Tag: paramilitary

Posted on

bacon—pancakes:

Why is “no helmet” in the bingo, I fo mock battles all the time and have little need of a helmet even though I own 3.

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

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There is an extremely critical difference that you need to remember between mock battles and real battles.

People in mock battles are not only not trying to kill you, they’re actually take deliberate steps to make sure you aren’t injured!

In a real battle your head is particularly vulnerable and a high priority to protect for a variety of reasons:

  • Head wounds bleed really strongly, between blood in your eyes and problems from blood loss – a relatively light cut can be a death sentence
  • Your head is relatively unprotected compared to your other vital regions.  Even a glancing blow can do serious damage to organs like your eyes, nose, etc
  • Because it is on top of your body, your head is vulnerable to attacks from pretty much every angle except directly below it so it has more ways to get hurt
  • As well as being the end point for the common carotid arteries, your head also contains a vital organ known as the brain.  Serious harm to this organ can result in life long crippling and/or death.

Not wearing a helmet as part of artistic license is often employed with characters who are either not normally in armor, or who need to be recognizable as unique among many armored figures.

However it is also often employed with female characters because of the idea that unless a character has long flowing locks, warm kissable lips and a dainty little nose clearly on display – men won’t be able to tell the character is female (and hence they’re supposed to be attracted to her).

Basically prioritizing the sexualization and objectification of female characters over portraying them as competent, interesting people, etc.

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– wincenworks

So there’s been a few more people asking why we would include no head protection on the bingo card…

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I know, I know…

But it probably also bears repeating that generally speaking, that part of the reason it’s a bingo card is because is that singular elements (even completely nonsensical) rarely ruin a design (most people don’t even notice Pharah’s battle thong). 

So if a something tends to skip on helmets for men and women alike for the purposes of giving character’s distinctive appearances and expressions it’s unlikely anyone is going to take issue.  It’s more about stuff like this:

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Or this

– wincenworks

Posted on

I came across Black Squad and it seems to be a game that is marketing itself on two things:

  • It will be like literally every other “real life” inspired paramilitary competitive FPS game (ie a Modern Warfare rip-off)
  • BUT there will be hot chicks in bike shorts and maximum cleavage on display (including that blond woman with who’s in everything)

So imagine my amusement with I downloaded it looked around in the shops and discovered that not only do they not have any female character options (at least not available for a new player). There are just four white guys who are almost indistinguishable from one another in game to the extent I can’t say for sure if it’s just the same model with different clothing choices.

This particularly weird since back in April, prior to the game actually going Early Access on Steam – they implied 1/3rd of the character choices would be a sexy, sexy lady who wears less pants when “badguy” sounding:

That and like just about every other paramilitary shooter out there, this game seems to pedantically focus on making gear look as authentic as possible provided it’s not on a woman.

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– wincenworks

Posted on

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

This is why we find it difficult to celebrate Blizzard’s baby steps towards progress – they are already so self-congratulatory about it that they basically gave up before they started.

Okay, yes, baby steps, Blizzard has got a long history of being terrible and a lot unlearning to do.  But they could at least try to show some self-awareness of this.

Dirty Bomb, a game which I feel we have actually tragically under-represented in our positive examples, has managed to incorporate diversity and gear equality without making it a novelty item.  How? By making diversity a genuine priority – that’s why their line up looks more like this:

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– wincenworks

And it’s not only body diversity which seems to be a challenge for female Overwatch characters, so is their AGE!

D.Va is actually the youngest in the whole ensemble (19). Female characters don’t get older than 34 (Mercy), while male ones range from 20 (if you count Zenyatta, a robot) or 25 (Junkrat) all the way up to 61 (Reinhardt).

The overall design of D.Va is perplexing on so many levels, too. What new is she supposed to contribute? Yet another young, thin, conventionally pretty woman in a catsuit… something the game (and the industry as a whole) so totally lacked before! Even her silly pseudonym rubs in that she’s a diva. 
The idea of a Korean professional gamer-turned-mecha pilot is very cool (even if the backstory rips off Evangelion/Pacific Rim), but why make her look so generic… and paint her mech pink? 

My most optimistic guess: one of many Blizzard’s Creepy Marketing Guys saw Zarya and said “So, we’re doing female tanks now? Okay, but next one is gonna be the SEXY tank! And make her more PINK!”

~Ozzie

more on Overwatch | more on Blizzard

Remember when Blizzard was doing female characters better in Overwatch?

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Yeah, me neither.

We will be doing a full post about the new Widowmaker skin, but until then, we just wanted to throwback to this post about all the effort Blizzard is putting into their diversity.
It still doesn’t make sense for Widow to wear those clothes because, 

  • a) she is a sniper and that top just screams nip slip; and 
  • b) she’s a sniper, who’s she going to be ‘distracting’ exactly from 2 miles away?

It also just looks really ugly? It really looks like someone designed a practical suit for her, and then Creepy Marketing Guy walked in and told them to cut a third of it off, so they just did, without any design adjustment.

-Icy

edit: Since a lot of replies ignore that the original post is almost 1,5 years old and mentioning newer characters is beside the point Icy is making about Widowmaker, let’s quickly address this: We do acknowledge how Ana Amari is a cool non-sexualized old lady (even if squarely within OW’s established beauty standards) and Orisa is a cool female robot.
That said, there are still problems with how old characters continue to be depicted and adding new heroes doesn’t change that.

~Ozzie

PS: Mercy is 37, not 34 – my bad. She looks neither age, regardless.

Posted on

Bulletstorm is getting a remaster, so it’s probably time to talk about how Trishka Novak ended up looking more like a pinup model than a “merciless stealth assassin” even after the team fought to cut down on her arbitrary sex appeal.

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What’s interesting is that despite his unwillingness to consider that perhaps, there were some bad decisions made here, Adrian is apparently in agreement with us over the outfits in some other people’s games:

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– wincenworks

Posted on

@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