Yeah?
I didn't play it so I can't really defend or anything. I watched a little bit of gameplay. The story was confusing and weird, but I really liked the music. Lol.
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"Other Publishers Told Us to Make It a Male Lead Character," Life is Strange Dev Says
- Thread starter chadskin
- Start date
I didn't play it so I can't really defend or anything. I watched a little bit of gameplay. The story was confusing and weird, but I really liked the music. Lol.
……forgetit
Member
True that, as if the devs want a whit guy as default, I remember how angrey people got when prototype 2 suddenly had a black main character. If the devs want a woman or a black guy, or God forbid *gasp* a black woman, then let them do it.
BioWare blatantly throwing heterosexual characters and romances up in my face did annoy me and make me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
I generally care more about the actions and story of the character more so than the ethnicity but yes devs should be able to tell the story of the character they want to, (as long as it's done well).
I've been playing the game for 60 hours, you can completely ignore the absolutely majority of romance if you avoid the heart options during dialogue, all the characters are much more
The original was on penny arcade but it's gone now...:/
This is closest I could find:
"Games with a female-only protagonist got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 per cent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually."
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net...o-remember-me-fear-using-female-protagonists/
Edit: can't tell if their talking about the game or the marketing...
Either way, the lack of faith and money perpetuates a cycle of "failures."
……forgetit
Member
I liked prototype and prototype 2 lol. Yeah my point was that designers should be alloud to make the characters they want without people saying they're pandering to a certain crowd. Sometimes characters just make sense as who and what they are.
Also I'm pretty sure the second guy was being sarcastic.
Emperor_Uriel
Member
While the style of gameplay doesn't really interest me, it's always good to see more devs writing female leads.
I've never understood why, outside of Gaf, I always seem like the one guy in a thread who likes the idea of experiencing the story of a beautiful, interesting woman instead of Nathan Drake clone #4536.
I've never understood why, outside of Gaf, I always seem like the one guy in a thread who likes the idea of experiencing the story of a beautiful, interesting woman instead of Nathan Drake clone #4536.
The gameplay as a concept was bad, I don't think polishing it with cash would have helped much.
Though, I suppose mediocre gameplay concepts never seems to hurt the sales of Assassin's Creed. So who knows.
So if you want your game to have a female protagonist, and you are against publishers telling you other, it MUST be to make a statement.
I don't see how the quality of the studio's games has ANYTHING to do with the conversation.
I believe that person was talking about games with female leads in general. I've never heard of anyone saying that Capcom gave Remember Me half of the budget it would have gotten if the lead was a male or anything. I mean, yes it's a possible scenario but I'm not one to accuse someone without some evidence. Sony gave Quantic Dream 27 million to make Beyond: Two Souls which is roughly same as Heavy Rain's budget and that's no small amount so not all companies think like that.
threelights
Member
I didn't play Remember Me, but isn't that the game where you can make your own combos? How is this a bad concept? God Hand did this and it was amazing for it.
That's a generalized number. Sony spent 20 mil on Heavenly Sword and Capcom who picked the game up after Sony dropped it has had females headline mainline titles. eg. RE3 and Dino Crisis.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
I liked neither. And yes they should but it depends. I cringe and voice my distaste when I see characters like Cindy or those characters from Onechanbara
What's wrong with Cindy?
When DONTNOD explicitly get told "we would like a male character instead of a female character" then that is a symptom of structural sexism based on their perceived understanding of consumer preferences. In itself, regardless of the quality of DONTNOD's prior work, demanding such a design change is worrisome if you think that the video games industry should be a fair and just entertainment medium.
Publishers are obviously not saying "since you made an underperforming game prior to your pitch, then your game should have a male lead character in it", i.e. demanding a male lead character is independent from having a subpar curriculum viate.
What's your case in point?
Those games are old...
Even Heavenly Sword is at least 9 years old. I think their faith has gone down since.
……forgetit
Member
That's a whole different issue. Basically you'd like the medium to grow up and include less sexualized female character models, right?
Reminds me of the bait-and-switch tactic in MGS2 by Konami (not insinuating that Raiden was some random chick, but the whole marketing trick). It's incredible they managed to keep a lid on it.
To be honest, I've never played god hand, but I have played a game like of Kingdom of Paradise where you made your own combos(well, not combos persay but swingsets), and the gameplay was fun. Kingdom of Paradise was a psp game, I doubt it had a budget any higher than remember me. Hell for that matter, I doubt God Hand had that much higher of a budget.
About how I feel about this, though I'm leaning toward this being the publisher's fault than the fact Dontnod hasn't had success yet. That being said there have been a few multi-million selling games with female protags and it really hasn't changed things. I think that the problem lies more with publishers looking at a target demographic and focus groups than actual successes.
I'm a big fan of Remember Me. It was far from perfect, but it had some redeeming qualities (fantastic music and art direction, interesting concept, remix gameplay was neat).
With that said, some of the people responding here are looking at this completely black and white. Do publishers try to skew things at times? Absolutely. Look at the examples given in this thread like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite.
