Dissing Mass Effect Andromeda because it has diversity and equality

[Captain Marvelous_v1legacy]

Meh. I find that comment section pretty tame compared to Middle Earth: Shadow of War's announcement trailer's. A black dude shows up for all of 2 seconds and the comment section's filled with people complaining about lore in a game that took massive liberties in the first place.

The anti-white thing seems to be because the player cannot create a white Ryder. It seems to be the anti-sjw crowd jumping at the chance to point out the hypocrisy and call everyone cucks or whatever.

 

[Zhukov]

No, I'm not making this up. People have been grumbling about it since the very first WIP demo reel which showed the Asari squadmate's face and she was promptly deemed insufficiently attractive.

Well you compare the looks and anims of this Peebee character to those of Dr. T'Soni from back in ME1.

Spoiler

*shrug*

Matter of taste I guess. Animation quality aside, I'm not really seeing the terrible problem here.

Besides, you know you can have a female character without them automatically looking like a supermodel, right? It's allowed to happen.

And damn, it's not even just the asari I found at least somewhat attractive even back then. You look at a bunch of the human females, too, I'd consider more than a few of them attractive: Dr. Michel, from the health clinic in the Citadel Wards...

Spoiler: So hawt

Emily Wong, the reporter.

Spoiler: Even hawter

I honestly do believe that even if BioWare have never been known for their animation quality, they were never THIS bad. Not even at their worst were they as bad as what's been seen from Andromeda.

Oh, bullshit.


I didn't even cherry-pick that. I just typed "dragon age origins dialogue" into youtube and clicked at random.

I suppose I should make it clear that I'm not trying to defend the quality of animation in Andromeda. It's shoddy stuff. But that's business as usual for Bioware. Their animation department is clearly under-resourced and always has been. I would like to see them do better. I realize that going full Naughty Dog doesn't mesh well with dialogue options and would be prohibitively expensive for games with as much dialogue as theirs. However it would be nice if they could at least manage something along the lines of Witcher 3 which managed to animate okay despite using dialogue options.

The standard of work on display is disappointing, but pretending like it's something new is a bit silly and blaming it on the SJW Shadow Government is the product of sad and deluded minds that really, really need to get outside more.

 

[Hawki]

Didn't Bioware say something about going out of there way to make sure all the characters in Andromeda had faults and what not? So they didn't end up being "unrealistically" beautiful? I think thats probably where the average Joe got that from. It looks like they designed all the faces around not triggering the tumblr crowd who cry about unrealistic beauty standards rather than what the engine can pull off in terms of animations.

I don't know, but if they did, the idea of having characters having flaws is generally considered to be good writing. As for physical appearances, that's comparatively minor. When people talk about why they like characters in fiction, it's usually because of personality traits. Physical appearance can add to one's appreciation of a character, but it's rarely at the core of it.

Haven't played Andromeda, so can't comment on animations directly though.

 

[Redryhno]

Didn't Bioware say something about going out of there way to make sure all the characters in Andromeda had faults and what not? So they didn't end up being "unrealistically" beautiful? I think thats probably where the average Joe got that from. It looks like they designed all the faces around not triggering the tumblr crowd who cry about unrealistic beauty standards rather than what the engine can pull off in terms of animations.

I don't know, but if they did, the idea of having characters having flaws is generally considered to be good writing. As for physical appearances, that's comparatively minor. When people talk about why they like characters in fiction, it's usually because of personality traits. Physical appearance can add to one's appreciation of a character, but it's rarely at the core of it.

Haven't played Andromeda, so can't comment on animations directly though.

The problem is that in most fiction where they're talking about it, they don't have a visual representation of the character with said qualities staring out at them.

I mean, take GoT for example, Tyrion is supposed to be at that point of being insufferably ugly before the King's Landing battle, and he's not supposed to have the majority of his face afterwards. But in the show, he's moderately handsome - even your worst criticism of the guy is something along the lines of farmboy homeliness - and after, he's just got a pretty fetching scar as far as facial scars go. The Hound is supposed to have bits of bone showing through the burn on his face and to nearly have that milky-white eye thing going on. Theon is supposed to essentially be your typical bishounen(pre-Bolton era). These are all characters that are beloved in the fanbase for one reason or another, and the majority of their visual counterparts look nothing like their descriptors.

Nothing wrong with it, but people like to play games because while flaws are great, there's a point where "your flaws are showing" crosses into "I don't know what you're trying to convey because you have no discernible facial muscles". Not to mention, if you look at most of the models for the male characters, you can see there hasn't been nearly as much work done to showcase said visual flaws(not talking animation work, just art and texture junk here). If anything, they've been 3-d airbrushed.

 

[BoogieManFL]

So you see most comments coming from mouthy SJWs acting out what is essentially the modern day version of a witchhunt.

Big surprise.. :/

 

[pookie101]

unless you have a pure white male cast sexually assaulting a bunch of supermodels you are going to have that bunch complaining

 

[Erttheking]

I've been saying it for a long freaking time. There's a nasty underbelly in gaming, and it doesn't take much to shine a light on it nowadays.

 

[Nazulu]

Yes, just show one side, that's not completely biased at all.


