The woman seems to have a leather armor that exposes the heart and the underbelly, and she has no sleeves for some reason. The guys' armor isn't like that. I've been going through the screenshots of various Divinity games now, and I haven't seen a single comparable garment on a man. Not even a sleeveless shirt. I don't like that. My actual first impression was from Divinity 2's screenshots. One of them has a woman in some sort of a metal armor. Assuming the head is blade repellent like heads often are in fantasy, where on earth would you stab her with that armor (maybe the heart, or anywhere above, or the arms). Then compare it to any guy's armor. Can't see a place where to stick a blade without some resistance. That's what's bothering me. If you're going to cater to the boob armor enthusiasts, at least try to make it look like they're not the only ones you're catering to.

Your first impression of me, a person who has lived for decades, is from a forum post? I guess that's why it's called a first impression. Even if there is real world precedence, choices you make can be bad, stupid or pretty much anything. Your reply really doesn't alleviate any of my concerns.

Seriously, if it was some Korean F2P where female warriors armors are basically a tiny metal bra and an as small metal thong, I would have understood your point, but here, I see woman wearing more revealing clothes by walking in the street during summer, as far as "fantasy female clothing" goes those are pretty tame.

I am not a fan or exclusive pre-order bonus/DLC/whatever at all, but here I don't really see what is the problem. You have a "regular" version of the games and an "limited/extended/collector/etc..." version of the game with the later costing slightly more. It's nothing new and even long before the DLC craze we had games sold in multiple version, Morrowind, more than 10 years ago, had multiple versions and even before it already existed.

Here nothing "forces" you to pre-order, if you decide to buy the games six months/one year after release you can, you will still be able to get either the "regular" version or the "extended" version, you will get exactly the same content as the one you would have got by pre-ordering it.

It will be up to you to decide if the "extra" of the "extended" version (basically the soundtrack, some commentaries and a bunch of skins) are worth 10$ or not.

The only "specialty" here is that by pre-ordering you get the "enhanced" edition for "free" and two extra free games, honestly as far as pre-order incentives goes, 10$ cheaper plus two free games (even thought I already own both) is not that bad.

Also for the record Witcher 2 had some pre-order exclusive (even seller based exclusives) mini-DLCs, granted those were given to everybody some time after release but that's something that nobody knew before the actual release.

A woman deciding to wear revealing clothes is a very different thing from making your game's women's clothing revealing. Having the option to wear revealing clothes is okay, not having the option to not wear revealing clothes is not. My first impression is based on the pictures I see. The pictures gave me the impression that the game's women's clothing is revealing, and there is no option to not wear revealing clothes. Except if you play as a guy. Then you have no option to wear revealing clothes. The replies to my query haven't even tried to convince me otherwise, they've been more of the "that is not a problem for me, so it's not a problem for you" and "you're overreacting" variety. Protip: if you're ever arguing that you're not being sexist, don't use either of those.

If you still don't see even a possibility of a problem, would you see a one if there was a sci-fi game in which women's space suits, the ones they use in vacuum and other tricky places, had a hole to show their breasts? A really tame one. Would you feel like the people who think it's stupid and probably put in for the wrong reasons are overreacting?

It's a bit sad to read the posts in news/pre-order topics. It seems everyone only wants to come in them and complain. Look around you or on other stores how it works. What we're being given here are pre-order bonuses. Uf you don't want them, don't pre-order. If you don't want to pre-order or pay for them later, wait for a price drop or (why not) that they are added as bonus.

New titles or indie release have most of the time less extras here because many sell them in a Director's Cut / Deluxe / ... version.

Also, the bonuses for the Witcher are more the exception than the rule, it is the only game here (two if you count Witcher 1 & 2) that offer that many bonuses. And CD Projekt is a much bigger company than Larian, which also happens to be located in Belgium, where salaries and taxes are way higher than those of Poland.

No they aren't.
This is a new game, not a classic.
A standard base game (any game) which is released, is released as is.No extra's.
What base games out there are released with developers video doc, skins and soundtrack (this in particular)? None that i'm aware of. People are expecting too much for free.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

It's the start of a very slippery slope and, from my experience, it gets 'black ice' slippy very quickly.

When we were asked to vote on this a couple of months ago, I voted no as I expected, if it was allowed, changes to the site and to what was 'acceptable' would just keep getting worse.

