Female Characters

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Korban3
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Female Characters

Post by Korban3 » Fri Jun 10, 2011 10:46 pm

I was trolling around on the Blog...
Troll-lolol Tralala.
And found the article about Wolfire's stand on female characters in Overgrowth. I was all...
Read, Read, Read.
And posted this:

" I think that the breasts suggestion really is good. It gets the idea across because of our familiarity with the connotation. Seen any guys with mammary glands recently? But not too big, I'm all for no hypersexualization, I hate it when games have that. I think a great character to look at in reference is Alyx Vance. She's an obviously feminine chacater, even if you mute the sound. She's made feminine without sexuality to convey it. It's a prime example of what you want, I think."

I noticed that the article was recieving comments rather slowly since it's so old by now, and that I'd like to open up the discussion here, in case anyone wants to submit an opinion.
I actually forgot about them mentioning Alyx Vance in the article when I mentioned Alyx Vance in my comment, oops. But the issue of breasts, or no breasts popped up a couple of times in the comments, so I put in my bit.
I agree that hypersexualization is annoying, but I think that breasts would provide an easy medium to deliver the message of "Hey, this is a chick." so that players have a chance to figure out the culture of each race to decode dress into gender. I also think that it will add a little maturity to the game. I mean, it's got blood, ninja ass kicking (pardon my French), and the like, and I think that non-kiddied characters just add to the feel.
Everyone's got an opinion. Share them here:
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Parlock
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Parlock » Sat Jun 11, 2011 7:04 am

You would also need to change the animations, as females move differently to males such as more hip movement, the legs are move in line etc. I don't think the results would be worth the effort.

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Endoperez
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Endoperez » Sat Jun 11, 2011 9:57 am

Parlock wrote:You would also need to change the animations, as females move differently to males such as more hip movement, the legs are move in line etc. I don't think the results would be worth the effort.
You could change those animations, and they would make the illusion work better, but it isn't necessary. If they do want to change animations, they can just change one or two of them. For example, giving the female characters their own idle pose would already help a lot. A custom walk animation could also help, but run and fighting animations could probably be as-is. You'll only notice the different in slow-motion, any way, and slo-mo will probably be quite rare in the finished game.

versol
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Re: Female Characters

Post by versol » Sun Jun 12, 2011 12:46 am

I don't think humanoid breasts are truly necessary to portray the female character in this particular instance. There are many other ways to denote gender without them. Prime example, and one I applaud, is the Guild Wars 2 female Charr, and this interesting blog explaining the design decision to give them felinesque mammary. It might be easier on the developer to follow a similar path, to save some time with modelling clothing/weighting to accommodate, though kudos to the weight painters who actually enjoy it. ;)

A female character that's more beast than man. Sounds good to me. :)

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Xorath
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Xorath » Sun Jun 12, 2011 12:07 pm

My only question is... who are they going to get to mo-cap the female movements? Do Dave or Jeff know someone that would be willing to help out?

Outside of that, gender differentiation would be a nice thing to see. I can easily see the Cats having a Queen or something, and getting your butt handed to you by a female character would be amusing.
Should there be any differences in combat or movement? Females have a lower center of gravity, so the physics would differ slightly, and males generally hit harder but aren't as agile.

As with any other aspect of the game, there's a lot of details that the team could pay attention to. It's all a matter of if they want gender to affect the game aesthetically or mechanically, and how much effort they want to put into it. When all of that is taken into account, I would personally like to see the option to play a female character no matter how light or heavy the changes are. It adds variety to the game, and helps provide options for female players.

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Endoperez
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Endoperez » Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:07 pm

Xorath wrote:My only question is... who are they going to get to mo-cap the female movements? Do Dave or Jeff know someone that would be willing to help out?

1) There are free mocap libraries available.
2) They can animate things by hand. I think at least some animations are done like that, possibly a majority of them.

