As a Daedra, I'm quite unfamiliar with mortals' sense of attraction.

To all those mortals who are attracted to male mortals, what could they do to make male armor totally objectifying and therein said male emotionally vulnerable?

I don't know about you guys, but I'm quite straight and would love to play as a male character with a "crotch-window". Mainly so I could reference "300" many times over and make sitting on peoples' corpses a lot funnier and humiliating.

All races look pretty different in every single TES installment so I really don't understand what you mean when you say "TES Altmer." The only characteristic she seems to be lacking is the golden hue to her skin. Also, your comment about how this is something we would expect in a DA game shows you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Females in DA aren't even overly sixualized by any standards. If anything you should be attempting to use Lineage or TERA as an example but even then that's a complete extreme and the only revealing thing about the female armor that we've seen is the chest window which is pretty conservative.

while I agree that six sells, it really has no business in a TES setting, your better off making elegant tasteful female armor pieces patterned after actual female contemporary armor than trying to sell virtual six toons...a LOT of younger audiences play the TES series and its better to keep it with a 13+ rating than going and slapping a T or Mature rating on it

I think what its going to boil down to is what KIND of gamer is TESO going to cater to

An interesting detail about female armour: A "boob-window" is not even necessary to make it look female; it's in fact pretty hard to make form-fitting armour for a female which doesn't look different enough from a male one to be perceived as "feminine". For example, for the second season of the "Game of Thrones" series, the design crew had to add a special pattern on her armour to visually "hide" Gwendoline Christie's (playing Brienne of Tarth) hips - and she really doesn't look like your typical model.

I find it disappointing too. As a gamer who'd like to give this game a chance (ie. a potential sale regardless of my gender or sixual orientation) I hope they keep armors in the game reasonable and don't six them up to jazz-hands the thing.

I like females and I like armor, so I guess I like female armor too

Seriously though, from the advertisemant screenshot I see nothing wrong with the armor being worn by the female character. If anything, it looks functional and not sixified (is that a word?).

I've seen other games where female armor was more in style of flimsy chainmail bikinis, so I'm glad the initial images I see for TESO retain a more modest and practical look whilst not going into detail of sword-guidance mechanics. If I were to jab you with a spear, it would go through most areas anyway as I'd just allow it to glance up from your armor and in under your chin. And imagine that, male armor seems particulary vulnerable to that tactic as it had these nice slopes everywhere allowing upward glancing jabs.

There should be an option to wear a vest under ones sixy armour in order to maintain ones modesty

Even better, let me wear a robe over my armor (like the olden days)

And I'm a guy so therefore I am the ambassasor for all men ? Also yes they need to stop making he-men and darkside just to save you time i read your post and i gathered " I really don't care either way " which is grand , just to let you know the rest of the post isn't in respone to you from here.

Anyway it's not just about "we think it's offensive to women" , Personally I feel it's like that's what the creative team expects of us and that is quite insulting , I want the armor to be the same for male and female , if there are differences I don't care but I and many others don't want the differences to be obvious highlighting of the females chest and ass , I'm going to show 2 screenshots that is an extreme examples . I like to RP as a powerful female nord warrior or a merciless female breton necromancer ( hope that didn't sound creepy) haha anyway you can't take any female character seriously like this ....

--> http://www.hdgamewallpaper.net/wallpaper/tera-online-wallpaper-1.jpg and http://mmogamesvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/tera_2010-02-16_17-37-44-28.jpg

That is the kind of stuff we dislike i mean l look at her and the guy to the right . the hell ?, now obviously TESO won't go that far but as I said it was an extreme example , alot of women if they wanted a female avatar would find it degrading to their character , as a male I find it embarrassing and it's not representing the community properly , why does not being born with a [censored] mean I have to dress like a stripper who's about to give the final reveal ?

The armor is not practical at all , it breaks RP and is just plain embarrassing and disrespectful , the female armor if it goes skimpy will reflect negatively on the community and we will lose out on more mature members , I would not actually play TESO no matter how good it is if it panders to the pervs who marry pillows --> http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/816601-man-marries-pillow and I personally feel it gives the impression that's who they think we are if they give us [censored] armor .

