kurisu_1974
Member
Well first of all, it's a product first and art second.
Secondly, what it the artist conveying by making the female protagonist look like an ugly dude from the 80s? What is the intent here?
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Star Wars Outlaws' Director: 'Bad Faith' Discourse About Protagonist's Appearance 'Not Worth Engaging In'
- Thread starter ManaByte
- Start date
Well first of all, it's a product first and art second.
Secondly, what it the artist conveying by making the female protagonist look like an ugly dude from the 80s? What is the intent here?
bitbydeath
Member
You need to get better FAP material if you think pretty girls in games is the best way to get you off.
feynoob
Banned
So, this star wars female character would be considered a beauty according to their standards.
That was how most Romans looked. Make up introduction changed how people view beauty.
The outfits are the issue, not how those women look. Like what is the point of that outfit?
2016 art.
She was there for the blood. The whole thing changes, if you change her outfit. They didn't, and that gave us a bad us fighter.
Now days, people want the generic russian look. They don't want a face that fits the settings of the game. Would be mad if you simply change the outfit.
feynoob
Banned
bitbydeath
Member
feynoob
Banned
It's called creating your character. Why should he draw what you think is a beauty? Should artists not draw handicapped characters? Scars? Do you want him to only draw healthy people?
The moment you define something, you limit creativity design.
kurisu_1974
Member
OK so you have no idea.
Trilobit
Member
So, this star wars female character would be considered a beauty according to their standards.
That was how most Romans looked. Make up introduction changed how people view beauty.
My point was that each time has their own beauty ideals which art depicts. Ancient Greece had their own beauty ideals and we have our. The least people expected from the developers was to not uglify the actress.
The outfits are the issue, not how those women look. Like what is the point of that outfit?
2016 art.
She was there for the blood. The whole thing changes, if you change her outfit. They didn't, and that gave us a bad us fighter.
Now days, people want the generic russian look. They don't want a face that fits the settings of the game. Would be mad if you simply change the outfit.
I thought the controversy around the main character in SW Outlaws was not about her body, but about her face going from this:
to this:
yurinka
Member
A beautiful lady, people would have liked to see the character looking like her....
... but they instead did use this lizard as reference and did put a wig on it.to this:
...
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Randall365
Member
‘Han Solo after a sex change?’ was written on a white board and then double-underlined by someone a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I suspect.
feynoob
Banned
Companies change the characters face sometimes depending on what they want. Sony changed the face of Spider-Man game. That face was there for 2+ years. Apparently, it was to match the voice actor. (Don't know if that was the reason).I thought the controversy around the main character in SW Outlaws was not about her body, but about her face going from this:
to this:
But some respect to the lizard. He is handsome as hell.but they instead did use this lizard as reference and did put a wig on it.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
This is delusional and ignores reality.
The VAST VAST majority of people care a metric FUCK TON about the attractiveness of characters. It's not just limited to Videogames.
Heck Hollywood doesn't gross billions in theatrical ticket sales from movies containing nothing but fugly troglodites.
Everything from comics, to movies to TV, to even popular novel genres (e.g. romance novels), to advertising, to social media generate revenue in a large part off the back of the insane attractiveness of their cast.
To claim that people should not care is to ask people to not behave in accordance our fundamental biological wiring. Humans are drawn to attractive people and they enjoy watching attractive people. That will never change as long as humans remain human.
Polygonal_Sprite
Gold Member
If you don’t agree with the alt Left then you’re arguing in “bad faith”.
“She’s beautiful”… fuck off.
“She’s beautiful”… fuck off.
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Trilobit
Member
Companies change the characters face sometimes depending on what they want. Sony changed the face of Spider-Man game. That face was there for 2+ years. Apparently, it was to match the voice actor. (Don't know if that was the reason).
I actually only got the PS4 version of that game for my PS5 just because I hate the new face lol. It was worth it despite the graphical downgrade. I don't have any interest in playing Puberty Peter. The game was clearly made with a more mature Spider-Man in mind.
