Art Poll: Signature Characters

It isn't really a question of the size of her "tracts of land" or of style trends in comic books or even of Feminism. Doc Delilah pretty much has the largest mammarial protuberances that you can get short of breaking the slider and she looks perfectly appropriate.

In the context of this discussion, the question is "What does Swan's (or any random hero/villain) costume say about her?"

Whatever it's supposed to say, the thing it does NOT say to me is "This is someone I should respect and depend upon." It says "This is someone I want to pick up at a bar tonight and wake up in bed with tomorrow."

It doesn't say, "I'm a Hero and here's my story". It says, "I'm a Victoria's Secret model." It doesn't even come close to saying "I'm a powerful magician and psychic with a particular grudge against the Fifth Column". Heck, forget the Fifth Column. It doesn't even say "magic" or "psychic". It just says "Look at me. Don't you wish you could have this?"

In the context of this discussion, Swan would not appear an any of my personal lists of characters whose uniform I consider iconic or visually striking.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

What hell kind of world has 'nanite based regen and armour with a technological spear' equating to 'Mystical'?

What hell else are you going to call yourself if you wield a sword and a spear and wear armour, even if it is technological in origin? 'Sword Girl' is pretty damn lame, so...

It's like saying Statesman has to live up to his name, so he'd better break out the suit and smart cuffs. And what exactly is reclusive about Recluse, the guy who owns his own damn islands and stamped his name all over them?

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

What else am I meant to say? I am perfectly aware that women in real life have larger bust sizes as well as smaller. One of my best friends at Uni is on the larger side, and anyone calling her 'incapable' had better get ready for a severely shortened life of misery, I tell you.

How about "The quoted(?) outfit seems to have an overly large bust and a costume choice that emphasizes this with no regard for the size of the current model, and no reason for this change other than a purely base, fanservicey and pointless choice that I would find annoying and demeaning in a professional design and merely stupid in a player created design"?

That seems to sum it up nicely.
If they're gonna be big, for the love of frag make them balanced and proportional. Doc Delilah works just fine; She's TALL as hell and looks balanced enough. Ergo, no mass outcry.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

^ qft

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Potentially it might have had a better reception in a thread more based around redesign (like the other one I've been frequenting). Since this thread was by started Noble more about "How do various costumes make you feel?" the reaction could tend to be more emotional then that in a thread tending towards "What are the best choices to cement this character?" Just my guess.

As to technical thoughts on KnightErrant's design: I'd say drop the wings (and try to photoshop the existing drapery to see how it would look, maybe photoshop the traditional head on to with its cool feathery bits), replace the sleeves with something less floppy (a bracer tinted white perhaps, to help serve as a wrist mount point for the drapery), maybe try the side slitted skirt rather then the solid side one, and probably lower the chest size by a few notches since the shading on that top already makes things seem bigger then they are. I do like the top selection a lot though, since it sort of evokes the transparency of the existing one while being technically less revealing, and at that color level does look sort of feathery to me.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Wow! Relax buddy
I made a mistake, now I edited my post. I meant mythical, non mystical.
English not my first language, and when Im posting falling asleep I can make some mistakes, so forgive me.
But I still think the same, tech-based pieces dont fit Valkyrie better than Valkyrie set, at least as I re-imagine a new armor and costume for her.
Again, my personal opinion (as every single post of mine).

you know, Statesman probably would look smart in a red, white, and blue suit combo.

Edit: I just tried this, and it didn't look so bad, but the suit itself would need to be red with a blue tie, going with a blue suit and red tie makes it looks like Statesman should be in a courtroom shouting "OBJECTION!"

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I believe that the elements of Hamidon were made simplistic in order to reduce the rendering load with all the powers going off, but I think that they've remained simplistic too long; mitochondria have a visible internal structure that I believe could be added to make them more visually complex:
Similarly, the nucleus is not an undifferentiated body. Take the nuclear speckles, for example. Preserving the existing Hamidon process, when he drops to a pop point, a set of speckles could migrate out of the nucleus and begin to grow rapidly, differentiating into the mitochondria as they moved to their positions around the nucleus. The central nucleolus could have a coiled mass of chromosomes. And, resurrecting something from the very first version of the Hami raid, when Hami is taken down, he spawns a number of Hamidon Buds, which are miniature copies of Hamidon that ooze away from the central spot and disappear into the ground unless defeated first.

