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Geneforge Remake Character Sex Choice?


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I loved the original Geneforge series, and I can't wait to play the new ones. Something I'd like to see in the new series is the ability to pick the sex of your character. For the whole original series I was wondering what a female Servile player looked like, or a male Agent, a female Guardian, or a male Shock Trooper.

 

 

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In the past few games Jeff/SW has been pretty good about letting you design the sex/appearance (even race in A3RW) of your character from at least a few choices.  That said, that was never an option in any of the GF series (melee/fighter, male - agent, female, etc) so who knows.

 

As I generally play an agent in GF I've just had to adjust to letting my feminine side out much more than I normally do out in the real world (I'm male)...

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It makes basically zero sense that the shapers do, either.  These were bad design decisions transparently made to accommodate limited art assets.  See also: Avadon 1, where both physical classes were male only and both magical classes were female only.

 

The Guardian and Agent sprites could be universal-gender almost as easily as the Shaper sprite.  There's no reason not to do this.  I sincerely hope the remakes fix this.

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4 hours ago, TM Paladin said:

It makes basically zero sense that the shapers do, either.  These were bad design decisions transparently made to accommodate limited art assets.  See also: Avadon 1, where both physical classes were male only and both magical classes were female only.

 

The Guardian and Agent sprites could be universal-gender almost as easily as the Shaper sprite.  There's no reason not to do this.  I sincerely hope the remakes fix this.

 

Yeah,  it was a random shoe-horned thing because of the limited assets. I am 90% sure  they will fix that. I also hope that lifecrafters won't use the mage sprite but would have one of their own.

 

I could understand if melee warriors (not Rebel "Warriors", but soldiers etc) were male only ... but Guardians have Shaping (thus, magic), healing, and even a limited array of spells. They can also be missile warriors. 

And the "male only" assumes that in the world of Geneforge women have similar physiology to real-world females that are smaller and less muscular. For all we know, women in Geneforge-verse could be more or equal to men in physical prowess. I Assume that's not the case since we don't have evidence they are as strong as men, but we can't know. 
 

The only evidence I have seen is that there  are more men blacksmiths and hard-labor workers than females but that's could be because... we have much fewer female sprites. And while the majority of "hard labor" people are men there are women dockworkers (like that rebel in GF4) or warriors (like the Guardian women in GF2 and GF5) and many soldiers and captains are women. 

 

So, I would say while there's some evidence that women shy from physically demanding labor compared to men, the difference between men and women in Geneforge is not as big as in our world. 

Edited by alhoon
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2 hours ago, alhoon said:

I could understand if melee warriors (not Rebel "Warriors", but soldiers etc) were male only ... but Guardians have Shaping (thus, magic), healing, and even a limited array of spells. They can also be missile warriors. 

And the "male only" assumes that in the world of Geneforge women have similar physiology to real-world females that are smaller and less muscular. For all we know, women in Geneforge-verse could be more or equal to men in physical prowess. I Assume that's not the case

 

There are some assumptions about our world here:

1) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to be an effective melee fighter (hugely false)

2) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to have effective physical prowess in general (also false)

3) Men are consistently larger and more muscular than women (definitely false)

 

This is the reasoning that game designers used in 1980.  It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now.

 

Beyond that, there are positive reasons that games today are more likely to offer choices about your character's appearance than actually asking you to specify their gender (let alone anything about sex).  Having this be open-ended still works fine for people who like the old view -- they can pick an appropriate image for their soldier and decide that he's a dude.  Nothing is lost.  But people want to play different kinds of characters.  People often want to play a character who looks like them.  And not everyone is a dude.  "Male" and "female" don't cover everyone, either.

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11 hours ago, TM Paladin said:

People often want to play a character who looks like them. 

Meh, I often want to play a character I find attractive, especially in good-graphic 3rd-person games. You would be looking at that PC for several hours, she may as well be pleasing to the eye. 

I also avoid taking people with as pale skin as mine as I find complexion a bit darker than  mine more attractive and more "humane"\"belong to good people" in general. I usually take pale white people with black hair only as evil-mage types or vampires or soul-suckers etc. Even for the "lazy noble" type, I prefer a bit tan on the skin. 

I am personally pale but because a lot of people I know work outside etc I have associated "darker skin" with "hard worker" etc. And I like my characters and PCs to reflect that. 

 

Example: I would totally take a pale-white Shaper when I play Geneforge, but I would like my rebel characters to be dark-skinned. Not just tanned-white, but either brown or black. Men or women that worked hard and fought hard, not that they spent their lives in oppressive brain-washing "schools" and covered with layers upon layers of cloth.
Or, well... green-skinned after touching the geneforge. 