Game prices too are now increasing rapidly for new games added to GOG - $20, $30, $40 etc -- far more expensive than GOG's normal prices Before long, we'll be getting AAA games as well with "just one online activation" required..

And as for pre-ordering, sorry, but unless you are absolutely 100 percent going to buy a game even if it's a piece of shit, if you pre-order any game you're an idiot.

The way a game looks in a video trailer can be markedly different than what is actually sold when it's released, and tens of thousands of idiot gamers can tell you that after they've pre-ordered games and realized they're stuck with a piece of junk they would never have bought it they had waited until reviews were out. On top of that, why should any developer have YOUR money in their bank accounts, often for several months, making interest on it when they haven't even given you a game for it yet?

TotalBiscuit has an excellent video out about why pre-ordering games makes you a fool, and although I don't agree with everything he says, in this case I do. He's dead against pre-ordering and he's absolutely spot on as to why.

You can read Total Biscuit's rant here --http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnJvuE3Ht-U&feature=plcp# (Question 2 - in the video - you can get to it by clicking the link at the bottom of the video)

The update sounds very nice and the offer adding Master of Magic and Divine Divinity is very charming. But, no matter how much I agree with the worth of the soundtracks by Mr. Pokrovsky, I'm not feeling well about the part with the additional upgrate. Simply because offering extra parts of a game isn't fine and Swen Vincke allready told us Larian will not release DLCs. And this, with an extra map and the skin, looks like one.

You saw two pictures were female character were showing their arms and shoulders and you came to the conclusion that it was impossible for female to not wear revealing armors... it's like if you were seeing a couple of Morrigan's pictures and came to the conclusion that all women in Dragon Age had to walk around half naked.

That's the thing, you don't have to pre-order. There is nothing pre-order exclusive here, you can perfectly wait for the game to be released and reviewed and then decide what to do then, you won't lose any content by doing so.

I might be wrong, but from what I understand, an extra map is also mostly cosmetic too, a glorified extra tileset if you prefer. The game is not "a map" = "a mission" like in other RTS like Starcraft for example, but it's more a case of : when there is a battle in a mountain area you fight on a "mountain themed" map, when there is a battle in a jungle area, you fight on a "jungle themed" map, etc...

So an extra map doesn't mean an extra mission, quest or something like that but just a little more graphical variety. (Once again that's how I understood it, so it might be wrong)

Where my impression came from:

Divine Divinity
13 pictures
3 of them with women, 2 out of those 3 with cleavage and whatnot
(noticed a male villager with a sleeveless shirt just now when looking at it closer, that's great at least)

Beyond Divinity
13 pictures
1 of them with women, she's wearing robes

Divinity 2
13 pictures
3 of them with women, 2 out of those with cleavage and whatnot, the one without is the cover art

Divinity: Dragon Commander
13 pictures
1 of them with women, both women in the picture are showing their belly button, not a single guy is doing the same

Divinity: Original Sin
I've seen one picture with a woman, and she didn't have sleeves while the guy next to him in a similar armor did. She had also bent her spine weirdly for no apparent reason.

I'll now go check the official website's pictures, but those aren't a part of the first impression anymore, that's research.

22 screenshots
All of the screenshots seem to include a woman, cool. 6 of them seemed to have revealing clothing. That's much better than before.

12 pieces of concept art
3 of them have women. They're all pretty bad, especially because they're the only ones. Links:
http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/conceptart/DOSCA_0000.jpg
http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/conceptart/DOSCA_0003.jpg
http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/conceptart/DOSCA_0008.jpg

So, for my unreasonable first impression, I had seen 9 (out of 53) pictures with women, 5 of them had revealing clothing. Out of the 4 pictures that didn't have it, one is the cover art and you can't tell if it's a playable character, one is of a villager with a long skirt, one is with a long robe, and one was a promotional image in which she's lacking sleeves (which would be just a minor annoyance without the bent spine).

It's entirely possible there were armored women that I just didn't recognize as women, which would be great, but that couldn't possibly affect my impression before I've been informed that they're actually women.

I think my impression was reasonable. Want me to make a similar "analysis" about the men in the pictures and some comparisons? Who knows, I might be way off mark, but I doubt it. There's a guy without a shirt, but I'm talking about the clothes and presentation, and I wouldn't mind a woman without a shirt (unless it's made in a stupid way, but then the problem isn't the shirtlessness).

