Armour Customisation in Andromeda: Arts and Crafts

Each response in this thread is like a teeny essay, so I know exactly what you mean. That's why I responded to the other thread first--just a couple of paragraphs, what luxury! 

5. Eh, it was more a case of just not knowing what to do with myself after I finished school, beyond some vague ideas about going into (gaming) journalism, and having some small amount of talent in the study of literature/writing generally. (Much as it may not show sometimes...) Had a choice between uni and more hours at my old supermarket job, basically.

8. Blue and gold is one of my absolute favourite colour schemes, so when I realised they were pretty much the official Spectre colours - Tela Vasir's the first Spectre we see in blue and gold, I think, but it comes up a few times after that - I just had to use it. I'm honestly normally not that into black and red - red's my favourite colour, but I prefer it in other combinations (I'd use white and red all the time if it didn't scream 'doctor' quite so loudly) - but, y'know, Picard. I know Shepard defaults to dark grey with the red stripe--I'd probably go the opposite way, since one of the main differentiators between the TNG uniforms and what came later is that the division colour takes up more room. So, a lot of red, with a relatively small amount of black.

Anyways, I'm in pretty much the opposite boat: 'cause the perma-helmet thing annoyed me so much, I always used the individual bits instead of the full sets. It's not that I hate the helmets, exactly--I just didn't like not being able to see my Shepard's face. So I'm super stoked by all the bubble-helmet goodness we've seen from Andromeda so far--here's hoping the extreme - and admittedly space-appropriate - reflectivity is something that can be toggled on and off depending on conditions:



And yes to all that, naturally. Suffice to say, BioWare's handing of body shapes has been shitty for a good long while, pretty much entirely because they refuse to make a woman who doesn't look like a model. You could argue the same for the male characters - as I saw someone doing in another thread, along with the old, 'But there ARE women who look like that!' chestnut, to my great irritation - but:
1. There are male characters with fairly average physiques, and we've already gone into the greater diversity of appearance available to male characters generally. (They actually get to be less-than-traditionally-attractive, amongst other things.)
2. Male models are almost always built as fuck, whereas most female models are not, thanks to differing - and damaging - beauty standards. Hence, buffman 3000 vs noodle arms.
3. As I think we discussed earlier, making all the dudes look like bodybuilders is about appealing to men. Making all the women curvy and 'hawt', with thin arms, is also about appealing to men. It's all about appealing to men. That's not to say that some women won't enjoy playing a traditionally-attractive character, nor the presence of some buff dudes, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a design decision made primarily to appeal to men, at the expense of people who'd, amongst a great many other things, just like to play a female character with a decent amount of muscle--since, y'know, we'll be fighting a lot.

Anyway, chalk me up as excited for what our new armour might bring, too--there's masses of potential in the thrusters, when it comes to both story/cutscene goodness and gameplay. (I'd totally dig it if they allowed those of us of a more... Biotic persuasion, to occasionally supplement them with some good old-fashioned space magic, though. Always wanted to pull off that Asari floating trick, or !!Biotic Charge!! myself through space...)

And yeah, 343i keep finagling stuff for no good reason--they have this really irritating habit of diluting iconic designs, with perhaps the most egregious examples being the Chief's armour, as you say, and the Warthog. (And also the Pelican, and the BR... I could go on.) It's a shame, 'cause a decent amount of the original stuff they come up does actually look pretty cool--that floating spire from the start of the Halo 4 campaign, for example, and some of the better Forerunner/Promethean guns.

Yup. So far as modern video gamedom - and, honestly, modern society at large, it feels like - is concerned, every woman ought have a butt to make a Kardashian blush. Which, hey, there's nothing wrong with having a big butt, but as we've gone into, there should be nothing wrong with not having one either--and, in any case, I can't help but feel that most of the big butts of gaming aren't really there for the sake of big-butt-having women in the playerbase so much as they are for a certain other, already extremely well catered for, group... (And this isn't even getting into the lack of consistency in clothing, as you say...)

On Halo: I didn't mind 4's story - the gameplay's kinda another matter, honestly; I didn't think the campaign levels were as interesting as they'd been previously, though they were nowhere near as bad as 5's, and don't get me started on the multiplayer... - but I'm positive it wouldn't have worked for me if I hadn't known who/what the Didact and Librarian were going in. Terminals are one thing, but you really shouldn't have to hunt down collectables just to have the vaguest idea of what's going on--the previous games' stories worked without any context at all, after all. Anyways, I'll give that blog a look--I do genuinely think there was the germ of a really interesting story in Halo 5, but they squandered it completely.

On the movement changes: I like the dash boost thing a whole bunch, but I actually am one of those people who isn't massively keen on sprint. It's not that I want to go slowly--I just don't like having speeds at which you can't fire your gun. So, I'd have preferred that they just upped the regular movement speed, borrowing from the old arena shooters that originally inspired Halo - Quake 3 et all - rather than more modern shooters. Oh, and I don't think they needed to add a zoom to all the guns, though the change doesn't bother me all that much since they didn't really nerf hip-fire, or anything - in fact, they brought back descoping - so I can still play pretty much like I always have.

