I will be honest....I wouldn't have given the idea the time of day, that they would intentionally make female characters not as pretty, EXCEPT for one simple fact. They obviously based Scott Ryder off his male voice actor....no it isn't perfect and yeah, he still has some funny quirks due to the AI facial controls, but he is CLOSE. Then you take Sara Ryder, and you look at her, then go find a picture of her voice actress.....NOT EVEN CLOSE. IF the art department quirked it up this bad that they were TRYING to make Sara look close to here voice Actress and got what they produced.....then yeah, they deserved to be fired. Then after I started looking into some of this and hearing some stories about how Bioware was leaning toward catering to that crowd, and I found the Day one patch changes to Sara's face. The changes weren't from making her bad to better, it was actually reverse....they actually made Sara look WORSE after the day one patch and they never reverted her back to the Day one look that I am aware. So you combine the hair styles chosen for women, the horrible creator choices for women, where you work to make a good looking character, and the obvious close resemblance of Scott Ryder and I came to the conclusion that it is a definite probability they actually didn't want women to be really pretty in MEA, and a more "Girl next door" look
And as an example of them NOT looking at total game when it comes to characters story and plot, I give you Liam and Vetra. IF you think about the back story and jobs of those two characters, their personalities are reversed. It is like somewhere in the production they had to reverse them(SJW, plot points, romance, Mars was in the wrong quadrant of Jupiter....I don't know) and no one ever went back and looked how it didn't make sense with their backstories and jobs. Liam isn't in any way shape form or fashion, suited to be either Security head OR from Crisis Response....think about how he acts....is he REALLY who you would want to be first in during a crisis?? Is he who you would want to set up your security and run a team?? Now think of Vetra, calm cool, collected, SHE is who you would want on a crises team...., but as a character I think she would have been better to have more of Liam's lines, and vice versa.
They neither of them were based on the voice actor. Each had face models. Steven Brewis and Jayde Rossi. To my eye, they both look like the model, but the texture from the Brewis scan was reworked from the original to work in the ingame environment. A straight scan is always going to look like a death mask once you hang it on a mesh and subject it to in game scaling and lighting. For whatever reason, the Rossi texture wasn't processed properly in some of the images that were released early on, but were never actually in the game. Still they made it into the memes. I never use the default character and roll my own, but default Sarah is pretty.
Animations are still sometimes weird. The facial tracking seemed broken, and the shading non existent, at least until the patch, making your character look like a muppet in several scenes. For sure, it doesn't look right. Even my custom Ryder, I still can't wait to get past the first scenes and off the ark... I don't know what's going on there, but even with a custom Ryder and the improved shading, there is something wrong with the eyes and animation. I've played too many games where the character creator gave you too few options to work with, and you had to spend some time at it. Pre-Frostbite BW games just plain did that better. And most all of those aforementioned games had community mods that made custom characters look like models. For whatever reason, nobody cried SJW over those games, and I can't really see the difference between this custom creator and Skyrim's as far as putting together a face I could like seeing in cutscenes for the next 60 or more hours. Either game, I spent the first two evenings just creating my character.
FemShep runs like a cowboy, and SisRyder suffers from the same gait. I'm not sure if that was a technical limitation or a design flaw, but I wouldn't throw a SJW/IMD (or whatever the opposite is) warning banner on it and run it up the flagpole. It just looks wrong.
I don't see a SJW conspiracy under the bed here, just a game that had five years of effort go in, and disappointment pop out the other side. If Liam bugs you now, imagine playing SisRyder and knowing he's meant to be appealing to the player as a romance option. Like Peebee, he is immature, yet occasionally funny to me, but spends most of his time cooling his heels back on the Tempest in my game. Gil plays for another team, so Jaal suddenly becomes the only interesting guy on the ship. However, I do not take away from it that this production decision is anything except a disappointing production decision.
Conspiracy theories on the Internet are like skin pores - everyone has a billion, and on examination never look up close the way they do from a distance.
