I have to admit that Oraco has been impressive in their dedication to minimizing the amount of creativity in their designs. Sometimes I joke about some studios using a spinner to pick random design elements, but it seems genuinely possible (example: nature + League of Angels)
Seriously the recycling art assets on the front page and committing to this level of generic imagery, is impressive in a terrible kind of way. Not to mention the combining with @eschergirls type anatomy.
No surprise that it’s not only incredibly generic in gameplay, but often accused of another game which is essentially a game that plays itself (so not quite an asset flip, but close enough it may was well be).
This is why we say that if you’re counting on sex to sell, it’s probably because you don’t have anything worthwhile in your game.
– wincenworks
Okay, so predictably Blizzard has used Blizzcon to announce a new Overwatch character, and now Talon (the bad guys) have a support healer – and surprisingly despite them clearly having recycled a lot of Mercy’s look (with more than little bit of Zarya and a lot of David Bowie… I mean a LOT), they’ve managed to avoid the Evil is Sexy trope this time.
Honestly this design is pretty good but I get the feeling that the boobplate is literally a case of “if no boob, how woman!?” given how refreshingly androgynous Moria looks in most of her origin story and lineup pic
It’s also pretty cool how she fills a big hole in Overwatch lore and meets the outspoken player demand for an evil/amoral healer.
Of course Blizzard took Blizzcon as the opportunity for demonstrating how they’re doing representation of women better in their games and media.
They also, a few hours earlier, released what is essentially Reinhardt’s origin story, which features exactly one female character:
An unnamed* redhead with a Disney face who is there to tell him that he doesn’t need to be hero so he can tell her that he totally does.
This is why it’s difficult to believe that, while many of their staff may be trying hard, Jeff Kaplan and Blizzard as an entity care about representation beyond marketing sound bytes and feminist cookies.
– wincenworks
Oh, what could have been.
I wish they would have pushed the medical tubing further, instead of just giving her a little tube backpack. Like maybe extending the tubing down her right arm to emphasize that she deals damage with it. Overall, the design is just very…. Safe. And also not angular enough. Look at the origin story screenshot above; angles!
I’m just kind of disappointed, honestly. One more thin, young-looking white woman, and her black/purple color scheme is giving me Morgana flashbacks.
Also, her powers are very reminiscent of Hel from SMITE and Seris from Paladins. We’ve almost achieved the originality singularity!
-Icy
I see this as a consistent problem with many female character additions to Overwatch… Individually, they’re pretty interesting designs (though it’s guaranteed that they looked better, less “safe”, in concept art), but when put together in a group, they turn into this boring blob of young-looking, thin, mostly pale ladies with a token unique feature here and there.
As I said before, I’d take so much less issue with D.Va (cause her pretty girl design is consistent with her teenage idol persona) if she didn’t follow after introduction of Mercy, Tracer, Widowmaker etc, who all have fatal flaws dictated by “sex sells” in their designs.
~Ozzie
*We understand that Brigitte has a name (thanks for all the readers for informing us of it); however that actually confirms our criticism regarding the supposed need for “doing the research” – the animated short can’t even bother to put her name into dialogue. The audience has to read some auxiliary non-game material beforehand to know who she’s supposed to be.
Hand-shaped bras a rare, but astounding “treat” among many, many gross boob-related costume tropes. And somehow, they’re almost always designed as skeleton/corpse hands, or at least monstrous looking claws… Because boob-grabbing wasn’t creepy enough on its own merits, I suppose.
What’s additionally weird about this particular one, is that if you look at her left breast, the hand-bra is not even holding it. It’s like hover hand, but extremely creepy instead of extremely awkward.
BTW, because nobody can prove me wrong on this one, I’ll assume that this lady lost her eye to one of those stabby spikes in her “armor”.
~Ozzie
edit: We’ve been noted that this artwork is actually stolen from League of Legends fanart. BABD’s policy is not to put down fan/amateur/hobby/otherwise non-commercial artists, and I’m sorry for accidentally doing that.
Shame on Dragon 2 for (not surprisingly, considering it’s a very generic shovelware/asset-flippy web ad) stealing someone else’s work!
~Ozzie
So, Divinity: Original Sin 2 started off looking kind of promising. Despite their head animator throwing a public tantrum on deviantArt, Larian Studios did seem to be making a fairly attempt to improve next time, after all someone had instructed Thierry to fix the artwork (to his great upset) in the first place.
So on 1 October 2015, their Kickstarter finished successfully.
On 11 February 2016, they published results of a survey they did which showed completely unsurprising results for a studio where creative leads can post rants about their right to be paid to objectify:
On 10 August 2016, it became pretty clear that Larian Studios decided the thing to do with this information was to double down and go back to their regular double standards:
Around May 2017 they started using their current iconic line up, the front and center lead of which has such a ridiculous costume it appears their advertising team feels the need to hide it:
Ironically, despite this apparently being less of Creepy Marketing Guy and more part of the studio culture, a lot of the content could be pretty good and they could probably get a lot more female players if they didn’t strive to save the booplate.
Alas, it seems to commitment knows no bounds:
Can’t imagine why they have so few female players…
– wincenworks
So, if you’ve ever doubted the influence of Creepy Marketing Guy, remember that generally family-friendly Nintendo has apparently decided that the best way to market Fire Emblem Heroes is to pitch it like… basically every other mobile fantasy game.
This is a real shame since Lucinda looks pretty good:
But apparently not in line with their goal of marketing it as “Mini-dresses, boobplate and garter-belts, the game”.
– wincenworks
(Many thanks to those who messaged in to let me know I’d initially mispelled Lucina’s name)
