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Derek Smart justifies Line of Defense's early access fee, new playable female characters
3000AD announced last week that its MMOFPS Line of Defense will arrive on Steam's early access platform in July, sporting a hefty $99 buy-in. In response to gamer rumblings over the status of the early release and the price, studio president and lead developer Derek Smart posted on Twitlonger to explain that the game is fully funded already but can't afford to let "freeloaders" in: "The $99 EA price tag - which has a LOT of perks - ensures that only serious people who can provide meaningful feedback through their commitment, need apply. And for that they get a lot more than they would if they waited for the final game release. We're simply not interested in letting freeloaders gain early access to the game, not provide meaningful - if any - feedback, while we foot the bill for the backend services, servers, bandwidth etc. We're a SMALL independent game dev making a MASSIVE game in a genre dominated and monopolized by SOE and their popular @planetside2 series. [...] And unlike those other guys, we don't take your money, then plonk you in useless assets (how do you like that hanger now?), a largely unfinished product or a product that may not even see the light of day." Smart also alerts potential players to the fact that the studio has altered its original plans to omit female characters from the game: "My decision to now fund and add two bad-ass female characters comes from the fact that, well, we as an industry need to start making a concerted effort to cater to our female players because good faith can only get you so far."
Know Your Lore: What exactly is up with women in Warcraft lore?
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. Between Rossi, myself, and those who came before us, there have been a metric ton of Know Your Lore columns. If you're wondering exactly how many, I suggest you take a look at our lore guide for a categorized list of them all. Occasionally, I'll go back and look through the list just to see what we've missed and what needs to be filled in or updated from old columns. And I've been looking at that lore guide and going over the things in it, and I keep noticing one really particular thing about it. There are hardly any women on that list. There's a scant handful compared to all the other heroes and villains and history and everything else on it. And it's not that women don't exist in the Warcraft universe -- they're all over the place, honestly. It's that there is only a handful worth of them that have enough character development and story to warrant dedicating a column to them. To which I say wait a minute, what is up with that?
Crackdown 2 will not feature female agents
Admitting that the ability to create and play as a female agent in the first Crackdown was originally intended (but eventually cut), Billy Thomson, Ruffian Games creative director and former lead designer of Crackdown at Realtime Worlds, explained to 1UP that the functionality won't be making an appearance in the sequel either. According to Thomson, it was excluded from the first game due to memory constraints that would've required a "massive reduction" to other parts of the game. Similar limitations will keep playable female characters out of Crackdown 2 at launch, Thomson claimed. "You've got four players (in cooperative play), and that means every single player can be a different character, and that has to be in memory all the time ... we had to save memory all over the place because we've got so much more content in this game than we had in the first game ... we don't stream." While the studio isn't making any promises about a female agent DLC update, "we never know what happens in the future," teased producer James Cope.
Fallen Earth's females get a more feminine facelift
Women of the post-apocalypse should look more feminine -- at least that's what Fallen Earth players think.According to developer Fallen Earth LLC, players thought that the female characters in the post-apocalyptic MMO, which just launched yesterday, should have physiological qualities typically associated with women."Fallen Earth has never been about the sexiness of its females," said product manager Jessica Orr, "but after some comments from fans and a hard look at the female faces, we decided some changes were in order."That meant having the game's artist, Chris Allen, make adjustments to the facial models in order to differentiate the females more from the male character models. The changes, implemented in a recent patch, included removing "excess skin" from under the chins, raising the cheekbones, softening the jawline, thinning the bridge of the noses and tweaking the shape and placement of the eyebrows. Allen also raised the corners of the mouth to make the women have "less of a scowl and more of a neutral expression," Orr said. The result is what Fallen Earth LLC sees as "more feminine models that steer clear of the characteristic 'babes,'" allowing players to focus more on the game itself. Orr also answered a few more questions regarding the look of the female models and provided us with more comparison shots below. What do you think of the changes?
It's-a Mario World: Mushroom Matriarchy
This week we knew we wanted to talk about females in the Mario universe, but we couldn't decide on an angle. "Mario's Love Life"? Too scandalous. "Damsels in Distress"? Anti-feminist. It seems almost offensive to feature a gallery with such a generalized premise as female characters (as opposed to something as specific as Rare Koopa Kids and Underrated Mini-Bosses Golfing at E3). But then we realized, maybe the mere fact that there are hardly enough major female characters to populate a gallery substantiates the need for one. Women are criminally underrepresented in Mario games and in the industry at large, but today we'd like to call attention to some of the lovely ladies shining through an otherwise testosterone-fueled bachelor party.Most female characters in Mario adventure games are ridiculously susceptible to kidnapping and all manner of perilous occasion. Today, though, let's look at them without the cliched rescue plot and inane stereotyping. Here's a gallery of females worth giving all of your lives for. It's-a Mario World is a weekly feature in which the ubiquity of Nintendo's flagship character is celebrated: We'll incessantly ruminate about mustache wax, debate the curious whereabouts of the princess and covet the luminous power stars strewn about the galaxy. Check back here every Friday to find out what strange and wonderful thing has got us tipping our caps.
Are female characters really penalized in Age of Conan?
There's an unpleasant rumor gathering strength in the Age of Conan community. It seems to have begun with this eight-page review, which (despite delivering a relatively healthy overall score of 76) is uncompromising in its criticism of those parts of the game that, in the reviewer's opinion, fall very short of what was advertised. The bombshell comes on page 7, where the reviewer states outright that '... Age of Conan's weapon swing time depends on the duration of the visual swing animation, and female characters swing their weapons about 25% slower than males - so every female melee character does 25% less damage over time!'
Conan chats up the ladies
Age of Conan spent today's Friday update dealing with the women of Hyboria. Honestly, the first time I saw the proposed cover art for the game, I was a little surprised it didn't include, well Conan. Placing a female on their game is just one step toward proving that there is a place for women in this society (and not just a lusty tramps either, although they are in there as well.)Female characters will have the same amount of strength as male ones. Although this deviates from the original concept of women in the works of Robert E. Howard, but I think you'll agree that the portrayal of women as weak, fainting pansies wouldn't nearly be as fun to play as say, my hero Red Sonja. But the developers have gone to great lengths to make sure that women have their own identity in AoC, and to that end have created over 2500 unique female animations. Each piece of armor is specifically designed for the female form rather than being a copy of the male armor, as you can see in the screenshot above. It looks to be that the trend these days is to create women with equal strengths and abilities to men. While I am all for that, I also would like to point out the obvious: that a woman is not a man. In the original D&D female characters had a modifier -1 strength +1 charisma. Yes, I agree that women are as strong as men, but their strengths lie in different areas. Of course, the strengths of a woman are definitely harder to quantify, so I can see leveling the playing field for simplicity's sake. I suppose I am simply left with the question does a woman fight and/or deal with conflict differently than a man? Will there ever be a game that can capture this?Whatever the answer may be to those questions, I am suddenly very jazzed to play this game.
