devtrackers.gg
Female dwarves were on the wishlist/roadmap for a long while. We had some internal concepts, but it never got to a proper place.
It's not really about the voicelines, although that is a giant workload too - in 2022 we had 3669 voicelines for the dwarves, so all of those would have to have a female equivalent.
The biggest issue is the character rig, that's ancient and have only been made to accomodate the single potato-ish body type. We'd have to redo that from the bottom up, remake all the cosmetics to fit the new body type and so on.
TL;DR: Redoing the systems to add the female dwarves we feel the game deserve is such an enormous task that it's not currently on the table.
What you see: we need to remake the character rig
What I see: we need to perfect boob physics
What you want: to touch boobs
What you need: to touch grass
Just add an option to select male or female, but it literally makes no changes whatsoever. The character and voice stays the same.
Then we wouldn't even need an option, would we?
Seriously, though. There are many really easy cop-outs that would feel lackluster. If we were to do it, we'd want to do it right.
Female here, love the game and I'm good with all dudes. We got Doretta and M.U.L.E. and that's enough for me.
Girlbossbots
Common dwarf lore says female dwarves look almoast exactly like male dwarves. So it would kinda be pointless to do anything but voicelines.
That being said, you guys are running an amazing game and no doubt you are the only ones who know how to run it best. I have been playing it scince Day 1 of early access. Rock and stone GSG!
Males and females being indistinguishable would be too easy a route to take on this issue.
I think most people accept that female dwarves look and sound pretty much the same as male dwarves.
You could add a male/female icon for people to select in customization that does nothing.
We'd rather do it properly that fall back on that.
I've always wondered if it wouldn't be possible to just create a female head model and leave it at that.
We'd like to not just "leave it at that".
Honestly, I think the potatoey look might just play in your favor.
Just go with "female dwarves and male dwarves both wear beards and look similar" and just do voicelines.
Too easy.
Make female Dwarves potato shaped as well, you f**kin cowards
WHAT IF WE ADD POTATOES ONE DAY, WHAT SHAPE WOULD THEY HAVE, DOCTOR PROFESSOR EINSTEIN?!?
So it's on the list for Deep Rock Galactic 2 whenever it's gonna start development?
That would be my hope - not making the same mistake twice if we ever do a sequel.
Half the population of the world and gaming.
“Nah too much work.”
Disappointing.
That's one take.
Another is being honest and admitting that we reached a point where it requires gutting and changing something really significant in the game systems, which isn't the trivial task you think it is.
Bullshit. That's almost as bad as an excuse as your developers deciding they just didn't feel like allowing people full accessibility options (disabling camera motion during animations).
They're dwarves. Keep the body exactly the same and do just the voice lines.
Good thing no-one ever said they "just didn't feel like it" then. :)
Should I dig out the old report where a developer responded that they literally just don't want to give people proper full accessibility options, so it's artificially limited in such a way as to be useless and non-functional?
That's worse than nothing, it's teasing people with the idea of accessibility options only for them to later find out they don't actually work properly. On purpose.
Does it say “we just don’t feel like it”? Then please do.
For the record stuff like disabling camera shake is a heavily debated topic at the office, and none of the reasons for it being untoggleable is “we don’t feel like it”.
It really doesn’t. Pitch the voice lines and add accessories. You just don’t want to do it.
Correct, we don’t want to half-ass it like you just suggested.
I have no idea, how your game is built, so i will just be talking out my ass on this...
But could you perhaps just change proportions of certain parts of playermodel? Just a tiny bit so there is some diference?
Or perhaps resize existing cosmetics - shrink by x% ?
There are a lot of easy routes to take, but the issue is that if we do it, we want to do it properly - and that's currently a technical issue we'd have to spend a lot of resources on.
Why exactly do you think women dwarves need a new character rig and voice lines?
There's a bunch of reasons. One is that we don't want female dwarves to be similar to male dwarves. It works in Tolkien lore and it works in Pratchett lore, but this is neither. Another is that female representation deserves the effort. It's a big cop-out to pick the easy route and say "Oh, they were there all along, you can't tell the difference" or "You can't tell the difference, but we'll change the pitch of the voice lines so you can hear it". The voice lines are already four different pitches to fit each class.
The most important one is that DRG is the first game in this universe, and whatever we do here sets precedence. If we half-ass female characters here, we've whole-assed the entire universe if we ever do something else.
Personally, I think female representation deserves more than the shortcut that involves a checkbox that does nothing, cosmetics with laces, and high-pitched voices.
We do not have female dwarves in Deep Rock Galactic. We wanted to have it, but we managed to make the game to a point where doing so takes a tremendous effort to do it right - and that's entirely on us. I'd prefer to be honest about it, dispel the hot takes and speculation on it, and explain why it's not likely to happen.
you guys complain that everything is too much work..then why get started on this thing at all? thats weird
Everything?
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Female representation deserves the effort, yet you don’t want to do any of it. All of the top replies are simple implementations that will help players with the representation that they desire. Is it really too much to ask for feminine hair options, eyelashes, makeup and paint? Put a pitch slider for voices of each class. A lot of talk about female representation but zero effort. That’s the biggest cop-out of them all. If you’re so big on female representation then why didn’t you start with it in the first place?
The most important one is that DRG is the first game in this universe, and whatever we do here sets precedence. If we half-ass female characters here, we've whole-assed the entire universe if we ever do something else.
First of all - read the above.
Second of all - you're completely missing the point. We're not going to add some half-baked solution with voice pitching and cosmetics just to do it for all the reasons I've mentioned several times in these threads. If we're going to add female characters, we want to do it right. Smacking some rouge on the existing characters is not sufficient, so again: We're not doing it, because we want to do it right, and we're currently not planning to do it, because doing it right requires a complete redoing of a key system in the game. That's currently not on the table, and we're being completely honest about that reason. We're not saying we're never going to do it, we're just not planning to do it or promising to do it. As to why we didn't do it in the first place, the game started out as a small project by six people, and no one could have predicted where it would end up. Again, like I've said - it was on the wishlist at some point, until we realized that the route we'd take would make it costly to do - and that was a mistake.
Your community is telling you that simple implementations are going to be enough. There are many people who will not play your game because there is zero female representation. Why are you so insistent on a new character rig and voice lines? I do not see a benefit here. I’m trying not to read between the lines, but I get the feeling you think female dwarves need to have a specific body type and voice, and it is weirding me out.
I think you should take my willingness to actually engage with you as a sign that it's not a topic we're taking lightly. I'm trying to explain that just adding cosmetics, makeup, and a higher voice pitch isn't how we want to do it. I also can't tell you how we want to do it, other than we want to give it just as much love and attention as we did with the original character rig. And maybe that is too ambitious, but like I said, it sets precedence for potential new games in the universe.
And yes, it totally sucks that it's not in there already. We know.
no half ass implentation so instead we're going to do full ass no implentation ever in this game. because reasons and we never once thought about this issue when originally making the game no want to follow at minimum problematic fantasy lore on fntasy races since we're already doing it for the male drawfs
Are you okay?
This is such a bad excuse. It's a dwarf and in yalls universe the female ones can still have the same body types because yalls armors are so thick it hides the body. No one is asking for a feminine hourglass body. Just a female character. You'd only have to redo the face and voice lines. It annoys the shit out of me there's no female character to play.
If you think the only possible shape is feminine hourglass, I don’t know what to tell you.