Quote Originally Posted by Kolsykol View Post
If you want to sell to mainstream audiences you basically make games for dudes and focus on muscle men and design everything for male characters.
This is a blindfolded denial of reality lol.

Making games for dudes always includes putting incredibly attractive women of varying sorts into the game in various states of dress and personality. They'll put in muscle men too, because that's considered attractive, but audiences always respond far more favorably to the attractive women side of things. Or just the women side of things.

If there's customization and sex selection options, lady oriented armor is almost always designed in a way that either highlights or accentuates the female form. Highlighting is stuff like the bikini armor or platemail with titties. This involves making some sort of extra graphical design choice specifically for the female body, and it usually gets far more attention than just pasting the armor over the male body lol (like really, they don't design armor for male bodies, it usually literally just replaces the body, completely layering over it).

And what do the majority of gamers do? If the option is available, they play women.

As for your "generic derplander" assertion... If it's even still true, it has more to do with the fact that it was the default marketing for so long, that it's what people expect. Also though, more than ever before, there are many women who game. A lot of them are into that sort of portrayal of dudes. It doesn't feel like pandering, it feels like the default.

Keep in mind that times have changed, and the best selling game of all time is still Minecraft. Almost all of the top 50 best selling games don't even focus on customization or men or women. They're generally sandboxes, pokemon, or real world based. That's the real safe bet.

As far as Elden Ring goes, I'm not sure how far into the mainline of it I am. It's an excruciating blast so far, and I'm a long time souls veteran. There is nothing different about it from the other Souls games, aesthetics wise. The default armor is male, and the default enemies kill en masse are also male. Most armor is identical across sex selection. I'm willing to wager that as in past entries, there's still some specifically female sets from specifically special females. Think Ciaran, Desert Pyromancers, Sable church robes, and the Doll Clothes.

I started as a buff dude Hero. The first platemail I found was literally from male enemies twice my height, and it's oversized on my guy, too. It has a cape that's so long, it trails like 2~3 feet beyond my heels. It completely covers everything I customized about the character. That just Souls.