Dood, I'd LOVE to play as a transgendered Labrador Retriever with a top hat and Doc Martins! But could I choose MTF/FTM or is my customization limited to what the developer allows...?mojodamm said:
Brink : No Girls Allowed
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I guess I'm not that concerned here. I mean, it's an FPS, right? I'll never see my own character.
If it was a third-person shooter, I'd be annoyed.
If it was a third-person shooter, I'd be annoyed.
Okay, time for me to take a stab at this issue...
While I can see where some of you are coming from, you really need to take your heads out of your buckets and take into consideration that when the devs said it's to make one, deep customizaiton system, they really meant it.
As others have stated, their workload would instantly be doubled for this. Some have brought up RPGs as counter-points, but I don't see any of them having a movement(and thus animation) system as complex as Brinks. Take into account that for all of this to work on males, they had to make according meshes that were weighted to their skeletons well enough so that they'd not animate weirdly during all those neat tricks you perform via SMART.
First is that you have to apply this to -every- piece of equipment that doesn't match vertex-by-vertex. Considering the sheer ludicrous amount of choice you get in Brink, I'd say doubling this workload would be crazy. Secondly, you can't forget everything else that ties in with this. What made SMART and the characters' motions' relation/insertion/creation process a long headache is that since you get to play against A.I in non-MP modes, they had to make sure the A.I is capable of using SMART: not necessarily a problem in terms of separate skeletons, but it's just very time consuming. Look at how long it took STALKER to be developed partly because of the A.Is complexity.
I'm sure you can see where everything starts to tie in together and how it becomes apparent that indeed, time constraints are a very, very severe issue. I've seen people bring up the comparison to "but game x used the same skeleton for both genders/it wasn't a problem"...to you, I present, first, this image of Femshep sitting(ignore the motivational text, best shot I could find in a hurry):
See the issue there? Even if not all females have the decency/care to not spread their legs while sitting idly, it still looks awkward in a general perspective. And while yeah, that's only for one sequence in ME2, it sticks out. People have made threads on BioWare forums asking for them to make sure the female animations in ME3 are of better quality. Now consider that due to biological differences, females and males don't look the same when they perform complex acrobatics...if Splash Damage stuck to one skeleton and called it a day...well. It'd just look goofy, and I'm DAMN sure people would whine incessantly about how the devs were lazy with the animations even IF say the female characters were as insanely customizable as males.
And again - it would double their workload, which I admit would not be as big of an issue if the SMART system didn't call for -so many complex, accurate animations and calculations clientside-. The mass of work going into Brinks already solid framework was, logically, willy shriveling in breadth.
I hope I got my point across on why time constraints would've made an equally badass customization system creation and polishing process a complete mess(not to mention the end result would've been sloppy).
FYI, I do make 3d models and dabble with animating them. While I'm no pro(not even mediocre), it's still pretty obvious how difficult it is to make just a handful of different designs look good and animate well on a scale as big as Brinks.
While I can see where some of you are coming from, you really need to take your heads out of your buckets and take into consideration that when the devs said it's to make one, deep customizaiton system, they really meant it.
As others have stated, their workload would instantly be doubled for this. Some have brought up RPGs as counter-points, but I don't see any of them having a movement(and thus animation) system as complex as Brinks. Take into account that for all of this to work on males, they had to make according meshes that were weighted to their skeletons well enough so that they'd not animate weirdly during all those neat tricks you perform via SMART.
First is that you have to apply this to -every- piece of equipment that doesn't match vertex-by-vertex. Considering the sheer ludicrous amount of choice you get in Brink, I'd say doubling this workload would be crazy. Secondly, you can't forget everything else that ties in with this. What made SMART and the characters' motions' relation/insertion/creation process a long headache is that since you get to play against A.I in non-MP modes, they had to make sure the A.I is capable of using SMART: not necessarily a problem in terms of separate skeletons, but it's just very time consuming. Look at how long it took STALKER to be developed partly because of the A.Is complexity.
I'm sure you can see where everything starts to tie in together and how it becomes apparent that indeed, time constraints are a very, very severe issue. I've seen people bring up the comparison to "but game x used the same skeleton for both genders/it wasn't a problem"...to you, I present, first, this image of Femshep sitting(ignore the motivational text, best shot I could find in a hurry):
See the issue there? Even if not all females have the decency/care to not spread their legs while sitting idly, it still looks awkward in a general perspective. And while yeah, that's only for one sequence in ME2, it sticks out. People have made threads on BioWare forums asking for them to make sure the female animations in ME3 are of better quality. Now consider that due to biological differences, females and males don't look the same when they perform complex acrobatics...if Splash Damage stuck to one skeleton and called it a day...well. It'd just look goofy, and I'm DAMN sure people would whine incessantly about how the devs were lazy with the animations even IF say the female characters were as insanely customizable as males.
And again - it would double their workload, which I admit would not be as big of an issue if the SMART system didn't call for -so many complex, accurate animations and calculations clientside-. The mass of work going into Brinks already solid framework was, logically, willy shriveling in breadth.
I hope I got my point across on why time constraints would've made an equally badass customization system creation and polishing process a complete mess(not to mention the end result would've been sloppy).