Woopah
Member
Sex appeal / attractiveness can absolutely be a benefit used in some games (such as Uncharted, Bayonetta or Stellar Blade), but it is not requisite in all games or all media.
There's over 100 million people who bought GTA V. How many of them "care a metric FUCK TON" about how attractive Trevor Philips is? How many people would put "the attractiveness of Starkiller" as an important factor that influenced whether they bought The Force Unleased or not?
People are completely fine playing video games where they aren't attracted to the playable characters.
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TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
I never said it was.
Are the three main characters the only characters in the game? GTAV is choc full of sexy female characters and risqué scenes that satiate those in the consumerbase looking for a little titillation.
VG are mostly a male dominated medium, and so most VG protagonists are also male. That doesn't mean those games don't contain attractive female love interests or other attractive female NPCs. They do far often than not... well.... until woketards started taking over western games development.
Most players of that game are hetero men, but even with that if you're going to try to make the argument that Sam Whitwher is not attractive then you're really not off to a good start at all.
Hetero men playing hetero-male main characters in games don't need their MCs to be tall, dark and handsome, bronzed adonises. But they definitely can be actively turned off a game where the human MC is ugly as sin (GTAIV is a great example).
Even your GTAV example of Trevor was a good one. Lots of players hated him, for many reasons including his trailer trash appearance, and they played and enjoyed that game in spite of him. Had Trevor been the only available character in GTAV, the game would have seen a faction of its success.
People prefer to play games where there are attractive characters in the game. I don't know why you seem to insist on it only being about the attractiveness of the playable ones. It isn't.
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Woopah
Member
What I'm seeing for Star Wars Outlaws is people complaining about Kay Vess not being attractive and how her chin/eyebrows/face structure is different from the voice actor, not that the game as whole lacks titillation. And I would not say that titillation is something which needs to be in an open world Star Wars game
I strongly believe that people would be fine playing as Trevor in GTA V, an ugly character wouldn't put off a huge number of people from playing it. People say Aloy is ugly and yet Horizon has sold really well.
Because the criticism I'm seeing about Outlaws is specifically about Kay. If it was just about the game having any attractive characters at all, we'd have to wait until the game releases no?
IFireflyl
Gold Member
Companies change the characters face sometimes depending on what they want. Sony changed the face of Spider-Man game. That face was there for 2+ years. Apparently, it was to match the voice actor. (Don't know if that was the reason).
Sony/Insomniac really screwed up with the PS4 Spider-Man game because they hired one person to voice Peter Parker (Yuri Lowenthal), and they hired a different person to be the face of Peter Parker (John Bubniak). The issue is that these two people have two completely different faces, so getting the voicing to match with the motion capture was a logistical nightmare. With the remaster, they re-did the face using Yuri Lowenthal so that future Spider-Man titles would require far less work effort as they would not have to spend time trying to sync the face and the voice.
This example you used has nothing to do with why people were upset over the Star Wars: Outlaws actress. They were upset that they took a lady who is pretty in real life, and they made her look very plain in the game.
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feynoob
Banned
Both actors got screwed by both companies. Yuri Lowenthal is 51 years, so making him young peter makes no sense. They should have used John bubniak for voice and model as he looks younger.
For lady actress, Its typical ubisoft downgrade. They did the same thing with watch dogs. e3 trailer was good. then the quality dipped badly when they released it.
Now doing side by side, the game version is hiding her big forehead
.
simpatico
Member
Ubi is going to really slide because of the discourse around Yasuke and this broad. The games look bad enough to be panned on their own merit, bonehead direction aside. Even if this was Han solo and even if Shadows had a Japanese lead, they would still look like absolute stale garbage. They're really not going to learn the lessons from these failures that they should.
laynelane
Member
Personally, I'd like to just see women represented as they are. They don't all have to be beautiful (beauty is subjective, as well), but changing the in-game characters away from the women they're modeled after or adjusting prominent features (like Dina's chest in TLOU2) - it all comes across as making the character less feminine. There's nothing wrong with femininity, though, and the use of women to make regressive points in games has become more and more noticeable. I don't financially support these games, but it's still disappointing to see this is an ongoing problem.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
My argument isn't about titillation. It's that people are attracted to attractive people and if given the choice would prefer to see attractive people in their entertainment media.
