No Sexual Objectification of Female Characters ? (Dev) Replied

Let me sum this thread up:

1. Regarding clothing and appearance there is the request of a high percentage of the community that female and male shall be treated the same.

2. Sidetopic that emerged during this threat with the following result: Playing a diffrent type of gender in a respectful non hurting way to other players is accepted.

3. The more options they will provide us how to style and dress ourselfs, the better.


Hope i got it ok.

 

This... is astounding. Am I dreaming, or is feminism actually overcoming the western depiction, degradation, and objectification of women? I mean, I've had a slightly elevated opinion of the SotA community, but I never would have imagined this (somebody get Ms. MacKinnon quick!).

Well now that the community has transcended at least some degree of sexism, its worth pointing out that scanty armor is unrealistic in such an intuitive way that it should be removed entirely, or made weak. I mean yes, most men deeply value all the parts that scanty armor might protect, but that doesn't mean that you could really get by with most of your torso and arms, and all of your legs, revealed, especially by comparison to the guy in platemail who has 100% of his person covered.

Anyway, great thread!

 

In SWTOR, there was a push by some groups for the ability to pull stats out of armor they may have earned and stick it into armor that fits their character's role-play. I imagine that if that were to happen here, eventually someone would stick some big stats into the skimpy metal bikini.

Not saying they should or would do that here, just that it happened somewhere else.

 

My pet hate in UO was when a male PK in a dress attacked and killed me! I even remember being killed by a female character with a beard. Bring on a good range of female clothing, traditional medieval with a small amount of the risqué stuff.

 

I have to agree with the original poster; I was recently looking at videos for Ultima Forever, and I must say the artwork for Mariah was intensely off-putting. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the opposite of a prude, but what attracted me towards Ultima back in 1989 was the sheer breathtaking scale of story it intended to tell; even where characters were limited due to pixel art and memory space, it was possible to give them personality all the same, and thus true depth. Compare Mariah in classic Ultima lore with how she looks in Ultima Forever. I'm here today, as a supporter of SotA because I trust in the devs to create the same deep atmosphere; But unnecessary boobage tends to distract from the tone for me.

 

I agree that there should be different body types in game, for women and men. This game will probably not go the way of the asian MMORPG's anyway, where women are better armored the smaller their outfit is, and their waists are too thin to support anyhting. I love playing like beautiful women though, so don't take that out either.

 

That's how SWTOR operates. You pick a "shell" of armor that looks however you want, and put the mods in from your gear drops to give that shell the stats you need.

Other games have an appearance tab where you equip items of how your armor will appear, and other items for stats. One of the advantages of the SWTOR model is that moving the mods around lets you update one mod at a time, really customize your stats, and it provides a money sink to help avoid inflation in the economy.

 

Hmmm..crafting maternity armor. Could be interesting!

 

My opinion is that yes, all armor should be wearable by either gender, and look basically the same on each (cover the same amount).

Yes, there should also be 'sexy' clothing and armor. However, stats should be affected in a realistic way. (if it doesn't cover much, it should be far less effective).

Finally, I would like to see a great range in types of characters in the game as well, especially NPC's. Old and frail, children, adults carrying babies, pregnant women, pot-bellied men, thick people, scrawny people, limping sick people, etc..

It would be great if Villagers and Peasants wore clothing that doesn't really seem to fit right. Many probably can't afford to have things fitted, so either make their own clothes with relatively unskilled hands, or get garments second hand that are not made for them. There are obviously different social levels in this game, I hope the clothing reflects this, not just in style, but in how it fits as well. A village tailor may still be wearing lower quality materials, but his/her family's clothes should fit right.

 

I'll go along with what Miravle Dragon mentioned about shapes, sizes, and ages of character models. I think the Sims 3 (which is the only Sims game I've played) had a great character creation system where clothing morphed to body style. Sure, the look of the characters are a bit cartoony but when you take into account body fat/musculature/ muscle definition as well as the degree of customization of facial features, you could probably come up with a less cartoony looking character with a variable degree of attractiveness beyond using the pre-selected features.