About Dragon Age, that game has some armor issues too. Not many, but some armors have magically appearing cleavage when worn by women and not when by men. I posted a picture about it on these forums years ago when people were talking about how the game doesn't have it. But yeah, if I had only seen like 50 Dragon Age pictures, and all the ones with women in them were of Morrigan in her usual attire without any other women in them, I'd make assumptions. Making a non-sexist game look like a sexist one would be a major screw up by the marketing team, wouldn't you agree?

/edit: Looked at the screenshots again and noticed a properly armored woman in the background in one of Divinity 2's screenshots. That's great, but it'd be better if she was in the foreground so it's easy to spot her.

I agree, and I really appreciate your sentiment. However:

While entertainment has a decent forward tail, the bulk of it is lagging behind social mores-wise - especially the AAA stuff where producers look to mitigate every other possible risk. That's only to be expected. Boob armor is a thing. Boob armor is sexist. But it has to be noted that Larian (probably) isn't going out of their way to be super offensive and/or stupid. For example, this lady is fine by me. Hey, they even covered up the female character in D:OS, responding to player concerns, without me having to bring up my great-grandma* who fought in the War of the Damned and wore standard-issue armor.

By no means I want to dissuade you from voicing your opinion. That's actually important. There's proof that raising concerns works; maybe we'll even live long enough to see normal armor become the standard. By no means I'm arguing "ur an idiot preventing urself from playing a game for stoopid reasons"; unlike some other people (S___m fans, trollface.jpg) I realize playing the game is an experience that can be ruined by software bugs, hardware problems, crappy visuals, pervy camera, intrusive distribution platform, your knowledge of the dev being a raging asshole, etc. Barring N2O, it's not possible to force people to have fun.

There are more questions to ask besides fanservice armor. Why only a male character? (The official answer: budget constraints. Unless they went on record saying how they absolutely need characters react to the female PC absolutely differently because their fantasy world just has to be realistically sexist, I can believe that.) Why only princesses, no princes? (I actually applaud the "marry a princess of a race of your choice", given that the races are Undead, Elf, Dwarf, Lizard and Imp. Looking forward to marrying an awesome Dwarven lady.) Why the published nonprincess characters are male only?

And yet, I still expect DC to be vastly more progressive than, say, Planescape: Torment, not to mention (blech) the recent Bioware offerings ("but it's written by a woman! it can't be sexist!"); and, what with it being a "genre emulation" game (see also: Sid Meier's Pirates!), I expect to be able to ignore things that would've been annoying in a more serious game.

*see Female Characters in Xenonauts Flame War of yesteryear.

You forgot to count the skeletons who walk around naked, most of them are males...

But seriously 5 pictures out of 53, most of them representing non player characters is all it takes for you to come to the conclusion that it's not possible for female player character to wear non revealing armor ? Not sure if I would call that reasonable...

I don't know a thing about dragon biology and as far as I'm concerned they could use the same model for girl dragons. They could just have a "are you a boy or a girl" question at the beginning and change all the references to "prince" to "princess" and "he" to "she" (or crazy cop out, come up with a fantasy gender neutral pronoun, like hän. that's Finnish, it's a gender neutral he/she), and I'd think it's the coolest thing. Making a big deal out of the gender would just make it worse. If the player character has a human model, they probably would have to make another one for that. :p

This seems like a good place to put this. Just because I'm in overdrive mode right now. :)
There are some really cool pictures in that article too.

This should probably be mentioned:
I actually want to like their games. I want to know why people think they're cool. I presented why I have ignored them in hopes that someone would explain to me why my concerns were unfounded. The reason I'm talking about this spiral spine boob monster stuff is not because I think the creators are the worst people, it's because I want them to do better. Strong counter reactions and denial of credibility just make my rejection stronger. I'd probably start writing love letters if a dev's reaction was "you know, I hadn't thought about that, we should do something about it" and then actually did.

Not really, the nakedness has nothing to do with the clothes and the presentation. I think it's cool when games let you get naked. Naked NPCs would be cool too, but if the naked women then had weird poses and the guys didn't, the presentation would be stupid (it'd be a lesser, different kind of stupid if everyone did poses :p ). Running around naked in games is fun. <about poses>

It's 5 pictures out of 9. You can't really come to any conclusions about women's clothing options from pictures that don't have women in them. There's a whole different thing you can assume from having only 9 pictures out of 53 have any women in them at all.