The design of female characters
in video games has been a topic of constant discussion recently. There are innumerable blog posts on the subject,
and I’m sure, like me, plenty of gamers have had at least some discussions with their
own group of friends about the topic. Even
those that feel there is no problem with the way women are designed currently
will often admit that, yes, game studios are definitely operating under the
idea that sex sells. Whether you think
studios are trying to appeal to a certain market, express their own personal
‘ideals’, or are just lazy, there is a noticeable lack of variety in female
character design. The current predominant
standard for designing female characters seems to consist of copy pasting a
large chested, small waisted woman and adding a slightly different face and
different costuming. This design is
repeated over and over, in game after game, in spite of the characters’
contradictory backgrounds, job descriptions and personality traits.
As a gamer and character
designer, seeing other designers ignore qualities that should affect a
character’s overall look drives me crazier than anything else. Ok sure, your character has an impractical
shirt that should fall off as soon as
she takes two steps— that’s fine. But is
that character supposed to move around a lot—for instance, behaving as a melee
fighter or tank? If the answer is yes, then
your design is flawed on a fundamental level!
The fact of the matter is, in many instances, these game studios that
are ignoring character traits are doing so just so they can create mindless
cheesecake. What it boils down to is a
laziness about character design that focuses on t&a (tits and ass) rather than creating a
believable, readable character.
One of the more popular games
that suffers from this t&a focused design is League of Legends. I love this game and am an avid player, but
every time a new skin comes out for a female champion, I can’t help but cringe,
because it inevitably is unbelievably impractical and doesn’t relate to the
character at all. Even the splash art
updates lately have been fairly overblown, with all of the cleavage front and
center as the focal point of every drawing.
While I love to see better art than what the game originally started
with, the fact that every female is turning into a double-d that could easily
be found on any corner in a big city is just frustrating as a lot of the
champions-in-questions’ lore doesn’t relate to this portrayal at all. If the lore is going to be ignored, why write
it at all?
And that’s the point of this
blog! As a character artist with a lot
of time, I want to re-imagine the female characters from League of Legends. My goal will be to create individualized,
unique characters that read easily from an in game setting. I will be trying to reconcile lore, kit, team
role, and personality based on the voice-over, and putting all these aspects
into a believable body type and costume for each character. I will only be working on characters
available on normal servers as of the date of this post, so if you visit at a
later date, please no asking ‘can you update [insert new female]’ because the answer
will be no, as I’m not interested in taking on a never ending project. There are also a few characters who I feel
already work based on their lore and designs (Diana, Kayle, Janna, and Orianna)
and I won’t be redesigning those characters.
And now for a quick
disclaimer. As this is a project solely
based on remaking the work of other artists, I want to first say that this blog
is not meant to insult or demean any of the artists at Riot, but is more
directed at addressing issues in the design standards of the gaming industry as
a whole at present. Since that is the
case, I will attempt to keep ranting to a minimum and mainly focus on my thought
process in creating the design for each character. While I can’t promise there won’t be any
ranting on here, I’m going to try to keep it kind to the original designers.
