Ugly on Purpose

Mass Effect is series of sci-fi action role playing games, featuring a large cast of characters some of whom the player can romance. One of the most popular romanceable characters from original trillogy was Liara T'Soni, a member of the all female, blue-skinned, Asari race. She was quite popular: That's why for the 4th installment, Andromeda, they introduced an Asari named Peebee:
Yes, that is intended to be a female that the player might be interested in having a romantic relationship with. Producing defective artwork like this indicates a defective mind, so it is unsurprising that the game was also plagued with technical problems and design issues.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a poorly named third person action game where you fight robot dinosaurs.

Concept art for the main character, Aloy, was created by Lois van Baarle aka Loish:
Cute.

Let's see how the in-game model turned out:
Eugh. In the sequel it somehow got worse:
A promotional image was released to show of the improved power of the new generation Playstation:
This image caused lots of arguments across social media. It usually went something like this:

Person A: Aloy is ugly, look at her beard.
Person B: Haha, women have hair on their skin irl. You have never been near a woman.

Interestingly, both people are correct and incorrect in this case. Aloy is profoundly ugly, intentionally so. This is obvious to the layman, but they do not have the analytical ability or artistic knowledge to point out exactly why she is so unnattractive, so they just pick up on the most obvious thing which is the amount of visible hair on her skin. The reason they pick up on this is because the artist intentionally emphasized it. They modeled those hairs, shaded them, and chose the lighting so that they were one of the most visible features of the image.

Women do have hairs on their skin, this is true. Women also have thousands of dust mites crawling around on their face eating dead skin cells, but I think we can agree if you rendered all of them it would be disgusting. When you create work of art, you start with nothing. Every line drawn or feature carved is a statement that is added to the work by the author. When you model all these hairs and adjust the lighting so it shines through her ear and off her face, what you're saying as an artist is "hey look how hairy this gal's ears and face are".

The fact that something exists does not mean you should depict it in detail. Like imagine there was a detailed scene of Aloy taking a shit and the defense was 'women poop in real life, have you never seen a real woman?'

Your opponent's lack of sexual experience, while amusing, is not relevant in this case. When you're with someone romantically you're probably not going to be critically analyzing their features unless you're roleplaying that drawing scene from the Titanic movie. Consumption does not confer expertise in creation. I would value the opinion of any makeup artist, photographer, or sculpter over even the most prolific pick up artist.

Why is Aloy ugly:

• Fat Face - The developers added weight to her face intentionally. The level of fat in her face does not match the level of fat in her body, indicating illness.
• Large Jaw - They picked a face model with a large jaw, then modified it to be larger. My initial hypothesis was that their face scanner was miscalibrated, but they later admitted to doing this intentionally. A large jaw is a male-typical trait.
• Heavy Eyebrows - Thick eyebrows that are set closer to the eyes is a male-typical trait.
• Cone Head - Her hair piled up on top combined with her strange hairline and lantern jaw contribute to an overall cone-headed appearance, a marker of illness or birth defect. This is a fashion mistake women make in real life as well. Note that Loish avoided it in the concept art phase because she is an artist with good aesthetic sense.
• Bad Skin - She is pale with freckles and rosacea. They thought they were making her look "outdoorsy" but the developers, and most social justice types, fail to realize that when a white person lives outside, they become quite tan with a healthy glow to their skin. Aloy looks like a sickly, out of shape, middle aged, indoor-only person went outside for the weekend.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an action FPS-RPG with a bad GTA clone shoe-horned into it at the last minute.

In 2013, the teaser trailer had a character that looked like this:
Upon release in 2020, the character looked like this:
Interstingly, you can see the character's appereance devolve over time through promotional media:

Update: I've been told these are two different characters. It doesn't matter, she's the marketing face of the game.

The game also features an allegedly female character, whom you can have awkward, fully clothed, first person video game sex with: Coincidentally, David Bowie's death would have been in the news at the time of development.

Lawbreakers was a failed multiplayer hero shooter shat out by delusional billionaire and cringe black-belt Cliff Blezinski.

The face of the franchise was the character Sunshine, who is uniquely hideous in phenotype, fashion, facial expression and skintexture: Not content with disgracing black women with just one abomination, they added a second: Lawbreakers became one of the biggest video game flops of all time and consumed most of Cliff Blezinsky's disposable capitol, likely eliminating him from major game development efforts permanently.

