@i-dont-have-a-witty-username submitted:
Have you heard of Darkest Dungeon? It’s a game that got funded by kickstarter and it’s aviable on steam!
It plays in the late middle ages and it’s about “fixing” the mistakes that your ancestor made after fooling around with eldritch knowledge. It’s pretty hard, your heros are basically a bunch of dirty jerks with lots of bad quirks and they go insane as often as they die in the dungeons (And they don’t get up once they’re dead).
The game is dark, but it has a pretty neat art style and cool mechanics! You have 14 classes and big chunk of them are female. The classes above this text are all the female classes in the game (Yes, even the plague doctor) and they wear pretty neat armors! You can change their skin and armor color at any time but there are also classes who are POC by default (Like the arbalest).
I think that’s pretty cool because many people say that there should be no POC in Fantasy games because… People of color haven’t been invited yet? Most Fantasy games play in a Europe-like setting (This game too, BTW)? Anyway, I just thought that this character design was worth sharing and I just wanted to hear what you guys think!
I have complicated (yet mostly positive) feelings about Darkest Dungeons, particularly whenever I consider posting about it on a blog devoted to female armor. It’s currently in Early Access, but official release is on the 19th so I guess it’s safe to comment on it.
With the exception of their insistence on all female adventurer breastplates have ridiculously high-profile boobplate they do pretty well, and the female adventurers without breastplates are excellently presented From what I’ve played, there isn’t really any issues associated with gender beyond some of forms of insanity using the standard gendered terms.
But it does have other issues pop up here and there, such as one of the early enemies you meet being Cultists. And well, they look like this:
So it does dip into the “evil is sexy” trope as well… which is kind of odd given the whole theme of the game is that evil is so terrible it will drive you mad.
Neither of these elements is bad enough I’d refer to it as a particularly negative example, but both of them seem to be included completely arbitrarily and seem at odds with the rest of the game.
– wincenworks
Dragon Age: Magekiller #1 Preview: Magic is a cheat
Dragon Age: Magekiller #1 Preview: Magic is a cheat
(Link above has blood and gore)
@ilikelookingatnakedmen submitted:
I’m so excited for this comic, but… boob window?????
Caveats: Boob window character is a mage, hot shirtless man also provided.
While I don’t work there or really know anyone who does, I sometimes feel like I can almost hear the discussions that must go on at Bioware with demands of Creepy Marketing Guy and then everyone else working out how to compensate for them.
In Dragon Age: Inquisition it seemed to be that they had to keep Morrigan’s original outfit (even though the concept art shows they had some amazing ideas) but we got wonderful takedowns on bikini armor and dashingly handsome male romance options.
In Magekiller it seems we’ll have to have booby evil mages:
And handsome male protagonist who walks around with his shirt off:
Since they have ditched the battle bikinis, I hope that one day soon we will see the day when Thedas’ morally questionable female mages get a less cliched outfits.
– wincenworks
Dragon Age: Magekiller #1 Preview: Magic is a cheat
Dragon Age: Magekiller #1 Preview: Magic is a cheat
(Link above has blood and gore)
@ilikelookingatnakedmen submitted:
I’m so excited for this comic, but… boob window?????
Caveats: Boob window character is a mage, hot shirtless man also provided.
While I don’t work there or really know anyone who does, I sometimes feel like I can almost hear the discussions that must go on at Bioware with demands of Creepy Marketing Guy and then everyone else working out how to compensate for them.
In Dragon Age: Inquisition it seemed to be that they had to keep Morrigan’s original outfit (even though the concept art shows they had some amazing ideas) but we got wonderful takedowns on bikini armor and dashingly handsome male romance options.
In Magekiller it seems we’ll have to have booby evil mages:
And handsome male protagonist who walks around with his shirt off:
Since they have ditched the battle bikinis, I hope that one day soon we will see the day when Thedas’ morally questionable female mages get a less cliched outfits.
– wincenworks
So, according to the dA page – the blue skinned lady is a “hybrid”. Because using the most generic stock characters wasn’t bad enough, they also had to try to rip of Underworld while making her look exactly nothing like either.
