There's a serious lack of them in general in games nowadays, the only ones I can think of are in already existing games that have existed for like over a decade now or fighting games ( the fgc isn't exactly prudes and they're niche ).
I think that this is because A, most devs nowadays try really hard to make their games look realistic and I think that people are way more overly sensitive to sexualized content when the graphics are realistic.
I actually think that this is one of the reasons why DoA gets so much hate from certain people even if we just ignore DoAX for a second, because ( for a Japanese fighting game ) the characters look more realistic.
I honestly think that Street Fighter has more lewd character designs but in general people don't react as strongly against it.
I mean imagine if Dragon's Crown or even games like Senran Kagura had realistic models, people would flip their shit even harder about it.
And secondly, and probably the main reason.
Instead of adding sexualized male characters marketing teams and the CEO's on top would rather just erase the sexualized female characters and nowadays it's harder to get away with just sexualizing one gender.
I honestly think that funnily enough the main reason why gaming nowadays is so extremely desexualized has to do with homophobia.
Game studios and publishers still pander primarily to men, but they also have to stay out of trouble and are scared of being called this and that.
And they know that if they add sexualized male characters then insecure men will flip out and not want to play.
They can sorta get away with shirtless men but they're usually still quite burly and conventionally masculine, they're still designed primarily for those men who play their games and not for women or gay men.
In general people are sorta stupid about sex and sexuality too, people can watch others get their heads blown off but a woman shows some cleavage and then a lot of people will unironically have problems controlling themselves and can't focus on anything else and they reduce it to fap material and nothing else.
I mean look at how people react whenever someone says that they're disappointed about a character change or expresses an opinion about this.
I've said before that I am disappointed with how they've been rewriting Miss Fortune in League of Legends and been desexualizing her quite a lot and the reaction is usually to call me a virgin and tell me to '' just go watch porn ''. It's so stupid and people are totally missing the point.
To me that's like if Mortal Kombat got censored and I just told people to go and look at gore videos on LiveLeak or something.
Most people just tend to have these extremely surface level takes.
It's the same if a game is censored in terms of sexualization and people call it out genuinely because they don't like censorship and the trend and the precedent that it sets, people immediately just start hand-waving it away and tell people to just go watch porn etc.
But then blood or a joke gets censored and people flip out about it and suddenly react.
People are just fucking stupid about sex. And I also think that they're insecure and ashamed about it, I'll never understand why men in particular try so hard to convince others that they don't care about it.
Beauty is subjective. What you think is beautiful was taught to you by those who were trying to sell a certain aesthetic when you were younger. Young people playing these new games will have a different perspective of beauty as the culture in entertainment changes.
What you're feeling right now is the struggle and frustration of getting old as the world that you know gets replaced by a new one defined by generations younger than you. It happened to your parents and their parents also. The only thing we can strive for is to not sound like our parents. It's the only control we have. So personally I welcome this new brand of beauty, it won't be around for long and will be replaced just as quickly as it's inception by younger generations. The cycle continues. Then I can feed off the tears of others as they come to the same realisation. Because bitterness is the intoxicant of the ageing. Its amazing to be able to roll my eyes at younger generations whilst knowing in the grand scheme of things it all means absolutely nothing. Especially how women look in video games.
Just give me a floating ball of light that can shoot guns and let's move on.
I really don't buy this at all.
I know what you're talking about and I do think that this is true in the sense that the definition of beauty is being widened.
But I don't buy that it's some organic change or that people want one beauty standard to replace the other.
I think that this has a lot more to do with fear and cowardice on the side of the developers.
I don't have any problems with more actual diversity, I think that seeing characters like Abby in TLOU2 is cool too.
But there really isn't more diversity, all that really happened was that they sliced the breasts off the female characters and put them in t-shirts and jeans and copy pasted the anger issues and misery porn that the male characters had and endured and gave it to the female characters.
But they're pretty much all flat or close to flat-chested and skinny or skinny with somewhat muscle definition. Anything else is extreme rare exceptions ( male characters aren't much better tbh ).
Actual diversity would include all kinds of body types and characters.
And I don't buy that this is some '' young people '' thing either, as opposed to what loud screechers on Twitter and Tumblr would have people believe young people and LGBTQ communities are quite hypersexual and worship conventional beauty a lot.
In my experience at least it's mostly men who have issues with this and don't find it appealing outside of jerking off.
Often times men even feel provoked by it, and they judge everything about what strength and power fantasies are based on masculine norms.
But to a lot of other people including a lot of men aggressive expressions of femininity is cool and badass, it's just not considered safe and marketable.
And the general audience ( which is mostly men ) won't identify with it.
Female characters nowadays are really mostly designed for men to have an easier time identifying with them rather than women.
probably thanks to that lot over at Ree and other dark corners of the internet.
show an attractive female and you'll get wailings of things like "muh representation!" "X is a bunch of Y-phobic asses!" "damn white males! they ruin everything!" "sexist pigs!" "racists!!"
This kind of shit is just performative wokeness, I think that most people who support characters like Abby and more body diversity don't want to erase conventionally attractive and sexualized female characters, they just want more options for everyone.
Some people can't praise a character like Abby or whatever without indirectly insulting other female characters or bring up complaints about sexualization everywhere even when it's out of context and not even there.
But I think that they're a loud minority.
