Why A Lot Of RPGs Irritate Me

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I was thinking of the best way to put this for a while, when the perfect phrase popped into my head:
"Why is it about 80% of female characters in an RPG have to look like they work in a Renaissance strip club?".
This has pretty much always aggravated me, since it feels that they're trying to draw you in with scantily-clad warrioresses (uh...) rather than the promise of a decent storyline, and it always tends to ruin the immersion for me.
Now I know that not all RPGs are like this , and I'm also aware that this occurs in pretty much any genre you'd care to mention (Dead Or Alive, anyone?) but it just bugs me especially when they do it games that are supposed to be about total immersion.
To quote Wes Lewis commenting on the NWN main campaign, "Sorry, but elven paladins just don't work for me. especially when their armour stops just above nipple height. I guess Tyr's enemies are really short."

 

Can you understand the concept of putting a beautiful female model and a nice red sport car together? A female, a car, they put them together. A car and then a girl and they put them together on shows, how does the first person who did this connect the dots between car and girls?

(i think it was the guy call watson who first did this and he was also responsible for the behaviourism school of psychology)

Seemingly unconnected stuff put together the the crowds like it, it sells and no one cares. A business is not charity.

 

The biggest problem with the armour is lack of realism, I think. A fighter could be slutty, but a paladin? Come on. Elves may be frivolous but they are rarely slutty... At least in the woody woody environment. Perhaps an arrogant and haughty elven fighter could wear something like that for show off value... But let's not forget that you can't have a full AC armour with vital parts uncovered. What Aribeth has uncovered is a perfect place to put a blade into. Especially from above (think of a mounted enemy or someone jumping on a table, or tall and wielding a short blade, that kind of stuff). Aribeth wasn't so extremely wrong, but the Valsharess... Except the drow are probably like that.

Next thing is different standards for the nameless critter NPCs and the named NPCs, especially the joinable ones or major nemeses. Male characters don't really seem to follow the same patterns. Okay, you may hear a sexy voice and see the kind of grooming women like on men (think Anomen's beard, Carth's hair etc), maybe some muscle here and there, but not too much. Not many bare chests, belly buttons, tightly wrapped pelvic sectors etc.

The bad thing about it is that it's gratuitous and helps the sales by letting young boys with problems get off a bit, realism not being a concern.

 

Pardon me CHev, but the paper dolls in BG2? I'm sick of my male paladin having half of his chest hanging out, and wearing short-shorts. Admittedly the paper doll isn't to the same level as Aribeth's cleavage, but still.

Another point- CRPGS- purchased by? Geeks (like my good self), teenagers (comme moi) and gamers (again, like me)

To further explain. While playing the simple NWN, it was pointed out to me that if I zoom on Aribeth, and tilt the camera, like so, look! See those pointy pixels on the front of her chest? Nipples!

Thus, I smack my roommate often.

To re-cap therefore, the reason this happens is to encourage Mr Gamer (or frequently, young Master Gamer) to split with his cash in order to indulge his baser instincts, involving and revolving round killing and leering.

I personally don't mind, but as I have said, teenager.

 

Another thing is you don't want to wear metal armour on bare flesh. Not even leather, actually. You need some protective cloth between it and your body. If only for weather-related reasons, not to mention all the rubbing. You don't want frozen or heated metal on your skin, let alone anywhere close to a nipple or something equally sensitive.

And yeah, I have a problem with appealing to the sex drive of underaged people like that. It's better than having them peek at their classmates or something but I don't like the idea.

As for Aribeth, you can actually see her nipples on the armour. Not sure if that's what you meant or if you meant some kind of peeking out.

 

You can?

*Dust cloud*

Hmmm. I see what you mean about not appealing to underage people, and I don't want to re-open a debate here, but the fact is that teenagers will find it. You can put sex in a box, duct-tape it and hide it in youir closet, but when you come home your teenage son will have found it.

ANd probably be locked in his room.

Besides, I'm sre there are plenty of geeky developpers too (I'm saying 'I'm sure there are' to avoid offence. I know), and they would ( I suppose) make what they want to see also.

Finally, it's pixellated. Yes, there are breasts, but breasts in a bad resolution. Nothing to really get worked up about (positively or negatively).
Now excuse me while I go to play Tomb Raider again

 

Personally, I find this whole argument about realism to be somewhat annoying. There's nothing realistic about dragons and such (though I have spent nights working out how to create certain breath weapon effects within biological beings; a black or copper dragon's acid being by far the easiest), so why should we attempt to apply realism to cRPGs?