On BTB: I have similar stories, mainly on Live rather than LAN, sadly, of just bombing around maps in a Warthog having a fantastic time--it really was my favourite mode, pre-5. (Well, actually, more like pre-4, since 4's ordnance drops, a little like 5's REQs, make vehicles little more than conveniently packaged-up kills. ) And yeah, it pretty much feels like they meant for Warzone to replace it, which is a problem for me since I really don't like the REQ system. I find it irritating for cosmetic unlocks - would rather take the randomness out of it, honestly, and I don't like that the guns are mixed in there with the cosmetics; since I don't play Warzone, they're useless to me, and melting them for points is tedious - and outright game-breaking for weapons and vehicles and such. Call me a traditionalist, but I think you should go into a Halo match with nothing more to differentiate you from the other players than your skill and knowledge of the map.

Oh, don't worry about it--I genuinely only have the one friend who's into Halo - the rest prefer CoD, Battlefield, and so on - so it's nice to talk about it, even if it's been so long since I last played, or read any of the tie-in stuff, that I feel a little ill-equipped to discuss it. 

This forum definitely has its issues, but it's certainly better than most places--and especially Reddit, as you say. Between that site's fundamentally broken upvote/downvote system, and the way gators seem to have infested almost all the game-based subreddits - hell, even r/StarTrek has issues - it's just not a pleasant place to hang out, for the most part. Still visit every now and then, though I increasingly find myself wondering why... And yeah, our society's - heck, our very langauge's - androcentrism is utterly absurd. The examples are just too numerous to list, though that innate assumption that pretty much every character - and every player/commentor - is default male within pretty much every mainstream gaming community I know of is, as you say, particularly infuriating--taken within the wider cultural context or not. Two particularly on-topic examples that have always irritated me are the original ME trilogy's 'Shepard' vs 'FemShep' dynamic, and Star Trek: TOS' 'Where no man has gone before'. Thankfully, much as TNG switched to 'where no one has gone before', BioWare's decision to actually show Ryder as a woman first, and then just keep switching for the rest of the marketing, seems to have, at least for the most part, prevented any 'Ryder' - meaning male Ryder - vs 'FemRyder' dynamic from developing around ME: A, at least so far. Instead, every Ryder gets a qualifier. And yeah, like most societal sexism - societal inequality in general, really -  it's a self-perpetuating dynamic--when you make women feel unwelcome, fewer women will speak up, and so women will feel increasingly unwelcome...

It was a pretty short argument, thankfully; I didn't want to go dramatically off-topic. Here's some links to the posts, if you're still curious:
bsn.boards.net/post/111752/thread
bsn.boards.net/post/111865/thread
bsn.boards.net/post/111920/thread

1. Yup, all this. The kinds of sentences rapists get even on the all-too-rare occasion they are actually convicted are fucking absurdly short, and that '20 minutes of action' case... Fuck. Like, seriously, fuck. If all the other evidence staring people right in the face isn't enough, that right fucking there should be enough to demonstrate that male privilege is still as prevalent as it's ever been. And society's general position on female sexuality continues to be absolutely fucking absurd, as you say, and it's another one of those things that's ingrained within our very language. Me and a friend were talking about this recently, and we realised that we genuinely couldn't think of a single commonly-used word for describing sexually-active women that doesn't carry fucking awful connotations. Men get, 'stud', 'ladykiller' and so on, while women are 'sluts', 'loose', 'whores' and a whole range of other awful shit. There's this idea that a man who 'gets around' is to be celebrated, something he should be proud of, while a woman who does precisely the same is expected to feel fucking ashamed!

2. Suffice to say, we're in complete agreement on all this. And yeah, I'm pretty sure most of the people who went off on one about Cassandra also had an oh-so-delightful bone to pick with the new Asari, jaw-comparison charts and all.  It's mostly calmed down since, but I'm pretty sure you'll still see vestiges of it if you drop by her thread on this forum. And yeah, needless to say, I doubt we'll ever see something comparable for a male character--I do so wonder why... 

Yup to all this--and I can speak from experience in saying that it's just something men don't have to deal with to anywhere near the same extent.

Pretty much why you've gotta just say fuck it, and do what you like--though, of course, that's much, much easier said than done. 



11. I have three older sisters; of course I've worn heels. And yeah, I honestly don't understand how people go out in them, much less how you'd fight wearing a pair. I know they get quite a bit easier if you wear them relatively often, as you say, but even then, it's not like you can ever really run effectively in them--maybe on solid ground, if you've got excellent balance and a well-secured pair, but definitely not on rough terrain. And yeah, I know combat/work boots and such have a heel - wouldn't do much good for protecting your feet from rough terrain, otherwise! - but there's definitely an awkward middle-ground between practical boot and combat stiletto--look at Ciri's boots in TW3 for a particularly irritating example. 

13. That's the odd thing--I'm actually not a completionist. I definitely like doing side quests and such, but only if they're interesting to me--I gave up on pretty much all Inquisition's side stuff, outside of the companion quests, after the Hinterlands, 'cause I could only take so much basically story-less busywork. And I generally don't bother with cheevos and such. Still couldn't help but hold onto those purples, though...



Heh, I worry that my own responses to this thread are growing increasingly less coherent over time.