Diablo is a series of isometric hack and slash role playing games made by Blizzard Entertainment. One of the characters you can play as is the Amazon warrior.

Here she is in late 90s cgi glory: And here's what they made her look like for the 2021 Resurrected version:

In Diablo IV, you can play as a hambeast barbarian:

Tomb Raider is a series of exploration platforming games, turned third action shooter. The protagonist, Lara Croft, is widely considered to be a sex symbol.

In the 1990s, Lara Croft looked like this:
In the 2000s, she looked like this:
By the third iteration of the 2010s reboot, she looks like this:
All of the characters in the game have weirdly shrunken shoulders, especially her pet POC. It even screws up the animations at times. It looks like they made all the models normally, then some director came in at the last minute and demanded everyone be made weaker looking. Some poor sod had to alter all the bones after the animations had already been baked.

The Last of Us is a series of games about shooting zombies.

In The Last of Us 2 they introduced an allegedly female character named Abby:
The player is forced to play as Abby and kill the main character from the previous game with a golf club:
There is a sex scene that looks like gay porn due to how masculine Abby is:
There's a story going around that a streamer was banned for showing this scene live on twitch, but had the ban reversed after he told them it was two men and thus no female nipples were shown.

The game is also disgustingly violent, in a way that feels like it was done with pornographic intent. Similar to a puppy crushing video. But that's a subject for a different article.

In The Last of Us video game, the character Ellie is a cute girl:
In the TV series, she is played by actress Bella Ramsey, who is ugly:

Forspoken is some kind of shit zoomer wizzard game.

The main character is based on a woman who looks like this:
Her in-game model looks like this:
The main problem with this game is actually that the dialog and writing makes her out to be an unlikable amoral piece of shit when it's not try-harding "how do you do fellow kids". The gameplay also probably sucks and it probably runs poorly because all games are like that these days.

This soap company has had a long running campaign to put uggos in your face through their marketing and now they're expanding into video games:
Finally we have fat ugly downs syndrome albino cripple representation.
It's like a shit version of the Burger King Kid's Klub.

Epic games ran an online course titled Defining Real Virtual Beauty where an expert 'appearance researcher' defined real virtual beauty as her own stupid face and doofus haircut:

Redfall is a failed attempt to clone Left 4 Dead, a game that came out in 2008, except this time with vampires instead of zombies.

All of the player characters are some kind of racial poc blob.

The marketing face of the game is this smugly mug:
Redfall is also plagued by technical issues and is generally regarded as unplayable despite having a large development budget. It was published by Bethesda, though, so what were you really expecting? They should have just made a Left4Dead mod.

Fable is series of action roleplaying games. Microsoft is rebooting it, so the new one is just called "Fable" again. The teaser trailer featured an allegedly female player character that looks like this:

It's a fighting game based on the DC universe and every character is hideous.

Here's wonder woman:
And here she is in the sequel:

Mortal Kombat is a long running series of fighting games.

Here is the character Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat 9:
Here she is in Mortal Kombat 11:
She would like to speak to the manager about the rampant sexism in this article.

This is based off a real person. Her name is Debra Wilson. She used to be on MadTV and was more normal looking, though still bug-eyed. As she has aged, she has done several things to intentionally make herself ugly such as gauging her ears, tattoing her entire body up to her neck, and shaving her head. This firmly cements her as a priest in the satanic cult of ugliness. They love her because she defiles her own flesh.

This is what Debra Wilson has chosen to look like:

Returnal is set in space and features an ugly middle aged woman:
So what kind of game do you think it is? Walking simulator? Hidden object mobile game? She's got a gun, but it's just a handgun, so maybe a story driven survival horror?

Wrong.

It's a hard core 3rd person arcadey bullet hell shooter with rogue-like mechanics.

This is marketing malpractice. If ever there was a time to put a sexy lady in a space suit, it's for this game. User reviews are all about how the game was 'slept on' - because no one knew what the game was even about. The desire to put ugly on screen overwhelmed sensible communication and basic demographic targeting.

Dishonored is a series of sneaky stabby fps games.
For this stand alone expansion pack, they chose this creature to be the face the game:

It's an upcoming game, some kind of Fortnite FPS, it's hard to tell because the trailer doesn't show coherent gameplay. This thing features prominently:
She appears to have some kind of Klingon thingon going on between her eyes.