It's a reaction to the reactionary, like some of you here are doing right now. I don't believe it's the right type of reaction, but this faction of feminist has made many uncomfortable over the years and it's made some people a little paranoid.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Remember everyone. Game developers are protected by the sacred rules of free speech and must be allowed to say whatever they want and include whatever they want in games.

..Unless what they want is to show diverse characters, in which case that clearly isn't what they really want and they're just doing it because SJWs who don't even play games are telling them to.

Wait, what? Every trailer features a Ryder white enough to shoot up a school.

I suspect a lot of racists expect fictional characters to be "idealized" versions of real people rather than to actually look like real people, which in the case of a white person means their skin must glisten like fresh arctic snow and their hair must shine with the golden hue of sunlight reflecting from the Rhine.

To me, they look designed so that you could read them as either white or white-passing, which is a petty normal default for characters now.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Thats ridiculous. Everyone knows me and my bretheren are the only true perfect aryans left, and we're not going to space before the jews are taken care of. Talk about unrealistic, do these people want Bioware to break everyones suspension of disbelief?

100% pure Teutonic warrior confirmed.

 

[DaCosta]

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

I started a thread elsewhere making fun of all the wonky animations and to share our expectations for the game. It took about 5 posts for it to become an anti-SJW rant thread.

 

[Tanis]

It's nice to see the gamergate/alt-right/anti-thinking groups are willing to take time out of their busy day of bunker building and food stamping to still troll someone for something they had little or nothing to do with.

Keep on posting, the more you do the less time you have to produce Nephew-Sons and Niece-Daughters.
;P

 

[Eri]

It's nice to see the gamergate/alt-right/anti-thinking groups are willing to take time out of their busy day of bunker building and food stamping to still troll someone for something they had little or nothing to do with.

Keep on posting, the more you do the less time you have to produce Nephew-Sons and Niece-Daughters.
;P

Sounds like someone is salty. Aren't you on here posting this comment I'm reading?

 

[Tsun Tzu]

But the game just looks...meh. On all fronts.

Has nothing to do with whether "Bioware's" (quotes because it's not even the same studio) gamma squad is pushing an agenda or not.

 

[MHR]

When pics are coming out comparing the supermodel's images used as the basis to the default male and female Mass Effect characters, and only the female looks noticeably off while it's the same story for virtually all the female models in the game, even making asari remind people of Fiona's ogre form in Shrek, of course it's going to cause a controversy. It's actually quite blatant. Tracer's butt getting a taunt altered caused a noticeable outrage, which is nothing compared to this. Tracer's butt got fixed so fast, whilst Mass Effect: Andromeda is an entirely "finished" triple-A game and they can't just redo all the character models.

It also seems to insultingly defy logic. Why pay many thousands of dollars to use the supermodel's image just to jack it up on purpose when you could have pulled any plane-Jane from outside the office and do her face for far less? Expect to hear a lot more of this in the days ahead. The game isn't even out yet.

*Manveer Heir being a racist shitbag*

The one thing I want to know is why this man was never called out by his employers for being a racist shitbag.

Because they actually literally are on board with him speaking his mind. 2 of the top-tier boss guys that is. Meanwhile if he changed any of those references to say "blacks" or "jews," we wouldn't have heard of this guy much before he got so fired.

Meh. I find that comment section pretty tame compared to Middle Earth: Shadow of War's announcement trailer's. A black dude shows up for all of 2 seconds and the comment section's filled with people complaining about lore in a game that took massive liberties in the first place.

I was there for those threads, and while people did kick a stink, everyone else was quick to shut it down rightfully saying for multiple reasons it was entirely possible a single black guy could end up in Mordor. The reasons I had posted there were because Nurn had a very active port industry where presumably people from all over the world could end up. Also some of the mercenary army in Return of The King had the Persian-inspired forces complete with giant elephants, Persians being essentially "brown people" right there on the big screen.

Besides, you know you can have a female character without them automatically looking like a supermodel, right? It's allowed to happen.

Of course, but Dr. Michel and Emily Wong look like the modelers took a pat of clay, sculpted it a bit with a spoon, and the result is fetal alcohol syndrome. Combined with phenomenal animations and that patented Bioware lip-syncing I bet that's going to look real nice coming off the screen being churned out by everyone's GTX 1060 cards.

 

[Nature Guardian]

Now, speaking about character visuals - I may be biased. Because I like "ugly" characters. I find them more interesting when they look flawed, because 99% of the people you meet in real life aren't superhot models either. Besides, it feels like it takes far more work to design a character with visual imperfections than a generic cookiecutter idealized body. So, to me, they aren't "ugly" but "goodlooking" in that I like their uglyness. How do I explain?

But the real issue is something else, personal preference or not: the issue is that whenever there's a complaint about a character being "ugly", it's always about a FEMALE character. It's the female characters that aren't allowed to look anything but idealized and sexy.

Actually scratch that, the real issue is just how many people are so loud about this. It's creepy. Someone compared it to a witch-hunt; they're correct.

Anyway, I feel disheartened. I put so much work and effort into being an arsehole, and I'm still nothing compared to those who are naturals.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Sounds like someone is salty. Aren't you on here posting this comment I'm reading?

Hey. It looks like you posted a thing on the internet.

That means you must have had an emotion at some point and therefore I win because even though I'm posting things on the internet too I am doing it in a detached ironic way which is much cooler than you.

The only thing I'm not detached and ironic about is ethics in game journalism..