QCF Design Community

I'm not sure you answered the question. Games have been giving boys and girls the same job (or even power at it) for years, this is true, but there's nothing really sexist about that in and off itself. DD in particular doesn't really go too deeply into the psychology of it's adventurers, you mostly get to handle them in their professional environment, so there's no reason to go into even specualting about how their malenss or femaleness would work out, and in the end they'd certainly step into any of the million pitfalls of trying to mechanically define a woman (or even a man), not to mention one of a whole entire species.

Because most of those really are, for the most part, cultural. My country, for example, is rather small, but contains vastly different people, and I've interacted with women of different cultural backgrounds (all kinda authotitarian with a strong drive to shape all their members into presentable member of their particular tribe/region/religion/whatever). You could simply not draw any conclusion about woomanhood from all these people! They were shaped by different things, sometimes completely different things and while guys from their hometowns or villages could very assuredly tell you what you can expect of "a woman", I can quite assuredly tell you what's likely to have shaped a woman... from that particular town or village. What happens startlingly often is that when people go to a larger centre to study they get drawn to women from completely different backgrounds simply because they're sick of the baggagge women in their hometown get saddled wih and they are thrilled by the discovery that there are women in the world which are completyl different than what they've been thaught a woman is.

Because a woman is, really, a completely blank slate which differs from guys for most practical puroses by having a menses cycle and a bit more hyperactive hormones on a monthly basis. That's it. Painting them as anything more mechanicaly specific than that is painting a member of a society or an individual, not a more athentic woman.

What IS groundbreaking in the DD approach to portraying women is the same thing that's kinda great about portraying guys. They're more grotesques than idealizations, which puts them visualy closer to realism or naturalism than you usually (or even ever) get in videogames. And they're empathicaly not oversexualized, which is great - giving boys and girls equal stats for being of a certian profession is something that's been done before, but it's the way thigs ought to be done, having boys and girls look like having those skills/stats at the same time makes sense wasn't.

+1 to dislekcia for doing the right thing, then doing the right thing again in not feeding trolls trying to turn statements about not making a statement into a statement about gender.

Thanks for bothering to do the right thing. I hope it only gets better when you start including non-European faces and whatnot. A lot of stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar all at once can be pretty exhausting, and it's great that you're looking at the next step.

In my humble opinion, DD's quirky art style feels more consistent as a result of using the quirky traits like the wrinkles, warts and bulging eyes also on the female avatars.

That said, unless basic rules of attraction are vastly different in the imagined world versus the real one, people who have the desire to be more attractive generally find some means to become so. As magical worlds are generally considered to host more opportunities versus mundane ones (like the one we are living in), it feels intuitive that in a magical world it would be easier to improve one's attractiveness should one wish to do so.

Nevertheless, this seems like one of those topics that have been over-discussed already, with very little value added by common sense anymore.