I have a sort of professional interest in community-made bodies. and I like seeing how the discipline has evolved. I did my work in the 1998-2002 area, when polygon budgets were around 1,000 or so. I think they’re about ten times that today. (With only 1,000 polygons, fingers will be fused into a “mitten” for the hand, toes will be fused to the foot, and ears will either be plastered to the head or stick out very little. The posterior will be greatly simplified (no crack) and most facial features will be done with textures instead of polygons. So, eyes and mouth will be “drawn on”. For really low polygon budgets, breasts will be merged into a “shelf”, which works well enough as long as your females are always depicted as wearing loose shirts. And obviously I never had to model detailed genitalia, which is what modders have done for Fallout 3.)
In the end, I concluded that it was impossible to derive even a rough guess about the breakdown of males and females making and using mods. At least, not enough to drop into an article without needing a half dozen qualifying asterisks. (Which would have basically been the article you’re reading now.) Sure, the downloads for sexy-looking females vastly outnumber the same thing for men, but beyond that I don’t think we could learn anything useful about the demographics of people playing. It’s a shame. This game is very female-friendly (if you play as a woman people use the proper pronouns and many NPCs will treat you like a woman, for good or ill) and I’d love to know to what extent that extra effort translates into a larger female audience when compared to a more male-focused game.
Bottom: Now, with the partial nude mod installed. I’ll bet this guy is wishing he’d listened to his mother’s advice about making sure to wear a clean loincloth before leaving the house this morning.
Middle: What the…? Where did that shirt come from? Man, that’s a nice shirt that just appeared out of . Still white, with a crease in it. Not bad for 200 year old cotton. In a sensible post-apocalyptic world, that shirt would be worth more than bloodstained scrap metal.
Top:Ah, I have killed a filthy evil raider. He’s wearing some bits of pointy metal on his otherwise bare chest. Now to strip that off and sell it in town. (Although I can’t imagine why they want it.)
I only point this out because if I don’t someone will chide me for not taking it into account: Men trend towards oogling a lot more than women, which means even if the player base and mod availability were perfectly 50/50 and they were all straight, the downloads still wouldn’t be even. Yeah, yeah. We’ve been down that rabbit hole more than once around here.
A lot of the male-nude downloaders will be gay men, not women, which further confuses my original question about the mix of men and women playing the game.
There were a couple of mods that removed only the male undershirt from the game, and I couldn’t figure out if that should count as a “nude mod” or not, since the default undershirt is a bit screwy. It’s really strange to kill a bare-chested male raider and find that when you remove his rancid leather pants not only is he wearing freshly laundered boxer shorts, but he’s also abruptly wearing a white undershirt as well. A lot of downloaders of this “nude” mod were probably people who just wanted the clothing to make sense. (I did.)
A lot of the extra clothing and hair packs are also nude mods, which means even female gamers might go after them even though they have no interest in seeing their character bare-assed. They just want the new haircuts and outfits. This is actually very likely, since the default haircuts are very limited, and the user-made ones are far more numerous and far more interesting.
Some mods require other mods in ways that are difficult to map out, which means some people may have downloaded (say) the nude female mod just so they could have access to new armor pieces or new characters. (I’m not sure why. One guess would be that modder B makes a mod which borrows a texture from modder A. Rather than add that texture to his own mod, he just tells everyone to download mod A first so you’ll have the required texture. Some mods even require several other mods in order to work, or the requirements form a chain of dependencies. Ugh.)
Some mods supersede others, which means if A is a mod and B replaces it, some unknown percentage of people that downloaded A will also download B, but some will stick with A and some will forgo A and download B alone. You’ll have two sets of download numbers without any way of knowing how much overlap they have.
It turns out that there are many variants of both male and female nude mods with many different versions, some of which are forked versions or unions of other efforts. This skews the download numbers, since one mod that is updated many times will have a lot more downloads than one that isn’t, but that doesn’t mean more people are using the mod.
As part of writing about the breakdown of males and females in games, I found myself trolling through the , looking to see what sorts of things the community had added to the game and what sorts of mods were popular. Specifically, I wanted to compare how many people downloaded the mods that remove the underwear from the game, thus making it possible to see women naked when their armor is removed. I wanted to compare those downloads to the same mods for male characters. I thought it might be interesting to see: “Nude female mod is downloaded N times more often than the nude male mod”, and so on. It was supposed to be a humorous little factoid to amuse the reader. But after quite a bit of head-scratching I concluded the task was impossible:
Fair warning: This post is going to be talking about nudity and linking to NSFW pages at the . The vast majority of the 6,424 mods in the database are perfectly safe and are related to changes in gameplay or additional content. I’m going to be talking about the small number which are risquГY. Technically the mod database shouldn’t show you anything R-rated unless you create an account there first, but you know how the internet can be sometimes. Be careful what you click if you’re in a place where seeing naked polygonal men and women might cause you employment, relationship, or self-esteem problems.
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Fallout 3: The Truth About Boys and Girls - Twenty Sided
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