I might as well weigh in on this before the thread completely devolves into a battle over how Sister Psyche should be drawn...

In my opinion, signature pieces are best used (but shouldn't necessarily exclusively be used) for situations where (1) the piece itself is interesting and (2) the piece is an example of a system or attachment point that can't or won't be used for player characters for technical rather than story reasons. For instance, Sister Solaris's draperies and Ghost Widow's combination of coattails and floating hair are "good" signature piece because they allow us to see something we don't get on palyer models for performance reasons: multiple cape systems. Daedalus's helmet, on the other hand, is not as great a use of a signature piece. While it's a beautiful costume piece, there's no real real it should be limited to Daedalus except "he's an NPC and player characters aren't." (In case you can't tell, I'd love to have that gladiatorial-like helmet as an additional piece of the Roman armor set.)

***

I realized that I left my favorite signature hero out of my list of character designs I like: the Woodsman. This design tells you everything you'd want to know about the character at a glance. He's a somewhat atavistic guy, close to the wilds, with a sense of mysticism about him, and his pseudo-druidic, animal-attribute-laden design shows exactly that. It even implies his combat-capable model's powers, as the antlers and fur echo the Tuatha he summons. Despite the paucity of information on him in-game and elsewhere, it even implies what kinds of enemies he might fight in an Adventures of the Woodsman comic- polluting evildoers such as Crey, entities entirely divorced from nature like that opponent of his mentioned in that badge text, and twisted environmental types and natural forces like the DE.

***

Special thanks to Rodion for posting that great picture of Hero 1. It'd been a while since I'd seen it. I wish his in-game cape looked that great.

***

Finally, I'd like to say that this has become one of my favorite threads, along with the two costume design threads in the art forum. I might not have much artistic ability, but when I get a new volume of, say, Astro City, the first thing I do is turn to the designs pages at the back to see how and why things were put together. I just love hearing about this stuff.

Bolded for emphasis. Swan is scantily clad. She is not stacked to the max. Sister Psyche is scantily clad. She is not stacked to the max. Mother Mayhem and Bobcat were also moderately endowed until their redesign. It's especially grating since their Primal counterparts are still moderately endowed. Granted, implants would fit Bobcat's "personality," but still, I can think of absolutely no reason to give her bigger boobs other than sheer pandering.

Doc Delilah was one well-endowed NPC out of many, and she isn't sexualized. Mother Mayhem and Boobcat and Desdemona practically falling out of her "how the hell does that thing stay up?" top and her hotpants and her rubber spine pose on the official GR page are just ridiculous.

Actually, my long standing theory is that Neuron got tired of Bobcat being a wildcat and... Has done things to her to "civilize her". Assuming he didn't just kill her, toss her body into the underground to feed the ghouls and make a whole new bobcat from scratch that caters better to his personal fetishes.
Suddenly makes Anti-matter's thing for Dominatrix not seem quite so scary in my mind.

Though on a more meta note, I had come to take Bobcat's redesign into Boobcat as a parody/insult to typical catgirl characters.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Short of the shawl - which I do think is an interesting and unique visual flair - I do agree that the costume isn't very striking or iconic. Where we may separate in our opinion is that I think it could get a re-design that shows the same amount of skin, actually manages to look good, and, dare I say, classy.

This really isn't directed at the quoted poster as YMMV is acknowledged but I guess what bugs me the most about these kinds of discussions is the relative (and sometimes willful) ignorance of who we are as a species. I'm not trying to be dismissive when I say that City of Heroes didn't invent boobies or skimpy costumes of cheesecake superheroines. It isn't Modern Media or a product of a sex-obsessed culture - I guarantee you about five seconds after the first caveman invented art, he was trying to draw a set of no-no's doing the nasty. This wasn't invented by Corporate America and forced down our throats (there's an image), it is part of our collective consciousness. Everybody shakes their head at all the naughtiness, declares things are going to hell in a hand basket, and then enjoys whatever their personal peccadillo is in the privacy of their own home. It's been with us since the beginning of time, folks. The shame and disdain and moral superiority we feel about sex and our bodies, that's what has been invented for us.