On the other side, I am also annoyed at going overboard with the stuff. BG1's human female warrior paper doll, for example, wears only a one-piece swimsuit when un-armored. On first glance it's kind of nice for someone who still has all their hormones ( @ chev), but after a couple times it just gets insulting.

Regarding holes in armor: What warrior worth their salt hasn't ever feinted an opening to draw in their opponent? This is admittedly taking it to a ridiculous extreme, but in such a ridiculous setting it serves well enough as an excuse. One could even tailor their fighting style to their armor's weak points (as if they wouldn't do that anyway with full armor too) so as to make the most obvious weakness in actuality their most well-defended area.
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Not to mention the distraction factor on combat...

 

Well then 'realisim' is the wrong term. How about 'logic'? In a fantasy world with goblins, orcs and other nasties around every corner you're not going to spend a heap of money getting custom made armor that is uncomfortable and damn useless from high angled strikes.

Feign an opening? Yeah, you're going to have the agility and speed to react fast enough when you're wearing at least 50kg of battle gear. Full plate is designed for blow vs. blow, not ducking and weaving fancy nancy stuff.

 

Sex sells. It sells cars, movies, sneakers, beer, you name it, it has been successfully sold with sex(sex appeal). Why should CRPGs be any different. If you want RL, don't play games, go to work/class/play practice/whatever ties up your time. I personally like to get away from reality, and that is why I play CRPGs.

 

Same ****. You're trying to compare fantasy with reality; I don't know why you're surprised it doesn't mesh perfectly. Of course it doesn't make sense, but what does? You can wave your hands and chant something to send a bolt of light at someone, which kills them? And you're griping about the armor?!?

Actually, I found a very convenient compromise for this with magical armor. All the magic (plusses) in the armor could be concentrated at the weak points, forming a sort of force barrier. For non-magical armor, I just assume that they were too lazy to make another more "logical" avatar and paperdoll, but they really do cover all despite not looking that way. Something to consider...

Actually, I can. I'm not extremely strong, but I'm strong enough (STR 14 based on max press numbers), and I move like you wouldn't believe, even in the heaviest armor I could find. For that matter, do you really expect anyone to regularly carry around 300 lbs. worth of stuff, day and night, without complaining in the slightest? Well, Minsc does, and he's not even the best of them; 18/00 or even 19 STR isn't that hard to get in/by BG2.

 

Fel, a Full Plate weights about 30-40 lbs (so claims every modern weapon/armor smith, there are more of these guys around then one would think), not that heavy, a knight could mount a horse in full armor or stand on his head (the armor was well designed to distribute weight in a "low fatigue" manner). You're right to the extent that your actual speed, your ability to "clear" an area isn't greatly hampered, but the way such armor is hinged, it greatly restricts the flexing. There's a reason that knights when on foot still opted for a single handed weapon, that shield was a necessity, for the limited ability to flex side to side and front to back, to to mention the limited extention of legs in a non-"running" position, made it very difficult to dodge or roll to avoid blows (not to mention the helmet massively restricted vision). That many knights wore a chainmail suite under the full plate only expounded the lateral mobility problem (specifically chainmail's poor weight distribution leading to early fatigue in battle)

The full plate was to stop arrows (as most longbows couldn't penetrate full plate at range) and deflect any blow that made it past the shield (and I use the word deflect as the armor is shaped in a way as to turn blows rather then absorb blows). Since in a melee battle there are multiple attackers coming from multiple directions, the full plate decides to opt for the sacrifice of lateral mobility for survivability.

Also since the full plate's restriction comes not from the weight, but form the joints, there is little benefit of dropping chunks of armor, unless you're dropping armor covering a joint. Aribeth's lack of armor on the upper torso is especially disavantageous as most knights (or warriors similarly trained to fight opponents in heavy armor) are looking to strike at the upper torso/neck, the traditional chink in a knight's armor (if the other knight is indeed looking to kill his rival knight, which wasn't too often, we don't want to thin the best of bloods after all). Pure speculation here, but I also doubt that most knights would leave their back exposed, you never know which peasant you forced into your army is willing to kill you (though is he has a crossbow, it doesn't really matter), now Neverwinter may not treat their lower class so poorly, but that doesn't rule of a traitor, the most important weapon in medieval seige warfare.

