The General Pooter Games Thread.

[Charon]

I mean yes youl can re-use the mocap and animations and stuff for other male characters but you can do that for women characters too.

Sure you can do that. But it looks ****. It looks totally half assed and the next issue would be "ubisoft doesnt even devote ressources in creating female characters, they just reskinned the male characters"
Vote with your wallets. I didnt buy a single Ubisoft game after their desastrous DRM and I still live well without their games.

Personally games without a character generator of some sorts are a big minus in my book. As I really hate the generic short hair wannabe gangster male look. Give me long hair and some make up already dammit...

[Learn2Eel]

I think what eldargal meant is that they can re-use the mo-cap they have done with women before, i.e. the actress that played the female assassin in Assassins Creed: Liberation (I forget her name, I barely remember any characters in these games lol).

[eldargal]

Aveline. And my point was if they can't reuse mocap for women the ycan't reuse it for men, either. Which means mo-capping needs to be done, so why not make it a woman? Every game since Brotherhood has had female assassins in the background who were animated and one assumes mocapped, but it is too much effort for a protagonist? It is no kind of excuse, it is just a cover for misogyny. Bioware had fully voiced male and female protagonists for ME1-3 and ME3 sold around 4-5 million copies in total.Volition has managed to have 3 separate voice actresses for SR2-4, each game selling around 3-4million copies.. ACIV sold 10 million copies and we are supposed to believe that Ubisoft couldn't afford to allocate the resources to create a female protagonist? Don't make me laugh. These are flimsy excuses meant to cover the companies disregard for women, nothing more.

[Charon]

Honestly dont know if the could do it. Maybe ist a coding thing, maybe even a license thing, maybe something completely different. I really dont want to defend them but the more than common "they could easily just do Y and they dont do it because they hate X" spreads everywhere. Doesnt matter where you work there are always people who will tell you that "you can easily do that!" when in reallity you cant.

In this game first of all you want to create a finished game you can sell (here you can blame them that the story is about a white male but that seems to be their target audience).
If you have that you can devote your ressources to features.
And yes having a customizeable protagonist or even a female equivalent in a story originally written for a white male protagonist is a feature here. You dont need that for a finished product.
If you dont have any more time or ressources you cut out features first (sorry no multiplayer for example)
If you still have no more time and ressources you cut game content (KOTOR 2 for example where entire levels and even the ending where cut out)

Most people have a hard time to imagine what amount of work, time and money go into the (perceived) simplest things in a game.
TONS of concept art for characters. Meetings to approve/expand on some of the concept arts. Another ton of artwork for the choosen concepts -> Here we did not even program a single piece of code or just think about actual graphics... we are still at concept stage! This can easily take weeks of the graphic department just for a single ingame character.

It all sounds incredibly easy as customer while in reality its tons of work and money. These are just business calculations. As it the choice of the protagonist. At the end of the day they want to sell their product.
If they cant sell their product, their target audience will shift (or they just go bankrupt as there are just a very few studios that can recover from an absolute disaster).

Aveline. And my point was if they can't reuse mocap for women the ycan't reuse it for men, either. Which means mo-capping needs to be done, so why not make it a woman? Every game since Brotherhood has had female assassins in the background who were animated and one assumes mocapped, but it is too much effort for a protagonist? It is no kind of excuse, it is just a cover for misogyny. Bioware had fully voiced male and female protagonists for ME1-3 and ME3 sold around 4-5 million copies in total.Volition has managed to have 3 separate voice actresses for SR2-4, each game selling around 3-4million copies.. ACIV sold 10 million copies and we are supposed to believe that Ubisoft couldn't afford to allocate the resources to create a female protagonist? Don't make me laugh. These are flimsy excuses meant to cover the companies disregard for women, nothing more.

Sorry but this is just nonsense. We can expect that ubisoft could afford it. Point taken. But also we can say that they do not want to cut their profit by implementing a "feature" that wont (in their mind) raise their income significantly.
Just because I could afford something that does not mean I have to afford it.
If you really think that a gaming company just hates women and doesnt want their money at all then there is something wrong with their business plan. And im quite sure there was a cost-benefit analysis before they decided to drop it.

[eldargal]

Of course they could do it, if they wanted to. We know that because other games do it. Smaller AAA developers with lower sales than Ubisoft and AC. But they have to want to. Ubisoft don't, so they won't. The reason they don't want to is because they are a male dominated company in a male dominated industry in a male dominated culture. They don't give a **** about telling womens stories because they aren't viewed as important.

The issue is that the white male gamer is not even a majority of their demographic. 47% of gamers are women, over 40% of console gamers are women and a good portion of the male demographic is not white.
The misogyny comes in viewing a female character as an optional feature. The story for Unity didn't spring out of the ground fully formed, nor was it handed down from on high. People wrote it. Those people made choices about the focus, who the protagonist should be etc. They view male as a default so the protagonist becomes male, to do something else is deemed an extra and requiring of extra effort which is untrue. A protagonist requires effort, the gender is irrelevant.

