A Remarkable Issue

I would like to say a few things before I begin.

Firstly, I am a girl in real life.

Secondly, I am a fan of making both male and female costumes.

Alright, let's roll.


The City of Heroes costume creator. One of the most amazing parts of the game. The literal millions of options are astounding, yet I can still find few faults.

Namely, the abilities to make your cleavage larger then your head. Real girls, in real life, don't have breasts that big. And that bothers me a lot. I'll admit I'm sensitive to that stuff, I am not as.. endowed... as others, but still! I imagine that feature was developed by males, for males. All the females I know set their cleavage at a minimum, because thats an actual size.

Another thing: Why can't girls have chest icons as big as boys? They are almost impossible to see, and really effect some 3D elements. I'd prefer it if they were the same size. Or, at least, large enough to see.

And yet another thing: The shoulder items are tiny compared to males. What if I want a heavily armored girl, with huge, thick armor and a normal, unarmored head?

And yet ANOTHER thing: Why do all the female hairstyles look somewhat the same? Can we please get one that doesn't look like it's being held up by over a ton of hairspray? Can't we get spikey, short hair that doesn't click into our details? And why is the first hair "Medium?" It is the ugliest hairstyle I've seen, ever, and it's the first thing that shows up when I reset my costume.

I'm sorry I sound like a brat, but that just really pisses me off...

~GreatRock

Real men can't be thirteen feet tall, either.

And male hairstyles suffer from a lack of diversities, too.

Thus is the curse of giving us many, many options - we keenly notice the ones that the system inspires, but does not provide.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Like I said in a similar thread, why am I stuck with long pants!? Why is it that the only jackets we can wear is dress jackets!? Why!?

Fix this now!

(Ignore me.)

I also set the chest slider down to minimum, or slightly higher, on all my female characters, and I'm a male. I don't like my females looking like they'd topple over every time they took a step. However, I do agree that the inspiration from this game is the comics, where it seems like almost every female has 38 DD breasts or bigger, despite their size -14 waist. Unlike the poster above, I'd say that the most common superpower among women in comics would have to be searing, crippling back pain.

There are a number of options I would like to see, for sure. On most of my male characters, I'd actually like to have smaller chest icons. Some of them just look really stupid being that big. Maybe a chest icon slider would be a better idea than just the two options, because some of them look better at a medium size, I'm sure.

The chest slider is not intended to reflect real life. It is intended to reflect comic books.

If you flip through any comic book that features female superheroes or villains, you will surely notice that not a single one of them has body proportions that could be described as "realistic". I don't see too many women in real life that are 6 feet tall with the body of an Olympic gymnast, coupled with a pair of bosoms that you would have to custom order brassieres from Victoria's Secret to fit.

Case in point: Power Girl. She has an awe inspiring chest, which she uses to her advantage by intentionally wearing a low cut top and clobbering her male opponents when they get distracted by her cleavage.

It's not so much that they are trying to appeal to a male audience as it is they are trying to accurately reflect the media they drew the vast majority of their inspiration from, which predominantly features female characters that stretch the borders of credulity as far as their physical appearance is concerned.

The only female character I can think of off the top of my head that was NOT built like a teenage boy's fantasy was Jubilee.....but she was thirteen at the time.

You would be hard pressed to find a female character in ANY media that isn't cast or drawn to someone's ideal of what a woman should look like.

Chest slider on every female character I make goes all the way down. More than enough at the lowest setting to get the job done, if there is indeed a job that requires breasts of a certain size.

I make mainly females and I don't set the slider to minimum. I do go less than half though.

I played with the breast slider a few times, now I mostly ignore it. It was 'gee whiz, look what they let me do!' for a while, then boring. The only time I see the front side of one of my own characters is on the character select or costume builder screens.

Male characters have unrealistic proportions too. Some men are built like that, but most of us are not. But this is a fantasy world. We make characters the way we want them to be, not how we ourselves are.

Different things bug different people. I can't be happy with a costume that looks like it would need adhesive to stay on. Why? I dunno, I can go along flying, teleporting, tossing fireballs. But I can't deal with a costume that I feel needs some support.