As it relates to CoX, complaining about T & A in a game that emulates superheroic comic fiction strikes me as not too far off complaining that Baskin-Robbins sells ice cream. This isn't some hallmark of our declining society for all you Werthams out there. This is what comics have been from the very beginning. If you really find it untenable, why not check out some of the Lego games instead? You'll love them - everyone is flat-chested.

Sure, under all that snark and your personal sensibilities there is a pretty valid point about the re-design disregarding the the size and proportion of the first model. My opinion? I think that the sizes and scales of Swan and Sister Psyche (and a few others) are a little small and scrawny given the some of the other NPCs and the geometry you encounter in the game so I'd be fine with them getting a scale makeover. In Sister Psyche's particular case, I could see such a makeover making her a little more curvy so her model would match better with her image in art, marketing, and other media. I'm not suggesting that they turn her into Morganna the Kissing Bandit - only that a little more is not inconsistent to the way she has been portrayed out-of-game.

That said, I can see how some people might not dig the change. I just don't see it as being the mark of anything in particular, aside from being an upgrade of a substandard model.

I think David kind of muddied the waters himself by commenting on an unsolicited design that someone else decided to share - KnightErrant may have just wanted to play too. Don't get me wrong - I like this about Noble Savage. The tangents and speculation and heavy interaction are all things I love about his threads. It just bugs me a little to see someone's efforts bashed with such an air of self-righteousness indignation.

It isn't that odd to see things pretty freely disassembled by some of the Cartel crowd but I really don't mind saying that I don't particularly care if someone lives on this forum or not, rude is rude. There was some effort put into posting that picture and I don't enjoy the disconnect between reading post after post of finger-wagging about the 'proper' role and portrayals of the female gender in a friggin' game while even the simplest rules of common courtesy are freely ignored.

That and I just really like a nice rack.

Probably a day late and a dollar short on my additions to this thread but I'll add them anyway just in case a Redname is still reading this.

The characters I think stand out are the following:

Banished Pantheon masks and Totems. Nothing like them in any other aspect of the game. The Totems are so damn cool i want one as a mini pet! or better a MM summons. Keep yer damn lich, gimmie that totem!

Banished Pantheon's Goddess Hequat. Her whole outfit screams cool native/primitive look, which we don't have nearly enough of in CoH. We have tons of tech stuff but hardly anything along these lines. Where are the cool headdresses/facepaint/more bone jewelery-boots-gloves-armbands-legbands options? Belts with dangling bone parts and pouches.

Clamor from the freakshow and the freakshow in general. Where are our cool freakshow parts? Cool asymetrical slasher/basher gloves and shoulder parts and neat torn clothes like she has? Or the cool back zappy items that the stunners wear? She (Clamor) has a fantastic look!

Carnival of Shadows. In general they look fabulous. Want those sashes and boots and face masks! Porcelain face masks in a few styles would be fantastic! Think Mardi-gras too...for that matter the swords the fencers use, so WANT.! Vanessa looks great, dark ring mistresses with those cool back items and sashes etc.. the torches the seneshals use! Love it all. I like the whole harlequin look compared to the standard circus clown look and they fit well.

Roman Ghost Widow and Ghost Widow. Excellent design.

Scirocco looks great too. You can just see desert nomad / arabian-esque in his whole look.

The Minotaur and Cyclopse from ITF. Great Creatures. Sad that the bull head is so piddly and you can't make a good Minotuar as a player. Too short, too tiny, too piddly, like some runt from the litter (player minotaurs).

Sybils. I so WANT Those Outfits for Players! They're really so different from anything else, sexy, flowing. So great for many concepts.

Jack In Irons has a great look too. Very Giant/ogre/evil fairytale enemy.

