EDIT: nevermind, shouldn't have said anything. It's best to ignore threads like this. It never leads to anything other than "people I disagree with are incels/nazis/feminazis" etc. This truly is the dumbest timeline. And I've seen the one where the Earth was ruled by corgis.

They actually colonised Mars by now

Every time I read some "controversy" or another about too much skin or too much sex in games, I am just simply astonished at the double standard when it comes to sex vs violence.

Any and all, even extreme graphic, violence is okay. Female NPC's with curves is verboten.

I just can't help but look around at the world we live in and wonder what it be like if instead of sex being taboo and violence being celebrated it were the other way around. Personally, I think that would be a much, much better world to live in.

I guess that's just me though.

Oh, is this another nothingburger over a consultation company being involved in a production in ephemeral ways?

Here, I'll give you a spool of red string, and you can even push in the thumbtacks into the corkboard. I'll even set up pictures of an Illuminati logo, a lizard man, and the current administration in your country of choice as the free spaces.

I have so little respect for how Stellar Blade has presented the main character as nothing more than a sex doll that even looking at pornographic images of her seems pointlessly puerile; why go to all the effort of designing a whole game around what's in essence, a digital pinup trophy?

I would prefer if games stuck to their lane of being games, and if the designers are that horny, they can lane shift and make porn. It takes less effort, there's less risk involved, and they can still make money doing so. All that's stopping them is some misguided sense of pride, ego, or honor depending on whence ye hails from.

Lookin at you, Hideo.
Don't forget the secondary bag of rats where most of the MCs of Pokemon have a stated age of 10-16, thereabouts which adds another layer of discomfort to the proceedings.

(Same thing with the Sonic characters, but that fandom was already lost by the time they finally introduced Rougelike the bat; the first legally aged female character in the series.)

Something that self-proclaimed modesty guards don't get, is that men and women are not the same and artistically enhanced femininity looks different than artistically enhanced masculinity. They maybe would know, if they left their safe space once in a while and noticed huge difference how men and women in the real world actually dress. To bad those self proclaimed modesty guards have a strong aversion to reality. Not that any of this matters, as artist should have the freedom to design fictional characters however they see fit. If you don't like it, don't look at it. But of course freedom is another concept those people have a strong aversion to.

It is also not true that those self-proclaimed modesty guards just want equal treatment of both genders. They have very explicitly no problem when only men are objectified or being demeaned (as for example in the barbie movie) as their whole world view is inherently sexist (among other things that are not the topic here) and they revel in their less and less disguised hatred towards men, which has become socially acceptable in parts of our society in recent years.

The reason why Hades gets a pass is of course because it promotes LGBT-content and therefore counts as "progressive" (Which, on a side note I have no problem with as it fits the theme perfectly as the Greek gods really did it with anyone...)

Going to take another 10 years for things to level out and get back to a balanced normal again but the proverbial pendulum is already swinging back - now that terms like DEI, ESG, BRIDGE, etc have entered and continue to enter the global public conscience and more and more regular people are becoming aware of or just are associating them with something "bad" that needs to be pushed back on, lest it infects, warps and ultimately destroys something near and dear to them too.

(sarcasm)
Yeah, forget about millennia of patriarchy and brutal subjugation of women around the world. That they had (and still have) to fight for the most basic rights, such as not being considered property, being allowed to vote, work, drive a car, decide who to marry etc.
But the one Barbie movie certainly makes up for all that "injustice". Heck, it even tilts the balance into the opposite direction! It turns men into victims and proves that women are even more evil, sexist, and hateful than them. What a wonderful justification to continue as before and not even feel bad about it anymore. Hah!
Brethren! Stay free, stay strong, stay vigilant! Together, we can turn back the clock.
(/sarcasm)

Yes, especially it if it really due to some big financing companies (Blackrock etc,) strong-arming game studios to do that, or change the Warhammer lore so that suddenly "Brotherhood of the Demigods" is renamed to "The Order of the Demigods" and then claim that yeah it always had female participants as well, when in reality it didn't.

IF it was just the developers or publishers own wish to make games with ugly women and trans characters, then by all means they are free to do so. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case, as Mark Kern has revealed.

Quite many real-life actors look quite "ideal", ie. more beautiful or more handsome than most of us. Say, Ryan Reynolds, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Olivia Wilde, Sydney Sweeney etc. They have the looks, both masculine and feminine, and at least for me that is not a problem, e.g. I don't feel bad and body-shamed for Ryan and Henry looking more handsome than me. Said actors are simply pleasing to the eye in their roles.

Yes yes, there are also lots of actors and actresses that don't fit similar beauty standards (Steve Buscemi, Melissa McCarthy) who have mainly become famous for other reasons than their looks but that is beside the point when talking about games deliberately making female (and only female, not male, like you can see in Star Wars Outlaws) characters look uglier and more masculine than their real-life counterparts.

And then the developers/publishers have the audacity to claim that is not intentional and it is due to technical limitations of scanning human faces to games which just makes women look uglier, which is easy to prove to be a lie, like e.g. male characters in Outlaws oddly not having similar "technical issues" looking like their real-life counterparts.

