Gaming has a very…difficult history when it comes to female characters. On the one hand, you have characters like Samus Aran, Lara Croft, and others who have been there since some of the beginning generations. However, when you look at some of those female characters, how they were treated, how they were “modeled,” and so on, you can see where game developers’ heads were at, and that, sadly, has continued to this day with certain titles and games. In the case of Dragon Age The Veilguard, though, there are apparently some people who feel that the game’s female characters don’t “look right,” and when they voiced their concerns to Bioware, they got an answer that they likely didn’t expect.
Specifically, they met the “wrath” of one David Gaider, who is a writer for Bioware, and he took to Blue Sky to go on a rant about what these “fans” had to say about things. The messages themselves are now protected due to the exchanges that David had with people online, but Tech4Gamers got screenshots of the event and it was rather telling on both sides of the equation.
According to Gaider, the opinions of “certain fans” claimed the characters from the upcoming Dragon Age title “weren’t attractive enough,” to which Gaider noted that those “fans” views were skewed by certain kinds of anime and “adult content,” if you get our drift.
He fairly pointed out that things in the gaming space have changed, and that means that certain characters and character designs won’t meet the way “that they were done before,” and even notes that the “world changed,” and so they updated their designs to go with it.
As you might have guessed, not everyone was happy with Gaider’s comments, not just those who tried to give feedback but those who had concerns about the upcoming game overall. A complaint that many have had about the game overall, not just with the character models, is that Bioware is ignoring parts of the series’ history and ignoring fan concerns about what the game will be like. Sure enough, some of those complaints have been proven true, as many key moments and decisions from past titles in the RPG line won’t be figured into the upcoming game’s story.
Others view Gaider’s actions as far too “hostile,” intentionally calling everyone who asked for changes things like “incels,” among other things.
We’ll have to see if this has any impact on the game’s sales.
