Nakedness in Skyrim

[ita]

I demand naked barbarians.

[draconix]

I'm actually pretty surprised how this is turning out. There are quite a few people who seem to have a real problem with the naked human body being shown in a video game. Then there are people who say no because of the hassle that Bethesda would have to deal with (due to the people who have a problem,) and then there are others who don't care what the people with the problem think and say it should be put in anyway. I wish I had put in more poll options when starting this but I didn't expect this kind of split. Who knew people came in shades of gray?:tongue:

 

I suppose that my answer is another shade of gray. I think Bethesda should include it as an option that players will have to turn on, and I don't really care about the people who have reservations about nakedness. Too many people are equating nudity to sex and debauchery, but then again that's probably more of my commentary on... well.. not the human race, but maybe the masses in the United States?

 

I don't see the media having any sort of heyday with the inclusion of nudity in a mature-rated game. It did not happen with God of War, it did not happen with The Saboteur, or even The Witcher, nor did it affect their sales, so I'm considering any considerations of that point to be moot.

 

Also, I can't remember who said it, but someone said something about having a good naked mesh and texture to start out with would lead to better armors and clothing created by users, which I hadn't even considered. That's a very excellent point. Perhaps then we wouldn't have issues with the body seams that we are seeing in Oblivion. Something good to start with will help standardize things for modders which helps them not have to reinvent the wheel.

[stephanie]

I think it should be as it has been since Morrowind and the 'Better Bodies' mod was released.

 

Let the modders do it. People like exnim, robert, eshme, and a few others have created bodies for Oblivion that are very realistic, a pleasure to work with, and it's easy to make clothing for them. Bethsoft would just throw something together that would need to be changed to make it look right anyway.

 

I vote to have no nudity from Bethsoft in the released Skyrim game. We can do it better.

Let the prudes have what they've always had - bland games with no realism.

 

Steff

:)

[Vagrant0]

I suppose that my answer is another shade of gray. I think Bethesda should include it as an option that players will have to turn on, and I don't really care about the people who have reservations about nakedness. Too many people are equating nudity to sex and debauchery, but then again that's probably more of my commentary on... well.. not the human race, but maybe the masses in the United States?

 

I don't see the media having any sort of heyday with the inclusion of nudity in a mature-rated game. It did not happen with God of War, it did not happen with The Saboteur, or even The Witcher, nor did it affect their sales, so I'm considering any considerations of that point to be moot.

I would point out that several countries have laws related to nudity in videogames, some of them even more strict than in the US. It isn't that nudity always has a connection with sex so much as the ongoing sentiment that videogames are just for children. Nearly every time the media latches onto something about game content it is always shared with a "There are children playing this game" or "I wouldn't want my kids to see this sort of thing in a game" completely ignoring that the game carries a Mature rating. A belief that isn't helped so much when games have adverts aimed mostly toward teenage males.

 

The other thing is that most of the games which the media latches onto are those higher profile titles, particularly those which are being talked about on one blog or another. As the outcry over Duke Nukem shows, clearly they aren't doing their own research in the matter.

[Kuraikiba]

Wait, what exactly would this really add? The hassle of making this could be time lost on better things.

[draconix]

Kuraikiba, it's clearly not about adding anything to the game, nyuck nyuck!

 

Personally, It's about removing parts from the game that break the suspension of disbelie, (aka immersion)

Edited June 16, 2011 by draconix

[Kuraikiba]

How does it break immersion to not have it? People don't randomly stroll about naked, unless they are totally insane or weird, or creepy. Besides, once you consider the idea of Orcs, Argonians, and Khajiits being nude, it really goes from realistic to creepy. GAH! I get horrible visuals thinking about it.

 

Besides, if it hasn't been in any other vanilla TES games, how would it make sense that NOW people decided to strip randomly?

 

As well, what context would nudity make sense in? No normal person takes a stroll nude. That's for sure. Anything that would make nudity make sense in context would very likely give the game an AO rating, which MURDERS sales. Only 25 games ever got the AO rating in the history of gaming, and each was an absolute failure. Oblivion almost got AO just for the fact there was a hidden nude mesh.

[draconix]

I don't want to sound like nudity is my flagship or anything, the game doesn't have to have nudity in it to be a good game. However, there have been circumstances which have been put into recent bethesda games that really necessitate nudity, and it's exclusion is what breaks my immersion. So with that disclaimer:

 

For me, immersion broke with I walked into a strip club/skooma den in Morrowind to find females dancing in rags for underwear. Immersion broke in Fallout new vegas when I stumbled upon a ransacked caravan, found the guard killed, and the woman in the group naked.. actually she was wearing a tank-top and underwear. It was sure nice of those powder-gangers to re-cloth her after raping her. :rolleyes:

 

I lost immersion when talking to the "naked nord" in Morrowind when he was talking about how he didn't have a scrap of clothing on him, when he knew full well he was wearing some underpants. In these contexts, nudity would make total sense. These aren't people just strolling around... well the nord was just strolling about, but you catch my drift.

 

Also, as I've read in this very thread, people have stated that games pre-morrowind, Daggerfall to be exact, contained nudity, so your 2nd paragraph is false, as Daggerfall is in fact a TES game. Pretty sure Daggerfall was not AO. :thumbsup:

[Kuraikiba]

1: Strip clubs are not always purely naked, but CAN be clothed very scarcely.

 

2: Fallout =/= TES

 

3: Scrap of EXTRA clothing can be inferred. Besides, why steal random underwear? It's a robbery, but not a frat-party panty raid.

 

4: First off, where did Daggerfall have nudity (DONT GIVE A PIC!)? Second, the ESRB did not exist then. Hence, it was totally unrated, as no rating system existed.

[Vagrant0]

Oblivion almost got AO just for the fact there was a hidden nude mesh.

Incorrect... Oblivion was released with a Teen rating by the ESRB. When the game was re-reviewed in light of the naked mesh and some of the gore elements which were missing/not noticed in the pre-release screening of the game, the rating was raised to M. You can have rather explicit sexual and violent content before making a game have an Adult rating. As opposed to and Adults Only game, which suffers mostly because most vendors do not have the permits to sell Adults Only content. As far as I know, the only games which have ever carried this rating have either been rubbish in their own right (arguably the rating helped sales), or been something along the lines of a Japanese Eroge (which tend to have a niche market and little publicity over seas). So even though the permit to sell AO games may not be carried by most vendors, to say that AO hurts sales is ignoring some of the facts.

 

Daggerfall and older games did not get much attention primarily because the only nudity seen was some grainy 16 bit sprite and a static paper doll in the inventory screen. While yes, men have fapped to less (8 bit Samus... for instance). The fact is that it just wasn't noticed, or even rated in may cases back then. The ESRB only started in the mid-90's, and initially only looked at console games because that was what was being used by the most users, and predominantly by children.