When will we see a NON-attractive woman in a video-game?

[Burst6]

Every human female in dark souls. The non-human humanoid females like Priscilla the crossbreed and Mrs juggs look over the top attractive but that's mostly on purpose for story reasons.

Spoiler: They do actually have a significance to the story rather than being pure eye candy so yay dark souls

But the human females look pretty average.

Spoiler: Take Dusk for example

Spoiler: or Rhea

To be fair though i think they wanted to make them look pretty but they realized they built a human model that has no way of making anyone look pretty even with hours of work.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Eye of the beholder and all that pretty much destroys this question. Beauty is extremely subjective. For instance, I'm not at all attracted to the DOA girls, or the Soul Caliber ones, or most anyone similar.

Kuo and Nix from Infamous 2 might not be on the conventional hot list. Trish from Infamous 1 joins as well.

Spoiler

Trip from Enslaved?

Spoiler

Any of the females in Fallout 3/New Vegas?

Spoiler: Veronica Santangelo, for instance

Aveline from Dragon Age 2?

Spoiler

It's kind of a toss up. Each of them are attractive in some ways, and maybe unattractive in others. It's not like each person agrees with what a standard model of beauty is.

 

[el_kabong]

Let's not kid ourselves, for men there's really only 3 categories of physical attraction:

1. Must have sex with
2. Would have sex with
3. Would Not have sex with (unless maybe REALLY drunk)

See? Alyx falls into category 2, or average.


I kid! I kid! mostly...

My friends and I don't even use that many levels. We use a binary scale. A woman is either a 0 or a 1. It's simple that way and avoids a lot of BS found in your typical ranking systems.

 

[Smeggs]

Let's see, one that hasn't been mentioned yet...

The barkeep in Twilight Princess wasn't what I'd call an attractive woman. Not unless you have a super overtaking fetish for blimp-tits.

Actually, Zelda has nearly as many fugly women as attractive ones.

 

[God's Clown]

You see non-attractive women CONSTANTLY in video games. It's a non-issue, your issue.

 

[Eldrig]

Kaidan Alenko. Such an ugly woman that she had to die every time I played the virmire mission.

 

[Smeggs]

You see non-attractive women CONSTANTLY in video games. It's a non-issue, your issue.

Yeah, pretty much this.

The same can be said for male characters as well. In recent memory the only male main protag in a game I remember not being a fucking underwear model would be Kratos or Nier.

And there's a reason for this: people like looking at or playing as attractive people. Duh.

And if not attractive by Nathan Drake standards, then by "Beef-Jerky-Bench-Press-A-Walrus" attractive, like Marcus Fenix, or Dom.

 

[Vault101]

its not so much "non attractive" as "variety"

I find it friggen hilarious people are bringing up alyx vance, and wyne from dragon age....

all charachter are more or less attractive in fiction so thats a given

 

[teh_gunslinger]

Rose from the Blackwell series is decidedly average, in the way a REAL person would be (rather than a whale-sized lumbering pile of jelly or a perfectly structured face and body with a few well-placed blemishes).

Ah. I think it's time to admit my huge crush on Rosa Blackwell. She's one of the best written characters in any game and I think she's absolutely hot.

Sticking to WadjetEye games I also really liked Anna in Resonance. Oh how I'll never forgive that scientist asshole.

 

[TheFederation]

katjaa in the walking dead wasn't very 'attractive'

 

[Nikolaz72]

I present:

Aveline

Wynne

There are quite a few women that aren't strictly sexy.

But when both genders are consistently fairly represented we can all stop reading posts like this....

Men aren't "fairly" represented either. Most games it's typical macho marine. So in that respect, they are kinda equally represented, as stereotypes.

Wynne was the sexist one in Dragon Age: Origins!
I was most saddened when I found out my noble could not romance her. It may have been hard at first but things could have worked out... why did she have to go all motherly on me? Why Wynne? Why?!

Might have something to do with Dragon Ages complexity engine wasnt that well-developed and she was voiced by a 30-something yearold. Confused a whole host of people. Made her seem a 30-40yearold lady with silvery white hair.... which isnt even that old to a lot of people.

I think she's 'supposed' to be sort of a grandma figure in the game.

 

[Pink Gregory]

its not so much "non attractive" as "variety"

I find it friggen hilarious people are bringing up alyx vance, and wyne from dragon age....

all charachter are more or less attractive in fiction so thats a given

I agree; when designing, the mind defaults to positive characteristics, 'negative' characteristics tend to be put in specifically; humans aren't designed after all, so it's a lot more difficult to design a 'realistic' human being, without a few 'negative' characteristics feeling a little token.

 

[SpAc3man]

Seems to me that there already are and the vast majority of everyone prefers to look at attractive women in their games. Which is why they are the majority.

 

[Kyle Downes]

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090704100139/tomclancy/images/b/ba/Anna_grimsdottir.jpg

Actually, as I think about it, I can think of more "not sexy" characters than "sexy" characters.