Anyway, I'm willing to go back to 2D, turn based RPGs, with God knows how bad of bitmapping like Exile or Realmz where I don't have to worry about armor inconsistancies, as your avatar looks the same regardless of his/her items and the avatar sprite is to blurry to ever be anything remotely near sexy.

 

I really don't buy the 'It's fantasy, therefore realism is bad!' argument.

Now, I don't worship realism in a game, however, from what I can gather the D&D world (and most other CRPG settings) is supposed to make logical sense. Yes, you can have dragons and elves and magic - but all this stuff is dealt with in a logical manner that can be mapped out.

Big holes in the armour for t3h sexiness makes no sense when put in context of the world. There are worlds where this could be done and, because that's how the logic of that world works, it could be done - but D&D fantasy games ... eh, it doesn't really work.

 

We all now that NWN was something adapted for the masses. If that makes it sell so be it. I like to look at a nice unclad girl like the next hetero guy, but in games it is a cover up. NWN is a good game that dit a lot of things right but also wrong. Aribeth was wrong i a sense of clothing and storyline. I am not going to debate her and NWN.

You can have sexy ladies in a rpg and still be realistic. Just not with armour. A wizard/fig(dex based)/AA does not have metal armor, yet is a good character. A female thief with some leather armour, ok. But a full fighter,.... stop being stupid!

Have you seen the gladiator armour in Guild wars? It is a plate bikini.

 

Someone should just make a porn RPG - it would sell like crazy (of course, you wouldn't be able to sell it in a lot of places - but there's always online distribution...)

 

@ Aikanaro: Been done before, mate. The Japs beat you to it a long time ago. They're called 'dating sims' where the idea is to seduce the pants of girls with big anime eyes, hair only on their head and wearing school uniforms... so it's not pants, it's skirts.

If game developers want to have a sexy female in a Forgotten Realms based game then they should stick to bards, rogues, dex based warriors, mages, druids and maybe clerics (of Sune?). But very few men like the whole Tom-Boy stronger than me type of girl, frankly I wouldn't date a girl that can lift more than I can let alone fantasise about one.

 

after reading the post, i loaded my NWN and took a few screenshots,

Ari1
Ari2
These are Aribeth from zoom in tilted angle. In Ari2, she is off the screen only showing her ... breasts.

nurse
This is the nurse besides Aribeth, off screen too.

i would say the "nippling part" is not intentional per se. It was because of the modeling and the texture of relative low polygons that caused these. When modeling female with polygons, it is natural to ... put two breasts and it is naturally these breasts polygons have pointy tips. I would say, there are just pointy tips instead of nipples.

But that Aribeth still has half her skin exposed while wearing metal armour.

 

I just feel insulted that the developers seem to want to infuse their game with partial nudity in order to draw in the "horny teenage nerd" demographic.
In the end, RPGs (well, most of them-don't talk to me about Japan) aren't about cleavage on that rogue over there, they're about killing the crap out of stuff with your huge, totally-compensating-for-your-inadaquacy sword.
Well, at least that's as far as I've read into it.

 

Never mind the realism or the logic - I personally still find this constant pseudo-eoticism in CRPGs to be quite annoying. It's not as if it is erotic in any way (not at the level of detail you see in BG, for sure), it's just distracting when you see that and think, "oh, yet another game aimed at male teenagers".

I'm not that annoyed by it, really, but I can understand why many women gamers would be quite annoyed with it themselves. Full plate is full plate, no matter the gender. There's no reason for the same suit of full plate to look just like it should on a male, and look like a swimming suit on a female avatar (HoW anyone?). It's simply ridiculous.

@Aikanaro & Abomination
Never mind the dating sims, there are actual fantasy CRPGs with porn galore in them. Ever heard of Knights of Xenthar (or Dragon Knight 3 - I think it's the same game)? It's a Japanese CRPG with a quasi-Zelda interface, and with enough nudity to make even Chev run away
I'm not sure if it sold well worlwide, but it was a big hit in Japan at the time (1993ish).

 

Believe me, as much as I argue for letting them do what they want, I'm a little insulted by it too. I just don't think it's a big enough deal to let it ruin your gaming experience. You have to find a way to ignore these little quirks.

 

If you check out the mod hosting sites for NWN and other RPGs you find some of the most popular downloads are things like the "jiggly breast" mod for Aribeth and "realistic" nude bodies for Morrowind.

We're talking hundreds of thousands of downloads versus a few hundred for a nicely done mod that adds a new sword to the game or something. You think game designers don't notice that stuff? Ah well, I was 14 once so I suppose I understand.