Ok so that takes care of voice acting. What about script? What about costumes? What about animations? What about testing twice as many assets? What about catering for non-gender binary people? What about catering for otherkin? What about catering for different ages? What about catering for all combinations of the above and the many more examples I haven’t listed?
Maybe the plot of “Deep Down” is heavily penis-centric and Capcom is correct that a female lead character simply wouldn’t work from a physiological point of view.
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…in what way?
Sorry, this is a stupid complaint.
Should all books and movies be released in a “male main character” and “female main character” version? Game narrative is by its very nature dealing with a huge amount of loss of control compared with other means to tell stories. If anything it would be much easier for a novelist to add this feature and yet it is, as far as I know, never done. Sometimes projects decide to allow gender choice on the player character, sometimes they don’t. You almost never play as a child or an old person, children are actually almost never seen in games and some of that is because of content production cost (also a ratings issue, have to pretend children never die in wars or wars might get less popular!). In 3D games all characters are almost always the same height and approximate width.
Almost by definition the main character in any game which does allow gender choice will be a “gender neutral main character” because the story had to be made gender neutral with perhaps some gender-specific bolt on segments, so I think mandating gender choice in main characters is a uniquely bad way to solve any problem with the paucity of female leads.
Also:
“Female: Why not make 12 male characters and 12 female characters, dividing the budget between them? $3 squillion each?
Publisher: Good lord, I did not know women could do maths!”
… uh yea. I mean the arithmetic is OK, the understanding of content creation is absent. Making 24 male characters in anything but 2d arcade game with no story would certainly be much cheaper and easier than making 12 male and 12 female. There is a good chance it would be cheaper and easier than making 1 male and 1 female. That’s just how the content works. 24 male characters can have 1 core animation set, 1 skeleton, 1 script, maybe 1 dialog recording of that script, 1 possibility to have a bug on all those things. Cranking out more mesh variations and textures is both easier to do initially and less likely to cause expensive bugs you have to fix later. Even when you reach the point of an elder scrolls type rpg with relatively low fidelity player characters and a game setup to allow the cheap creation of a huge variety of npc characters the fact that they support female player characters is a significant expense (I’m glad they support it, but even for a game like that I’m sure its a noticeable expense).
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This is known as the slippery-slope fallacy. And it’s a fallacy for a reason.
It’s illogical to jump from “let’s make our product more accessible to more than 50% of the human population” to “oh, so now we have to make our product support a thousand more subgroups?”
Sure, it would be great if they also catered to more groups of people. But don’t try to use that as an excuse for cutting out more than half of all people.
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I’d imagine most games already have female NPCs. Can’t they reuse those assets?
I’d also like to add that I find it profoundly depressing that the first suggestion about fitting in a female character is to add the threat of rape. Seriously?
I am not the keenest or most up to date gamer, I know Skyrim is pretty old but it seemed to me that it worked pretty well with non - specific plotlines, a silent protagonist, gay marriage etc. You can question the cleavage windows on female armour and the tinges of racism, though.
I should dig out NOLF again.
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But does it bleed male tears? It sounds like you’ve got a case of that
one hears so much about these days. Patriarchy is a line against the darkness, man: if you leave the line you leave a gap in the line!
On a more serious note, is that gif by Ivan Brunetti? It looks like his style, but I couldn’t find an attribution.
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It looks like they have dozens of costumes and armor. Why the hell would adding a few for women suddenly pile them under mountains of debt?
You’re really reaching.
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Did you just compare a video game to the Taliban?
This shit is off the rails.
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Is it though? Is it an argument any less valid than there should be more women in games? As a gay man I can count on one hand the number of games that have even recognised gay people exist, let alone allowed the player character to express homosexual tendancies. Why should I be excluded? Is my right to be recognised less valid than a woman playing a game? Why is binary cis-gender the accepted line to aim to?
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Why did you post a flashing pain-image to the thread?
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they can probably re use SOME assets, but again its a cost/benefit calculation. An NPC’s assets can be controlled and tested to the NPC limitations, a player’s assets must be tested to extremes just to be safe.
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No, I want villains to threaten Broshep with something that men find threatening. You know, like scratching his space vehicles.
Your using the fact that the industry doesn’t do more to support one group to argue that that they shouldn’t do more to support any groups. Does that sounds right to you?
Should gay men not have supported the voting rights act, or the civil rights act?
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think about a suit of armour in a game. you add female means you now need to have 2 versions of that armour. each with its own set of animations and textures. each with its own testing cycles. oh and you need to test each character now much more rigourously to make sure he or she doesnt sudden;y decide to try crossdressing without the player wanting them to. i’m not saying its not possible, but I am saying its a lot more complicated.
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Holy crap! I had already worked out in my head some valid, well-thought out reason for this game to exclude female characters!
Looking cursorily over some of the information on it, it seemed to involve a time-traveling plot into a medieval era, with a prevalence on period armor and combat. I thought, “Okay, that makes sense. If you are traveling back to the European Middle Ages and you (for whatever reason) are anticipating armed, armored combat, then, really, you should be sending men. Unless you want to screw up the time-stream, you want to blend in and be unnoticed, so you send back a lot of big, European males. As time-travelers, you don’t want to call attention to yourselves, so don’t send back a bunch of women warriors (or warriors of an uncommon ethnicity). Blend the hell in!”
Then I looked at the gameplay. It’s fantasy armor dudes with lightning balls fighting giant freaking monsters. Seriously? You could have stuck in women, guys with chainsaw hands, and a lizardman with flaming breath and it wouldn’t have done any violence to the ‘concept’. Weak.
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But the games have your gender in them though, just not your sexual preference.
I find it hard to believe that a game about fighting dragons is going to have a lot of sexual tendencies in it in the first place. Do you think one of these 24 guy characters is going to be non-white? Imagine the staggering costs of such a decision.
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So all of the suits of armor are the same for all the male characters and they just swap heads or something?
The same test is already being done 24 times. Why can’t it be 16 times for men, 4 times for women, 2 gay men and 2 lesbians? How does that add programming time if it’s still 24 characters that do not talk or have any script to say because everyone talks to them like they are a toaster holding a sword?
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That was it for me too. Fantasy. Dragons. Walk down a tunnel, fight a dragon, get spoken to. There’s nothing in here that Ash and his boomstick wouldn’t have fit in with. And if he works in it, anyone can.
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No I’m not, kindly stop putting words in my mouth. I’m saying that there has to be a line as to what games developers are expected to do. If a game is designed with a story around specific aspects of a character, which remember we have been told by the developers that this one is, then why should they then have to crowbar in things which may not make sense narratively to appease some (some would argue, rightly or wrongly, less significant) parts of the audience. Surely putting in a token female character just to make up the numbers is decidedly not the way to go? The alternative is to exclude any story elements which deal with virtually any relationship and end up with a bland boring experience or to create 2 versions of the game entirely, which, despite some people’s lack of understanding, WOULD vastly increase costs.
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