How tall is commander shepard

Am I the only one who is noticing that women in a lot of games lately are pretty much just as tall as men? What's the point of this? Male Shepard looks like he's a good 6'2", 200lbs, yet in conversations with Ashley or any human female, he's dead-eye level with them. For a game that seems to want to depict the male and female bodies accurately, it's a huge contradiction to make the women so tall. I'm still very confused about why games are doing this. Do people actually think it's sexist? Men being visibly larger and taller than women is a biological fact about our species, and making them the same height kind of looks cartoony.

Most of the women are close or shorter. Ashley makes sense, because she used to be a somewhat manly chick before Bioware went and Miranda'd her. I haven't noticed with *every* human female. However, I did notice this one female during one mission who was a bit taller than Shepard and had a gigantic looking head. I wish the 360 had some native way of taking screenshots... I don't know what happened with the scaling there.

And I wouldn't say they want to depict bodies accurately, considering every female still has immaturely proportioned super-tits, including the Fembots.

This totally got under my skin too! Also, why don't they model PMS for female characters? If they're trying to be realistic, shouldn't there be times when your female crew members suffer random debuffs because it's that "that time of the month?" 
Also, women have lower upper body strength and lower max VO2 than men, so shouldn't they have to use lighter guns and run for shorter periods of time? Also, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN? Are you REALLY going to tell me that every single woman on the Citadel uses birth control? Really, Bioware? Why do you have to shove your feminist anti-life agenda into EVERYTHING?

 Also, in IRL women are generally weepy and less decisive than men, but FemShep's dialogue is just as assertive as "actual" Shep's. This is totally unrealistic and it completely broke immersion in the game for me.

@Jumanji said:

This totally got under my skin too! Also, why don't they model PMS for female characters? If they're trying to be realistic, shouldn't there be times when your female crew members suffer random debuffs because it's that "that time of the month?" Also, women have lower upper body strength and lower max VO2 than men, so shouldn't they have to use lighter guns and run for shorter periods of time? Also, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN? Are you REALLY going to tell me that every single woman on the Citadel uses birth control? Really, Bioware? Why do you have to shove your feminist anti-life agenda into EVERYTHING?

You make a good point about children. The only kid I've seen so far (and I'm 30 hours into the game) is that kid who dies on Earth.

Probably the same reason they had giraffe necks in the first two games. I always assumed it was to keep eyelines the same across both genders in dialogue and stuff so they wouldnt have to do the work twice.

@Jumanji said:

This totally got under my skin too! Also, why don't they model PMS for female characters? If they're trying to be realistic, shouldn't there be times when your female crew members suffer random debuffs because it's that "that time of the month?" Also, women have lower upper body strength and lower max VO2 than men, so shouldn't they have to use lighter guns and run for shorter periods of time? Also, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN? Are you REALLY going to tell me that every single woman on the Citadel uses birth control? Really, Bioware? Why do you have to shove your feminist anti-life agenda into EVERYTHING? Also, in IRL women are generally weepy and less decisive than men, but FemShep's dialogue is just as assertive as "actual" Shep's. This is totally unrealistic and it completely broke immersion in the game for me.

You know you are making a whole lot more sense than your sarcasm intended.

@Jumanji said:

This totally got under my skin too! Also, why don't they model PMS for female characters? If they're trying to be realistic, shouldn't there be times when your female crew members suffer random debuffs because it's that "that time of the month?" Also, women have lower upper body strength and lower max VO2 than men, so shouldn't they have to use lighter guns and run for shorter periods of time? Also, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN? Are you REALLY going to tell me that every single woman on the Citadel uses birth control? Really, Bioware? Why do you have to shove your feminist anti-life agenda into EVERYTHING? Also, in IRL women are generally weepy and less decisive than men, but FemShep's dialogue is just as assertive as "actual" Shep's. This is totally unrealistic and it completely broke immersion in the game for me.

Maybe we can form a Kickstarter to fund this custom patch?

Girls rule why boys drool.

Duh.

Everything about females in ME, even voices, body language and facial expressions, especially in ME3 = What Bioware intended because that shit sells, even the fucking Krogan female they did their best job at sexualizing.

They spend so much time and effort on that, they forgot to put a way for a maleShep to romance Vega into the game, but don't worry, they threw the worst fucking out of place piece of shit character from the fanboy fanfic wank that was the latest Mass Effect "novel" into the game to make up for it.