And just one last point , I hope they have character sliders in the character creation , I'm sick of he-men and barbie's , I want a scrawny archer like feandil and a beefy strong female warrior like uthgard the unbroken . Like the single player games , only have weight actually apply to female avatars , men go from scrawny to hulk and females stay at model build even with weight up full 0.o

I want proper clothing and armor, and will be content with the inclusion of boob-window armor as long as I have many, many non-boob-window options.

heh im a man and i find sixy female armor offensive its not realistic it doesnt fit with the times no REAL warrior princess is gonna run around with her body exposed, in times of war historically women got fitted to cover their bodies just like men did, if you want to make the armor LOOK nice thats one thing but make it so the ARMOR looks nice not the female's rear end and boobs....if i wanted to see those id go watch porm

They could make cosmetic armor less valuable, or moderately accessible.people would be apt to decline using provocative clothing, but it's still there. No one who is serious about diving into some dungeon would be caught dead in it.

I would say that defeats the point but but it aint stoppin the naked hordes of lvl 1 females runnin around if we do get that crowd

That was a favourite trick of mine in WoW, complete with the fun task of matching the shirt and armour colour so it didn't stand out too much. I'd certainly rather not have to do that, of course...


Which is why you wear a gorget. One of these days we're really going to have to put fantasy game designers through a class on medieval armour...

Exactly, so why do people focus on briasts guiding in swords when the male armor is no better at protecting you

Actually... I think that's the point - they would be caught dead in it.

Well, it's certainly not that men's armour doesn't bother me sometimes... it's just that women's armour tends to be worse, covering less, and seemingly more an active attempt to look sixy rather than accidentally leaving something out because the person making it didn't realise it actually did something important - a sin of ommission vs. a sin of commission, as it were. It's a two-stage thing with me - first make the two types of armour equally okay, then they can get around to making them both correct. (No sense in giving women a gorget if there's still a big open area just under it, after all!)

in my opinion they are equally bad. Huge Shoulders are actually a bigger drawback limiting your line of sight slowing you down making you an easier target not to mention totaly ruining your center point and making you able to be flipped over way more easily....


EDIT: yet i think this topic is dumb if its not going to TERA like levels (Wich it is NOT in case you havent noticed)

As I've said multiple times before, this isn't a race that you win just by not being the worst in it. TESO shouldn't get a pass just because it objectifies women less than its contemporaries. I even mentioned in my OP that we aren't in chainmail bikini territory, which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but boob windows are still representative of the trend of objectification in video games and other media, and I would very much like to play a game without them.

And to restate: huge shoulderpads and other such things are also a problem. But, a point I've yet to have made: those aren't relevant to this discussion, not least because the game does not feature huge shoulderpads. The male armour in all of the screenshots up on UESP so far has been relatively reasonable - there are some peripheral vision issues, but the armour doesn't look cartoony, and the pauldrons in general aren't ridiculously exaggerated. That one ridiculously huge orc in the flythrough video is an outlier - the screenshots feature orcs with much more reasonable proportions.

So unless you can bring up examples of objectification of the male models in the game equivalent to the objectification of the female models, continuing to bring up the huge shoulderpads really rings kind of meaningless.

i prefer functional armor that covers everything but fits around the shape of the woman

im seriously tired of all these games where 95% of all female armor is fit for a swimsuit show

While the boob windows are anoying, I have a copy of Edge magazine. Its done a story of ESO, and there a picture of a female with none boob window armour. Its not even "sixy" fitted, it looks like decent medium armour. So it might just be a problem with that one piece?

luckily its easier to please ....

http://s.excessif.com/mmdia/i/19/1/spartacus-blood-and-sand-4221191nknob.jpg?v=1

the armor is not that practical XD

so now the game will be a bunch of he-men and women running around half naked.... I have to admit that a PART of me won't mind that

ehehe

its an advertising thing (if we are talking about the huge poster elf woman!!)

all in all it was NOT bad, I mean some games just slap some slave-girl/princess Lia with Jaba the Hut kinda women and she is not even doing a battle pose, it more like a sixual pose, at least TESO were pretty decent about it

Its seems unnessecery really, the ingame picture is really good. The armour looks pretty nice, and none sixualised in tge slightest. I dont know why they need boob windows, they have really badass armour without it. But if there are Male topless armours, then the boob windows don't really matter