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Korban3
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Korban3 » Sun Jun 12, 2011 8:46 pm

I think that a couple of animations would need a change, but only a small number. The combat wouldn't really need a change, just the walk and idle, as stated before. I was thinking more of the aeshetic changes, but there might be just a few mechanics ones too. Many animal species have little differentiation in movement between male and female genders. It's mostly behaviour. Females tend to be more defensive and plain vicious, especially when they've offspring to raise; it's mostly in humans (and presumably humanoids) that we see the movement changes because of the upright stance. I just thought that a few facial structure changes, mostly texture functions, and a little anatomy changes would be necesarry. I don't even imagine that there would be a huge difference in strength between the two genders because of the anthropomorphic nature of the characters, althought maybe some agility difference, but there are men who have the build and agility usually attributed to females too, and vice versa.

LookforAI
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Re: Female Characters

Post by LookforAI » Wed Jun 15, 2011 2:49 pm

Female character? Looking for the vivid blood spilt from female? Oh, my... Moreover, how do you know that the current characters are male?

Please DO NOT waste time to build female bodies, make female voice, and female animation. Including female is just mortal and plain idea. This can not make the game more competitive, specialized, and distinct from many games in the current market, but instead, the words such as "sick", "perverted", "fetish", "SM" must be added to the future comments of this game.

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Xorath
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Xorath » Wed Jun 15, 2011 3:53 pm

LookforAI wrote:Female character? Looking for the vivid blood spilt from female? Oh, my... Moreover, how do you know that the current characters are male?

Please DO NOT waste time to build female bodies, make female voice, and female animation. Including female is just mortal and plain idea. This can not make the game more competitive, specialized, and distinct from many games in the current market, but instead, the words such as "sick", "perverted", "fetish", "SM" must be added to the future comments of this game.
Much like a FOX 'News' program, I find your post rude, condescending, and biased. If you're going to make a point, try to be more polite about it.

I doubt that the team is going to divert all of their resources into rendering boobs and making female animations. Even if they did, that would be their choice. The simple choice of having a character model that is obviously male, or obviously female has nothing to do with being sick, perverted, or having some sort of S&M fetish. Most of the community is more mature than that.

I wonder at times if having the community involved is a good thing. Would Halo fans have argued with the option to choose a female Spartan? Heck, maybe it would be just as easy to differentiate between gender in Overgrowth.
Lugaru didn't show the differences, and I had a hard time keeping male and female characters apart. You had to go by dialogue. If nothing else, it would help me keep track of who's who.

LookforAI
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Re: Female Characters

Post by LookforAI » Wed Jun 15, 2011 4:16 pm

Xorath wrote:
LookforAI wrote:Female character? Looking for the vivid blood spilt from female? Oh, my... Moreover, how do you know that the current characters are male?

Please DO NOT waste time to build female bodies, make female voice, and female animation. Including female is just mortal and plain idea. This can not make the game more competitive, specialized, and distinct from many games in the current market, but instead, the words such as "sick", "perverted", "fetish", "SM" must be added to the future comments of this game.
Much like a FOX 'News' program, I find your post rude, condescending, and biased. If you're going to make a point, try to be more polite about it.

I doubt that the team is going to divert all of their resources into rendering boobs and making female animations. Even if they did, that would be their choice. The simple choice of having a character model that is obviously male, or obviously female has nothing to do with being sick, perverted, or having some sort of S&M fetish. Most of the community is more mature than that.

I wonder at times if having the community involved is a good thing. Would Halo fans have argued with the option to choose a female Spartan? Heck, maybe it would be just as easy to differentiate between gender in Overgrowth.
Lugaru didn't show the differences, and I had a hard time keeping male and female characters apart. You had to go by dialogue. If nothing else, it would help me keep track of who's who.
It may NOT be proper to add female characters in such intensive fighting game, which involved violence, maltreat, abusement, torture in high degree, and also with large chunks of purely red blood.

Even someones suggest to add the feature "Dismemberment" in this game. There will certainly be lots of players try to dismember the female body and post their game videos on the Youtube!

