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[pisskop]

I don't know; it might be easy to get me to wear that dud armor   I've worn less.

But yes, I imagine its time that period or functionally inappropriate armor and clothing goes by the wayside.

[Funk]

I they just followed the mount and blade model of using the same armour with a few changes, it would save a lot of work in makeing the game.

[UXLZ]

Ehh, overt sexualisation more so than sexism.

In some cases the form-fitting space suit is the correct attire, though. (In quite a few cases it's regulation and the guys are wearing the exact same suit. It's just that the female characters have parts that, er... Stretch the suit more.)
Chainmail Bikini is ridiculous. Makes sense in some cases. Depends on the character's fighting style. (Though you think they'd at least have some leather or something...)

The Witcher 2 did the 'Warrior Girl' thing (the actual, proper warrior) reasonably well with Saskia. In almost all her appearances she's in full plate armor (though no helm, and excepting the Lesbomancy scene, of course.)
Though The Witcher series isn't exactly famous for its good portrayal of women, I think TW2 did it pretty well in moooost cases. Not all, though.

I love that Pointless Armor picture, by the way. xD

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

What bugs me is the idea that  all women that fight must do so in

A) A chain mail bikini,
B) A form fitting space suit
Or just plane old Fetish wear.

it's just dumb and reeks of sexism. 

If i was in charge of call of duty advanced warfare, i'd of given the player a big ass cyborg mech guy for back up, 7 feet tall covered in armor with a built in arm gun and pulled a Samus Is A Girl switch at the end and the thing is that would probably fill a few inches of new print.

I just want more of this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

than this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not all women in games fight like that

I think fallout 3 & new Vegas pulled off giving women realistic armor/clothes.
Especialy the combatants. Fallout 3 had a woman in full power armor, no helmet so you could actually tell her out from the crowd of similar people in the same armor and fallout new Vegas had another brotherhood of Steele woman dressed up in scribes robes but she had a power fist and super high unarmed (hand to hand) fighting skill

[Audioworm333]

Games that put incredible focus into graphics

Don't get me wrong, I love looking at a pretty environment. But what I don't love is my piece of crap computer choking on the game trying to render its' pretty environment and I can't get a better one because I'm poor as fuck.

Besides, I often look at games and think that the game could be so much more fun if they took a bunch of those resources they put into graphics and put them into the more important parts, such as AI, to name one.

[UXLZ]

Yeah, that one is so true. I think we're at the point where, while Graphics can get better, they don't really need to get better. Work on optimisation (like proper multithread coding) and ease of creation (that is, so it isn't so damn expensive) for the current level of fidelity, maybe bump it up to 4K resolution once it's mastered, but stop trying to make everything 'Hyper Realistic' more so than the previous game like everything is nowadays. Then we can advance.

'Realistic' stuff ages like crap anyway.

That's why I think all games should have animesque visual styles.
Cell shading hallelujah.

[Darkmere]

So this one will be long but I've been stewing over it for a while and this seems like a good place.

Disguising bad plots with good production values

The first that comes to mind is Fallout 3's complete mess of empowerment fantasy and plot holes, but that's for another time. Lately I've been playing a lot of Borderlands 2, so I'm ranting about that here. Going to take the unpopular opinion bluntly:

Handsome Jack is a terrible villain terribly written whose actions make no sense and is only in the game to fill the role of a cardboard antagonist.

I've completed the full game twice now, and know the basic idea of the Pre-Sequel. Long spoilers for the plot are contained in the spoiler below, be warned and all that.

Spoiler: Borderlands Spoilers herein (click to show/hide)

So Jack's the CEO of a corporation that spans six galaxies. He spends 100% of his time and attention childishly taunting a few hundred people on a single backwater planet who cannot threaten him in any meaningful way. The closest analogy in the real world I could make to this would be the despot of all of Earth spending his time murdering people in a small village in one underdeveloped nation because there might be a gold mine there.

But he wants the vault because what's in it is so powerful! Okay, ignoring the fact that Hyperion has enough resources to build a space station large enough to cast its shadow over the full surface of a moon (over one planet in one of six galaxies)... Let's assume Jack really, really wants a pet lava dragon. Which is cool, so there's that. But at the very least Hyperion controls travel to and from the planet. No one can leave. Dahl is gone. Atlas is gone. There's no indication in the plot that any other corporation has a notable presence on Pandora. At absolute worst, Sanctuary is doomed because Jack could just blockade the entire town with constructors and starve them out.

There's also the fact that he's spent at least a decade forcibly torturing his own daughter to the point that she commits assisted suicide, fighting him to do so while begging people to kill him. He sees this as... a murder by savages. Whatever might be going on in his head is so far divorced from reality that he's no different from a rabid dog that needs to be put down. He's not a man with any ideology beyond killing the player characters and their friends.

Presumably the Guardian would have been used to wipe out the actual bandits, right? Okay, but remember there's orbital mortars. They supposedly cost money... but the entirety of eridium mining yields are going to drug up Angel, AND there's a shining city being built in the middle of what looks like an ocean, AND the big space station thing. Oh, also Hyperion has a presence in six galaxies. So again, there's no reason to go after the Guardian. You can't even use the Destroyer's "warping reality" excuse, because that's revealed as a lie told to the original vault hunters.

