This is something i can agree on
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The contractors forgot to put it in and now the current dev team is scurrying to find the notes on how to update the code for the gender options without breaking more of the game when updating the code lol
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somehow i actually believe that could be true
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I’ve generally avoided these threads, but I just have to dive in.
This, representation, which is spoken of, what exactly is it people want “represented”? In what way is it that “you are represented”?
Is it “as you are”?
Is it you having gone through the rigorous training since the age of six, having undergone undergone augmentation to further modify and improve your body, while also wearing a protective exoskeleton suit further protected with massive armor plates and shield emitters?
The latter is certainly me, and I don’t look like anything the latter would make me look.
Halsey was initially said to be the only one able to distinguish who was who among all the spartans while they were in armor. A marine pondered who was male and female so he would know who to ask out.
I’ve always had this headcanon that all armors were unisex, and the undersuit compensated for any gap that may arise from differences in bodies from Spartan to Spartan. Especially considering all the costs, and form fitting armors for one or two users as something completely impractical if the user was in some way incapitated but the armor salvagable and usable by another.
Come Halo: Reach and the female variant, it looked so off.
I always just saw “twigs” under the undersuit.
It’s a multilayer suit with all kinds of regulatory fluids, crystal actuators and whatnot, and the female model thinned the arms so much it looked like there could barely be anything underneath the undersuit.
Yeah, I get “representation”, but given the lore type of person I am, with some sort of own imagined “logic” applied to things over the year, I don’t really see what kind of “representation” is expected.
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SPARTAN-IIs heve their gender expression erased due to their augmentation just prior to puberty and castration.
SPARTAN-IIIs were allowed to reach puberty and mature as they weren’t expected to survive missions
SPARTAN-IVs are of age adult recruits that are maure human beings with full developed features which are then augmented.
I just want them to follow their own damn canon and respect the players.
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Cant even read this post man.
Conflating the want for actual male and female representation in the body models with the fact you dont actually look like a spartan irl is reaching so far your arm is going to fall off. You must have taken a perc before you wrote this post
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He just recited the sacred texts of the lore lmao
they have books on this you know!
And the lore states that every spartan after the 2s was allowed to hit puberty and even past that were fully grown adults by time of augmentation. Makes no sense why suddenly spartans wouldnt have defining details in their gender anymore
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that never happened you creep
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my point exactly!
anyone arguing against the gender inclusion/expression now refuses to believe current canon or hates women lmao.
Lorewise, these are Spartan IVs, they were augmented in adulthood. Also, in game every depiction of a female Spartan prior to Infinite has had noticeable dimorphism. I would put the representation in games on a high level than other media. Also, if female Spartans have feminine sounding voices, then they haven’t had high levels of testosterone in their body. Which means we’d expect they’d still have some dimorphic traits. So lorewise, I don’t see why this is a big deal.
More importantly, people liked the options we had in past games. Now that’s gone and not everyone is happy. When you factor in how heavily the customization and player experience was marketed, then it’s really understandable people want to voice their concerns about the options we used to have being taken away.
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I’m pretty sure I read Fall of Reach a dozen times in middle school
Correct me if im wrong but i do believe in some way spartan 2s were medically castrated, or had drugs put in them to reduce attraction
This was Halsey’s doing. I remember her having that discussion with her AI prior to Cortana or it was Mendez and a bunch of ONI brass that were questioning her putting a bunch of honry teens on the battlefield together.
Again this wasn’t a problem with the IIIs who were considered entirely expendable so no problem if they grow up. They’ll die sooner or later was ONI’s reasoning.
And we’ve talked the IVs in the ground at this point.
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no the chemicals they were given suppressed the need to reproduce but thye still can, and the chemicals also force them through a rapid puberty cycle which made the grow a few feet inside of like 3 months
I look at this topic in two separate boxes. The “it takes work” box, and the “social issue” box.
From the “it takes work” perspective, I’d say its quite likely they avoided including drastically different body types for this very reason. People can complain all they want about what we currently have available and the means to unlock it, but we’ve already seen a lot of cosmetics added from what we “knew” we had available at launch, and we have every reason to believe we’ll be getting more and more over this 10 year (proposed) title. Every single armor piece and cosmetic flair needing to be scalled to accommodate different model shapes would take work and it’s looking like it’s work they didn’t want to put in.
Onto the “social issue” box, and a lot of this is just personal suspicion, but representation has become such an overblown and ridiculous issue in entertainment and social spaces I suspect someone higher up in 343i felt it was a safer path to lean into androgynous design and call it a day. Reach was one of several games that caught hell for “over-sexualizing” women, and the offense was literally that the female models had hips and a corresponding wiggle in the walk cycle. Something anatomically accurate pissed off the people who get pissed off about this stuff (and let’s be real: such groups have ridiculous reach and impact). There is really no upside for 343i on the topic. You don’t do it, you’re not soing enough. You do it in a way that doesn’t please everyone, you’re an enemy of “insert marginalized group here”. I could totally see why 343i would opt out and hide behind the concept that the armor obscures all, and your Spartan can be who you say they are.
Personally? I’m all for it. As long as hit boxes don’t change, go nuts. But let’s not act like it’s something so simply done.
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What’s really weird is that they care… can you change the height, weight, or hairline of spartans? Cuz unless I missed a setting, they don’t look anything like me either.
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Armor seems to scale just fine in the Chubby Spartans mod.
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Nice non argument, basically repeated buddy up there saying that because we ourselves are not 7 foot super soldiers that it doesnt matter if there are gender options for us.
If you dont care about this dont post here its very simple
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Spartan 2s were augmented at the age of 14, that’s well past puberty for many.
I don’t ever recal castration being something they did, especially since the Spartan in the Live-Action series introducing Locke having a girl, as far as I recall.
Reduced procreation drive, sure but never actual castration.
Wow, I ask what the representation looks like, trying to understand it, not just merely accepting it, as I want to understand it. Also offering how I see it.
There’s a reason threads about this subject aren’t regularly locked, and that’s the hostile behaviour.
It’s really not a great way to get a point across.
All prior Spartan “models” were integrated into 4.
Yeah I know, I talked about my experience with Reach. Arms seeming like twigs.
Sure, I respect that.
Something which’d be compensated for in the undersuit to properly fit the armor plates. But yes, I can still see that.
And I’m glad for that, the previous games things. Not reduced options, that’s bad.
But, I’m merely seeking an understanding of how we’ve come to this point, in contrast to my understanding of the lore.
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