 

 

11 hours ago, TM Paladin said:

 

There are some assumptions about our world here:

1) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to be an effective melee fighter (hugely false)

2) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to have effective physical prowess in general (also false)

3) Men are consistently larger and more muscular than women (definitely false)

 

1) You are right, but being larger and more muscular is certainly and advantage in most forms of melee fighting I am aware of. There's a reason those knights were eating that much protein to develop muscles and all. When you're larger and more muscular, you hit harder. Not more precise, true, but strength counts. When I was doing fencing, the very tall friend of mine was less skilled than me but was doing better simply because he had greater reach. It became a problem so in some tournaments he was told to compete with the high-school kids (we were middle school) 

2) I don't understand that. What do you mean "Physical prowess"? Because I mean... being larger and more muscular. 

3) 50% of men are larger and more muscular than 90% of women or something. That's what I would call "consistently". Yes, there are 10% of women that are more muscular, wide and taller than many men, but in general, human women are smaller and less muscular. From wikipedia, men  have on average 15% more body mass. That I would call consistently larger and more muscular, even if there are exceptions. 

(random comment: I thought women were smarter than men from what I have experienced around me although wikipedia says it's not the case. But it may simply be that women make better choices and are less prone to prove how tough they are so they are less prone to do stupid things than the men I know. However, girls in my country (and in my uni) have better academic performance, so... I still think women are smarter.)

Edited by alhoon
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1 hour ago, alhoon said:

 

I also avoid taking people with as pale skin as mine as I find complexion a bit darker than  mine more attractive and more "humane"\"belong to good people"

 

You must have a hell of a time in Avernum...

 

/at least beyond A1 who got tossed in from the surface

//& A5 where you're an Empire soldier sent down

 

12 hours ago, TM Paladin said:

 

3) Men are consistently larger and more muscular than women (definitely false)

 

Ummm....yeah.  Good thing there's a plethora of equally large & muscular women ready to jump onto the field/ice/court when players on 'x' baseball/football/hockey/basketball/soccer/etc/etc/etc go down with Covid-19 & the teams are looking for replacements...

 

Or the military where women can & have been excellent pilots (both rotary & fixed wing) or other jobs where brute physical strength isn't a factor but quick reflexes are.  However, as a front line grunt hauling a 120# pack & weapon 20+ miles/day day after day ... yeah, no.

 

This isn't exclusively a human trait either.  For example dogs, the male is generally 10-20% bigger/taller in most all breeds.

 

Are there exceptions to the rule, of course, but they are exceedingly rare & certainly not enough to generate a 'definitely false' response.

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23 minutes ago, TriRodent said:

 

You must have a hell of a time in Avernum...

I recently started playing Avernum (The 2018 remake) and ... yeah, kinda. My initial reaction to most of those unnaturally pale when I read the descriptions is thinking they are bad. I gravitate towards the inn where there's a "not yet pale!" bartender woman, even if it is a chore to go back there.
BUT... it was intentional in that game to show the pale skin as unnaturally pale, constantly reminding you that you're not on a cave-diving mission but in a brutal prison world.

Edited by alhoon
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2 hours ago, alhoon said:

I thought women were smarter than men from what I have experienced around me although wikipedia says it's not the case.

 

I think highlighting this one sentence, without comment, is the best response I can possibly give to all of the above.

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I'm just going to sidestep the conversations about sexual dimorphism and gender essentialism above, except to say that you should consider that there may be other reasons why statistical breakdowns of differing gender achievements happen for reasons like social factors and cannot be reduced to biology.

 

I hope that there will be some type of nonbinary/androgynous/agender option, especially if we're putting in gender options for each class (which should happen).

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NGL i saw the title of this subject and i knew better than to get in, but i did bc im a glutton for punishment. Anyway, in my canon shapers actually evolved past gender, and material/structural power made it irrelevant. 


I agree with slarty & goldengirl.  Having all things gender neutral as the "shaper" shaper, or even the serviles would be great because honestly there is no need for diff "gendered" sprites either particularly with when there is no real point unless you have full customization options which would be expensive. Like aside from the cute icons in avernum which kinda made it more immersive i wouldn't see the point. And in general i don't see the point of not playing a character bc you perceive them as x or y. Particularly when their skill sets are entirely different.

 

I'd be much more interested in seeing how new sects would exist in geneforge, since like terrestria had been in peace for some 300 years. What would be the point of a guardian as like a prominent shaper sect. Agents and Shapers would make sense bc like diplomacy, espionage and research would always be useful. But i remember the section on alwan and guardian makar in g5 made it seem guardians had a great sense of honour and don't believe in empty posts away from the frontlines. But what frontlines could have existed in a peaceful nation. 

I really hope Jeff remakes the shaper government because its very inconsistent and arbitrary which weakens the story. 

 

9 hours ago, alhoon said:

I also avoid taking people with as pale skin as mine as I find complexion a bit darker than  mine more attractive and more "humane"\"belong to good people" in general.

