This isn't a gotcha thing I'm doing, I was watching this AI vs artist Arch was doing where he did one before with black April O'Neil and he's done another with dark skin Velma this time. Some flaws here and there but a massive improvement over the HBO show, at one point, he puts out the idea with what I like to refer to as 'milfy Velma' was having it that she was detached from the group, is a reporter herself and events brings her back with her old friends, so like the show just, not shit.
One of the immediate things that detached me from even trying to watch it was how ugly the self insert Velma was yet if this AI made hotter Velma was in it, I might at least give it an episode.
But a key part of this is that watching shows is passive, you're not interacting so for games it depends for me. Does it fit the setting as if it's a game about giant mechs then it isn't really a factor. If there's character customisation beyond just selecting outfits, then it becomes a big factor as if I want to create a really hot character, the game itself shouldn't limit me. Same as if there's 'romance' choices and all of them are fugly.
I've gotten to the point where having attractive guys but ugly women in a game is a massive red flag for me as then it means this is a self insert game and there's likely to be a lot of ideology in the narrative too. So just want to hear your guys takes if having attractive female characters even affects the shows and games you play/watch.
Not having hot girls? Not much.
Having INTENTIONALLY DISGUSTING whores being passed off as "normal?" Very much!
Yep - as soon as you see something like that, you immediately know what the intent is, and what it implies for the content of the game.
Hard pass.
This is the correct answer. I am anti-"anti-reality" not "anti-reality", and reality has more than its fair share of uggos. It only becomes anti-reality when you try to pretend an uggo is attractive, not there mere existence.
Would be interesting to see someone try to use a "not conventionally attractive" woman and through writing make her attractive to the audience.
The inverse is also true.
Are hot girls required? No.
Does having hot girls make me feel it's less likely to be woke trash? Yes.
Basically it's a scale of "modern beauty standards" (avoid) > neutral (neutral) > hot girls (good sign.)
This is a perfect answer. I also think like that
This is my position too. I don't need hot girls in games, and I even get annoyed by them if they're inappropriate for the setting and tone. I don't even mind 'normal looking' (as in non-supermodel) women. But games with deliberately uglified or mannified women like the new Fable and the second Horizon game? REMAKES that make the women uglier like Dead Space? I don't want to touch those games.
Oh yeah, raceswapping goes in the trash too.
Repulsive women is an indicator that the content is pushing the gay commie agenda.
My dealbreaker is on-screen faggotry. Verbally implied faggotry can be acceptable, particularly if it is done to be funny and not seriously, men interacting "romantically" on-screen is viscerally disgusting.
I'm hoping the AI gets good enough and ubiquitous enough that it can do stuff like automatic frame-by-frame model and animation replacement and eventually the ability to do so in a photo-realistic manner.
That way there will be "mods" for all media to fix the mistakes of the creators, not just for games.
Just men being fags or does that include Lesbians too as I don't mind being called a hypocrite in saying I don't want to see guys kissing but two hot women kissing sure as this is my thought process..
Even women enjoy watching two hot women make out, but nobody wants to watch two dudes going at it.
just men, women making out isn't repulsive, but if it is excessive you know that is agenda pushing
it is how they laundered in faggotry in the 90s where nearly every nerdy show had to have a chick relationship
The way it strikes me is that it's a signal statement that says, "NO we are not interested in entertaining you by creating a competent narrative that includes suspension of disbelief, we will poison any escapism or fantastic idealism you try to derive, and we refuse to build a world where you have problems that don't reflect the writer's real-world pet peeves and opinions about what you deserve."
It's a transparant attempt at subverting the sense of wanting to connect with the character you're playing, and a pathetic attempt at instilling a set of lowered expectations for yourself.
I specifically look at how attractive the females are in any game I consider as a test of the game designer's position on the axis of 'pleasing' to 'preaching.'
If they are attractive there is an indication that the designer is interested more in making the player happy than in converting them to their own personal worldview. If they are unattractive, they have taken a stance that is combative, adversarial, and impugning of their audience.
Style doesn't factor into this one single bit. You can simply ask yourself if the artist tried to make YOU happy, or they tried to buy off a political racketeer with their design intentions. You will have your answer easily so long as you are frank and discerning.
Yea, how attractive female chars are is one of my red-flag-checks when I consider a game. Making them ugly has become a leftist political statement, so I'll go with the opposite. Same with how "ethnic" characters are.
Very good points, you do get this whole "you enjoy our shit and buy more of it" attitude from these kinds of shows like Velma or that He man show than with even the most blandest isekai anime out there.
Yes.
I want attractive characters. People want attractive characters. When people make mods for games, what's the first thing they do? Make all the characters they interact with attractive.
