What’s with the giant, staring eyes?
They are all still white (or grey).
Which they acknowledge.
We also messed up pretty badly by whitewashing our cast
This makes no sense. What about preserving profits by doing the least amount of work possible and preserving shareholder value?!
They did the same thing for male characters (and enemies), as far as I can tell. It’s a caricature-like cartoon style, so emphasizing the traits that add character makes some sense. (Realistic-scale eyes would only be a few pixels, and it’s hard to show anything with that.)
edit: The above mostly applies to the world models in the game; the portraits are obviously large enough to allow less insane eyes. Then again, it’s a fair rendering of how the face of the game models would look scaled up, and that’s sort of neat.
The giant googly eyes are bizarre.
This type of candor is always refreshing, especially the open acknowledgement of how the shorthand language of pop art informed their design choices on female goblins.
Much like with SciFi, almost all alienness is still represented in a male/female binary framework. “Why do all the female aliens have boobs?” a designer may ask. “Because how else will the audience identify her as a female?” Is the typical reply.
Our creations are always a reflection of ourselves, but when those creations get off the beaten path of human experience, stereotypes always seem to pop up to help with design shortcuts.
Interesting that - I’m not sure what it might add for context, but the game was developed in South Africa.
They’re quite modest about it
But we like to think that we did some good with what we tried, and our minor efforts – far less insightful and involved than most of the work done about gender in this industry – still managed to generate conversation and opened a few eyes from time to time, at least according to some of the feedback we’ve received.
Sad in a way, that’s almost certainly way over-modest - “most of the work done about gender in this industry” probably still consists of making the helpless female victim show more cleavage.
I think they need to rethink that, because especially on the Monk it is rather distracting.
If they keep it, they’re going to start seeing their art in meme pictures.
A while ago I made a D&D adventure for my then 6 year old. I wanted to find a miniature for her - but couldn’t find a generic enough female thief. Kinda annoying.
We still had fun and I got to make a few cool maps. Gotta make some time to try another adventure.
… it was the biggest sandwich they had ever seen. Would they ever find a man worthy enough to prepare it for them?
Political correctness gone mad. There were plenty of strong athletic women in the Olympics who still like to look feminine. What a waste of time.
The character portraits they ended up with do look feminine though.
The googly eyed portraits in the 4th column are all the Church related classes - priest, then monk, then paladin. They’re just a leeeetle bit intense and crazy.
You can see this in the other columns - fighty classes, sneaky/stabby, magic… I forget what the last is.
Surely someone has reliable data on how often players choose to play characters of the opposite gender.
Let’s face it; you’re going to be seeing that portrait, and that 3d character a lot over the next hundred hours-- might as well choose something you enjoy.
I am offended they totally discriminated against warrior chicks in battle bikinis.
“The time at which we truly started ramping up our in-studio policy of awareness about DD females…”
I feel like there could have been a, oh I dunno, better way of phrasing that.
You know, they’re kind of nutty looking, but I kind of dig it.