Also this sentence is upsetting me and my darker complexion homegirls. Its borderline creepy

Edited by Owenmoz
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On that note though, I also hope Jeff does a better job with terrestia's ethnic diversity bc like geneforge 5 touches that very lightly and it fails to do anything with it i have many complaints about. Oh the woodlands people have redish skin. They suffer shaper rule but they remember. 

Which doesn't make much sense because multiple hundred years is enough to erase many cultural identities particularly when its an empire that's very bent on assimilation and full control. There's very little to remember in a situation like that. And moreover that should be a more apparent part of the rebellion too, like i'd imagine resentment over settler colonialism would a big motivator, yet the outsider human part of the rebellion seemed more so to focus on the inequality aspects than like cultural genocide, appropriation of land, and cultural/religious sites. \

Benhold was the biggest disappointment of them all. Being a native deran added 0 to his chracter. That entirely ignoring the already weak storyline of his, which might have been ignored if there had been a better job done on the rest of the native people, but he was the only notable native character and that was... Not it.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Owenmoz said:

I agree with slarty & goldengirl.  Having all things gender neutral as the "shaper" shaper, or even the serviles would be great because honestly there is no need for diff "gendered" sprites

 

Actually, I don't think Slarty and Goldengirl said that Shapers should remain a single, gender-neutral sprite. I honestly got the impression that they would prefer if there were more than one sprite available per class. 

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They didn't say it should have a single gender neutral sprite, but that there is no real point in having the gendered ones, pointing out to geneforge and avadon as examples of how having gendered sprites can backfire.  But also I wasn't repeating what they said in verbatim, i said I agreed and then explained why I did. 

UwU

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It can be more sprites. I just don't care that they be gendered. It can be many more sprites like the shaper sprite or the servile sprite. On the same end should jeff not have enough money, better to have a non gendered sprite than have fixed gender sprites particularly if its gonna be men are warriors and women are spell casters. Ultimately its just a sprite and i genuinely don't care about them so long as Jeff cleans up the shaper sect organisation. Because it makes no sense as it is right now and it has plenty of plot holes.

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More sprites are fine.

 

Sprite options that happen to look conventionally male or female, are also fine.  (Particularly if there are multiple options, but even GF's one agent sprite was an OK situation.)

 

Forcing the player to explicitly choose a gender doesn't add anything, and comes with some real negatives depending on how it's done.

 

Forcing the player to choose a specific gender in order to play a specific class doesn't add anything either, and comes with a lot of negatives.

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4 hours ago, Vinlie said:

I'm just saying the Geneforge art made for the women look very nice. Like is this supposed to be Greta on the title screen (assuming this is Greta taken prisoner in Quessa-Uss)? If so, she looking great.

 

https://imgur.com/a/xLvT6Fg

Personally I always assumed that was Miranda getting captured, since Greta was just 'not allowed to leave'.

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6 hours ago, Vinlie said:

I'm just saying the Geneforge art made for the women look very nice. Like is this supposed to be Greta on the title screen (assuming this is Greta taken prisoner in Quessa-Uss)? If so, she looking great.

 

https://imgur.com/a/xLvT6Fg

 

2 hours ago, TheKian said:

Personally I always assumed that was Miranda getting captured, since Greta was just 'not allowed to leave'.

 

I agree. That is probably not Greta. 

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  • 2 months later...

Am I the only one who'd also like to make a left-handed character? Seeing my avatar swing their baton with their right hand feels very weird and janky.

 

Of course choosing gender for would be logical, especially for the rebels. Ultra-conservative sects like the shapers having rigid gender roles could be explained away but historically, almost all rebel movements had female combatants. It's the only way to win against a stronger enemy.

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1 hour ago, marnick said:

Am I the only one who'd also like to make a left-handed character? Seeing my avatar swing their baton with their right hand feels very weird and janky.

 

Of course choosing gender for would be logical, especially for the rebels. Ultra-conservative sects like the shapers having rigid gender roles could be explained away but historically, almost all rebel movements had female combatants. It's the only way to win against a stronger enemy.

 

Gender doesn't seem to play any role in the rank of someone in Shaper society. Astoria is a female Shaper boss, Greta is the rebel leader of humans, Litalia was before her. 
The ultra-conservative Shapers were not shown to be male-dominance. They were conservative on their own thing. 

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4 hours ago, alhoon said:

 

Gender doesn't seem to play any role in the rank of someone in Shaper society. Astoria is a female Shaper boss, Greta is the rebel leader of humans, Litalia was before her. 
The ultra-conservative Shapers were not shown to be male-dominance. They were conservative on their own thing. 

I didnt say male dominance. I said rigid gender roles, like how only women can be agents.

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