GabeZhul said:
To stay with the already mentioned Skyrim examples, in that huge, sprawling game there is not a single fat noble or wispy thin beggar. Instead everybody looks like they work out in their free time between three healthy meals, a totally realistic depiction of an early-feudal society living in the frozen north (sic!). Really, the biggest nod towards diversity Skyrim even gave was making all the elves ugly, so at least that demographic was present (until everybody modded them pretty, that is.)
Or how in Far Cry 3/4, there's not a single child, pregnant woman or hunched elder in the entire nation. Look, at least Skyrim can be altered with mods. You are talking about issues of fundamental game design. In Skyrim, all playable races use one of three models. Male, Female and Child. The only other playable models are werewolf and vampire lord. That's it. Each of those has to be animated and have armour/clothing able to fit on it. If you were to create an entirely new model that varies significantly from the others, none of the armour/clothes would fit it and it would need its own animations too. Each model has its own skeleton which dictates where things go and how they move.
It is a question of developmental resources. Skyrim has more than most games...consider AssCreed games where there's only set of everything. Even Mass Effect was as lazy with one male model, one female model and one set of animations shared between them. All the armour looked the same on male or female Shepard. Skyrim doubles that from the get go. That's not even to mention all the animals, giants, dragons and other non-humanoid models.
If you really want more models, there are inevitably games that will provide that, but you're looking in the wrong place. Making one is challenging enough. Making two is double that. Making more and you can have a short and shallow game with varied NPCs populating it. Will having fat or thin people *actually* make the game better? More immersive perhaps, but I would suggest it's more important that dev time go on making a bigger, better game. I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept fewer body types and enjoy a superior game. At least Skyrim has mods that can do all these things and that cannot be changed in other games.
This is very unimportant in the grand scheme of things. In a world where we can enjoy games like SRR, PoE, BG2 and other isometric games, racing games where we are just a car and so on, this is as low on the list of priorities as it's possible to get. Unless you're simulating modern day cities (like GTA5 (which does have fat people)), having so many models is a waste of development resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
