Grim Dawn and the Un-sexualized Female Character

Grim Dawn, the new Action RPG offering from Crate Entertainment, is phenomenal. For those of you who don't know, Crate is mostly made up of the same team that once composed Ironlore, the studio that produced the ARPG cult classic Titan Quest. For their sophomore outing, they have demonstrated that they still have an amazing grasp of the delicate stat balances and complex character creation systems that make for an amazing ARPG.

The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic Lovecraftian Steampunk setting. Both plate armored skirmishers and gunslinging grenadiers stalk the battlefields and magic isn't an entirely unheard of thing. The story mostly revolves around an ancient race of beings called the Aetherials who claim to have once been the denizens of the game world, now returned to take back what belongs to them. So basically, the main story from Titan Quest only worked into a new world.

I was an early adopter of the game, having supported Crate's Kickstarter campaign a few years back. I had occasionally fooled around with it in several of it's development builds, but I didn't take a serious look at it until it left early access this past week. I decided that for my first official character, I would make a female shaman. The first part on a whim and the second because it was the only class I hadn't tried yet. On the former is where I feel decidedly let down.

I'm not going to beat the dead horse that is arguments against sexualization of female characters. I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that that is a bad thing. If we can't, you're reading the wrong blog. It is important, however, that if you're going to give the player the option of selecting their character's gender, that there actually is a difference between the two genders. Men and Women are, in fact, different, and good character design should communicate that fact.

 The female character model in Grim Dawn essentially amounts to a slimmer version of the male character with long hair, and not even very long hair. It's like a bob or a pixie cut. The character animations are exactly the same as the male characters. Once she puts on armor, she completely looses all of her body shape, looking for all the world like a small man wearing over sized clothes. While it's true that you can rotate the model on the character screen and see that in profile, she does in fact have breasts, the presence of any feminine physical characteristics is completely hidden when viewing the character from the games normal, isometric camera angle.

This is, quite simply, bad character design. The solution: improved body language, feminine clothing, and a better character silhouette.

Improved body language would make the most significant improvement in the character model. Completely reworking the animations to make the character more graceful and effeminate would clearly communicate to the observer "Hey, this is a woman." Simple things like cocking the characters hip while standing at idle, or while firing a hand gun, can make a huge difference. Making the character more light on her feet would be another. The idea is to provide visual cues to the characters gender that require no changes to the model itself.

Feminine clothing is the next step in the equation. The starting outfit that the female character comes with is, in fact, feminine. She has a scarf tied around her waist, and the vest she is wearing accentuates her bust. This is sharply different from the loose fitting jacket that the male character is wearing, and it really sells the difference in gender. Unfortunately, that difference in attire is carried through the rest of the gear. Let's be clear, I'm not asking for chain mail bikinis here. I'm talking giving the existing clothing a female cut. Give the jackets darts and three quarter length sleeves. Make the gloves more fitted looking and less like bulky work gloves. Make the boots come over the calf instead of being ankle boots. The fact of the matter is that an absence of female armor says more about the game world's cultural attitudes towards women than making the armor overtly feminine would. Clearly, they didn't have female soldiers if women are now forced to wear cast off men's clothing.  When it comes to communicating character gender, adding a little lace trim to a jacket goes a long way.

The final, and perhaps least important step, if the first two are followed, is to give the female model a more distinctly female silhouette. This is also probably the most controversial, and definitely the easiest one for the artist to over do. The idea is to exaggerate female traits without either making her look cartoony or like porn star. Quite frankly though, given how androgynous the model is now, it wouldn't take much. Make her hips a little wider, her waist a little smaller and her shoulders more narrow. Wide hips and a narrow waist communicate more femininity than a large bust, so that can probably stay where it is. Besides, improving the gear models will accentuate those anyway. Change the pixie cut to a pony tail and you would be in business.

We all know that women come in all shapes and sizes and with all types of personalities, I would never suggest otherwise, but from the perspective of good character design, it is important to convey things like gender clearly. If it was the designers intent to give us an androgynous character, than they should have given us one androgynous model to play with. They didn't. They chose to give us a choice between two genders. Failing to make the character models reflect that fact isn't just lazy, it's bad design.