The "boob issue", as a friend of mine puts it, is just a comic book thing. It's as much a common feature of the visual style as spandex and capes, so I doubt it'll be going anywhere. (And yeah, as a chick I've always looked at female comics characters and pitied their backs. That's *got* to be painful. )

I'm with you 100% on the hair, though. Most of the hair-styles in this game are absolutely atrocious... They're the weakest part of the costume system by far, in my opinion. (That spot used to be held by Tails, but those got a pretty good reworking when animated versions were released-) 'Thing is, though, male toons have it just as bad as female toons do.

I've ended up reusing hair styles between some of my guys, just because there are so few tolerable options. I haven't quite hit that point yet with the gals. (And my toons are evenly divided between male and female as far as numbers go-)

Maybe this game should add a boob physics engine since not all breasts are the same. A chest slider is too limited and only gives perfectly spherical ones. Although adding the boob physics engine of Dead or Alive would cause numerous team wipes due to the guys on the team being hypnotized by the breast's movement.

In all seriousness, the costume creator needs to be adjusted for more customization. Unfortunately, I can't go into details for examples about MMOs with better customization since it would be breaking one of the rules.

Never underestimate the power of the female anatomy to hypnotize the male villain...and hero alike, thus creating an opportunity to gain the advantage in attacking a weak(ened) enemy. Seriously though, there is an over-emphasis in many comic characters in anatomical characteristics. Look at secret identities and many super-characters play down their looks and physiques. While I do admire sweater kittens of most shapes and sizes, anatomical symmetry is a wonderful thing to see in spite of how freakish it may be. Do I think roid heads are practical as far as being 300lbs and 1% body fat? No. Do I think every woman on the planet should be 36-24-36? Again, no. I do have to suspend my disbelief in this game on every occasion for powers...cough cough...AR...and I do suspend disbelief on 98% of the toons made in this game.

My point being is that I like all boobs, regardless. Boobs rule. Big, small, they are all good in my book. Well all of them except maybe the gravity challenged pairs, but as long as they dont rest in the cereal bowl I suppose they are all good too. What can I say? I am visually cued.

Real girl here too!

What I do for my character "Technically Eva" is give her a battle mode which is really just an altrnate costume set that is based on the huge male clockwork design. It make the battle mode pink to match Eva's regulr outfit. But this only works because it a robot.

my ohter toons all have conservative outfits which is like how i figure i know i'm with other actual girls because they are fully dressed. Who would rally fight cfime in a swim suit?@! srsly!

I gotta agree tho with OP i slide my boob slide all the way to the left. But have u noticed that all us hero types are super slim and in great shape? I'm gross skinny in RL but i know lots in RL who look more like Bouncing Boy! lolz

The chest slider has been talked about a ton, so I think armor is the more important subject.

Please, more large armors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thaumator Ah, the crux of the problem.

Wow, she is like the billionth person to bring it up, so it's ridiculously rude of you to decide that admission is her primary reason.

Ah, Thauminator, you're a jerk. You really are. And I'm not saying that I am jealous of the huge bazoingas in the game, I'm just pointing out that, as far as crimefighting goes, you're going to have a lot of trouble with back pain.

And, regarding whoever made the point about being 9 feet tall: Yes, you can be, but theres an option to be normal, too. The average height is in the middle of the slider. And, well, sure we can jump 300 feet, but we're superheroes! This isn't about realism for powers, its about realism in body shapes.

And, also, the shoulders for females are laughably small. I want armored badarses, charging in with a sword and beheading people, not some lightly armored person with a sword who looks like a ninja, while trying to go for the "Don't mess with her" look. We need padded armor, huge armguards and giant biceps, too! Who says girls can't be buff?

And, also, why is there so much mentioning of real world females? Sure, there are a few, but they make up less then a percent of a percent of females in the world. There are more people that are as buff as you can make your male then those with boobies that big, unenhanced.

Yes, this is based off of a comic book, but this isn't going to stop people from providing D++++ figures to satisfy their urge for pixels that look appeasing. I simply wish for a way to make women look more.... manly.