Wait, she's supposedly "ugly?" Yeah, that's definitely an odd take by some gamers. I would prefer to say she's a more realistic depiction of a female character. I really don't get people sometimes. I'd suggest they look themselves in the mirror.
What are your gaming pet peeves?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
You guys should be part of the Horizon fandom. We get posters on the horizon, and Horizon Forbidden West reddit complaining about Aloy being ugly and not a busty model with boob armor and such. Not often but enough and people have this expectation that she should be some model like woman despite the post apocalyptic setting of a world where humanity was wiped out and had to start over.
I keep seeing the use of one bad screenshot from a pre-release demo where she looks alittle weird. They're obsessed with that one picture.
I honestly don't understand why every girl in a game needs to be a supermodel. It can be alittle weird where some devs seem to be actually be making female characters particularly unattractive, but it's certainly not a deal breaker for me. Although things like the character creation for the new Dragon Age is alittle overboard, where you can make your female character obese with top surgery scars... but you can't make them thin or large chested. Like, I don't even really care because I would make my standard human male fighter type but... if it's a custom character creator, let people... make the character they want. And maybe don't include top surgery scars in a medieval-style fantasy game...
Wow, and here I thought that the game was praised precisely for not going in that direction at the time of its release. I mean, I personally find it refreshing that female characters can look fairly normal now. Even the most recent Tomb Raider trilogy feels more grounded. I feel 'busty' is such 2000 era expectation.
Me neither, and that just sets unrealistic expectations, to be honest. I'm glad that there's been a shift away from that kind of thing in game design, for the most part. Though it seems now it's mostly coming from the East these days. I'm personally way past the prepubescent stage of my life... heh.
I'm firmly in the camp of I don't really care either way. I'm totally fine with video game women being like, normal looking or super hot. It's generally irrelevant to me. My only mild complaint would be when it kind of goes to extremes... with some eastern games featuring only scantily clad impossible body models, and western games featuring nothing but Soviet Babushuka's.
I ALSO generally don't like double standards, so my only gripe on the western side of games is that while it's great we can feature like, normal-looking women... when do men get that treatment? It seems like for every Aloy there's a Marcus Fenix.
All games should just be Oblivion, where everyone looks like a potato.
Things aren't really that black and white.
Some people praised the game for making Aloy aggressively average looking. Some people complained about it.
I'm generally a middle of the road kind of guy and I won't say either viewpoint is "correct". People can like what they like, and not like what they don't like.
It happens sometimes. Think Gordon Freeman, or pretty much any GTA protagonist.
It depends on where you look and what type of games. If you're playing a fantasy rpg, chances are it's going to make them look more outlandlandish and exaggerated, such as Cloud. For the most part, I feel like males have been on the more normal side of things since the beginning. One of my first gaming experiences was with the Police Quest series, which as about as normal as you could get. Man, I wish we could get something new in that series.
Fellow Canadian spotted?!Game prices gone wild! I was just browsing the Playstation store, noticed The Crew Motorfest was on sale. The ultimate edition is $135 Canadian.Sorry, I know developers need to make money, but that just feels like way too much. It's disgusting. So, in relation to this thread, I'd say inflated game prices. I know some studios have said game prices would be going up, but this is frankly insane.
Yep, damn it, I thought I could hide out... 
So, not so much a peeve, but more of an observation that I discussed with some friends one night. It seems that while graphics have advanced quite a lot over the years, AI when it comes to games has not. AI is still quite terrible at times, which is surprising given the recent developments in AI in general in the last several years. And I wonder why that is. Of course, AI in games is mostly a series of scripts and subroutines rather than a true "AI" in that sense, but I'm trying to imagine a game using AI that can learn and adapt to its mistakes on the fly and actually get better. All too often, I think all of us have encountered AI just standing there waiting to be killed. What I think has been happening is that because graphics and AI are both demanding, the AI has often taken a backseat to always demanding graphical showcases, and I think that's my peeve. Would like to see better AI.
Last time I saw a game AI that truly impressed me was in Alien: Isolation.
