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

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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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 

ms-silver submitted:

*While commonly referred to as male, It has been stated by Motiga that Tyto’s actual gender is to remain unknown.

**There’s actually another male character, but he’s currently getting a design overhaul, and as such I felt there was no need to include him.

Now that part of the NDA is lifted, I can feel comfortable showing the male/female character lineup for the new currently in beta MOBA, Gigantic.

While yes, the males do seem to have more of the monstrous selection, and yes, some of the females don’t have the best of attire into battle, I have to note that really I don’t get the “Look at these SeXy GiRlS!” feeling that I do from a lot of other games. Not to mention that several of the male characters also don’t necessarily have the best attire to dive into battle with as well.

Even with their characters like Xenobia, there doesn’t seem to be a major focus on the fact that she has a cleavage window, and that is even with them using her in their promotional art.

But of course, the game is still in closed beta and things can and likely will change before the game actually goes live. Here’s to hoping we get more monster-y female heroes in the future!

Another important aspect about this game is this is their line-up on their web site, to let you know what heroes are available:

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Even using just portraits there’s a lot more diversity in the female body types and personalities than we are used to seeing. I mean compare it to Vainglory’s promotional line up:

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And they’re not even the worst example, not by far.

Each one of the ladies in Gigantic looks like she’s got a story and personality and it’s going to be different and not be lampshading to justify sexy costumes. I like that, I like that a lot.

Please do update us when/if they add the monster lady (or ideally, ladies).

– wincenworks

edit: Minor change to how characters are placed on the graphic, so that they appear bigger on dashboards.