This really shouldn't be some biblical revelation, but I suppose we've gotten to the point where these various DIE hires are so up in their own little bubble that they don't actually interact with real people, or the 'sweaty gamers' they sell this stuff to.
I suppose the question that comes is, would you give a show like Velma a chance if we got hot milfy version the AI made over what we got or would hearing the plot be more important to you?
Velma is shit no matter how pretty you make it out to be. The ugly and lack of quality go hand in hand like the red flag you mentioned.
But I will say: if someone were to tweak the color levels on Death from that Sandman tv show so she ends up paperwhite, it doesn't even need to look good, just make her a white shape with black hair, I'd watch the show even if its dog shit just to see what the show is about. Hey, maybe deepfake the dialog to clean up the woke shit to boot.
God... now I'm remembering that terrible watchmen tv show, these people really are monsters.
You have a point, when you are creating an attractive or pretty character, you're intentionally thinking what would appeal to an audience so more chance you try to make a good story with it. Whether that lands or not, eh we've seen plenty of flops with good looking characters but no ill will to know that's always a risk.
Compared to a self insert ugly character, you're already putting yourself and/or ideology first so you're already creating an atmosphere of hostility towards a potential audience.
Most of those AI edits wouldn't scare me off a show. Excluding the trampy and slutty ones. Still I don't think you'd get me to watch Velma specifically from it. I can't think of one nostalgia reboot I've ever liked. I want my nostalgia to stay in the past. If you were offering some other show I was interested in then we're good to go.
Yeah even if Velma was hot I'd have written the show off for the race-swap bullshit, just knowing it's the tip of the woke iceberg of shit to come. That, and the fact that I'm far too old to be watching those kinds of kids shows in the first place.
I tend to hate to gatekeep things by age, like the adage of what adult things are. Like I'd argue a lot of video games, books, some anime, etc. that would be thought of as kids things really aren't exclusive to that.
Whereas so many of these "adult" things are locked in the mind of a 13 year old boy. The people that think they are mature because the movie they watched had a vagina in it, or a Scooby Doo show for adults because "haha Shaggy said penis and they want to fuck". As far as I'm concerned all that stuff is for adult babies.
Every slippery slope is real.
They say they want "realistic/normal" women but they fly right down the slippery slope to fat and ugly. Because they hate beauty and the only way for them to be accepted is to destroy all competition.
Fat, ugly, yet super competent and all the perfect Chad guys in a fifty-mile radius lust after her.
It's pretty much a deal breaker if there's none because 99% sure the makers are shitty feminists. Ironically, 10+ years ago, I would have been the first to question bikini armor/fan service. But the current drought made me appreciate how good we had it.
I honestly think games like Returnal (old slag protagonist) and Jedi Fallen Order (bug eyed Debra Wilson) do worse in sales because of these choices. People can't say exactly why but the disgusting visuals fill them with an instinctual revulsion, resulting in lower sales. Lara Croft was famously made busty 'by accident' but you can't tell me a flat-chested problem-glasses gender studies major would have become a gaming icon as the lead in a series of unforgiving hardcore platformers.
Behold the ten billion Skyrim/Fallout mods that make the women in the game into super models, from the queen all the way down to the dirty beggars.
When you see a hot women your eyes are wired straight to the arousal/dopamine center of your brain and you become interested before you are consciously aware of it. So in a way you could say these games aren't engaging in deceptive marketing to trick your limbic system and you can judge them on their merits. But I do enjoy playing a game a lot more if the women in it are pleasing to look at, it's just basic biology.
Jedi Fallen Order is actually an excellent example. That's a game I might have actually looked into - protag is a white male, doesn't look like an idiot, combat seems okay, atleast pretends a little to be more Prequel than Disney...
...and then we have his, what, mentor? That looks like a straight up half-human half-alien, and I'm basically 'nope'. Not happening. Fuck that. I'm out.
The funny thing is there is another character in the game who is a total babe, but has like zero interaction beyond her little sub story. If the Jedi mentor had been a normal old guy (even a black guy) it would have been better.
I doubt modern game devs could pull off a Jolee Bindo.
I wouldn't complain if they did, though.
Also Dying Light 2. The first game had a cute and feminine female companion on the main story, the sequel features Rosario Dawson, who was okay looking in her younger days but is like a 50 year old abuela now.
The funniest part is that is her actual face.
Worse, it's an improvement over the real thing. I don't know what the hell happened to Debra Wilson after Mad TV ended, but the woman clearly lost her marbles and became just as insane as the characters she frequently portrayed on that show.
Here's an image of her for those with courage and/or stupidity.
At least the bug-eyed thing from Fallen Order looks like it's trying to pass off as human.