The comments about how Ubisoft took an attractive model and from that created a weirdly facially proportioned troll for their MC are directly in-line with that. And Outlaws isn't the first game to face such a criticism. People leveled the same complaint about Aloy and Sarah from Mass Effect Andromeda.
Western game devs just seem to insist on uglifying their female character models from the underlying actress. It's especially jarring because it doesn't happen for the male characters; implying that it's wholly intentional.
I never said it did either.
I say you're very wrong. But we can just agree to disagree on this.
Aloy is way less attractive than the model she's based on. But she's nothing close to ugly. They definitely masculinarized her in the second game, which made a lot of players who liked her in the first, dislike her in the second.
Kay is the only character we've seen beyond aliens. So, it's not really something that should come as a surprise to you that her weird face has been the focus of the discussion.
Last Hearth
Member
I'm actually getting this game for free as part of the Laptop I just bought, I have no interest in it and would give the redeem code away, but apparently GEForce experience has some mechanic where you can only redeem the code from the hardware that you purchased that came with the code. Anybody know a way around that?
Pegasus Actual
Member
Frodo! Don't trust it! It's gonna steal the ring Frodo!
Cyberpunkd
Member
If only one could point a common thing between Padme, OT Leia and Rey….
Also as others have mentioned it’s the same thing as Mass Effect Andromeda - the actress playing her is way prettier.
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Cyberpunkd
Member
Also this is why game journalism is rubbish - a good journalist would have pressed him by asking: “Ok, but the actress is very pretty. Why the difference?”.
Also the argument on “approachable” falls flat when we are talking about sci-fi IP with aliens and laser sticks. How is this approachable?
Also the argument on “approachable” falls flat when we are talking about sci-fi IP with aliens and laser sticks. How is this approachable?
Cyberpunkd
Member
It will sell well because it’s a SW game, there are not many of them after EA fucked up the licence. There is no need for him to virtue signal except feeling morally righteous.
PeteBull
Member
Question is- will it be launch window sales at 70$ or deeply discounted/used copies sales that barely move revenue stream?
And another question, since its licensed SW game aka big marketing budget and ubi forked some solid cash for licence- how many copies game gotta sell to be deamed profitable? Definitely at least 5m, maybe even 10m, anything above 10m i consider huge success, anything below 5m launch window i consider flop for this kind of ip/budget(including marketing budget).
We will wait and see if ubi gives us any sales info- 10m+ this year we know game made plenty cash, same thing if its 5m+ before holidays so w/o any discounts.
elbourreau
Member
Looks like a member of Queen.
I’d rather bed Freddie.
Now I will not be able to unsee it... ... ...
Woopah
Member
Sorry for the late reply!
Definitely happy to agree to disagree on some things.
I agree that people are attracted to attractive people but I don't remember anyone them caring it it this much before.
Guess I just don't see it as an important factor in gaming and think some people get too angry about it. I've played loads of great games where attractive women were not in it much or at all. Whether Outlaws has any attractive women in it or not is irrelevant.
Right, she's one of the only human characters we've seen and is the focus on her. Hence why I was saying the focus is on the playable character.
Dr. Wilkinson
Member
I think the point is that it really shouldn't matter if the main character is "attractive" or not. Attractive is subjective, anyway. So on it's face it's already a silly argument to begin with. But more to the point, whether you enjoy the game in the end or not will ultimately not have anything to do with the "attractiveness" of the main character. You either enjoy playing the game, or you don't.
I also have to point out that we never see discourse like this when it's a male protagonist.
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Dr. Wilkinson
Member
Well the issue is there are plenty more examples where it goes the other way, and no one seems to notice or care. Yet for this particular game, the female main character "must be superficially physically attractive" otherwise there is something wrong, is that the argument being made? Because like I said, there's plenty of games we've all played where the physical attractiveness of the protagonist does not matter at all, and it is not a hinderance. So in that case, the real question is, why does it matter in this specific case? Because it's a woman instead of a man? Woman protagonists must be attractive at all times, but men protagonists don't have to be? I've never heard that before it seems awfully silly to me, not to mention a clear double standard that people should probably just get over themselves about.
