this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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The entire industry has overcompensated for sexualisation by removing ALL femininity from games and it fucking sucks. It's relatively nice that feminists have successfully influenced large parts of the industry but they went much too far the other way.
Yeah. BG3 was better but not by much. (Why can't I wear the pointy sleeved medieval dress the pregant lady in the hag den has?! No it isn't practical, but I'm a bard so that ship has sailed. I want to ride sidesaddle on a white horse playing the Ballad of Enemy Explodes while my companions roll their eyes at me!)
I don't think it's the fault of feminism more than a lot of male designers having no clue about what femininity in design even is beyond "makes me horny".
Starfield though seems to really commit to the "no pretty things ever" bit. Do they not realise that if ordinary people go to space there will be lace on spacesuits before the week is out?
Yes don't get me wrong here. I am not blaming feminism for the problem. I am blaming developers for overcompensating and out of fear they're just removing everything that could be considered high levels of femininity from games entirely.
I'm on the side of the fence that actually doesn't care about sexualisation if you do it right either. If you're going to do sexualisation to women and do it in equal amounts to the male characters I am completely fine with it. The japanese developers seem to get this right in some games, although they tend to have different cultural problems.
New World committed to this too and I hated it.
Sequens and sticker bling jewels.
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I think one of the bigger issues with their fear of this content is that they're also completely averse to having anything about it in their games too. Questline with a staff team on a remote facility where the women are treated as a lower stratum? They wouldn't make this because they're afraid of it. Questline involving space sexworkers? Which would ONE HUNDRED PERCENT be a major issue in most of the cities present in these games? They're afraid of it.
The worldbuilding that they are doing suffers because they are ideologically afraid of approaching it properly. They end up with bland worlds because they're afraid of touching anything that might have an edge, anything that might upset certain groups of people, what they're creating ends up being like unseasoned food. Sure it's edible but it's lacking a lot of human elements created by the problems and contradictions of societies. They don't want to include "marginalised" topics, whether it's women or race or lgbt, all those topics are white washed away and don't exist in futureverse, it would be almost utopian if it weren't also full of pirates and megacorps waging private warfare, but at the same time even the evils of the megacorps don't really feel real because the FIRST thing corporations would do is find marginalised people they can hyper-exploit.
Caveat: I have not played enough quests to guarantee that none of this is in the game yet. But it is my impression so far.
The space suits are so dull! No decals, no graffiti, no color. Uft.