Tag: Diablo 3

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Simplifying the Diablo Ladies, Part 2 

Demon Hunter from Diablo 3 was… a challenge, to say the least. Mainly because I couldn’t decide where to even start with that ridiculousness!
Not only is she super sexualized via the enforced “feminine” silhouette of skin-tight armor, boobplate and giant thigh gap, including a cameltoe… she’s also the most overdesigned thing I ever tried my Photoshop skill on. 

Apparently to work as an artist at Blizzard, you have to willfully forget the most basic rule any design school worth its salt teaches: Less is more. 
For concept art of what would ultimately be a small character model in-game, all those pieces have SO. MUCH. NEEDLESS. DETAIL! Teeny tiny little shapes of distracting ornamentation, basically nothing to rest your eye upon. 

I feel really sorry for anyone who ever attempted cosplaying this shitshow – so much work added into recreating all those arbitrary seams, textures and spikes, sheesh. 

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I was so busy simplifying the shape language that I overlooked some stuff I do pretty routinely, like getting rid of the cleavage in the first and second levels, and modifying the hourglass silhouette (I did add some bulk in higher levels, just not much). 

Preparation for posting this redesign is why I threw back this post lately (also, you know, it’s just a good post to resurface) – because those level ups convey neither a better set of armor, nor more protective layers, except for pauldrons. The shape of her boobs and thin waist remain a constant, no matter how much more “armored up” she’s supposed to be.

Like with Ashe before, I decided that my version is a trans lady, with a noticeable crotch bulge

in the place of the creepy thigh gap. Though I discarded my initial gag related to its size, as it was just in poor taste and not my joke to make. 

Overall, this thing took two or three weeks to finish (last level seemed unsalvagable at first), but hopefully I managed to put some actual design thought into this hot mess.

~Ozzie

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Simplifying the Diablo Ladies, Part 1

We’ve talked about how Diablo makes such an effort to make very disappointing characters. So, it was finally time to take on some of those designs and try to make them less overdone and less….

Anyway, I went for a concept art of the Wizard from Diablo 3. I stayed in the color scheme because I was more distracted by…. everything else that was happening. All the tiny details that only highlighted how little she was wearing… it had to go. I ended up giving her a simple tunic and pants, in order to have some grounded large shapes in the middle of all the small ones. I do like the shoes (below the knee, anyway) and the jacket, so I left them alone.

I did remove some weird-looking accessories, like the not-glove and the awful crown sharps, and I changed her face as I always do.

Definitely a simpler redesign, but it was still not easy to work around all the things that I wanted to keep in the design. I probably should have made her tunic a different color, but it’s still way easier to look at than the original. Hope y’all enjoy!

-Icy

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Can you believe we never bingo’ed the Final Form of the wizard from Diablo 3? Well, fret no more! Where do I even start; this looks like a chafing apocalypse, honestly. Not only is she going to freeze in the icy locations, she’s going to get bitten by some zombie and contract an infection. And that’s if the zombies are kind and don’t bite her right on the femoral artery, which is nicely framed for those zombies that crawl on the ground.

But who needs protection when you have a vaguely skull-like cod piece thing?

-Icy 

Imagine all the armor she could wear if she just used the metal from her ridonculous headpiece for protecting her vital organs! 

~Ozzie 

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karniz replied to your post “have you seen the armor for characters on Diablo III, and if so, what’s your opinion on them?

Why do you guys just look at concept/promo art and not actual in-game armors? The actual armor within DIII is very well designed and not as sexualized as the samples you show. I feel it’s a disservice to your viewers that you don’t do more research..

Oh wow, you’re telling me that the promotional material Blizzard creates to market Diablo 3 are completely misleading and non-representative of the game… and not only has nobody mentioned this before but somehow it’s my fault?

Wow, I better look into that right away. Thankfully there’s always YouTube to provide us with Let’s Play videos so I can take screenshots that look slightly off since the live footage is always in motion and was never intended for still frames!

I bet the the in game models look completely different.  I bet they’re huge and so detailed that you’d be a fool to look at anything but what the actual in game play looks like.  It’d be ridiculous to propose that Diablo figures are displayed, by default, so tiny that you can’t make out any real detail beyond basic colours and silhouette right!?

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Oh… well never mind! The first thing you do when you start one of these games is create a character.  Obviously the Barbarian models in character creation will be completely different to those used in promotion and the ones that someone made gifs (from gameplay) of!

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Oh wow… what a co-incidence!  Oh well, there’s always the Demon Hunter right?  It’d be ridiculous to think that they’d use that stupid stance where she poses one leg in front of the other, sacrificing her balance to flaunt her hips! Or have her arms posed to both look like a she’s trying to be an action movie star and draw attention to her boobs.  That’d never…

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Wait a minute… does this game actually have all the problems previous suggested? Is it possible I just use promotional art and cleaned up gifs because they are easier to read and communicates clearer?

Is it possible that this kind of rampant double standard and objectification of women is so common in gaming that many people just assume it’s justified and normal?  And that it’s long overdue people called it out and didn’t just forgive games because there were a few good examples in it if you looked?  Or even games where it’s mostly good with some outrageously bad items used in marketing?

Outrageous! Someone should start a blog about this kind of thing… they could even like, make some sort of checkbox game to help illustrate the point!

– wincenworks

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have you seen the armor for characters on Diablo III, and if so, what’s your opinion on them? i think they’re actually very practical compared to other games and if a piece of armor’s revealing on a woman it’s likely to also be revealing on its male equivalent :)

I don’t think I would ever describe any outfit from Diablo III as “practical”.  Which is okay in itself, fantasy that conforms strictly to reality isn’t much of a fantasy.

That said, I feel there is only one outfit for a character in Diablo III that deserves celebrating – the Crusader.  And I suspect she only got her outfit because of the moral implications of her occupation:

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All the others may be equally revealing, but are designed with very different stories and themes to them.  For example, as is appropriate to our blog, Barbarians.

First there’s the male barbarian. A massively muscular individual on a huge skeletal frame – his heart exposed due to his apparent unwillingness to match a breastplate with his oversized pauldrons and horned belt.

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Female barbarian, equally exposed per se but her frame is less bulky, her pauldrons less over done, she has no big horns before her and her outfit is structured to ensure nothing obscures the silhouette of her boobs:

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And of course, there’s the desktop wallpaper that’s seems to be a homage to Red Sonja in wardrobe, hair and general presentation.

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A lack of armor or even clothing is not inherently a bad thing.  It is not by accident that a totally nude warrior will not score Bingo, but a suit of battle lingerie will.  Depending on your circumstances, it may even be safer and healthier to disrobe before battle.

Outfits should not be measured by some sort of skin quota – there are some amazingly terrible outfits that cover a lot of skin.  Rather it has to do with the purpose and priorities behind the designs, no amount of tweaking a male version’s armor or arbitrary coverage rules is ever going to disguise when a design prioritized being sexy over being badass.  Rather it tends to just make things even more absurd:

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All of this is sadly pretty standard for fantasy and video games in general due to the strange belief that (regardless of what other aspects they have) at least the highly visible, if not all, female characters must present aspects like cleavage in order to be successful.

Which is really ridiculous when you remember that some of them (coughUbisoftcough) really seem irrationally adverse to including playable female characters in the first place.

– wincenworks