Game prices gone wild! I was just browsing the Playstation store, noticed The Crew Motorfest was on sale. The ultimate edition is $135 Canadian.
That's crazy! I waited to get Tears of the Kingdom on sale. $74 was pushing it. Got it around $59.
It doesn't help that games via the Playstation Store hardly ever get deep cuts, so while a game might get a 20% or 30%, with those prices, it hardly feels like a drop in the bucket when it comes to sales. Rather they feel like throwback prices. Just for fun, I'm looking at Rider's Republic right now, the followup to Steep. Regular edition is priced at $50 CND, which is kind of reasonable. But if I want to go all in with the complete edition? $130. It feels like there's no middle ground anymore, and certain markets will get reamed, all because the market demands higher prices.
Back in the 90's, I bought myself one of my first pieces of software. It was animation software and it was $70 CND. I thought it was expensive back then and still is fairly expensive, but about a decade later $60-$70 became the standard pricing range for software, until recently where it rose to $80-$90 CND. To Americans complaining about game prices, don't worry, it can get worse...
What really turns me off an MMO, is when they don't have enough content to fully level your character in the campaign and forces you to grind out levels because mission 5 went from lvl 15 to mission 6 is lvl 20. Defiance 2050 did this when you got to San Francisco and The Last Descendants just did this in their second area.
That's where they'll typically introduce microtransactions. Make it a grindfest and hope people will get annoyed enough to want to spend actual money to get an exp buff. If they're F2P MMOs, that would be typical behavior.
When you're trapped in an animation sequence. For example, Halo multiplayer. Instead of shooting a guy you do a stealth move and stab from behind. But that creates a short animation sequence you can't get out of. So you're a sitting a duck for that brief period of time.
Regarding remasters and ports, and their high prices. It used to be remasters and ports would fall into the realm of the bargain bin, and bargain titles would fall into the range of $30-40 USD for a title. The price of the PC version of the original Red Dead Redemption was revealed today, listed at $50 USD, and it's something I feel should be considered a bargain title given its age even if it's the first time it appears on PC. But at that price, it's $70CND, only $10 less than I paid upon release of the sequel in 2018. Game prices are out of control.
There are several pictures of Humberly Gonzales in other angles than the one you're talking about, it certainly was a deliberate attempt to unbeautify her.
Cuz they are selling a fantasy. Fantasy that people pay a lot of money to dwelve into so they can forget about reality for a few hours.
That's why Black Myth Wukong sold like gangbusters and Concord got shutdown after just a week.
And there are other casualties as well:
Mortal Kombat 1's Next DLC Wave Reportedly Cancelled
A longtime Mortal Kombat 1 leaker claims that future DLC was cancelled due to Khaos Reigns selling poorly.
www.thegamer.com
"Sex sells" is a mantra that this generation of marketing execs are forgetting.
There is more of a market for media with conventionally attractive characters than with unconventional ones.
I played the game and... I really don't see it. They just gave her a kind of anachronistic hairdo, which tracks for Star Wars.
I'm not sure "that's why" is quite as simple as that. Wukong did do very well... although that was in large part due to it selling like crazy in China...
But in the grand scheme there is definitely a backlash against the whole "modern audience" thing, and rightfully so. It makes no sense to be trying to produce media that appeals to like... what, 5% of the population? And also sort of turns off a good number of others?
I'm sort of middle of the road here in that I don't really care if women in games aren't all portrayed as super models for some reason, but the gross overrepresentation of LGBT and identity politics in games is absolutely having a negative effect. It's ok to make games like that, whatever, but people also shouldn't be shamed if they just aren't interested in that.
I get the point on both ends of the spectrum. Sex does sell, it's marketing 101. But it does tend to sell to a particular demographic. If a company is trying to break into and expand to other demographics, it doesn't always work the same.
BUT... that being said, it's pretty clear that the demographic these games are trying to appeal to isn't large enough to sustain the media, and by marketing to that demographic, they're actively turning away their much larger demographic. It's just bad business, and it's somewhat shocking it persists. I do blame alot of it on the DEI-craze, it put alot of people who are not qualified into positions and we're really starting to see the failure of that now.
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