RE: Desire Demon Models
“I completely understand this in almost any other monster situation, but I think we all gotta agree the desire demon is a special case of standard female objectifying sexualization that perhaps should be reorganized with it’s own special case answer.”
Allow me to clarify further.
If you draw up design plans that require 100 unique models, and the Art team comes back and says, “we only have time to do 50”, then you need to go back to the drawing board and decide which of those things on your list is Nice to Have and which are Must Have. The hypothetical questions I provided earlierare the sort that would be used in that situation… and it’s a situation that has arisen on every project in which I’ve been part, usually more than once as schedules (and work estimates) change.
If one’s belief is that “addressing the concerns some fans have regarding the possible sexualization of a creature model” is enough on its own to get it on theMust Have list, I’d say that’s pretty indicative of someone who hasn’t had to go through the process, as the decisions one is forced to make during the development process get way tougher than that. That’s not an indictment, as that’s true for most people, but my impression is that fans will always believe a dev team should be able/willing to pull the resources from somewhere to address such matters. That somewhere, evidently, shouldn’t matter.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree or disagree with the assessment regarding the Desire Demon specifically—and I also say this with the knowledge that you have no idea how or if the Desire Demon model being referred to is used in Inquisition—but the time to address that question would have been back when the creature was concepted and first made. Once something already exists, the questions regarding what can or can’t be done about it have to change. You can argue with me about it if you wish (with the understanding, I hope, that I am not part of the Art team, and am thus speaking solely from an understanding of the process as a whole), but that is how it works.
anonymous said:
Im really curious about the types of demons we will see in Inquisition, is there a chance we could see a male version of a Desire Demon?
Possibly. It requires a different version of the creature model, however, and isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. So the question, when the Character Art team considers such an idea, is “what do we gain for the time it takes to make the model variant?”
Variety? Certainly. Yet the Character Art team (and the Design team as a whole) must concern themselves with the variety of creatures in the game overall… if we only have time to do x number of models, and that only gives us y number of creatures, does doing two versions of the same creature mean we’ll have less variety in opponents overall?
Probably. So then the question is: is that particular creature a common enough opponent that having variety in that creature type will be beneficial? That answer is sometimes “yes”, such as for humanoid opponents (particularly since the bar is lower for such variants when the base model and animations already exist). Is it true for the Desire Demon specifically? If not, does the plot call for a specific male Desire Demon as a particular character? If so, then it’ll definitely happen, but we only get so much budget for specific character models as well, so at some time the Design team would have to decide whether that’s important enough a character to warrant the treatment.
Those are the sort of factors that would go into such a decision. Usually, for a particular enemy type, it’ll be one version… and thus either “male only” or “female only” (or neutral, I suppose, depending on the type of creature in question). I know the Art team has made a concerted effort to not always default to “male only” with its creature/enemy models, but that’s a response to a slightly different question than “will we get gender variations for creature models that already exist?”