So whether adding female characters should depend on the type of game. For example, if adding female characters to the game "Super Mario", then it is perfectly fine. However, adding female to a game involving murder, blood splashing, assassination, and torment may ruin the game, and have people doubt the real purpose of the game.

P.S. Nowadays some people do not call "Tomb Raider" as a game, but instead, a porn!

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Korban3
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Korban3 » Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:01 pm

It may NOT be proper to add female characters in such intensive fighting game, which involved violence, maltreat, abusement, torture in high degree, and also with large chunks of purely red blood.

Even someones suggest to add the feature "Dismemberment" in this game. There will certainly be lots of players try to dismember the female body and post their game videos on the Youtube!

So whether adding female characters should depend on the type of game. For example, if adding female characters to the game "Super Mario", then it is perfectly fine. However, adding female to a game involving murder, blood splashing, assassination, and torment may ruin the game, and have people doubt the real purpose of the game.

P.S. Nowadays some people do not call "Tomb Raider" as a game, but instead, a porn!
That's sex discrimination. Women and men are equals as humans (and rabbits). And yes, dismemberment would be awesome, but that's for another forum thread. I think that it's people who say that females have no place in violent games are the ones who tend to push girls from playing these games. I know there are females who play violent games, but this sort of thing ushes them away, I think. Keep in mind that my first post, which II'm getting the vibe, you didn't read said that I'm totally AGAINST hypersexualizing female characters in games. I hate it: it's annoying and demeaning, and DOES cheapen the whole thing. Besides, in the original Wolfire Blog post, they said that they were already going to add females, so that's that. They were just considering how to differentiate between genders.
And calling Tomb Raider porn is ridiculous. She may be smokin' hot, but I'm gonna lay down the law here:
-When you push buttons, does Lara do stuff?
-Are there enemies and objects to interact with?
-Is it video in the output format, at last partially?
If you could answer yes to these questions then I'm sure its a video game.
I'm not usually rude, but your being close minded and stereotypical. Women don't ordinarily run lives like they did 700 years ago in my country anymore. They can get jobs, own property, vote, and CAN aspire and train for a job in infantry in the US military. And this is a game, so I don't see anything wrong with women seeing the a violent game with female chracters.

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Korban3
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Re: Female Characters

Post by Korban3 » Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:04 pm

I'd like to stress, for those who haven't read the original blog post, that female characters ARE going to be in Overgrowth. Already decided; no arguing that topic. This thread is about how they should be depicted. I'd really appreciate it if people read the original post, which is right here:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/female- ... vergrowth/
It's pretty interesting, so read it before saying something ridiculous.

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kehaar
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Re: Female Characters

Post by kehaar » Wed Jun 15, 2011 8:13 pm

So, LookforAI, are you saying that women/female characters have no place in a fighting game?? That they should not fight, but maybe just remain victims whose death will motivate the male hero to greater heroics?

Do you hate it in Fallout3, Mass Effect and numerous others when your character is viciously attacked by female npc's and you have to kill them to survive? Do you never play a game as a female character when there's an option? Did you hate Alyx Vance kicking so much ass in Halflife2? Couldn't stand to see Veronica punch your enemies into the dusty ground in New Vegas?

Or do you just object to the ridiculous outfits they put Lara Croft into? (they are pretty stupid and pander to the teenage boys, you won't get any arguments against that)

Women fight all over the world and have done so throughout history, so why not in games?

And lastly, what kind of a society would the world of Overgrowth be without any females? All guys?
What story would you tell?

LookforAI
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Re: Female Characters

Post by LookforAI » Wed Jun 15, 2011 8:31 pm

The Overgrowth will be much more violent than Tomb Raider.

IGN made this:


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kehaar
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Re: Female Characters

Post by kehaar » Wed Jun 15, 2011 9:22 pm

I don't get it.

Are you saying that getting shot with a .45 bullet (or whatever her guns are supposed to be) is less violent?
How do you figure that?

Do you just mean the blood splatter effects?

...and yes, Tomb Raider is juvenile and stupid, but by the blog post, do you still think Wolfire is going to make Overgrowth like that?

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