You are basically proving the original point there. So you feel it is quite ok to force some kind of political agenda to games as some kind of social engineering experiment, ie. can we make small boys prefer uglier girls in real life too, if we show them enough ugly women in games?

My view is that leave such ideological culture war shit out of games, movies and other entertainment, and let people look at characters that are pleasing to their eye.

It is a similar "problem" how many young women have unrealistic expectations what men should be like and how they should behave. e.g. expecting men to have six or seven figure income, men acting as romantic fools whose only interest in life is the said woman (a female power fantasy of men wanting them and fighting for their attention, as in e.g. Twilight movies or various romantic novels aimed at women).

Do I feel such "unrealistic" stories should be abolished from women, so that they get a more realistic view on how real men behave (snoring and farting in the bed) etc.? Not really, let girls and women have their fantasies of men who never snore nor fart.

Not everything that is pleasing to the eye, makes you horny.

I've only seen the demo gameplay videos of Stellar Blade, and my reaction to e.g. the two female heroes in the beginning was looking at their faces and being "Wow, they sure look striking.". It was more akin to looking at a beautiful sunset from a top of a mountain, than getting horny. Similar feeling when I looked at e.g. Henry Cavill in Superman movies, I didn't become horny then either but it was easy for me to admire his looks in the movies (except that one movie where they digitally removed his moustache from the live shots, yikes!).

It is also striking how overly aggressive SJWs are in this thread, instantly going to ad hominem attacks, calling people who disagree with them as "horny incels" etc. Luckily I have a beautiful feminine looking wife who is even good at kitchen (she is actually there right now) so I just shrug off the insults.
Ah yes, the evil patriarchy... Admiring the looks of a beautiful woman is sure like modern-day slavery or something, and definitely not something natural, ie. being attracted to beauty.

Muslim countries are way ahead of us, they put women into black sacks so that the male gaze doesn't oppress women.

Surely that skinsuit is there for technical reasons and not just to suit the male gaze, like the Zero Suit, or Quiet's lack of clothing?

I'm not even offended, just that I find it silly to put all the risk into being horny instead of just going full horny and making the smut so many of these creators supposedly want to make.

I just want them to drop the pretense!

Addendum: People like the OP complaining about these things have the lifting power of an anemic mouse over these distant financial investment groups and consulting firms, but it is fun to watch them scream and kick their way into irrelevance.

For millennia all humans had it pretty bad, except a small elite called nobility. Sure you could argue that women had even less freedom than men but on the other hand they weren't supposed to give their lives in pointless wars for the honor of their sovereign, a duty for which the right to vote was often seen as a compensation (at least during the more liberal times of ancient Greeks and Romans, most of the time the only compensation was waiting in the afterlife...). I'm not sure the slave workers in the mines and quarries felt all that privileged either but what do I know?
In the modern age though, at least in the western world, women don't have to fight for their basic rights. They have in most countries a higher expectancy of life, a higher quality of life (exemplified in a drastically lower suicide rate), a higher education, and are much less likely to be a victim of intra-species violence or end up in jail.

Anyway none of those past and present injustices legitimate any form of "payback". Injustice doesn't cancel itself out, it just adds up to more injustice. And don't get me wrong, I think it is OK, that every male marvel hero takes his shirt off to please the ladies and films like barbie paint men as dumb and evil but then you really have no business complaining about a video game character who looks pleasant to straight men.

There are double standards even in the categories themselves, not just between them. Case in point - Sony is perfectly fine with Baldur's Gate 3 or The Last of Us 2 being completely uncensored on their platform, yet Stellar Blade, a game which has neither full nudity nor sex scenes had to be hit with the censorship stick.

It's why things have started slowly improving. The words they use lost all meaning and impact because they are being spewed everywhere at the slighest hint of disagreement about anything. It used to scare people a while ago, when being labeled as something negative, but most frankly don't care anymore.

Censorship being a much more accepted and normal practice in most asian countries (pixelated genitals and penetration in pornography is standard) likely also plays into it.
The resistance to Sony suggesting to have the character model covered up may have been zero to none because to South Korean devs this is no big deal either.


Literally nothing is safe, Female Adeptus Custodes/Tzeentchtodes being the latest example.

To be honest, had it been like that from the start, there wouldn't have been nearly as much blowback. The problem here is that the demo and version 1.000 printed on physical discs have the game without the censorship and it was only the day one patch, that introduced the changes. That is what's very suspect in this case. A very viable guess would be:

1) Game going gold.
2) Game going to access media before release, along with the demo for general public.
3) Access media complaining about sexualization and whatever other nonsense through private feedback channels.
4) Sony reacting by forcing the developer to include the censorship in the planned day 1 patch, which was obviously hurried because they didn't even change the relevant UI elements and whatnot. Not to mention the edits themselves as they didn't have the same shading/quality as the original costumes.

We will never know for sure though, but I see the above as a very realistic scenario.

Also, Sony is at it again, this time from a different keg with Helldivers 2, which suddenly went from a universally beloved game to yet another shitstorm. Sony's gotta Sony I guess.

what did i just read

dunno but me brain hurts