On vacation, just finished my 6th 60 hour RPG for the year. To lazy to put that out, so this piece I wrote a month ago will do.

This is a topic I’ve stewed over for some time. There are multiple games out there that exist in worlds were body augmentation is an admitted thing. From Dragon Age’s gender flipping to Mass Effect or Cyperpunk’s super tech, anyone with money should have the body they want or the body that is most convenient for them. Yet we stick with making them bland, generic, and not desirable. It’s confusing to me in way.

Cyperpunk is probably the biggest one to me. I wanted to play 2077 with it’s recently announced expansion and most people seeming to admit the current game is good, I kind of want to finally go and play it. But the girls in it are… meh? Part of that is I dislike the punk style that Cyperpunk is built off of, but even the business women looks bland to me. Like in that position she should either look like a runway model to basically be her own honey trap or be surrounded by that kind of women with assassin augments on. Beauty is a part of selling stuff. In a cut throat capitalist hellscape like Cyberpunk, people will use any advantage to get more money. Including using their bodies as canvases. The only people that shouldn’t look like runway models are people who want to be underestimated, the actual poor, people who need other body types like bodyguards, or prostitutes for extremely specific fetishes. Fucking design characters based on their roles in society and not a checklist.

Then you have the reverse setting like Dragon Age. At least in this setting mages are locked up so most people wouldn’t have access to this kind of stuff, but there is an entire empire meritocracy place that would 100% have all of it’s leaders and probably a decent chunk of it’s servants class be super attractive. The few characters from that magic empire don’t really strike me as magically augmented to be attractive though. Fenris might have that in his backstory, being an escaped slave from there who was used sexually, but no one else really seems to be upping their cupsize or curing blemishes or anything. Honestly it’s Inquisitions uglying it’s characters from 2 while also introducing the first female to male character where this thought hit me. They have gender change, but not make someone sexy magic? They definitely have illusion magic, it’s even admitted in someone’s backstory they used that to get a mate for generations, so why isn’t anyone else using it? I know the answer is politics, but this is exactly why those type of things suck for fantasy. Making your fantasy more like our current reality kills your fantasy. If you introduce a concept, take it as a part of the world and apply the damn thing.

It doesn’t help that basically every table top made into a game flirts with sex as a player option. From Baldur’s Gate 3 to Pathfinder to Cyperpunk, hell one of the Shadowrun games has a bar lady admit to doing this but she’s apparently the only person smart enough to augment her looks to attract customers. It boggles the mind.

At the least you’d think nobility and the rich would be picture perfect while the poor and middle class would be blemished and average looking to tell them apart at a glance. Make it really apparent who has money in this world but nope. You can only tell via their clothes, not how healthy their face is or how full their figure. Why the fuck the fighting game has a better character creator then the RPGs is beyond me.

Building on the world building issue, that’s the crux of this. It really doesn’t feel like the developers of these worlds or games thought out how their shiny idea would work in that setting and didn’t bother to build rules around it or design the character art around the reality of their worlds. Like I get some games can’t help it because of engine issues or dev time(I’m not a fan of no bust slider in BG3, but I get those are actually the hardest body part to build stuff around), but there’s really no reason DA:I doesn’t have a get sexy spell other then bullshit or stupidity.

[Edit]At some point there was 3 more paragraphs here. I have… no idea where they went?