Update: The game was cancelled. They had a closed beta test, and based on the feedback I guess they decided to shitcan the whole thing lmao.

This vehicular combat game features an obese black woman named Harmony:

Hacky slashy and fight Boudica, the strong female antagonist:

If you try to write a story about a 'strong woman' that has no sexual appeal at all, it inevitably becomes about mental illness. This isn't due to sexism, in fact it's even more likely if the story is written by a female developer.

Women value their connections to other people more than men do, so when you cut off the possibility of being attractive and admired, of having a relationship, then all that's left is a dumptruck full of neuroticism.

State of Decay 3:
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II:
???

This example is not as extreme as the others because the developers were trying very hard to create an appealing character.

Face model Stephanie Joosten:
Her in game character, Quiet:
It's not just the dour expression, the process of digitizing an actress's face simply doesn't capture her appearance properly. You lose the surface effects and skin deformation, the subtle lighting and life of the character. If a proper artist modeled the face from scratch they could compensate for the weaknesses of the medium. Instead they rely on technicians to mechanically copy reality.

Many people have pointed out the east vs west divide in appealing character design.

This younger generation is going to the dogs.

A few collections for the road. I saved these from 4chan and haven't vetted everything, but there's probably a dozen other games worth highlighting in these.

There's no bottom.

Pokemon GO is an augmented reality game for mobile phones where you pretend to catch fictional animals by going to real world locations. It was released in 2016 but has recently received a graphical update, which included changes to the customized avatars players had created:
The graphical fidelity seems to be exactly the same, meaning the sole purpose of this update was to make the characters less attractive.

This isn't just about the male gaze, by the way. This game is played on a phone. It involves going outside. I know this is going to sound incredible, but girls play this game. I assert that girls, generally, do not want to represent themselves as unattractive. I'm sorry I don't have a source for this claim, soyjak, you're just going to have to trust my original research.

Update: It has been confirmed that Pokemon Go is CIA funded surveillance tool that takes hundreds of photos every time you use it and feeds them into a next generation spatial AI model. No I am not kidding.

The human barnacles in Microsoft's DEI department have produced some lovely guidelines on how to "help customers feel seen". Among the authentic and validating buzzword soup salad is advice to make your female characters as strong as men, fully clothed, and unattractive - and to make your male characters emotional and weepy.

Oh my mistake, it's just "questions to consider". Just consider these questions that the three trillion dollar mega corp has for you. It's not a guideline, just consider it, while you also consider how much market vertical they control in the space in which you wish to operate your business.

Screenshot taken from developer.microsoft.com (Archive)

The operator Ji-Soo Paik is played by Korean actress Son Eun-seo.

Here she is in real life:

And here she is in game:
To be fair, she's only credited for the voice, so that face is entirely the creation of the developer, DICE.

Hades 2 depicts the goddess Hestia like this:
I actually had quite a bit of difficulty parsing this image as a human face. Some tips if you cant see it: it's sort of a lumpy grandma face with vitiligo. The center part of her lip is pale, it's not buck teeth. She has a random pink paint mark on her forehead.

The main character is indistinguishable from a racist caricature:
I don't know anything about this game but judging from the eye makeup I presume she plays major league baseball.

She's not profoundly ugly, but her stylized features give her a permanent aggressive sneer. Being feminine, demure and attractive is just not a space that black women are allowed to occupy in modern media. To the activists that make this shit, blackness is just another cudgel they can use to bludgeon convention. The goal is not to show the appeal of diversity, the goal is to disgust.

More Star Wars is coming (every year until we're all dead).
The new player character looks like this:
This game costs $130 by the way.

The character is allegedly played by actress Humberly Gonzalez:
Even considering the usual face scan ugification, this doesn't make any sense to me because it doesn't look like her at all. They must only be using her facial motion capture and voice.

Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game released in 2001. A remake is scheduled to be released on October 8th, 2024 with various gameplay video and trailers already made public.

Here is the character Angela in the original:
Here she is in the remake:

Here is the character Maria in the original:
Here she is in the remake:
Once again modern game devs are faced with the profoud question "how big is a human head supposed to be?" We may never find out, but at least we can bask in the glory of face-scanned blood vessels throbbing through semi-translucent skin in 1800p resolution at somewhere between 29 and 48 frames per second.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a stealth espionage action game for the Playstation 2, released in 2004. It features a female antagonist/mentor named "The Boss".