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kurisu_1974
Member
Because they used a pretty lady and then made an ugly lady out of it?
Killer8
Member
It's pretty simple: people want to play as characters who they are attracted to. I wouldn't even narrow that down to just physical attractiveness, it's just the most readily obvious one. Some may overlook a lack of physical attractiveness if the character's personality is appealing or if they are worth looking up to in some other way (see: the sexy women going out with the goofy looking funny guy trope).
An issue specifically with Outlaws is the questionable quality of the game. This is Ubislop, which few people are expecting to be well written. We'll probably be getting an annoying, Mary Sue girl boss. Nobody knows yet but it seems likely given recent trends (and because we've already seen her shrug off a thermal detonator explosion like it was nothing). Physical attractiveness does a lot of heavy lifting and with it removed from the equation, all that weight is now being transferred onto the shoulders of the character's writing and other traits. Most writing in media is not worth a damn any more so that's why we do often have to rely on superficiality like attractiveness to get things over the finish line of enjoyability. In movies back in the '70s Hollywood used to be able to get away with putting all sorts of mutants on screen because the films were actually decent (we just called them "character actors" back then).
There's a saying that we eat with our eyes first and that rings true when judging a character based off their looks. Until we get to the tasting, an ugly character gives an off-putting first impression. First impressions do matter a lot, and to pick an example which is actually explicitly aimed at women, there is the famous Fabio appearing on hundreds of romance novel covers:
That image is what gets women through the door. Then if the book's any good, they fall in love with the character due to the writing. And while women want to bone him, men also want to be him - so they can bone the women and swing a sword on top of a mountain. It's an example of how attractiveness can lead to widespread appeal.
As I said, physical attractiveness is not the be all and end all because there can be other character attributes to make up for it. But when the developer has the opportunity staring them right in the face to make the character very attractive - literally, in this case, when they have scans of the beautiful actress - going out their way to not secure such an easy slam dunk appeal to the masses is baffling. By appealing to the maximum amount of people via physical attraction, it means that even if the other traits like their personality fail to resonate, there is still something superficial to fall back on. It's a fail-safe. The girl boss pill is more easily swallowed if she at least looks good.
Why this issue has become such a big point of contention with both this game and Fable is also down to the demographics of the players. Most people who play these sorts of games continue to be straight men. Certain people won't want to admit that. A straight man will not be concerned with the sexual attractiveness of a male protagonist, because he isn't concerned with that aspect of the sex to begin with. He will be looking to other attributes to judge his worth as a character. I'm pretty sure most straight men don't want to bone Conan or Marcus Fenix but they still appeal a lot as heroic, masculine power fantasies (and I say that as a positive). A straight male player will care more about how hot a women is because that is what he's biologically destined to see as an important quality of that sex. When a man with a functioning sex drive sees a woman, where she sits on the boner binary is the first thought on his mind.
I'd also argue that attractiveness isn't nearly as subjective as it seems. The fact that 2 people can disagree on whether someone is attractive or not isn't proof of its subjectivity. To me it just shows that the person being judged maybe isn't actually so attractive as to get widespread recognition of that. If Kay Vess was attractive enough, we wouldn't be having this argument, in the way that we don't hear any widespread debate about whether or not Brad Pitt is attractive. You can always find outlier opinions but the exceptions just prove the rule.
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March Climber
Member
Dr. Wilkinson
It's not worth it. You're screaming into the void.
MagiusNecros
Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
Compare with
Padme
Leia
Mara Jade
Bastila Shan
Even Rey
Would rather play a Rodian at this point instead of Kay Vess.
sloppyjoe_gamer
Gold Member
Compare with
Padme
Leia
Mara Jade
Bastila Shan
Even Rey
Would rather play a Rodian at this point instead of Kay Vess.
