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Like we'd want some scrawy wizard's midriff on display. If you want manflesh, the barb is barely wearing anything at all.

Yeah but not all video games pander. At least we can all look at Beyond Good & Evil and Portal as the sole shining beacons of gender progressivism in electronic gaming.

Oh, please.

Also this wizard (why are there almost never Asian males in games?) has unnecessary cleavage for no reason, that's kind of whory.

What, a woman can't show cleavage without it being "whory"?

Honestly, I think this is basicaly no big deal, but if you can't see why people might have a problem with a chick who fights demons and monsters going around with her robes cut to show off her tits, then you need to stop and think about it a little more. There's nothing actually wrong with a real live woman in a social situation having her cleavage on display, yet at the same time they are not splattering the forces of evil with some cool slicing spell.

Ford Prefect wrote:

Gandalf wrote:Why don't Blizzard just make the characters in both genders, and make it an option?

Err, they are. Both the barbarian and the witch doctor can be played in either gender. It seems unlikely that the wizard will be any different.

Oh, how baffling.

When they were describing the wizard at Blizzcon, they always referred to it as being a woman.

Honestly, I think this is basicaly no big deal, but if you can't see why people might have a problem with a chick who fights demons and monsters going around with her robes cut to show off her tits, then you need to stop and think about it a little more. There's nothing actually wrong with a real live woman in a social situation having her cleavage on display, yet at the same time they are not splattering the forces of evil with some cool slicing spell.

Like I said before: this is a wizard, obviously not wearing combat clothes. You expect a magic user to defend himself or herself with plate armour?

If this were a warrior I would join the chore. She's not. She's a spellcaster, not expected to wear armour and protect herself with spells.

Gandalf wrote: When they were describing the wizard at Blizzcon, they always referred to it as being a woman.

Presumably, that's because that was the model that was finished and on display.

Ford Prefect wrote:Like we'd want some scrawy wizard's midriff on display. If you want manflesh, the barb is barely wearing anything at all.

Hey, I like skinny, cute men! The muscular look is fine, but it's far from the only good-looking male build.

Another point to consider is the fluff written behind the Wizard. The character you're playing is apparently a kid, a precocious student who's powerhungry, foolhardy, and dabbled in forbidden magic. She beat the headmaster upside the head with magic, then ran off to go do stuff. This is both not someone who'd be expected to have loads of sensible combat gear, NOR is it someone who would be experienced enough to think that was a problem. She (or he), is a young hothead who thinks she knows better than everyone else, and also probably has the classic 'bad things happen to other people' mindset. Sure, you could argue that the character is stupid, but that doesn't mean that Blizzard is stupid for doing modelling that fits the character.

Alternatively, every other damn fantasy game has female characters wearing two scraps of chainmail and a hat, and Blizzard were damned if they were going to be left out?

I seem to in the minority (hell come to think of it, I think I am the minority) that while I'm a straight guy, I wouldn't mind seeing a female out character wearing an outfit that in real life wouldn't cause her to break most indecent exposure laws by streaching or swinging a weapon hard enough.

Porn is ok, jeez there's a time and place for everything and I don't want (poorly done) pseudo-porn in my games if I can avoid it.

Molyneux wrote:What do you think the odds are that we'll get male-wizard exposed midriff, though?

My guess is very high.


The in-game model seems to be much more conservative than the concept art.

If the final model was dressed like the concept art, then I could see some of the arguments for her being scantily clad. However, what we see her wearing is essentially a low cut tank top and overcoat robes. She's not showing any midriff, and she doesn't have her breasts squeezed together as if to say "Look at me, I have big boobs!" Without the robes, that's still a lot more clothing than many young women with a similar frame wear to clubs. If she were to be dressed like that in todays public (out grocery shopping for example), she might draw looks, but I don't think anyone will be thinking she's a whore.

We probably shouldn't focus on the Wizard's costume as if Blizzard invented fanservice in fantasy RPGs. However, it should be pretty obvious that the convention of cleavage baring characters who aren't slutty barmids is pretty sexist, or at least wanky. I guess I was just chiming in with the initial post that criticized Blizzard.