Here is how she appears the first time you see her in the game:
On June 9th, 2024, Konami announced Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater, a remake of MGS3. The announcement trailer featured a recreation of the exact same scene:

Perfect Dark is a series of first person shooters where you play as secret agent Joanna Dark. A new game in the series was announced during the Xbox Games Showcase on June 9th 2024.

Here is Joanna Dark in the year 2000:
And in 2005:
And now in 2024:
She's become quite the handsome woman.

This is a third person souls-like set in some kind of alternate history revolutionary war or something. I dunno, who cares.

The (female) main character has a face that looks like this:
And a body that looks like this:
Did I mention this game is third person? You're going to be staring at that pancake for your entire playthrough. The game also suffers immensely from "realistic" graphics syndrome where everything is shaded in gray and when you're in shadow everything is completely flat. It's ugly all around.

Even her goddamn dog is ugly.

Concord is Sony's attempt at an online-only 5v5 team based hero shooter live service.
Here's a particularly heroic character from the game:
But there's no need to cherry pick (or blueberry pick) because every single character in the game is hideous. At best they look like normal-ass people you'd see working at a game studio - except they all decided it would be fun and quirky to cobble together some OC cosplay using the contents of a mardi gras drag show dumpster and a random number generator.

They had an open beta recently, so anyone could just download and play for free on steam, and it peaked at about 2300 players online. These are the kind of numbers you that a tiny indie game can hit (ask me how I know), but this is a AAA game with a nine figure budget. More people have made youtube videos about the game's failure than have played the game. It's straight DOA because of DEI.

The game is also chock full of Marvelized dialog and cutscenes that play like dollar tree knockoffs of Guardians of the Galaxy. Class B cognito hazard, research at your own risk.

Update: The game was released and sold very poorly. It has been announced that the game will shut down after only two weeks of operation and refunds will be issued. The budget for the game was north of 200 million dollars. I suspect there are more youtube videos about the game's failure than there are people who have played the game.

Update: There are rumors that the total cost is north of 400 million or even a billion dollars. Since the total revenue is zero, this could easily be the biggest media flop of all time.

Penny's Big Breakaway is a mascot 3D platformer with highly polished graphics and a custom engine made by the team behind Sonic Mania. I feel kind of bad including this because it's an indie game and I think they might just be incompetent at character design rather than malicious, but this is the ugliest mother fucker I have ever seen in my life:
Paul Revere yoga grandma left in the sun for too long kinda vibe.

This is important because it is affecting sales. The game has been out for 5 months and I estimate it has made about $500k on steam. The problem is the studio has a publisher and 19 employees and it took them 5 years to make the game. To keep the lights on, they need to be making 10x their steam numbers on the console ports. This is not impossible but it would be at the high end.

If you just made a cute chibi person or cartoon animal you'd be in the clear, what the fuck are you doing with this brown melt face spool golem? "Oh she has yoyo powers so she's gotta be made out of yoyos", wtf? That'd be like if Sonic the Hedgehog was made out of shoes.

Update: I played the demo and the problem might just be that the game is meh. The ugly still limits your audience.

Unknown 9 is an upcoming game all about the mystical brown people with all of their spiritual wisdom and exotic accents and their struggle against the evil white man who wears a suit. The stunning and brave main character looks like this:
My favorite part is how the hair, skin, eyeballs, and clothing all look like they just teleported in from different universes. I'm so glad we've spent a trillion dollars increasing GPU power by 1000x over the past 20 years, it's been so worth it for this moment.

She's based off of Anya Chalotra, an actress where I can't figure out if she's good looking or not. I would describe her appearance as controversial. I guess that's why she was hired to challenge beauty standards (Archive), which is kind of a messed up thing to say about someone. Hopefully she doesn't actually have psychic murder powers and go full Carrie on us.

Update: The game came out and flopped catastrophically, selling ~3,000 copies on steam (this is a AAA game). Most of the reviews are from people who got the game for free in a graphics card bundle and they're still negative.

Screenshots from an upcoming Wolverine game were leaked and Jean Grey looks like "Caitlyn" Jenner:

They made a Mass Effect board game and guess what!
This was widely talked about on twitter (of course) with one of the designers having a meltdown and asking people to give the game fake reviews to own the chuds. Thousands of chud soldiers were lost in this cunning manuever.

