This set (http://static.guildhead.com/guildhead/uploads/images/2056.jpg) for example is amazing, and personally I find it way more attractive than the lingerie clad women. It’s what I was wearing for a while until I got tired of using up all of my transmutation stones.

On the other hand though, I would like to commend ArenaNet on their female charrs. I love how I was able to make mine as big as any male charr and look fierce and tough, instead of just being smaller with huge boobs.

I am going to post later, but of course I had to check out the light armor of the two ‘new’ races that we got to see this last beta weekend, asura and sylvari. The asura are fine and fully covered, the sylvari are a mixed bag. They are definitely lightyears ahead of how the norns and humans are presented.

Female norn are all top-heavy, with body shapes that don’t really support all that top-weight. Meh. I have given up hope that humans and norns will be fixed. It’s just not on ArenaNet’s priority list at all. Which means that there will definitely be some people who won’t pick up the game because of some of the starter armor, I am sure.

I think GW2 deserves a lot of credit for making female characters on two races (Charr and Asura) that don’t conform to the half-naked hourglass figure that almost all other RPGs default to.

However, it’s still disappointing that:
A) Despite how big and burlesque the male norns are, female norns all look very skinny. Why can’t I make a female character that looks like a real brawler?

B) I get that some players like the half-naked look, but does all the armor have to look that way? Aside from the starting armor, everything I’ve seen for female humans and norn seems to conform to this. If I want to roll a bad-ass ranger with a big leather trench coat, why can’t I find this for a female character?

Part of me wants to say “well, at least it’s not as bad as Tera,” but that’s not good enough.

I’m considering cancelling my pre-order, which makes me sad as I really like almost everything else about this game. Not only are the character models an issue of sexualization and objectification, but they are immersion breaking. Arena-net wanted to build an immersive world, yet when you go to save the old apothecary from bandits and her voice is that of an “old woman” but she looks to be in her 20′s… uhm… slightly jarring. Immersion broken. Famers with milky white skin and some blush on their cheeks? Please.

I really feel like the females in this game were tailored for teenage boys. I generally can get over this stuff, and being young myself I might be desensitized to it more than someone who is a bit older, but it’s just so in my face in Guild Wars 2. It just about made me sick. It’s too late in development for them to make any sort of massive change about this, and their silence on the issue speaks volumes. People HAVE been making noise about it, both males and females.

Damn shame that SWTOR is the only game to really get it right… that game was a snoozefest.