Can I just ask, are you involved with this game in any way? or are you supposing that the defense you give for the choices in this game are the ones the team made in the first place?
Otherwise you are just saying that nothing but the barest minimum effort was made in making this game and offering it as defense, So I’ll ask, can the game be any good when the sex of the characters was decided because of budget?
Think about it, you are saying, this game was made as cheap as possible, (at least in terms of developer effort, a technical decision)
I say, everything is probably viewed as an investment, and there should be a cost/benefit analysis to what is included in the game, the people who made the game do not believe that the effort to include female characters will pay off. (A business decision).
Man, the artists get told to make a female character they do it, they don’t make the decision. the programmers and testers get told to do more work they say no?
Concerns about deadlines? those get decided at the beginning of the project, and if time runs out then its a management problem which nobody’s claiming is the case here.
It’s still drama though. Again, you will find some instances of male rape in gritty dramatic real-life-setting fiction (though still at a MUCH lesser rate than female rape).
ETA: Just for the record, it seems there is an attempted prison rape in the game Mafia 2.
You’ve completely dismissed the very notion that women play or purchase video games throughout this entire thread. I’ve addressed you directly because you’re being obtuse. And what do you reply to me with? Evasion, if not projection.
Well the developers claim that the decision not to include a female character was fuelled in this case by story considerations and so far there is nothing concrete to counter this. What I am saying is that simply crowbarring in a female character option is not a simple as just pressing a button and that there are a lot of other factors to take into account, not least of which is budget/time constraints.
Show me one example where I “completely dismissed” the notion of women playing video games. Show me one time where I insulted or dismissed a single person directly. I pointed out that the vast majority of people who play this type of game are male and that publishers are catering to that market. Should things change? yes, i believe they should. Are they going to by forcing the issue? realistically no.
Borderlands also suffered somewhat from Smurfette Syndrome. Female characters’ special trait was that they were female. The psychic women are “Sirens.” Lilith has powers named “Diva”, “Girl Power”, “Hard to Get”, “Mind Games”…
In the real world, a suit of armor for men would be identical to one for women. All those stylized suits of armors with breast divots are ridiculous since they would actually make you far more vulnerable to damage. If you’re a female warrior, you’d bind your breasts - tightly or if you’re an Amazon, chop them off altogether.
CAPCOM could just give the golden fully armored person a female name (and voice over?) and be done. If anyone complained that they didn’t go to any effort, they could just say that sexualization of armor is sexist (which it kind of is).
Good, acknowledging that all that budget nonsense you were giving before is BS is a step in the right direction. Also gj on deciding to be the devils advocate so late too, it absolutely lets you defend what you said to say that you were just BSing in many of your previous posts.
Ok “bro”, I get that text based communication is open to ambiguity, but honestly, i did not expect to have to include a devils advocate disclaimer in every single post I made. Maybe it’s my error for thinking people could realise that without being told so explicitly.
I also did make the point about the story thing earlier in the thread, and so did the developers in the original post linked, but you chose to ignore that, so what more can I do?
Sadly video games are not the real world. There is a real and heavy cost to adding new active models. Even non-gender specific animated objects in the game must be integrated carefully with whatever new active model is introduced, female or not; e.g. another race such as the cat people of the Elder Scrolls were altered to be more human like to ease the development costs of their models. However in my opinion, any persistent multiplayer world with deep variability and customization NOT including at least a female base character is probably rather lame…literally missing half of what makes up a human-ish virtual experience.
I get that you believe that the reasons they give are true, so, what do you think this means?
See, I think it means that they don’t care about female gamers, if they did they would have allocated time and resources and altered the plot to allow for female characters.
Because unless the premise requires it, and the premise is brilliant enough to warrant it, there less people who might want to play it.
But just as in movies and other media, they probably think women who will want to play the game will be so used to being ignored that they’ll buy it anyway, so no need to add a character for them because it won’t hurt their bottom line.
There is literally no reason to do this. All CAPCOM has to do is change the name of one of the armored characters to something obviously female and possibly do a new voiceover. That’s it. Problem solved. Hooray!
You’re making things entirely too complicated because you’re assuming the issue is there are no female bombshells with giant breasts walking around. This is not the problem. The problem is there is not a female character (regardless of the shape of their body). I had no idea the main character in Metroid Prime was female until after I played it for goodness sakes, but it was lauded for the fact!
Yeah, video game developers. Everybody should just make one game. Jesus christ. Nobody’s telling Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee or Cormac McCarthy or Haruki Murakami to write more female protagonists just for the sake of it. The upcoming Star Wars movie is going to be “hotly-anticipated” too, but anybody who asks JJ Abrams in post-production to change the gender of the main character would just be laughed off and not taken seriously. Because this is a video game, this is somehow become a debate. It’s pure madness.
Why are video games the only thing being attacked constantly?
Also, there are TONS of smaller video game developers who actively, happily, and proudly write strong female characters into their games; my last job was at one and I wrote parts of a Jane Austen game and a mobile game whose only characters were strong, diverse, independent mermaids.
And, I suppose, the reason for thinking this is because that’s what they said?
Please, correct me if I’m wrong and you have other reasons to believe this. However, when you play devil’s advocate you usually want to get to an unpleasant truth, something other than what is already part of what amounts to a “press release”
See, I agree with you, this is a story about a strictly male protagonist (Or rather, interchangeable protagonists. In the plural. Like 12 of them)
And the decision to make the game as is, and that the publisher thought this would be profitable is what raises concern.
You can keep defending that they really did do this because of the plot and budget, but it still misses the point of how the plot is considered profitable because of some, clearly very hidden assumptions, and that it can’t be both, if the plot dictates it then its not a budget issue, if its a budget issue, then that’s what clearly driving the plot. A much more valid point if you’re a small developer with finite resources, but not at all what is being claimed.
