But the other side can play this game, too, so to speak.
Sister Psyche's costume of straps, Mother Mayhem and the Twins, Swan, the female walk cycle, the Penny Yin boobs-and-butt splash screen, the dominatrix Barbarian costume set.... Someone could look at all the B&S art and, with a little time, pick examples from CoH to say "But your supposedly family-friendly game does it too!"
I agree entirely, someone might say "your game has that too!"
But if that's the case, you have to then ask, who is this "other side" who'd want to play that card? Someone who thinks
all games are bad and they already contain too many over-sexualised characters? Then all that would do is add hurt to
Blade and Soul too, yes? To suggest that CoH is the 'lesser of two evils' doesn't diminish the greater 'evil'.
How about someone who thinks all games should have
moar bewbies in rather than less? Well their complaint isn't valid either because B&S
does have 'moar bewbies' than CoH, and pointing to CoH's females and B&S's females simply confirms that.
Either way, attention is drawn to B&S, and not in a good way.
Like I said earlier, western comic books have quite a long history of questionable female heroines - I mentioned Wonder Woman always being tied up and carrying a whip, and I could add Power Girl and her 'assets' (created, as I understand it, as a joke by the artists to see how far they could push things before the editor stopped them...but he never did) too. However, more recently, comic book females have assumed a less glamorous and more positive role model for women...unlike fantasy MMOs which seem (if anything) to be sliding in the other direction.
If people use the "yes but yours has bewbies too!" argument, it presupposes the "too" part - i.e. B&S has to be in the spotlight as the offender before someone can wag a finger in
any direction. And if that light of negativity is on B&S at all, it's bad PR for NCSoft.
Saying that CoH's "sexualisation" is on a par with that found in Blade and Soul is like saying the
real reason Statesman was killed off is because Southern Korean NCSoft didn't like the fact his costume "looks a bit like the North Korean flag"...
Joking aside (assuming that IS a joke of course, and not the actual reason he was killed
) remember the statement
"...a realignment of company focus" and the fact that however you paint CoH's heroines, B&S is still an order of magnitude more overtly sexualised.
The ironic thing is that I'd guess the statement "a realignment of company focus" actually refers to what seems to be NCSoft's intention to focus on casual/mobile gaming in future, and that, I believe, might be part of their desire to close down overseas pc-based MMOs. So in order to deny the allegation that 'realignment' equates to 'adding moar bewbies', they'd have to explain
what the realignment really is...and that's something I'm sure we'd all like to know if it would shed any light on the reason
why they're killing our game.