Akeroh said:
I've found, with RO2 and *especially* Brink, that there were tons of people that wanted women in game, and I'm starting to get annoyed, not so much with the request, but that people think that it's simply easy to add a female model.
Especially Brink huh? The game Brink? Brink where in the character design/upgrade/'dress me up daddy' screens the model doesn't stand there, but *bounces*. Brink where the character model looks around displaying his facial hair/haircut/scars and his relatively impossible yet suitably impressive musculature. That Brink? Brink, which is so hung up on its ability to fully render and customize the player character, that you can select an outfit that is properly accessorized to properly set of you hair and or eye color? Is this the game that we're talking about? Brink; the game that is absolutely obsessed with its ability to render a male body in minute detail, this is the game where you don't understand a desire for a female model?
Well son, let me explain it to you this way. When mommy developer and daddy developer love their software idea very much, they plead with a stern-faced Reverend Publisher....
Yeah, OK, that wasn't going anywhere, but it was funny for about 1.5 seconds.
And I'm going to disagree with you a little. "It doesn't change game play at all." You are underestimating how important the character design is to Brink. I'll admit that I have only played the game for about a weekend. And it was fun. But I would have been hard pressed to stay interested in Brink for even a month. Brink does have some nifty features, and those features are both in the macro-scale (gameplay and level design) and micro-scale (character design). Yet the gameplay wasn't so impressive that it alone makes Brink a success. I really liked the level design, and the fact that the parkour thing adds a whole new dimension to level design.
Adding a female character (something that should have been done pre-release, along with about 5 other things that I won't mention) could conceivably have expanded the potential player base. [Yeah, I know, most wimmen hate FPS anyway] But the female model would ALSO give players like myself a reason to stay interested in the game longer.
Because I *totally* want to play Brink as a big-boned heavy weapon dyke b... ruiser.
(And that's not sexist because I'm talking about me)
Additionally, you don't actually have to re-create the player skeleton from scratch - unless you go with the Fantasy Female model that looks like two watermelons glued to a stop sign. If you make the rash assumption that the female model is going to have the same impossible muscle tone as the male model, then the skeletons can be the same, and only the adolescent males will cry about the absence of BO-dacious mammaries.
And also... I could swear that when I played Brink, that there WERE female NPCs. If you're complaining about making female models just for the masturbatory look-at-how-well-rendered-our-shit-is screen, then you must have skipped that day in 'visual appeal' class. The Brink team must have known that the game would have a short life span without a heavy amount of DLC. And if they DID plan to bring the DLC, they should have had the sense to schedule the female model coding before the release date. And if the Brink team didn't anticipate the need, they should have.
Edit: "Do you seriously wanna see a female character be shot/stabbed/blown up/chainsawed/beheaded/whateverelse in game?"
Oh yes, Black Kite, I very much do. And the ability to pick up a chunk of body separated from the torso above the pelvis. Then call a team mate over to make a wish.