Swan's shawl is a classic unique piece and I wish we had shawls for the gypsy style look for players.

PPD hardsuits look amazing. Really look like powered suits of armor. Wish we had better looking armored options along those lines. It's the legs/gloves/shoulders that really make the look, not too bulky but not skin tight meshes either.

Nightstar/Vikis: The blades and whole sleek look to them are wonderful. want those blades for characters even if they're just looks on an outfit.

Asymetrical looks which I wish we had more of, like the mender belts and shoulder parts. those look great, same with the chest bands. Need those kinds of options for players. you can only do so much with gladiator shoulder part.

Arachnos Tarantulas: Have you looked at them from the side, it's a girl all crouched/bound into that robot body, freaky and cool at the same time.

Maestro with the wicked Dr Strange-esque collar and sash (we really need sashes dammit!).

Goldbricks: That jetpack was so cool looking. So sick of skyraider jetpacks everywhere.

Igenous look great especially the lava bosses. Man wish stone armor (granite) got that style look.

Ruularu. Also a really cool alien creepy look. The eyeballs are fantastic! Want one of them as a non combat pet too Glad we get them as lore pets. The wisps look really great too.

Well, I don't really want to subvert or derail this into a "Let's deconstruct Swan" thread. She really doesn't matter all that much in the larger scheme of things.

FWIW - I have no problem with the amount skin she shows. As was sort of pointed out by someone upstream, if you take her translucent bits into account, she could even be considered semi-modest from a certain point of view. Of course, those translucent bits resemble a nighty/teddy closely enough to just reinforce the lingerie look she has. I actually think the shawl is pretty interesting. It just happens that it ALSO reinforces the Victoria's Secret look.

Basically, I can take or leave her. It's just she screams T&A fan service for no particularly good reason. I don't think there's anything in her backstory to suggest that she's a lingerie model, though that might explain how she first came to the attention of a rich playboy like Justin Sinclair. *laugh*

I'm reminded how for the first couple of years in the life of the game, Cryptic held an annual Halloween real-life costume contest. One of the entries was a girl in a bikini and heels, striking a martial arts pose in an alley. You had the "Woo hoo, you can rescue ME any time!" comments and you had the "where's the beef?" comments because even though it was definitely something you could create in the costume designer and it was certainly something you could potentially see in a comic book, it didn't actually reflect a whole lot of creativity on the part of the contestant. (I'm sure that she was recreating the look of one of her hero characters and so didn't feel like it was lacking anything.)

Swan strikes me the same way. Someone thought the shawl was a great idea, and then either consciously or unconsciously figured that a Victoria's Secret Angel look was the natural accompaniment to it without really thinking very hard about whether it was right for the character. You gotta have at least one T&A hero, right? Swan is there precisely to represent the likes of The White Queen and Lady Death and Witchblade and other skimpily dressed, sexy heroines as for any reason relating to her backstory or the need for another Vindicator. Heck, even Wonder Woman has been depicted as a swimsuit model complete with waxed "naughty bits", at times.

That makes analyzing Swan's costume very deeply to be sort of beside the point, really. It's not intended to say anything about the character. It's intended to represent a genre of costume design.

Look at it this way -- You find yourself surrounded by ten Circle of Thorns, seconds from having a huge fragging thorn plunged into your heart. Which of these two heroines inspires the most confidence in you from the standpoint of appearing like someone you can rely on to rescue you?



I know which one I'd pick, if I was using the head on my shoulders.

I also guarantee you that that caveman liked big butts and he could not lie. So where are these big butts, if we're just acting out biological imperatives by shoving large-chested virtual women into skimpy outfits?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, to anyone who thinks that "comics do it so this game should do it too" I only have two words for you: Rob Leifeld.

I know which one the Circle of Thorns would be distracted the most by too...

As a suggestion for Hamidon in future, it would be awesome (citing the tentacles in the preview of First Ward having to be attached to something) to have some kind of "maw" in the middle, using Charybdis from "the Odyssey" as an suggestion.