Ford Prefect wrote:Honestly, I think this is basicaly no big deal, but if you can't see why people might have a problem with a chick who fights demons and monsters going around with her robes cut to show off her tits, then you need to stop and think about it a little more. There's nothing actually wrong with a real live woman in a social situation having her cleavage on display, yet at the same time they are not splattering the forces of evil with some cool slicing spell.

I don't think that's the problem, but rather that it's just being overblown. Over half the discussion so far is about how she has cleavage (yeah, I know this post isn't helping). I would prefer a little more balance in the amount of body shown off in fantasy art or video games as much as anyone else, but, especially since the wizard here isn't that bad by fantasy art standards, it seems like a bit much. It just seems like it's being treated as such a big deal here because other people are saying it too, so might as well join in, rather than it actually being appropriate.

To Stark or anyone who knows what he's referring to, what is the Sacred skill system like? I've never played the game and haven't had any luck finding much detail online.

I still want to strangle myself everytime I see the graphics, but enough of that.

I kinda like how the character classes are now different in age. Diablo II, they're all pretty much the same young group of adventurers. This time around you have the old and aging Barbarian and the young hotshot Wizard.

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:To Stark or anyone who knows what he's referring to, what is the Sacred skill system like? I've never played the game and haven't had any luck finding much detail online.

The Sacred skill system is backwards compared to Diablo; instead of putting points into 'skills' on level which you then use to shoot people with, you get 'combat arts' from drops that you use to shoot people with. On level, you choose skills and put points into them (max 8 in S1, 10 in S2, unlocked as you level) to augment the 'arts' you're using, weapons, equipment etc. Instead of using mana, the arts are cooldown-driven, and increasing the level of your arts increases cooldown which results in a measured pace of upgrade as you increase you relevant skill to compensate for the cooldown times.

In S2 this is extended by breaking the arts into three 'aspects' or trees (with separate cooldown timers, relevant skills, etc) and having the equipment weight you use also affect cooldowns, resulting in a juggling act between the power of your spells, your ability to reuse them, the armour you're wearing, etc. The points you put in relevant skills also unlock 'upgrades' that allow you to spec each art in a different direction (although it's fairly limited, each art having 3 binary choices in fixed order) so everyone can use all the arts of their class, but will only be able to use higher-level or upgraded ones in trees they've skilled into. The game also takes buffs from MMOs, which allow you to run some constant effect at a fixed increase to regen, thus again trading off capability against spell reuse.

From what I've read about D3, they take many of the good ideas from this system and fit it into the regular D2 framework. In particular, it sounds like the spell upgrade/socketing in D3 will be much more flexible than Sacred2's limited choices (since apparently you just socket runes in or something).

Attributes were never a huge part of the strategy of Diablo character building. Skill build was always far more important, so I don't really see any big loss by making attributes class inherent.

yeah, I am actually kind glad about that, since I always got the impression I was Gimping myself when I was allocating those Attributes, like dumping nearly all for dex as Bowazon.

I totally agree. Attributes can easily make or break a build, and unless you have a pre-build sheet (ie the druid bear tank), it's a lot closer to break.

I don't have time to go through all 23(!) pages of that thread, but I find it utterly hilarious that people are not only complaining about, but saying they won't play the game because it will allow you to respec your characters. Oh no, you don't have to waste five hours redoing your character from scratch because you learned the hard way that you don't like this skill path! The horror.

Holy shit, I've seen the exact same thing on the Sacred2 forums. Did you know that allowing respec in any way means builds are meaningless, the game has no consequences, and is for babies? Here I was thinking everyone thought games that didn't allow respec were an artefact of 1999 and everyone just used char editors to do it anyway, lol!

Clearly allowing you to do something means it's impossible to be ELITE HARDCORE and just... not respec. Right?

Stark, you forget that respeccing also destroys replayability. After all, if you don't have to spend hours and hours redoing your characters because they ended up broken or not fun to play, that's less hours you're spending playing the game and thus the game sucks! Sign me up for playing as a Wizard three separate times from the start just so I can find one I like to play!

It's pretty sad that Blizzard saying 'yeah forcing people to trash characters is bad, making people enjoy the game is good' actually makes people ANGRY.