Best Of

This is all so predictable, the "raising concerns", "just trying to have discussions", the "haha, I was just a joke guys!". In fact this topic has been so humorous that this is the second time it's been made the topic of a thread by the same person! So laugher, much funny, wow! In all seriousness... no one laughed, no one found it funny

In all honesty dude, just stop, these talking in circles and pontificating are doing you no favors. All of these talking points are the exact same ones reactionary use. Which when they quack like a duck, and walk like a duck, I'm going to call them out as ducks. You may not be walking like one now, but you're definitely quacking like one. Either this makes you a useful drone where you'll be on whatever next culture war thing the reactionaries point at, or you genuinely believe this stuff but are trying to hide it. Quacking like a duck, still makes you a duck all the same.


This is the flavor of the week, the current point of outrage. No one who is in dev takes this outrage seriously, because here is the thing: even if you bend and do exactly what the reactionaries say... they will still find something to complain about, because once you're on that emotional spiral, it just keeps on wanting to be fed. It has already happened to a game that chuds loved and made a culture war out of, until they found something they didn't like and created a petition around it.

I may not care about Star Wars all that much, or this game; however I do care about reactionary sentiment leaking into the game dev space, potentially pushing people out, stifling accessibility and creativity for everyone. A unsolicited piece of professional advice, if you keep going down this rabbit-hole, it will make you, at minimum, unpleasant to work with as it seeps into all parts of your life (it's already apparent in some of your other threads). If that does happen, you will have no one but yourself to blame as we all tried to warn you.

If you want to get yourself out of this loop, stop watching reactionary content, go outside, learn new hobbies, play with your pets, take an anatomy course, focus on your art, etc. Maybe also understand how to deprogram yourself and what kind of tactics are used to draw you in... because yes, it can happen to anyone. Recommended playlists:





I think this thread has run it's course

before trying to solve a problem first i'd want to quantify the problem to see if it is a problem or not

for games at this level i'm not sure that 450,000 angry redditors means anything, if that is even a real number to begin with

and given the nature of the complaints and its close ties to the sort of culture war nonsense that is at least partially fueld by kremlin money, i'd be really suspicious about what is real widespread audience sentiment versus rage bait for insignificant audience
presumably ubisoft has a handle on things like that, they've been on top for a long time.

if i'm making a game and the audience is teenagers, i'm making all the characters hot, just like virtually all other games do. it's pretty much a no brainer.
if i want a nuanced story with layered characters who are more like real people and have something intelligent to say, it won't be a video game for tweens/teens.

NikhilR said:

If I had worked on Kay and saw that criticism with a 450,000 strong army of dissident gamers threatening a boycott I would absolutely re-evaluate the character modeling I was assigned.
I do understand that the way game development works in the corporate machine maybe I can't do anything about it and I certainly would not go John Wick on the establishment.

But I do wonder that if Kay wasn't meant to be a 1:1 match of her reference and this fact was polarising the audience, should ubisoft have put out a PR statement addressing the concerns the audience had with her character model during development so as to prevent a "haha told you so moment" upon release?

Do you really believe 450,000 gamers are that sore because of her character model? Really?

It's culture war nonsense. I'd put money that the game is on that "woke game detected" list because she doesn't look enough like a sex doll for some people.

Ubisoft put out that statement to try to manage the capital G gamer outrage. Not because they did something wrong.

NikhilR said:

I felt that the deep fake definitely shows subtleties that were lost in the redesign. 
Its not too different from overlaying photo reference on the model and checking for inconsistencies during modeling and at rendertime.

Even at the current generation, we can't quite make characters that are perfectly true to life. That's not a fault of her design, it's a limit of what we can do with the tech, time and budget available. Of course polygon models have limitations when it comes to the subtleties they can capture; they're just our best attempt at replicating the results of real skin and sat on top of real, moving muscles sat on top of a skeleton. Digital models generally don't have simulations of those, and I'm bet an open world game running in real time doesn't, so of course you'll lose some subtleties in motion.

If you mean the face itself.....We've established it's different than the original model. Don't you think it's strange, then, to use the original model to say things are missing from Kay Vess when it's just as likely they were just considered unimportant or different than the vision the designers had in mind?

NikhilR said:

Her face is more androgynous and that's fine, personally I have always appreciated that facial type (tilda swinton comes to mind)
But was it wise to do it in this case, and was it done right by their world class top tier character art team?
Does right mean final approval or are there nuances that have to be revisted considering the backlash so that there isn't a repeat of this on future games?

You aren't doing yourself any favours by relating the quality of her face to your personal preferences, I think. It's something like the "I can't be racist, I have black friends" of criticising a character's appearance.

Why should it be unwise? Are you suggesting they should have dictated their character designs by the whims of a load of angry horny guys?

There's a word for this that escapes me.....But basically, it feels like a racket. "Better make your character designs horny enough....It would be a shame if there happened to be a load of backlash against your game." That's basically the intention of the people behind these backlashes and "boycotts". They are, of course, entitled to buy or not buy as they like, but I think this kind of "asking questions" is really just carrying water for them and trying to legitimise their regressive demands. You aren't arguing about whether or not the desires of the audience should be considered - it's just rhetoric stating their desires should be pandered to.

Her character design isn't a problem. I don't think most people even thought anything about it. Because most gamers are not Gamers. Games live and die on their franchise power, their quality, and the reputation they earn through that. The character design is not the lynchpin that holds it all together.

NikhilR, why not just title your post "Star Wars Outlaws: the game has some problems, but the character's attractiveness is my biggest one"
Since there is very little critique of anything but.
We're all allowed our hot takes, but at least call it a spade...

Alright dude, I'm going to call your bluff, what is happening here is a motte-and-bailey fallacy essentially a moving of the goalposts.

Already you've told us what you think, that the character Key is a 0 out of 10 (super ugly). That her looks are not only ugly, but worthy of scorn by speculating on her fictional parents being were she gets her "ass face" (quoting you) from. That she is an "overpowered thug" (this is all the bailey part of your argument)

All of these complaints thinly veiled over by an extremely flimsy "I just want to talk about the gameplay decisions guys!" (this is the monte in your argument) Especially as you've been called out, all it took was a little bit of pushback for the walking back to begin. It's intellectually dishonest. This is not the first time this has happened in one of your threads, and I doubt without introspection, this won't be the last.

As someone who has had DEI training, one of the most valuable things I've learned is from a session from a lawyer, who goes on to state that in the court of law and in legal matters what you "intend" to say doesn't matter, it is what is the impact of what is actually said that does matter. If what you "intend" to talk about is the gameplay and design choices, there is no need to throw in commentary about how butt ugly you think the character is, but you did it anyway. It's what you really think, it's what you really believe, otherwise you wouldn't have said it. Clearly whatever content that has been consumed since the last Star Wars thread and the state of "culture wars" in general has escalated and you're not as clever about hiding it this time.

It is entirely possible to talk about character design and art decisions while completely separating your own personal opinion on whether or not you think the character is attractive. It is also possible for a character to not be to your liking, but still understand what they are trying to go for and respect it. There needs to be some honesty here: Whatever issues you feel are with the design are gameplay have been amplified by discourse surrounding how the main character is seen as not attractive enough by the reactionary part of the internet. It's absolutely, obviously seeping through your posts, regardless of what you "intend"