I love Guild Wars. I just bought heart of Thorns and I am greatly enjoying it. While the game has many great examples of female armor, sometimes not so much. This is focusing on the heavy armor class, because Light Armor is too easy of a target
The Vigil armor. The Vigil is a faction dedicated to eradicating the Dragons that are destroying the world through uniting the races of Tyria. If you join them, like the other factions on this list, you can get their special armor…which is not so great for ladies, because apparently the Vigil, which is not only lead by a woman but a Charr, a race “Forged in the crucible of battle”, only supplies boob window armor.
Next, the heavy armor for the Order of Whsipers. The Order of Whispers is an ancient secret society that has been influencing the leaders of Tyria for centuries. And they make bad armor for their agents. While a bit of extra work, this armor set could be nice but, no, boob window. This seems to be intentional, as this is the concept art for this hot mess.
Thanks, Anet, and Hello Esher Girls.
Finally, the Durmand priory. A faction dedicated to scouring ancient relics and lore for ideas on how to fight the Dragons, with an oddly low scoring armor. Weird.
Anyway, if anyone asks why I always play Charr, a catlike beast race with little to no sexual differences, this is what i‘m going to show them
I get the feeling that someone at Guild Wars decided that they wanted them to be “sexy” but didn’t want them to look conventionally “sexy” so they decided to do things like put windows on the side of the belly and above cleavage.
Presumably they were hoping the shift would distract people from the obvious gaps in the armor and exposed vital areas.
I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation but if you can look at look at the number of revealing and blatantly “sexy” female armor designs, compared the the number of comparable male designs, and then honestly look me in the eye and say there isn’t a ridiculous and offensive imbalance, then your perception is skewed and frankly baffling.
and inb4 upset messages from anyone who genuinely likes the revealing female armor sets, that is literally not my point. I’m happy for you, honestly, I’m glad you have armor that you enjoy putting your character in (it must be nice). The point I’m making here is that we deserve to have choices on both sides, instead of having bare breasts, midriffs, and thighs shoved in our faces on ladies and nothing but bulky coats on dudes.
“It goes both ways” ceases to be a valid argument when there are LITERALLY five times as many sexy/revealing armor sets for women as for men.
We regularly get people pointing to Guild Wars as a positive example, and while we are happy that it does include some sensible armor for women, and doesn’t limit the cheesecake treatment to women, it still has a lot of issues.
We get a lot of messages and reblogs that mention Guild Wars 2 and Monster Hunter, generally citing them as great examples due to particular costumes.
However, we are reluctant to highlight them as good examples due to one simple word: inconsistency.
Yes those are from the same game – no there’s no variant of the female Raviente armor that looks less absurd. Likewise, Guild Wars 2 has a huge variety of armor that sexualizes female characters.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy for you and glad you get to represent your particular character how you like – but I’m also really unhappy that not everyone who plays a female character has that opportunity.