As to sexy armors and clothing. Sure, some degree of sexy clothing is okay but sexy armor? Isn't that what a chastity belt is?

 

I think that we should look at both form an functionality here. A full plate should cover pretty much everything, not give the women a big "please stab here" cleavage window that the 16 year old boys drool over.

On the other hand, there are also pieces of clothing outside of combat, those things could be anything. I get there's many people (most notably guys) who want to see stripperific clothing as a option, I'm fine with that, it's their opinion. Though the female players should not be forced to wear stuff from that category.

I'd like to see stuff ranging from workers clothes to fancy ball gowns. Any sexualized clothes should more along lines of what tavern wenches would wear, but that's just my opinion.

Also, players should have more options for female character appearance. Most games will allow you to design male characters ranging from beautiful to butt ugly. Women should get the same option, we barely ever get to see any options for this outside of making them look aged with a few wrinkles. I think that games like Star Trek Online got this right, the only difference between men and women there are that women get different haircuts and access to skirts (why can't I give Scotty a kilt?), other then that they are mostly the same.

At any rate, let's try to avoid this:

Mod Edited: Language

 

I agree, cloths don't need to be gender specific and I prefer if all cloths can be worn by all characters.

 

Party pooper, you're raining on the cross-dresser parades. Equal rights for everyone! hehe

 

Not to be contrary, but I used to be guildmaster of PMS (Putting Men Straight) guild and it was for women only. All my male friends ran and made female characters just to join my guild. lol It was hilarious, and everyone had a good laugh about it.

 

$2.25M: Mod tools + Unique Art Creation skill + Expanded Player Customization

• Work begins to expose options for player modification of the offline game and limited elements of the online game
• Skill for “Art Creation” to create actual individual unique art to show and trade in game
• “New You” detailed character creator - We will provide tools well beyond the basic choices of gender, body/face/hair/eye types, and layer in morph targets to customize your avatar to be “the real you” at the in-game “New You” salons.

I seem to enjoy posting stretch goal info, but it's a great list of solid info for what we should expect to see.

Morphing in character creation in every game I have seen with it means you can stretch and pull most anything. If you want a fat character, you can do that.

 

What most people seem to miss amazingly enough are the key words "because it has better stats".. I was not making a commentary on people's fashion sense. If I had said "because they like it" that'd be a different story.. Though I dare say that I'm sure some people would feel they'd like to have equal rights to not see such things. But the point is.. clothing and armor should make sense.

If people want to use item stats as an excuse to cross dress.. that's messed up. If they want to cross dress that badly they shouldn't need to make an excuse they should do it and deal with it.

 

I only require that both genders feature equally revealing/unrevealing outfits.

Full plate armor should make the wearer look like a tank. (Sexy tanks OK)
But if there's a bikini, it better be wearable by both sexes.

 

I wouldn't think there's enough demand for such a thing to validate the effort. Remember that every item needs to fit a mesh. So anything that's wearable by both genders needs 2 versions to be modeled. This isn't UO where you're just using animated sprites. 3D is a little more troublesome like that.

 

Thank you for the clarification. I had no idea.

 

I am in complete agreement with the OP. Characters should be customizable with a body slide function for sizes. I think there should be all shapes and sizes and all levels of attractiveness.

Vanilla Skyrim did this terribly, however with the right mods it works well. Bowen is spot on the more variation you have the more time consuming with so many different skeletons, mesh, animations, armour fittings and horrible clipping problems its endless.

My only problem with it is its a huge job to have that much variation and when you consider the budget difference between the two games maybe Shroud should keep it simple after all I would prefer more $$ on game content and dynamics/combat.

That said if a player wants to wear a platemail bikini then that's fine too but the armour value should be representative of how much skin is being shown and how little protection it actually has.