How about Reva Skywalker? DLC character coming a few months after release
MagiusNecros
Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
I prefer Shin Hati thanks.
Sethbacca
Member
Remember when they put Fabio on the cover of a game and we ended up with this? Literally unplayable.....It's pretty simple: people want to play as characters who they are attracted to. I wouldn't even narrow that down to just physical attractiveness, it's just the most readily obvious one. Some may overlook a lack of physical attractiveness if the character's personality is appealing or if they are worth looking up to in some other way (see: the sexy women going out with the goofy looking funny guy trope).
An issue specifically with Outlaws is the questionable quality of the game. This is Ubislop, which few people are expecting to be well written. We'll probably be getting an annoying, Mary Sue girl boss. Nobody knows yet but it seems likely given recent trends (and because we've already seen her shrug off a thermal detonator explosion like it was nothing). Physical attractiveness does a lot of heavy lifting and with it removed from the equation, all that weight is now being transferred onto the shoulders of the character's writing and other traits. Most writing in media is not worth a damn any more so that's why we do often have to rely on superficiality like attractiveness to get things over the finish line of enjoyability. In movies back in the '70s Hollywood used to be able to get away with putting all sorts of mutants on screen because the films were actually decent (we just called them "character actors" back then).
There's a saying that we eat with our eyes first and that rings true when judging a character based off their looks. Until we get to the tasting, an ugly character gives an off-putting first impression. First impressions do matter a lot, and to pick an example which is actually explicitly aimed at women, there is the famous Fabio appearing on hundreds of romance novel covers:
That image is what gets women through the door. Then if the book's any good, they fall in love with the character due to the writing. And while women want to bone him, men also want to be him - so they can bone the women and swing a sword on top of a mountain. It's an example of how attractiveness can lead to widespread appeal.
As I said, physical attractiveness is not the be all and end all because there can be other character attributes to make up for it. But when the developer has the opportunity staring them right in the face to make the character very attractive - literally, in this case, when they have scans of the beautiful actress - going out their way to not secure such an easy slam dunk appeal to the masses is baffling. By appealing to the maximum amount of people via physical attraction, it means that even if the other traits like their personality fail to resonate, there is still something superficial to fall back on. It's a fail-safe. The girl boss pill is more easily swallowed if she at least looks good.
Why this issue has become such a big point of contention with both this game and Fable is also down to the demographics of the players. Most people who play these sorts of games continue to be straight men. Certain people won't want to admit that. A straight man will not be concerned with the sexual attractiveness of a male protagonist, because he isn't concerned with that aspect of the sex to begin with. He will be looking to other attributes to judge his worth as a character. I'm pretty sure most straight men don't want to bone Conan or Marcus Fenix but they still appeal a lot as heroic, masculine power fantasies (and I say that as a positive). A straight male player will care more about how hot a women is because that is what he's biologically destined to see as an important quality of that sex. When a man with a functioning sex drive sees a woman, where she sits on the boner binary is the first thought on his mind.
I'd also argue that attractiveness isn't nearly as subjective as it seems. The fact that 2 people can disagree on whether someone is attractive or not isn't proof of its subjectivity. To me it just shows that the person being judged maybe isn't actually so attractive as to get widespread recognition of that. If Kay Vess was attractive enough, we wouldn't be having this argument, in the way that we don't hear any widespread debate about whether or not Brad Pitt is attractive. You can always find outlier opinions but the exceptions just prove the rule.
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RoboFu
One of the green rats
One of the best nes games made?Remember when they put Fabio on the cover of a game and we ended up with this? Literally unplayable.....
Katajx
Member
I remember getting home with that, and was all wtf. This is nothing like that. I still bring this up to people every now and thenRemember when they put Fabio on the cover of a game and we ended up with this? Literally unplayable.....
Sethbacca
Member
It was a joke man. Take it as such.One of the best nes games made?
Compare with
Padme
Leia
Mara Jade
Bastila Shan
Even Rey
Would rather play a Rodian at this point instead of Kay Vess.
How you guys let a grifter like Grummz whip you up into this shitty frenzy is beyond me.