For example, EVERY generic NPC woman looks "all right".

Poor Grimsdottir, they took her from a bookish, intelligent but kinda-plain looking brunette to a bad-ass over-sexed redhead over the course of 4 games. She's probably my favourite character from the series (her speaking voice is hypnotising) but I never understood why the had to constantly change her character model, especially when the games are all meant to be cannon. It's strange. Though I suppose not the weirdest change they've made in the Splinter Cell games.

 

[lapan]

Plenty games feature non-attractive characters. Dark Souls defaults you to being unattractive and you will be for the majority of the game. There are also plenty games by now that allow you to create your own character to your liking.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

The same day we have unattractive people as important characters where being unattractive isn't part or their shtick in any form of mainstream media.

(i.e. Probably never.)

 

[Lt._nefarious]

My Femshep from ME1 was made purposely worn and battle hardened looking. She wasn't "ugly" just not very pretty either... Oh and I thought Ashley in ME1 was hideous...

 

[halfeclipse]

You've GOTTA be kidding me. She's your example of a less-than-attractive woman? Really?

She's my example of completely average, not ugly, not gorgeous.

As someone who drew people for a living, she clearly has a bone structure and facial features that fall in line with the modern perceptions of "beauty" to be considered totally average from an impartial perspective. That's even with me solely taking into account her general age demographic and her not being my type.

I mean, to each his own, but I can't see too many people considering her "completely average".

Still able to draw? If so heres a challenge: Draw an unattractive female. She must be in good health, between the ages of 20 and 45, not afflicted by any grotesqueries, and have facial features and a body type that conform to the average of whatever ethnicity you choose. Assume she pays a modicum of attention to her appearance. (i.e. brushed hair, reasonable clothing, no clownesque application of makeup, etc).

Grotesque is far too vague a term for your challenge to mean anything. If we're constituting "less than ideal traits" as "grotesqueries" then that's impossible, since you said make her unattractive. If you're just saying "don't make her nose gigantic or make her missing her two front teeth" then yeah, easy enough.

Also, 45 is extremely generous, at that point aging could have already totally fucked over a person's appearance. Just think of the nasoloabial folds, the tear troughs, the fat loss, the labiomental creases! It's like a kid in a candy store.

It's doable, but it'll take specific effort to that end, you'll need to turn the definition of "average" into a pretzel and you won't be able to manage anything approaching ugly.

What are you talking about? What does my "definition of average" have to do with this beyond facial features that are typical of a specific ethnicity? What do you mean "won't be able to manage anything approaching ugly? It doesn't take "specific effort" unless you're an amateur artist who hasn't spent very much time studying a variety of faces.

I'll give you a quick list of normal things you can add to make a person less attractive. Note that having any single one of these features does not instantly make a person unattractive unless it's to an extreme, and most people have a few of them.

slightly drooping eyelids or tired eyes
large lower or upper eyelids
deep set eyes, small eyes or bulging eyes
angled eyes or strangely shaped eyes
very small eyelashes
eyes set too far apart or too close together
blotchy complexion or any number of common skin conditions (mild acne, rosacea, various types of dermatitis, etc.)
thin or translucent skin
asymmetric facial features or atypical spacing of other features (people often have subtle asymmetry that you don't consciously notice unless you look for it).
thin or overly thick lips
hooked nose, bulbous nose, broad nose bridge, overly upturned nose, large or overly small nose, etc. etc.
gaunt facial features
a slightly protruding mandible or a recessive one.
Large forehead or small forehead.
a "long face" or "round face" or any number of other "facial types".
normal aging
fat
the list goes on and on.

"average" is usually having a few of these negative traits and a few positive traits to go along with it. Unattractive would be having negative traits that clearly outweigh the positive or particularly notable negative traits. The only way your comment makes sense is if you're asking me to draw someone who is like a 5 out of 10 and entirely unattractive at the same time. Of course, that would be super dumb thing to ask, so I assume it's not what you meant.

Average as in you can see an example of this negative trait to x level of severity in a reasonable chunk of the population. Given that most people won't have any severe examples of a negative trait...

It's doable but it requires you to take an extraordinary number of possible features and tweak them towards the negative, and even then she wouldn't be an example of the average person (average as in the measure of central tendency not average appearance) simply because of the number of negatives.


My (somewhat convoluted) point is this:

1. The distribution of appearance is a Gaussian function. Lots of people who sit somewhere between 4-6 out of 10, far less who trend towards a 2-3 or 7-8, very few 1s or 9s and practically no one who's a 0 or 10.

2. Average is still pretty damn attractive, just not extraordinarily so. Below average is still going to be at least somewhat attractive. Again using the x/10 scale, 3 or lower is where you'll find genuinely unattractive and at that point you're at least one standard standard deviation from the mean, maybe two.


Provided videogames don't swing excessively to the opposite extreme, you won't find unattractive people (female or male) that often simply because unattractive people don't happen that often.

 

[Legion]

Most games already have this. You are just ignoring them.