– wincenworks
Warmachine – Necrotechs
@recklessprudence submitted:
So, I was reading your past Warmachine commentary, and got to the part where you said that ‘Skarre comes from an army where the female commanders are always sexy ladies – and the male characters… significantly less attractive’, and I thought “Surely not! I read Master Necrotech Mortenebra’s lore and remember her disdain for the flesh she escaped by becoming the
undead horrormasterpiece of engineering and magic she is now, and I vaguely remember the model, she’s just an only-partially humanoid robot with her soul animating it, there’s no reason for her to be like that”…and then I looked up her model.
Yes, that is boobplate. On a spider-robot-lady who barely has a face. Why was that the crucial aspect one of the greatest masters of combining Necromancy and Engineering the world has ever seen focused on?
Especially when a focus on her sex appeal was nothing that was in the lore, and in fact her disdain for the weakness of flesh (not anything in particular, just the fact that bodies need food and water and fairly narrow climate tolerances and time to heal and whatnot – the whole organic thing)
Hell, even her subordinate necrotechs are undead for the most part, grotesque monstrosities of necromantic technology that look like this:
PP, I love your game, but… really?
…On the plus side, she has no ribcage under that to be broken, like a normal undead, just more mechanisms of her robot body? But then, it’s still going to guide both ranged fire and melee strikes into a spot, repeatedly. And I don’t care what you’ve built your new body out of, or how thick the forcefield generated by your will married to sorcerous technology surrounding your body is, you don’t make your third century by making things easier for your many enemies!
I personally have this theory (that I cling to out of desperate fear of the alternatives) that armies like Cryx end up with sexy undead because the creators have trapped themselves into using boobs, wasp waists and thongs as their signals that a model is female. Particularly if they’re “evil”.
Once you’ve set that convention, or simply decided to adhere to it in order to conform with market expectations – you paint yourself into a corner with the designs. Doing the undead horror who’s more machine than flesh as a different attracts attention to the convention and breaks the “language” of their visuals and opens it up to criticism.
Sticking with the conventions, however limiting and silly that ends up being, invites people to respond to anything ridiculous as “it’s just fantasy”. That of course, only holds up so long as lots of people stick to the same conventions – so they all find themselves trapped in an unspoken agreement.
– wincenworks
Warmachine – Necrotechs
@recklessprudence submitted:
So, I was reading your past Warmachine commentary, and got to the part where you said that ‘Skarre comes from an army where the female commanders are always sexy ladies – and the male characters… significantly less attractive’, and I thought “Surely not! I read Master Necrotech Mortenebra’s lore and remember her disdain for the flesh she escaped by becoming the
undead horrormasterpiece of engineering and magic she is now, and I vaguely remember the model, she’s just an only-partially humanoid robot with her soul animating it, there’s no reason for her to be like that”…and then I looked up her model.
Yes, that is boobplate. On a spider-robot-lady who barely has a face. Why was that the crucial aspect one of the greatest masters of combining Necromancy and Engineering the world has ever seen focused on?
Especially when a focus on her sex appeal was nothing that was in the lore, and in fact her disdain for the weakness of flesh (not anything in particular, just the fact that bodies need food and water and fairly narrow climate tolerances and time to heal and whatnot – the whole organic thing)
Hell, even her subordinate necrotechs are undead for the most part, grotesque monstrosities of necromantic technology that look like this:
PP, I love your game, but… really?
…On the plus side, she has no ribcage under that to be broken, like a normal undead, just more mechanisms of her robot body? But then, it’s still going to guide both ranged fire and melee strikes into a spot, repeatedly. And I don’t care what you’ve built your new body out of, or how thick the forcefield generated by your will married to sorcerous technology surrounding your body is, you don’t make your third century by making things easier for your many enemies!
I personally have this theory (that I cling to out of desperate fear of the alternatives) that armies like Cryx end up with sexy undead because the creators have trapped themselves into using boobs, wasp waists and thongs as their signals that a model is female. Particularly if they’re “evil”.
Once you’ve set that convention, or simply decided to adhere to it in order to conform with market expectations – you paint yourself into a corner with the designs. Doing the undead horror who’s more machine than flesh as a different attracts attention to the convention and breaks the “language” of their visuals and opens it up to criticism.
Sticking with the conventions, however limiting and silly that ends up being, invites people to respond to anything ridiculous as “it’s just fantasy”. That of course, only holds up so long as lots of people stick to the same conventions – so they all find themselves trapped in an unspoken agreement.
– wincenworks