With that said, it's a bit unfair to then throw a blanket over the entire thing and assume that's what happened here. Dont Nod is an unproven developer who's first game's core gameplay was fairly unremarkable. I think they have a lot to prove as a developer. Who's to say that if a different developer came with this concept that it would have been received better? There's a big ass gray area here between the publishers wanting to make a return on their investment and the developers making the game they want despite being unproven.
I really hope that sometime soon a game with a female protagonist just makes an insane amount of money because you will see publishers scramble to get a piece of the action.
With that said, some of the people responding here are looking at this completely black and white. Do publishers try to skew things at times? Absolutely. Look at the examples given in this thread like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite.
With that said, it's a bit unfair to then throw a blanket over the entire thing and assume that's what happened here. Dont Nod is an unproven developer who's first game's core gameplay was fairly unremarkable. I think they have a lot to prove as a developer. Who's to say that if a different developer came with this concept that it would have been received better? There's a big ass gray area here between the publishers wanting to make a return on their investment and the developers making the game they want despite being unproven.
I really hope that sometime soon a game with a female protagonist just makes an insane amount of money because you will see publishers scramble to get a piece of the action.
I was in high school when Star Craft Ghost still had a chance of coming out and I remember getting in an argument with a guy who said that, even though the game looked really cool, he would never play a game with a woman as the playable character. It didn't make sense to me then and it doesn't make sense to me now.
It definitely happens though. I remember playing bayonetta and my housemates were making fun of me for playing a girls game.
Only later did they start enjoying watching me play after realising how crazy the game is.
The execution of the concept left a lot to be desired. Create your own combo's ending up just being do certain combos to get certain buffs. Picking what moves create the buffs had no actual consequence on the gameplay itself.
threelights
Member
But you are talking about the concept being bad. And then you yourself said a game with the same concept and how it was fun... So the concept wasn't bad, they just didn't pull it off, because of budget or because of lack of experience, but not because the concept was bad.
Portal...?
But yeah. There's a lot of risk involved in general with high budget games. But is there anything that bad about mediocre games? How many strikes before your out?
I get the feeling having gameplay that's light and just focused on concept can help them a lot. Sometimes trying to be cool and actiony is just plain bad because we have so many amazing action games to compare to.
I'm all for:
Games with lots of game and no story.
Games with little game and lots of story.
I'm also cool with
Sucky story and great gameplay
Great story and sucky gameplay
It's when both suck that I get iffy with. Lol.
Hell, I know people who stopped playing Samus in Smash Bros after I told them she was a woman, and to this day I get questioned why I often pick female characters when given the choice.
I think it's silly, but it's unrealistic for publishers and developers to ignore customers who think like that.
Look at Tomb Raider, it sold millions and was still considered unsuccessful initially.
It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy too. Games with a male lead do sell better, but games with a female lead don't get nearly as much marketing dollars behind it so which is the problem. It's going to take some publishers to risk the chance to lose money in order to dispel that method of thinking.
There's also the fact that there are very few of them, so they have to be hits or they're considered unsuccessful. Games with male leads flop all the time but publishers never consider their gender as being the reason why and just make another game with a male lead.
Might be reading this wrong, but publishers probably don't separate demands like you think they do. They don't give a fuck about what gender the character is before how well something previously released sells or how it was reviewed, does gender pop up as a variable when it comes to selling the product? Absolutely. Is it the main or only reason a publisher says no in most cases? Absolutely not.
And your point about wanting videogames to be a fair and just medium is misguided, you should demand that with everything revolving around business. And I'm not diverting attention away from videogames when I say that, the biggest players in the videogame business mimic other mediums with how money is made, spent, all that. Its the culture of business that's influencing this, nothing more, nothing less. If making money is the biggest priority for the biggest players, fair and justness don't matter that much.
My case in point, point, was that you diverted attention away from what's being discussed to a weird and minute point. So Elizabeth wasn't on the cover of Bioshock Infinite. And? She was in trailers, commercials, all that. She was the other main character in the game. Picking a battle with how characters are represented on videogame covers when the game in question represents a woman character all the time, that's a weak ass battle that doesn't belong in this thread.
I was differentiating between the concept of create-a-combo and the game's combat concept. In order to make the combat they had good, they'd need to rethink the entire thing from the ground up. Create-a-combo is a good concept, but the actual action of fighting in this particular wasn't.
And it probably was down to lack of experience. I'll agree with that much.
If you compare them within their own genres(and how good the game part of it actually is), games with female leads sell fine. It's just that there aren't many Open-world games with female leads or Millitary FPS with female leads, where the sales tend to gravitate.
SuperSonic1305
Member
That was with a marketing company wasn't it?
Keep in mind that in Portal, Chell being a female protagonist is of very little consequence. It's a bit unfair to compare it to something like Remember Me or Tomb Raider where not only do you see the character the entirety of the game, but there is also voice acting and performance involved, which adds to the overall game.
I completely agree though. My tastes vary quite a bit, so I could play something like Wolfenstein The New Order and have a blast with it and also play Gone Home and really dig what they did with that.