Co-op is included, with four Whitey McStubbly characters to choose from.

It is not about underestimating the amount of effort or resources involved, it is about criticising the choices of how those resources are allocated. Ubisoft clearly do not think those resources deserve to be allocated towards creating female protagonists, that is sexist. It is as simple as that. The resources ivolved in creating a protagonist are the same regardless of its gender. They chose to make it male because they are male in a male dominated company in a male dominated industry catering to a demographic that is actually extremely diverse. This is not sustainable, but while it lasts it is extremely offensive and upsetting.

No, it is not nonsense. They could have had a female protagonist. This isn't a ****ing feature, it is a choice. They chose not too because they would rather do what 90% of games do and cater to a small percentage of the demographic that is like them, white men. No on at Ubisoft is sitting there thinking 'grr I hate wimmins' they simply don't care about women and telling their stories. Because women are devalued, their stories are not worth telling and using a woman to tell a story is some kind of optional extra rather than a legitimate option in their minds.

[Charon]

Actually, the amount of women playing games is even higher (52%) as you can see here

[url]http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2014.pdf[/url]

BUT (and this is an important "but")

This includes ALL games. And we also have data that there are generes and even playstyles that are prefered by women (statisticly speaking).
"Only" 30% are in action games and that in an evironment where action games just make up a very tiny fraction (45% of games are non social/mobile games like farmville or angrybirds and 30% of that are action games).
So yes. The company makes a choice based on the demographic of "their" gamers. And they happen to be male of a major part.
Bioware may have a complete different demographic playerbase and thus they cater to them.

[eldargal]

"I don't like the assumption that all people who play games want big chainsaws and women in bikinis. It's like, really? Not all gamers are teenage boys, and even teenage boys want more than that," Raymond said.

The interviewer said that protagonists of many popular video games often are "husky voiced, emotionless *******[s]," and Raymond seemed to agree.

"It's got to change, right?" she said, pointing out that even traditional action movies have evolved to a point where their main characters are more narratively complex.

[URL="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ubisoft-boss-not-happy-with-the-assumption-that-gamers-only-want-chainsaws-and-girls-in-bikinis/1100-6418995/"]The (woman) head of Ubisoft Toronto, sadly ironic[/URL]. Also according to that article AC has sold 76 million copies in total now (I,II,Brotherhood, Revelations,III, Liberation,IV) so I scoff at the notion they couldn't afford a few days work from a handful of animators, some textures, a voice actor and a bit more mocap.

[Tyrendian]

Bioware may have a complete different demographic playerbase and thus they cater to them.

that argument only works if you assume their regular player base (which I am a part of, including the stubble ) will like the game more because the protagonist is male rather than female - i.e. because they get "generic white male stubble main character" number X rather than someone interesting, like in Freedom Cry and Liberation. And that I do find unlikely to work out in favor of them - sure they might lose out on a few customers, but I'd imagine they'd gain more than that from people (and not even necessarily girls...) like EG...

[eldargal]

[URL="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/once-an-underperformer-tomb-raider-nearing-6-million-in-sales/1100-6418162/"]Female led Tomb Raider reboot just reached the 6mil sales mark, exceeding estimates[/URL]. But you know, female protagonists cost more and boys don't buy them or something?

[Charon]

that argument only works if you assume their regular player base (which I am a part of, including the stubble ) will like the game more because the protagonist is male rather than female - i.e. because they get "generic white male stubble main character" number X rather than someone interesting, like in Freedom Cry and Liberation. And that I do find unlikely to work out in favor of them - sure they might lose out on a few customers, but I'd imagine they'd gain more than that from people (and not even necessarily girls...) like EG...

Sadly it doesnt work that way. Its no question of "do they like the generic white male stubble more than an interesting character?", the real question is "do they like the generic male white stubble ENOUGH that we dont have to spend additional efford and ressources on creating an interesting character?"
And as long as the answer the this question is "yes", it wont change.

Female led Tomb Raider reboot just reached the 6mil sales mark, exceeding estimates. But you know, female protagonists cost more and boys don't buy them or something?

Never said that. I said an ADDITIONAL protagonist costs more (and how many we do have in Tomb Raider?). I also never said "boys dont buy it". So please keep it civil.
Also Tomb Raider is a successful franchise and already was before the reboot. I played it too, its a solid game (apart from a few hickups) but I really dont care what gender the main character has as long as the game/story is good.
In DA2 you could choose your gender freely and the game was still ****. Thats why im not waiting for DA3. I also enjoyed ME1 and 2 but didnt like ME3.