Insert long rant here about how they can never find an actual attractive black women to play the part, for some fucking reason.
It's pretty easy to tell the difference between an ugly character existing for the sake of the narrative and an ugly character existing because the creator is a communist dedicated to the destruction of all things beautiful.
Having attractive ones? Eh, honestly not much. Sometimes I swear I'm the minority around here but games/movies/TV series are just not sexual pleasure outlets for me.
Awful ugly looking women or cartoonized leftists like is in that video is a red flag the rest of it is going to be shit though. Same with gay and tranny stuff. If it's there it's an indicator that it's a waste of my time.
While I agree, it's not one or the other. You can have feminine, attractive women that dress normal/modestly and aren't CGI-MarySues, but even that is a no-no for the jealous woke writers these days.
And that god-awful "Skrillix" lesbian-cut that White and mystery-meat women have in just about every show/movie these days.
While I don't care for ultra-sexualized characters, male or female, and things like chainmail bikinis, skintight catsuits, and midriff-baring armors annoy me, the opposite of making characters, namely female characters, as sexually unappealing as possible is frankly worse (especially since the males in those media tend to be conventionally attractive). It's a failed Brown M&M Test that tells me the devs are intentionally making the game to appeal to hypocritical leftist lunatics (and for ESG funbux), and to spite the old, traditional, majority audience. It's bad enough and so prevalent these days that I'm now perusing stuff I wouldn't consider in the past because of how blatantly horny they are because I at least know they were made with some effort to be entertaining products, and not to spit on me for merely existing.
To answer your title: A lot.
There is a reason why we choose the word "attractive" to describe physically appealing people. It attracts us. That this basic truth has somehow become demonized and twisted is honestly discouraging to see.
I despise people who react with variants of "go touch grass" or "just masturbate to porn" when someone wants beautiful people in a video game. No one masturbates to cleavage. It's just pleasant to look at.
Referring to your second paragraph, you can tell how full of it they are on that front as you should hear the screeching that happens when you take their hot men away.
I may be misremembering, but I swear there was a romance game where all the options where hot single dads, some artist gender bent them as fan art and they harassed the shit out of them for doing that.
it depends what context I will be playing the game in.
for living room console games, I'm okay with attractive and sexy characters, but I don't want anything lewd. I want the game to be tame because there are others coming and going while I play.
for PC games that I play in the privacy of my own room, slutty characters don't bother me in the least. whether or not I'm attracted to these characters or think they're any good is another story, but as a whole being sexy is neither a plus or a minus in my book.
for time-waster phone games, I actually resent the abundance of lewd characters. there are several games on the market that look like they have decent gameplay, but feature probably the closest thing you can get to porn on the app markets. I don't want to be sitting on a plane or in a train looking at porn.
You make a good point as games where it's a ratio of, say, 6 hot women to every 1 ugly seem to get the balance more or less right. Hell, with some games for character customisation like GTA 5 I looked up a YouTube video so my redheaded online character didn't have a burns victim face.
It does take a lot of effort to make a REALLY ugly female character as scars, being chubby or having a lot of muscles doesn't stop you still making them attractive so it's definitely malicious intent making them so unappealing.
I didn't buy diablo 2 resurrected due to dumpy females, and I probably wouldn't have bought diablo 4 anyway but once again... dumpy females.
If they were average looking, that would've been fine. They made them look like scratch ticket enthusiasts from the wrong part of town.
In video games I agree with you that an attractive/ideal guy but ugly woman is a red flag and indicates that the developer isn’t focusing on making a good game. In movies/tv/music I’ve been known to check something out due to an attractive lady, but if it’s bad it’s bad. I bought all of Fiona Apple’s CDs back in the day because I thought she was hot.
This push to uglify women is pretty telling though, especially since they don’t do that to men.
Her average output might not be great, but her cover of across the universe is still a great vibe though.
Absolutely!
I just don’t like ugly people in general, like in my media I mean. I’ll go outside and socialize if I wanna see regular looking people. Man or woman.
if they went out of their way to make a reasonably attractive woman hideous, it's something made by shit leftists and can be ignored.
also if they make animated characters just look like men in drag.
I've enjoyed whole episodes of star Trek where not a single woman showed up at all. I actually forget there are women in James Bond films.
Main cast priorities:
Ugly "diverse" women < Ugly women < Hot "diverse" women < Hot women < No women
It's more so that deliberate uggos are not to be tolerated.
Anyone who is saying "I don't buy media for the attractive female characters" is probably naive or lying. The reason such characters are used is obviously because sex sells. It's the easiest and most pervasive form of manipulation of men out there.
