleven skins: Five show Ana as her glorious mature-aged self, four show her with her face completely covered and two show her as young.  In fact there are zero Legendary skins where you can see Ana’s beautiful older face.

And the skins with her as a young woman don’t really do anything surprising with her, it’s not like Genji’s showing him as pre-cybernetic, it’s just… well:

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So while it’s fantastic that Blizzard has started to realize that women in their sixties are dramatically under represented in action games – it’s kind of a shame that they couldn’t commit to it the whole way.

– wincenworks

Ana is a very welcome addition to Overwatch’s cast (heavens know we’re in a desperate need for older women in media, especially games), though I can’t help but notice how, not unlike Zayra, she’s a very safe approach to diversity. While being 60, she’s at the “conventionally attractive lady with grey hair and a couple facial lines” side of old person design.

Also, the fact that Ana’s clothes look very realistic for a sniper make Widowmaker’s hypersexualization stand out even more. With changes Blizzard made so far, they’ve proven a couple of times how they can edit and add things to the game as they please, but are afraid to change all that much

~Ozzie

So, just over a year ago we reached perhaps peak hopefulness with Blizzard and their “doing women characters better” game: Overwatch

Now the Summer Games special has come around again and let’s see what they’ve learned about their audience and what they want to see, and there’s a lot of potential, I mean in the new skins along, three empowered men (1, 2, 3):

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Or is it with the new skin for the brown woman who got a new skin, Sombra (x):

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Of course not, their promo strategy’s opening * is peak predictability:

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Yes, apparently Widowmaker needed a shirt with no chest so she could show off her combat bikini and had to also have a garter:

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It makes me suspicious that I know who may have overseen the design…

Meanwhile Ana has two novelty skins at this point… exactly zero of them make it clear that she is an older woman.

– wincenworks

* Yes I am aware they followed with promoting Junkrat’s skin, in the most boring and unempowering way humanly possible.

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Blood Elves vs. Night Elves… AND BOTH SUCK!

@thenightmarerider submitted: 

Found this on Facebook, and as far as I can tell it’s official art. May as well be, because knowing the history of WoW’s design of female armour, this just fits the bill. Multiple bingos as far as I understand it, simply because OH LIGHT WHY?! And of course, you’d never see a male character caught dead in this stuff, so pretty evident in a bizzare elven fetishisation. 

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But guuuys, Blizzard totally tries to do women better now! 

Because Overwatch does some baby steps in that direction, we should definitely ignore how art like the one above (originally promoting Burning Crusade ten years ago), or this or  this or this still gets officially used to promote World of Warcraft. 

~Ozzie

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So, as exciting as it is that from time to time, Blizzard makes progress in their newest product: Overwatch – I am still more than a little bit bothered that this is the image of a “hunter” that they put forward on their World of Warcraft site.

The game has been updated that much that people are now trying to run bootleg “original build” servers, and they’ve never gotten some better character art for this class than this.

– wincenworks

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battleteacake:

from-titan:

i’ve been meaning to do this post for YEARS and i finally managed to dig out all these sketches and put them together.

the sexual dimorphism in WoW has always been sad especially considering blizz had such good ideas at the start but the furious fan feedback always made them redesign these fascinating and monstrous females of the races into much more humanlike. i also remember the uproar of thin male blood elves and the homophobic and sexist slurs that followed which made them beef up the male model considerably.

i tried my best to give a go at redesigning them to make their body types, postures and facial features more aligned.

dwarf, undead, goblin and gnome models on the other hand are great, 5/5.

bonus, give male belves thongs too:

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

Suspicious dimorphism, probably moreso than double standard in costume design, remains one of big factors in furthering notion that female characters are inherently completely different from the male ones… but not from each other, even among different species: 

And of course then fans pretend that’s just how things are, as if those weren’t fictional worlds with arbitrary rules.

We don’t know what’s happening at Blizzard, but it’s always sad to see them actively try to do female characters better, but then deciding to go back. Should whiny dudebro fans or the Creepy Marketing Guy be blamed, we’ll probably never learn. Nevertheless it’s a shame that it happens.

~Ozzie

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Orisa

Many excited readers informed us of the new Overwatch tank character, Orisa, as well as her child prodigy creator, Efi.

One thing we can say from the start is that Orisa is easily the first female-identified character in the game to whom “can I fap to her?” obviously wasn’t a design priority. So there’s no robo-ass or boobs to show and sexualize.
That said, she’s a modified battle robot, so unless Blizzard lowered their standards to super sleazy, it was a given she wouldn’t have arbitrary secondary sex characteristics. 

That said, Omnics having gender in the first place is pretty complicated issue, storytelling-wise, as some are considered non-gendered machines (Bastion) and other are mechanical people (Zenyatta), which makes it akin to “Why does Goofy wear pants, but Pluto doesn’t?” sort of philosophical problem. 
Though Orisa’s story, given that Efi converted her from one kind of robot into another, seems to explain her being female quite well. 

It’s also nice to see how since the open beta, number of female tanks in the game rose from 0 to 3 out of 6, making it the first currently the only gender-balanced class in Overwatch. 

Efi herself being an African girl is good in terms of diversifying cast, though we’re still yet to see a black female character who is also playable. 

~Ozzie

If we are to engage in the oddity of gendered robots it’s good that the explanation be something outside of gender roles or excuses for literal objectification of women.

It’s really good to see Blizzard actually applying some of the principles they’ve been talking about at the GDC.

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It would however, be even better if they remembered that while it’s important to have diversity in your secondary cast, it’s even more important to have it in your primary lineup.  That and robots are not (yet) an audience for your games.

– wincenworks 

more Overwatch on BABD | more Blizzard on BABD

edit: Thanks to @randomentalist for pointing out that support class used to be gender-balanced after introduction of Lúcio, but before Ana.

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ItsSupercar: So far, Blizzard has taken kind of a Schrondinger's approach with Mei's body type, hesitating to confirm one interpretation over another when ti comes to her weight. I guess this is where

So, while it’s good that Blizzard recognized the Chinese New Year  in Overwatch and game Mei a neat costume… it’s really disappointing that they seemed to feel the need to give it a pull in waist… to the extent they managed to glitch it.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be quite a few people in the community who are skeptical of the idea that this @eschergirls worthy design is actually a bug.

– wincenworks