I guess what I'm getting at is Jack has nothing to make me care about him at all. He spends the entire game repeatedly putting himself in the way of the characters just to make the plot itself move, for no real reason, and has to constantly remind you of just how many puppies he's drowned so you can't forget for a second that he's Irredeemably Evil and you have to Go Fight Him.

After the fan response to him, I actually expected someone interesting and at least somewhat morally conflicted. Instead... Butt Stallion.

[Neonivek]

Here is the thing Darkmere

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Warrior was supposed to be FAR more powerful then he actually was.

Remember the Prisoner in the first game was supposed to be outright indestructible and was only defeated because he was in a between state.

My personal theory? The Key's charge time was actually intentional. The Warrior was revived before he was complete.

Heck the Eye from the Prisoner alone was able to turn his ship into a planet destroying super weapon.

[nenjin]

Ah, so I'm not the only one who thinks Handsome Jack isn't really a good villain. The only reason people like him are because of the lines he drops and the way he drops them. His motivations make no sense. He's so divorced from reality it makes it impossible to take anything he says as actually fitting in the game narrative. Every logical inconsistency you pointed out stuck in my teeth too; that and the fact that people seem to adore him. Borderlands has never had a good story; it's always had entertaining voice actors. People seem to confuse the two. I couldn't give two shits less what my reasons for doing stuff in Borderlands is, and the writers basically didn't need to create anything with actual legs to justify the gun porn, and they knew it.

I think part of my dislike too is that Handsome Jack's obvious love of himself and his own reasoning is kind of a reflection of GBX's love of their own franchise. Shit doesn't need to make sense, or be more than screwball antics and gameplay. We're Borderlands! But don't let that stop me from cramming a shit ton of pointless story down your throats anyways. For example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The part where New Haven or Sanctuary whatever the fuck obvious name they gave it, teleports? They make you sit through that and do nothing to admire how grandiose their works are, no matter how many times you've played the game. It's a clear instance of the developer's need to make you sit through this thing that their artists spent weeks laboring over. Handsome Jack is that, only it's the product of their writer's labors, and it continues to happen through the game.

[Darkmere]

Isn't the whole point of the reveal that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Angel had lied to the original quartet, and the Destroyer story was all BS? At one point Jack even says it was a dupe to get Eridium to spawn. I assumed it was an attempt to power up Angel it some kind of pocket soldier.

Keep in mind I'm far too cheap to buy the pre-sequel yet, so if it was retconned in that one I'm unfamiliar with it.

@ Nenjin: On god. The head writer is so high off his own farts that anything he talks about makes me want to punch him. You are absolutely correct on this one, self-aggrandizing to a fault.

[Neonivek]

No you are right Handsom Jack isn't really all that great a villain at all.

He is humorous but if he doesn't make you laugh... he just makes you frustrated.

[UXLZ]

Ehh, truth be told I never thought HJ (Handjob? Handsome Jack) was a particularly competent villain, but he was a good villain in the sense that you, the player, had a connection to him. Rather than being told by some random guy 'Oh, by the way, this dude you've never met and only ever heard about is totally a bad guy, you should kill him.'

I mean, he seems to be super-ultra rich, and we know that Money>All.
You know what REALLY pissed me off about Borderlands? THE FUCKING RESPAWNING STATIONS OH MY GOD THEY MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. At least HJ can be written off as 'Dude's nuts' but the respawning station make SO MANY PLOTHOLES. ALL THE PLOTHOLES.

Unless I am missing something?

Oh, and HJ's animations and arms cannons in the second game were so laughably bad... The arm cannons...

[nenjin]

Your connection to Jack is that he hired you then immediately betrayed you for (in the words of Torgue, the not-so-secret-conscious of the writer) "REASONS!" They try really hard to make you hate Jack from the outset, it doesn't evolve as a consequence of what he does. Your hatred of Jack is based on the voice skills of a guy playing a smug jackass who you don't get to kill until the end of the game. I suppose there were a couple times in the story where he pops in and shit happens, ambushes and what not, which kind of actual made him more than some guy who won't shut up. But I sensed early on how desperately they needed you to hate this guy for the story to be worth a shit, and I wasn't getting on that train, because I unlike the protagonists, am not a complete fucking moron.

And that's always been a gripe of mine with BL, since the first. You as the protagonists are silent morons doing as you're told and being duped by people (the writers) who think they're very clever with their twists and funny with their taking the piss out of the whole story at the end. You're a meat puppet in someone's absurd story. It's why I can't ever get attached to anything in BL. And why I don't buy it until it's stupidly cheap or someone bends my arm. It's a decent game on all fronts, but unlike a lot of decent games, it makes me regularly slap the people that make it. To which I'm sure they'd reply "Huhuhuh it's Borderlands, that's one of our design goals!"

Actually, I take something back. I am attached to something in BL. Torgue. He's the only honest fucking character in the whole series. He's the only character that actually lives the theme without muddying it up with serious vs. FUCK YOU plot threads. He just screams and is absurd and loves to watch shit get blown up. I can appreciate the humor without feeling like some of it is at my expense.

[Frumple]

... maybe HJ's actually a (failed) experiment with manufactured body doubles? That would explain a lot, from the out of the way location, to the apparent low risks to hyperion, to the questionable decision making. It's not the real HJ, but rather a malfunctioning decoy.

[nenjin]

That's like trying to retroactively explain why the end of BL1 wasn't a huge punch in the balls. Even if it does, your nuts are still sore.