Less widely reported was how Liara was modified to be significantly more masculine:
Note the changes to her pose, waist, rib cage, breasts, and arms. Also notice how it looks like she's supposed to be holding a biotic orb in both pictures but they forgot to turn that layer on for the board game sheet. This would not be surprising, since there are also typographical errors. Note 'arenaline' instead of adrenaline.

I would need a high res scan to be sure but I suspect the board game art is a paint-over of the game model, which would make the changes particularly deliberate.

It's a cozy Animal Crossing style life sim set in the Lord of the Rings universe. A teaser trailer posted to twitter featured this DEI gremlin as the first reveal of a hobbit:

Misty is a playable character from the Codblops series (of fishing games, presumably).
Here she is in Codblops 2 (2012):
Here she is in Codblops 4 (2018):
In addition to the outfit and model changes, this showcases a problem in modern games which is a shift towards physically based rendering (PBR). This is where an autistic technician defines how your model looks instead of an artist. In the 2012 model, there's manually adjusted normals, vertex color, and texture work to make sure her face has nice shading. In 2018 they just whacked a diffuse-only model into the game and prayed to the lighting engine. That's why she has light shining up her nose and on the top and bottom of her lips and on the harsh polygon seam of her eyelids. She doesn't have eyelashes because they probably couldn't figure out how to sort transparent objects.

Credit to Glitching Queen for this comparison.

Dragon Age is action RPG series with - as far as I can tell - a strong focus on sexual disgust. I've never played it, and all I know about the previous entries in the series is that everyone on reddit was posting about how much sweaty hairy gay dwarf sex their character was having in the game.

For The Veilguard your character can have sex with this:
That's Taash, a biologically female non-binary identifying companion. Also you can make your character look like Lord Farquaad got in a traffic accident, you can't have a big butt or big boobs but you can have top surgery scars, you go on transexual related quests even though there is transformation magic and you just pick your sex in the character creator, characters do pushups when they misgender someone, there's cringe zillenial writing, it just goes on and on. Watch a youtube video.

The forces of chaos are constantly complaining that Warhammer 40k is fascist, but also that they want to be represented in it. To that end, they have successfully lobbied to have the first female Adeptus Custodes (Elite imperial guard super soldiers). She looks like this:
Finally women will have their rightful place. As men. In the space reich SS.

No skin care products allowed.

Q: You are ugly.
A: But am I wrong?

Q: You are [a|an] [.*ist|.*phobe], douchebag, virgin, asshole, loser.
A: But am I wrong?

Q: That game was successful.
A: Lots of terrible things are successful. People just buy the current thing because the tv told them to.

Q: I like that game, it's fun.
A: I'm sure it is. Like the old joke about riding a moped.

Q: Are there any games with good looking women?
A: Yes. On my Steam Review Page you can click on the tits tag to see them. There aren't as many as you would think, given all the hype around the subject.

Q: All of these people are normal looking.
A: Heroes should not be normal, they should be exceptional. At least slightly above average. If I wanted to see normal people I would just go outside.

Q: My girlfriend is fat and ugly and I find this article offensive.
A: In real life, people can have many good qualities besides their appearance that would make them a good partner. A video game character has only her looks, so they are much more important.

Q: You are disrespecting women.
A: This article is about how the fictional depictions of women don't live up to the real thing. I mention 5 specific face models who are more attractive in real life than in the video game, because the developers intentionally sabotaged their appearance. I mention two concept artists who happen to be women, and their work is excellent. The game directors disrepsect women by mutilating their work, altering their face scan, or occasionally deliberately choosing an ugly girl and parading her around in an act of performative cruelty. Forcing a beautiful person to be ugly is disrespectful. Telling an ugly person they are beautiful is disrespectful. Telling the truth is not.

Q: This is just your opinion.
A: Yes. Of course it is. Imagine being so broken down by the education system, forced to repeat consensus opinions as gospel for so long that you actually think accusing someone of expressing their own opinion constitutes a rebuttal of any kind. I truly pity the person who considers this to be an argument.

Q: Lots of people disagree with you.
A: Truth is not determined by consensus. It is possible for everyone in the world (except me) to be wrong.

Q: OBJECTIVE REALITY DOESN'T EXIST REEEEEE
A: 👍