I appreciate a well-populated chainmail bikini as much as the next guy, but even I get tired of the way female characters get portrayed. Males, too, really. Not every guy in Stormwind is a roided-up Hulk Hogan with a mullet, after all, just like not every woman is a 36DD with childbearing hips.

Yeah, there were a lot of grotesquely oversized boobs on the female toons too, but I made mine properly proportioned, and even got comments on how my toon looked better than most due to that — I even went Image Designer for a couple of months so I could “downsize” several female friends who decided that they didn’t want to “slut it up” anymore. After that, if we ever saw anyone “oversized” we’d assume it was a teenaged boy who hasn’t learned that “bigger isn’t always better” yet.

Misogyny is real throughout society, 99% of the people who make games are men (we only know of one person on the entire Blizzard staff who is female, and she’s a community rep. Any of their executives? Any of their game designers girls? At all?), and the marketers know that sex sells, and both women and men in our society are socialized/trained to prefer sexualized, objectified female images. But things are improving, and I think they will keep improving as long as we don’t let anyone pretend that misogyny isn’t real.

And yes, the male avatars are consistently muscular in a way that is nearly unachievable for regular guys. But I’d argue that a) fighting in a bikini is worse, at least muscles makes sense for an adventurer, where are the muscles on the girls? and b) both are idealized for what men want to see. Women don’t want super muscle man with ugly face, they want well-toned man with some (but not too much) muscles and a handsome face.

I want to see more women like Fray and the girl from Beyond Good and Evil out there. They are hot too. There are a lot of ways to make a woman HOT without resorting to tracing a porn video. Not that I don’t love porn. Just don’t want to mix my peanut butter with my chocolate, if you know what I mean.

Eve works on a low end machine and until recently some people were using dial-up yet still manages to look pretty sharp.

I was listening to Warp Drive Active yesterday and someone from CCP North America was raving about how much they like the White Wolf staff.

Little things I know but in a climate where these things get launched in states which are headscratchingly ridiculous I suggest there is ground to expect that we won’t have to buy bigger fangs from the online store, won’t have to buy a new PC nor will we have to install a version of Windows that is 2 weeks old to play it (or any of the other completely daft things MMO devs sometimes think is a good idea).

There is also something to be said for the things that tend to be attractive to men and women being different. Some things are easier to “render” than others.

@Stabs – Looking at this from a history of White Wolf’s capacity to manage its IP once it is out of their hands, we’ll be lucky if the vampires don’t sparkle in daylight.

I’ve always had a video game crush on Jade from Beyond Good & Evil: http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp/22

She’s neither over-sexed nor scantly clad.

Still waiting for another game along the lines of Vampire: Bloodlines