Additionally, given the scale of Hamidon, perhaps when we DO fight the Praetorian version, the suggestions from earlier about the zone itself being sort of the opponent could tie into this quite nicely? Take down some tentacles like Lusca's as an example...

I'm sorry, but your attempt at clothing her is atrociously ugly. It's her minimalist look that is so atractive in her costume. Also, the swan feather are her signature costume part. If you are going to change anything on her (which she doesn't need to, just make her cossie parts in hi-res IF the must be a change) that is the one thing that should remain.

Your face needs a freakin' redesign. Possibly with lasers mounted on the head.

Mako is Shane Hensley, also know as "the great white," who runs Great White Games... he wrote a lot of the story for City of Villains, and the Luddites smack of his style of design. Heck, I'm surprised there isn't an enemy group for villains to fight composed of zombie cowboys animated by demons trying to possess them, but the will of the hero inside proved to be too strong.

On the topic of NPC updates, I'll throw my hat in for Hamidon. It's certainly showing its age, especially with the new bio pieces floating around. The Devourers, for example, while really cool, have a very sluggish menace to them, and could stand to be looked at. Maybe with some vague remnant of humanity in them, to let us know that these truly are mutated humans with no ability to control their actions anymore, perhaps with the subtle outline of a face somewhere on them. But then, I have several characters who are connected to the Hamidon in some way, and may be a little biased.

I know this probably isn't the place for it, but the interior of the Eden trial is looking pretty bland, too, especially with the screenshots and video I've seen of the Underground Trial.

I honestly can't even make a straight answer to the question because the examples provided have next to no relation to the genre, even if one is a pretty nifty cosplay of a signature superhero. The genre we're discussing famously has all manner of impracticalities in costume design for both men and women. If I were a person inhabiting that world, I don't suppose I'd be all that fazed by a half-naked lady swooping in to save my bacon with her awesome psychic powers. While I might be inclined to admire the view or wonder how she keeps her skin so satiny smooth and blemish-free while fighting bad guys in her underoos, I would also be part of a world where that sort of thing is not uncommon. I'd probably just be happy I was saved.

I guess a more pertinent set of questions to what I was railing against would be 'Which woman is more capable? Which woman is more intelligent? Which woman has more personal integrity? My answer would be: I can't tell from mere pictures. It's definitely off-topic for the thread but on target with my personal beef.

Hey, I appreciate shapeliness top and bottom so if you're trying to either/or me, my response is to put those hands together. Maybe a little extra on the back porch would balance things out for the people for whom proportion is important.

Having just evoked Rob Leifeld a page or so back myself, I'm not quite understanding your using him here. Anything that he ever did in comics is bad and must not be repeated? I'm truly not getting what you mean to say.

I can assure you that Rob Leifeld was not the first to draw disproportionate anatomy and he didn't invent big boobs in comics. While I personally did not really like his art at the time, his stylized approach was really just part of a trend of the 1990's - he was just arguably one of the more ridiculous offenders and has become the quintessential boogeyman. I'm not really up on comics enough these days to comment on what his lasting impact might have been but it does seem to me like the stylized approach to characters remains firmly represented in the industry.

My take - and I don't think that you and I are going to see eye to eye - is that a game about superheroes just might attract a few fans of the main media in which superheroes appear and those fans will have certain expectations. Idealized bodies have been a staple of the genre. I'd never suggest that the game shouldn't allow for normal proportions or that we should never get an overweight body type because they have representation too but, yeah, at least some of the signature heroes should be hotness and if they wear a costume that would just be completely ridiculous in the real world I would feel that is pretty par for the course with the source material.

But he *did* invent pouches and disappearing feet, right?

So, it seems that Swan *doesn't* seem to do a good job of portraying her story visually... and since so many people don't like her visuals... we're just cluttering up Noble Savage's thread with arguments about what he already to leave out of the thread...


... just saying ...


That said, I restate my previous post and emphasize the fact that Blue Steel is Uber and can kick all your visual's butts (Translation: he tells a story, being a hero and a cop... he just needs less "floods" like pants).