Male vs Female armor Design

Hey there !

I wanted to start a discussion about a thing that bothered me for years now but has been present more and more during the latest years.First let me say I start playing GUild wars 2 (as an old GW1 player) till launch with few weeks breaks.

And I'm not into the "female human character" meta such as korean games tend to do.I'm kinda frustrated about the "poor design" of male character armor compared to female ones. The amount of details or just the details not being that great overall between both gender.Of course, it doesn't apply to all armor or outfit sets. Some are even uglier on female than male. But sometimes I really feel there are more options on a female characters than on males.

Here some outfit comparaison for you to make your own feel about it. I took outfits cause it's easier since it's a one piece set ( and it doesn't use transmutation charges lol) and of course it picked the ones that were very different from male to female.

PS: sorry for the salad ... it's the only Female character i have with a female charr ... no point since it doens't change that much between male/female on charr.

What are you impression on this? :) My point is not the only truth . I have the right to agree or disagree ! As long as you're arguing your point without destroying the ones that has a different point of view.

I'm not sure the samples here argue your case. Both variants are detailed and far from poorly design, IMO. In fact I know a lot of people were quite pleased with the Male Elementalist outfit for finally giving males a decent "skin" option.

Most of the female sets (especially the human ones) looks awfully cheesy and/or overly "sexy" (if you like it cheap). Like we were playing little princesses (or escort service employees) instead of sturdy adventurers. That's the main reason I almost exclusively play male characters.

I prefer the style of the Saints Row series. Instead making different attires per gender, both genders can wear any attire. The adjustments are only for body shapes.

Fashion and aesthetic taste aren't objective truths that one argues. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc.

With that established I'll say I feel it goes both ways. Some armor sets look great on female and horrible on male and some armor sets look best on male and not so good on female.

Your examples in particular are very minor gender variations and the outfits look remarkably the same on both genders.

People that'll argue the semantics of that are vying for some arbitrary and very strict monomorphic standard... for which they have the charr and the asura who more often have no sexual variation with regards to their armor.

Non-issue IMHO. GW2 tends to do armor/outfit design very well.

Yep I picked the outfit (as i said) for easier sample access ... I mostly play light classes (elementalist) and that was the issue i got ... only skirts and robes .Here my actual ele armor skin .

See here the struggle to find a good pant and shoes . Can't really do much more than that for now .

I actually think this game has a good range of choices for both male and female characters, especially now we've got some more 'revealing' male light and medium armour with PoF. It's just not as straight-forward as the same outfit or armour set looking the same on both genders. Although in terms of it looking good that's not only highly subjective but also depends on more than just gender. What looks good on my female human ranger can look terrible on my female norn engineer, just because they have different body shapes, colour schemes and I have a different idea of what each one would wear.

I definitely think you need to play around with options, particularly mixing and matching sets, to find something that looks really good but I've very rarely had a character I couldn't dress the way I wanted, and when I couldn't it was mostly minor things, like wanting completely bare arms for my male charr thief and having to settle for one bare arm and one 1/2 sleeve.

Dye is also important, particularly when talking about the level of detail. The right dye can make a huge difference. I often find very bright or very dark dyes can hide detail in the base skin. Even something as simple as the Student Coat will show this - the male version (and possibly the female, can't remember or check now) has a pattern on the main body but some dyes will hide that, others will really bring it out (even though it's the same dye slot as the fabric behind it). The female sylvari wedding dress is a really extreme example of this. With some dyes it will look very flat and dull and almost like it's using a lower graphics setting to the rest of the character, but with even a small change in dye the texture and shadows come out and it looks much more detailed.

Sometimes I actually like that because with all the detail showing some pieces can look too messy for me, so I'll use a darker or brighter dye to smooth it out and make it look like plain fabric. On others I love using the dyes that almost come out in 2-3 different shades like Midnight Ice, Heirloom and Abyssal Sea because it can make an otherwise ok armour piece look amazing.

What about the toes out asuran shoes? D: its rare that they release stuff with all the 3 toes in... most times its 1 in 2 out !! I guess all races/genders have something they don't like about their armor choices.. i feel bad for charrs though.. they never receive anets love and grace over armor/outfit skins.

BDO's armor design is so much better that it feels like gw2 designs are on a $5 budget.

I agree with the OP and pretty much gave up on male characters and make only female now (35 toons on main account, 34 total on alt accounts).

The issue you're likely having is that the designers tend to cater to the north american conservative/prudish market in terms of style. They also have to appease their playerbase expectations regarding what is appropriate for male and female characters of each armour type; what image do you think of first when you consider a male warrior or a female spellcaster? As a result, male armours cover more skin than the female counterpart and look more functional (this is especially noticeable on the shoulders, /s gotta love those american football shoulderpads everywhere /s ). It seems to me that male armours are designed to take hits, but females are not supposed to be hit (which is sexist and insulting imo).

They can buck the trends a little, but not too much, otherwise people won't buy them (gemstore) or will just ignore or transmute over skins which the design team spent resources making but the players don't like (medium legendary armour comes to mind). The other thing we should bear in mind is the games' PG rating, though a cursory glance through the female selections defenestrates this.

BTW, your examples are illustrative; idk wht CETheLucid is smoking when they say that the gender differences are minor- they are really obvious.

@"Funky.4861" said:The issue you're likely having is that the designers tend to cater to the north american conservative/prudish market in terms of style. They also have to appease their playerbase expectations regarding what is appropriate for male and female characters of each armour type; what image do you think of first when you consider a male warrior or a female spellcaster? As a result, male armours cover more skin than the female counterpart and look more functional (this is especially noticeable on the shoulders, /s gotta love those american football shoulderpads everywhere /s ). It seems to me that male armours are designed to take hits, but females are not supposed to be hit (which is sexist and insulting imo).