FYI, I do make 3d models and dabble with animating them. While I'm no pro(not even mediocre), it's still pretty obvious how difficult it is to make just a handful of different designs look good and animate well on a scale as big as Brinks.
this 100 times over.PayneTrayne said:
it's not an rpg for one, so i could care less on that aspect, and two, it's the developers game, the game could be for all its worth the most awesome game on the planet, and some of you people are disregarding it because you can't be a female? really?
if this was the truth there are tons of games out there that i feel very sorry for you on just because you can't be a female.
I don't get how you guys can see it that way. Gender is a form of customization. It is half assed customizing because you can't even choose the most basic option, male or female.voetballeeuw said:
The choice of what kind of hat you want is surely a microscopic choice compared to the gender you play as. At a time when the gaming community is expanding, it just doesn't make sense to exclude half the population.
If a game boasts customization, I'd expect gender to be the foremost choice given to the player, seeing as it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to feel like your avatar represents you.
Now, I'm a guy, and I doubt I'd play as a female in this game, but it sure would add a lot of immersion and depth to the game if it wasn't just dudes running around, no matter what trousers or socks they're wearing.
I guess this is an issue where there isn't really an objective answer, it all boils down to how you view character customization and what choices the developer made.
I for one prefer playing as a female character but I guess I'll settle for having fun trying to make the ugliest guy possible.
I for one prefer playing as a female character but I guess I'll settle for having fun trying to make the ugliest guy possible.
That's actually a really good point which has to do with the game mechanics and not social pressure. Excellent job sir!CardinalPiggles said:
That isn't that uncommon. It is more rare to actually see a game that does let you have a female character...
Such a bad reason to whine. Seriously, female characters do not need to be represented in every single scenario because some scenarios simply would be unreasonable featuring them.
Mount and Blade Fire and Sword? No female commanders.
TF2? Only female character sitting safely in her office yelling out orders (Fine with that).
Battlefield, Call of Duty none on the first lines of fight... And don't even get me started about multiplayer.
Deus Ex (Original and the only good one): Nope.
I say if this decision is made only because game designers wanted it to be so. Fine, let them.
But if it was made out of lazyness than well... Don't deliver unfinished product. Simple as that.
Mount and Blade Fire and Sword? No female commanders.
TF2? Only female character sitting safely in her office yelling out orders (Fine with that).
Battlefield, Call of Duty none on the first lines of fight... And don't even get me started about multiplayer.
Deus Ex (Original and the only good one): Nope.
I say if this decision is made only because game designers wanted it to be so. Fine, let them.
But if it was made out of lazyness than well... Don't deliver unfinished product. Simple as that.
You can probably explain the lack of females away in the story. "Females are too valuable, without them we can't continue to exist, this is also why you don't see childrenl; they're both our future!"
Whilst it is disappointing, it is also understandable: Having to tweak all of the clothes and options to work with a female character is just extra work, which they obviously don't think is much of an issue. Unless people want it to be...
Whilst it is disappointing, it is also understandable: Having to tweak all of the clothes and options to work with a female character is just extra work, which they obviously don't think is much of an issue. Unless people want it to be...
EvE has no need for character hitboxes which break balance(if you've never seen a game where everybody abuses being female for an advantage go play an fps with the option, i'l wait), EvE's avatars exist purely as a pretty homemade portrait and as such takes a fraction of the time to actually make properly, EvE has also been adding new options for a hell of a long time to that system.mirasiel said:
51% of the population of the world, not 51% of the target audience, having no female option is nothing new to FPS games.
while I can appreciate the general victimized minority to feel the collective need to have a bit of a whine (oh hey i'm colourblind, that actually affects 'gameplay' and yet nobody gives a crap), but this idea is so shallow and blown out of proportion that it's idiotic.
The company are not doing it to offend you, the company have good reasons for their decision, the community comes up with plenty of good reasons (and bad but ignore those) why it, shouldn't/can't/doesn't matter if it does, happen.
The decision not to include female characters sadly echoes the long history of Western society trying to pretend that women don't exist and/or don't matter. I for one am really tired of seeing half of the people in the world left out or ignored. This sort of thing is really insidious because whether intentionally or not, the developers are saying that women don't matter. By simply excluding women all together, the message is simply that they are of no importance. I wasn't completely sold on the game as it was, but even if this were the greatest game ever created, I would refuse to buy it.
Yes, yes it does. Halo 3 had female voices (with "gender neutral" avatars), ODST had the same and even had a few female avatars for Firefight mode, and Reach has female voices and two sets of avatars so that both genders are represented. So, since only the first two were male-only, there are now officially more Halo games that include females in their multiplayer than there are Halo games which do not.TheDarkEricDraven said:
And Section 8? I had to actually look that up, because that's a pretty obscure example. Did anybody buy that game?
Besides, Halo has never really claimed to have a very robust character customization feature until Reach, and even then your entire body and face are obscured by armor. The same can be said, as far as I can tell, about Section 8. Brink does claim to have a robust customization feature, so that's why "the upset".
I think when Gears of War and Halo can be cited as examples of games which are more gender inclusive than another game, the developers of that third game should probably rethink things.