Like most forms of such manipulation, it's impossible to not be affected by it except by consciously avoiding consuming such material. It's pretty sad that most men aren't awake to the degree they are being manipulated by sex. In fact, now that there is a drive to remove attractive females from media to push political messages, you can see men fighting for the inclusion of sexualised characters so they can continue being controlled by their sex drives, in other words, fighting to be manipulated by sex (and by implication, women).
When there is a plethora of attractive female characters to go around it becomes the baseline instead of something special. Which means people can say with sincerity and truth they don't buy it because of them, because its simply expected with any package you buy. Like the drink at a restaurant. That's how gaming used to be, and still is outside of parts of the Western AAA/indie scene, so its still the case in a lot of ways.
So when they are saying that, they are simply saying its not enough to sell the game to them not that they have some zen compass above such base impulses.
Just because a game has attractive women with big tits doesn't mean I will play it. There's a billion cell phone games out there that are obviously designed to get 12 year olds boys to play the games and spend their parents' money on it because cartoon titties. The games are trash and usually produced in China cause the whole thing is scamming boys that just hit puberty.
However, having exceptionally ugly female character models and especially black women (yes, I'm racist) and/or blue/red haired chicks and butch chicks with tattoos is a huge warning flag for me to stay away from the game. I can only imagine the kinds of developers that make a game with these sorts of character models and even if the game is a good game (which I doubt), I won't play it because I do not wish to support these kinds of people in society so I will not touch it to boycott it similar to the Bud Light boycott. If you don't represent my values and beliefs then I will not support your game. That's why I've never touched overwatch or fortnite despite some of the good things I have heard of those games. The female character models turned me off entirely.
To me, video games where the women are attractive (that means skinny, big breasts and feminine) and the men look like men, I'd want to be like indicate the developers share similar values to me or at least aren't trying to make their video game about values/beliefs so I'm more inclined to play these games.
Sometimes I have played games entirely because of the big anime titties and I have been surprised at how good the game was so in some regards "attractive females" are a good enough hook to get me to try a game. I will 100% not play a game because of ugly characters even if the game is good though because I don't want to support ugly characters or the developers who'd want to develop games with ugly characters.
It will pique my interest to take a look, but if the creative property is boring, then no amount of hot girls will save it for me.
I genuinely don't care unless its a game that expects me to "romance" or "fuck" one. As long as the game is fun I can live with most anything.
Catch being, most unattractive female characters are also in games that aren't fun, so it checks itself out there.
Attractive women are a sign terminal California hasn't set in yet. So it is a plus, though it won't sell a game by itself. Even eroge need more than just that.
It’s not a factor for me, but that is more the type of games I play. Lots of older racing and NFS games, Warthunder and other things of that type of games, humans aren’t usually there. In the games I do play that this would apply to, I don’t really think about it unless it’s a case of a character being intentionally ugly, I’ll probably not play it but that’s more because the game likely sucks than having a pretty face to look at.
A little late to the party, but to add to your supply of info:
If a game features an ugly woman, I won't look deeper, I simply won't buy it. Doesn't matter if the reviews are good, into the bin it goes.
If a game features an attractive woman, I will look deeper, and actually watch trailers/previews/reviews.
If neither, than it falls somewhere between, might depend on my mood, or the game's genre or hype.
The reason for this is simple: Attractive women are easier to make than unattractive women, and everyone likes attractive women. Studios have admitted, outright, that they mo-cap and rotoscope their actresses for their CG, then hit the result with an ugly stick because it's too attractive. The baseline generic mocap girl they bring in off the street is too sexy for their work. They have to take away resources, take away effort that could be put into making the game better, to actively make the women ugly.
And if a game is actively spending money, effort, time, and development resources to make a less attractive product... How will they treat me as a customer? How will they treat the product they're making? They have no respect for their product, they're vandalizing it for the sake of ESG score. Why would I even waste time looking into such a product, spend a minute on their trailer?
Having attractive female characters is always a good and welcome thing, but having ugly female characters is a huge red flag. The newest mortal combat is a game I wasn't even considering with how shitty the publisher is, but the deliberately ugly is just so bad I can only hope it finally starts waking up the normies. The way people have been rejecting a lot of the big movies by disney and such make me think it might finally happen, but I know better than to get my hopes up.
Attractive women makes media more pleasant than media with intentionally hideous women, but that is less important than the media just being good. I'm never going to choose to watch porn over a great movie.
Hot babes = not a negative
Ugly hoes that are ugly on purpose = a negative.
I want to see the ideal of humanity, not the bleak reality I live in. If I wanted to see a 3/10 landwhale, I would just go to the nearest fast food chain.
This question is yet another example of where feminism and popular culture intersect.
You shouldn't even have to be asking this question if it wasn't that feminists had made such inroads in Hollywoke (a major cultural propaganda center) and the gaming industry.