They can buck the trends a little, but not too much, otherwise people won't buy them (gemstore) or will just ignore or transmute over skins which the design team spent resources making but the players don't like (medium legendary armour comes to mind). The other thing we should bear in mind is the games' PG rating, though a cursory glance through the female selections defenestrates this.

BTW, your examples are illustrative; idk wht CETheLucid is smoking when they say that the gender differences are minor- they are really obvious.

As I said... everyone can have a different point here ! "i'm not saying i'm right , you're wrong"Of course not every armor sets are different. Of course most of them are really alike. It's just my general feeling playing a male light character in general . Weirdly i have not that much issues on my revenant so maybe ppl have a point here :) And this post is all about personnal feelings

@Funky.4861 said:BTW, your examples are illustrative; idk wht CETheLucid is smoking when they say that the gender differences are minor- they are really obvious.

If it was something that could help your perception, I'd be sure to recommend it to you. :cookie:

@Funky.4861 said:It seems to me that male armours are designed to take hits, but females are not supposed to be hit (which is sexist and insulting imo).

Thats because Female models have smaller hit boxes and get an agility bonus. Thats why there are so few Charr players in PvP.

Agree with OP, sets look way better on human female then male, and it proves itself with amount of female characters running around compared to male ones. Its not only couse of details, but general design as well. Most male armor designs just make no sense, being to wide on some part, to short on other. Proportions are terrible on most of male armors.There are also super strange details that are, in my opinion, unnecessary and put on armor just for sake of making something different (this is the case for all armors on all races and genders).

@starlinvf.1358 said:

@Funky.4861 said:It seems to me that male armours are designed to take hits, but females are not supposed to be hit (which is sexist and insulting imo).

That's not actually correct. The reason why asura are the most popular race for PvP is that the models are smaller and harder to read, even though speeds and hit detection are identical.

Look at my signature. I’d kill for new, fancy “skimpy” options for male characters. Heavy armour in particular.

The ones that are in the game have been in the game since launch and their model and texture quality shows their age, sadly.

The thing about male armor sets is that they are poorly wrapped on the mesh that they were created on. The basis for all armor meshes seems to be humans since they are scaled normal, then you get the added scaling from a human that makes male armor sets look ridiculous that comes from norn charr asura and plant people.

For instance I can tell that for norn, whoever made the scaling for it was super lazy and decided to just double the x scale and 1.5 the y for leggings. And it makes pretty much every other leg piece look unnaturally larger than the legs. The same can go for charr and asurans. Rather than to spend more time setting up individual scaling schemes, anet went full lazy and said let's just use a base and scale... And as a result you have pauldrons looking bigger than they need to be on certain races and stuff like that.

The only armor that is scaled to perfection on each race is....that's right you guessed it cultural armor! And the reason that it is is because the creators of the armor carefully tailored each piece so that it fits perfectly. It clearly shows in the way that the armor is created, it's not just an ordinary UV map, it's a carefully tailored UV map that's not just some knockoff wrapping.

@Aridon.8362 said:The thing about male armor sets is that they are poorly wrapped on the mesh that they were created on. The basis for all armor meshes seems to be humans since they are scaled normal, then you get the added scaling from a human that makes male armor sets look ridiculous that comes from norn charr asura and plant people.

For instance I can tell that for norn, whoever made the scaling for it was super lazy and decided to just double the x scale and 1.5 the y for leggings. And it makes pretty much every other leg piece look unnaturally larger than the legs. The same can go for charr and asurans. Rather than to spend more time setting up individual scaling schemes, anet went full lazy and said let's just use a base and scale... And as a result you have pauldrons looking bigger than they need to be on certain races and stuff like that.

The only armor that is scaled to perfection on each race is....that's right you guessed it cultural armor! And the reason that it is is because the creators of the armor carefully tailored each piece so that it fits perfectly. It clearly shows in the way that the armor is created, it's not just an ordinary UV map, it's a carefully tailored UV map that's not just some knockoff wrapping.

It's interesting what you 've said ... But i can understand they won't put too many ressources on just armor size scaling . I mean it's a lot of effort for a short results. Even if it makes me kinda mad about it . I can understand why they would have made this that way. Anet isn't a super big franchise such as Blizzard or EA

Tl; dr - We’re long overdue for more Cultural sets...

is this one of those SJW "females be' too sexy!" threads?if so i disagree.

@"Danikat.8537" said:I actually think this game has a good range of choices for both male and female characters [...]

I disagree, as my initial response already made clear. ;) The "range" for females is mostly limited to "I look like a fragile princess", "I enjoy running around half-naked" and "I have no taste at all."

@MithranArkanere.8957 said:I prefer the style of the Saints Row series. Instead making different attires per gender, both genders can wear any attire. The adjustments are only for body shapes.

:+1: I wish it was like that in Guild Wars 2!

@Nath Forge Tempete.1645 said:Here my actual ele armor skin .

You stole my Sylvari Mesmer's look! :o :p

I don't know... the outfits you posted seem really well made on both female and male characters (with the exception of the male witch one)...

@Maikimaik.1974 said:I don't know... the outfits you posted seem really well made on both female and male characters (with the exception of the male witch one)...

The last one is perfect. Shows skin for both genders. Shame that is pretty much only true for light armour: medium and heavy it is pretty damn one-sided with females showing skin and males being left out in the cold...

I think it's just a matter of each person's opinion which outfits look better on which gender/race. Some outfits, I like on both genders. Others, I like it more on one gender than the other. I don't really see a pattern of outfits looking worse on male.