I'm assuming that Dont Nod is using the engine they used for the remixes in Remember Me for Life is Strange which is good since it was my favorite part of Remember Me. In fact, my favorite parts of remember me will be potentially be highlighter in Life is Strange between the remixes, art design, animations, and music. I'm worried about the story though, because I really disliked the ending of Remember Me...despite liking the overall story concept.
Why was Elizabeth kept out of the cover (or wanted to be kept out) if they didn't see that element as harmful to the game's sales? It's pretty relevant, since it's the same mentality that would drive a publisher to assume whether the main character's gender is crucial in a game's success or not.
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I mean i agree that if they were told (and they probably were) that their last game was weak shit in the meeting, they probably left that out of the interview, and focused on what makes them look better and is potentially gonna sell a bunch of copies of this game out of sympathy, but it's still relevant to the discussion, because they were still said something about that main character's gender.
RE3 and Dino Crisis are ancient history now.
The Resident Evil series used to have a really good balance of male/female protagonists. Chris and Jill had equal billing in RE, Leon and Claire in RE2, and RE3 was given entirely to Jill. Even Code Veronica and RE0 put the focus on the female lead. RE4 is all Leon's, which is fine as it balances out RE3. RE5 gives the main focus to Chris while Sheva is the secondary character, again kind of reflecting RE0.
It's with RE6 that the trend of male leads becomes a bit worrying. Across three campaigns there are six playable characters, only two of whom are woman and both of whom are secondary to the male lead. I feel at least one of those campaigns would have been better served making the woman the player one character. It feels that, with the success of RE4 and especially RE5, Capcom are afraid to put the focus back on the female characters.
You could argue that, with three playable female characters, Revelations 2 is going to fix this, but at the same time you could argue it's a side-game and doesn't carry the same weight or risk as a mainline title. Unless RE7 comes out with Jill Valentine as the lead with a male character backing her up, I think we're going to be seeing a trend of white male lead characters in RE for a long time.
NHarmonic.
Member
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...ioshocks-bland-cover-is-for-frathouse-appeal/
Came down to appeasing people that make quick fire assumptions based on the first image they saw at Walmart or Gamestop. After Infinite went through development hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Levine himself felt pressure to try to appease every demographic possible towards the end of development.
Infinite's success relied mainly on Bioshock fans buying it outright, and then anything else that trickles in is a bonus necessity.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
I think even if Remember Me had a male lead, the game would've still done pretty badly.
I mean, despite the name, it's prettttty forgettable.
I mean, despite the name, it's prettttty forgettable.
So unbelievably stupid. So sick of publishers ordering devs to change it to a male lead.
I don't know about you guys, but playing as generic male protagonist #657 got old awhile ago. At this point I will buy a game with a female lead just to support the idea of having female leads.
I don't know about you guys, but playing as generic male protagonist #657 got old awhile ago. At this point I will buy a game with a female lead just to support the idea of having female leads.
DJ Crimson
Banned
I don't know why some users are trying to shut down the discussion. Arguing that it's a cynical marketing tactic and the sole reason why it was brought up. Marketing to who exactly? Nothing wrong with bringing up their experiences with other publishers and their games. If no one wanted to discuss the merits behind it; this topic wouldn't have this many posts.
This mindset is just as bad
I think what you really mean is any game that seems good or interesting that has a woman as the main character is worth buying.
If I keep going on about that with every game I make then yeah it would look like as if I am defining my studio by the gender of the protagonist. They have already told us publishers want to change the gender of the main character with Remember Me, now they have another gig and they're saying it again, seriously? Is that the whole conversation they want surrounding their games? Can't see it as anything else but a cheap sales tactic especially when other devs like Supergiant release a game with a female protagonist and dont sell it as its sole appeal. I don't owe you a sale because you have a female character in your game, make a good game first.
I'm not sure I agree with this notion. I still want to play a game I like...female lead or not.
Isn't that what i'm saying? They removed Elizabeth from the cover because they thought her gender was going to hinder sales.
That's what we're discussing, so i don't see how that example is derailing.
I think what he's getting at is that they didn't remove her from the cover because they thought her gender was going to hinder sales....they did it because they thought it would get people that might otherwise ignore the game to try it out.
I realize that kind of sounds like the same thing, but I don't think it is.
Seems to me that they figured those who were going to buy it will buy it regardless of the cover, and they were looking to get the "frat boy crowd" to be interested as well on top of that. Right or wrong, I feel like there is a difference...but it feels like an argument of semantics more than anything.
http://youtu.be/mFf8uU0e1Cc?t=1h41m11s (1:41:11 to 1:44:08)
Talks about Prince of Persia and Pandemonium losing girls/women due to the psychology of the characters. Sexualization and gritty aesthetic changes gender balance and actually made them lose part of their audience.
I'll try finding Anita too.
DJ Crimson
Banned
You do realize if we use your logic, they would already notice the abysmal sales of Remember Me. That game didn't set the world on fire. Why would they bring up the same conversation when they know it won't have much of an effect on sales. Maybe, I dunno, they actually wanna talk about the issues they experienced.
Despite being ancient history, historical precedence beats a vague blanket generalization. His citation never made the claim that Remember Me got it budget halved for having a female lead. He just draws that inference to make Dontnod look better.