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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases

I don't know how anyone can believe this unless their primary source is Internet controversies, rather than playing video games.

Here are some popular games released by large American studios with attractive women: Cyberpunk, Street Fighter 6, and Overwatch 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider (et al), League of Legends (et al), Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, Alan Wake 2.

I'd buy the claim that there are more, less attractive women in modern western games than there were 10 years ago, but I don't know how you can claim the The Woke are preventing American corporations from making games with attractive women at all.

Could you show me a AAA game with more than 2 women where none of the women are attractive?

Perhaps the way I wrote my earlier comment lacked nuance, so I'll add it here. There more fanservicey female is basically extinct from western AAA games these days. At best, large Western studios are going for what could colloquially be described as "safe horny". Your example of Tomb Raider exemplifies this, as the original protagonist was pretty openly sexualized, while the later incarnation is perhaps conventionally attractive, but almost always fully clothed. A few games like WoW actively removed some of their sexualized elements, while I think basically anyone who plays games will notice they've generally become a lot less common than they once were. Some men don't like this type of titillation, while others (like me) enjoy it in doses, and some actively seek it out. No matter your opinion though, it's undeniable that there's a market for it, a market that is now almost exclusively served by non-Western studios with games like Xenoblade 2, Nier Automata, and others. "fanservicey female characters" is basically Stellar Blade's only claim to fame, yet it's looking like it's going to be a huge hit no matter the gameplay simply because of this. Of course the woke side of gaming threw a giant fit about it.

So Western games still have a fair share of non-sexualized but conventionally attractive females. But even on that side there are problems, as going for "realistic" women means subpar implementations end up looking like gremlins in ways unique to Western implementations. One example of a game where no women were attractive was Mass Effect Andromeda, as even though the female protagonist was based off a pretty good looking woman, the end result looked like she had crippling autism since they didn't get the animations right. Another example is basically any game involving Debra Wilson. She seems like a perfectly nice individual, but she's pretty plain to start with, and she ends up looking like a total gremlin in the games she does mocap work for.

I play a lot of Warhammer: Darktide, and it's a running joke in the playerbase that it's impossible to make an attractive female avatar.

I think that's more of a deliberate setting choice rather than being downstream of politics; it makes sense in-universe that the rejects would be ugly and it's not like the male characters you can create are any better looking. Everybody in that game is ugly.

Cyberpunk comes from Poland. Street Fighter 6 comes from Japan.

Thanks. For some reason I thought Microsoft owned Capcom

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