 (Let's face it, we're too old for this shit.)

why do all the none asari women now have the same hair and similar faces? we may never know

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

There's a main party member whose name is pronounced "Tall-E"... what do you expect?

The things people find to complain about..

I like how when it deals with homosexuality it's groundbreakingly realistic, but when something stands out as blatantly unrealistic it's all for the sake of the game/budget/balance.

@PhantomGardener said:

The things people find to complain about..

I'm not sure were this thread is going but it bothered me to no end that in Mass Effect 2 all the characters were the same height. Tali was as tall as Sheppard when clearly she should be shorter, Mordin was the same height as Sheppard when clearly he should've been taller and the Krogan of all beings were all the same basic height as Sheppard. It annoyed me during the cutscenes when obviously Bioware has full control over the models behavior. It's sorta addressed in Mass Effect 3 but they still haven't done the heights right in game. In one cutscene at the beginning of the game Liara is half a head shorter than Sheppard and then later on she's roughly eye level. It's a nit picky kind of thing to get annoyed about but they should have done the heights right.

Would you argue that FemShep should be shorter than ManShep?

Less memory to use for animations, I think.  If the male and female models are only 2 inches apart instead of something normal, like 6 - you can more easily share the animation set between them.

 It seems like a common trick a lot of people use.

almost all characters use the same skeletal rig. You start making the women shorter and they have to realign all the weapon animations and interactions with surfaces and environmental objects...It's just more work for something that isn't all that important.

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

@MrKlorox said:

There's a main party member whose name is pronounced "Tall-E"... what do you expect?

Tall-E is my new rap name.

Shared rigging between male and female characters is a pretty widespread problem in games, sadly. It's also why women in Bethesda's games have crazy wide, square shoulders. Even mods can't do much to fix that, because all the animations would have to be redone. That's almost certainly the reason for this game. Is that a valid excuse? I don't know. I don't have the numbers for how much it would cost to change that. Frankly, I find the awkward jogging animation Shepard has when he or she is in his/her casual clothes to be more distracting.

Yeah... it's because they use the same base model for pretty much every character and just build their features into that. This is why Chakwa's tits are just as robust and healthy as, say, Traynor's or another young character. You can literally see this in every single Bioware game from KOTOR on.

For story justification, remember two things. The first is that this is the future and plastic surgery has probably reached some sort of singularity, where anyone can look exactly like they want to. So of course many females who desire to be taller make themselves so. Also remember that almost all of the people you run into are military and probably extremely fit and have been from birth, something that can and does make people a little taller.

As a final note, I'm exactly 6'0 tall. There's a girl in my Creative Writing class in college whose breasts are eye level with me. I have to crane my neck to see her head (this led to a rather uncomfortable thing when I first talked face to face with her where I looked down for a minute and it seemed like I was glancing at her boobs, but didn't mean to). Yes, believe it or not some women are really tall.

@Hailinel said:

Would you argue that FemShep should be shorter than ManShep?

Male Shepard looks to be about 6'2", so absolutely. Since, you know, women on average are about 5 inches shorter than men, it'd be safe to assume that Female Shepard is around 5'8"---and that's a generous height. I think the average height for white women in the United States is 5'5", and men are 5'10".

It's because of skeletal rig memory limitations. Not a sexist agenda.

Sorry, they can't do height variations just yet. At least not without other huge sacrifices. Maybe on the next generation of consoles.

well first this is a made up universe, second they are in the future, as far as we know that have super enhanced milk that makes everyone tall

This is an issue in almost every modern pseudo realistic game with humanoids, almost every NPC is within 2-3 inches of each other if not exactly the same height (unless they're a gimmicky race like gnomes or dwarves). It's probably not quite as bad but essentially every NPC in Dragon Age was a palette swap of two basic models that were the same height.

@mpgeist said:

Probably the same reason they had giraffe necks in the first two games. I always assumed it was to keep eyelines the same across both genders in dialogue and stuff so they wouldnt have to do the work twice.

HA, wow, I never thought of that but that's a pretty good point.

@Hailinel said:

Would you argue that FemShep should be shorter than ManShep?

Male Shepard looks to be about 6'2", so absolutely. Since, you know, women on average are about 5 inches shorter than men, it'd be safe to assume that Female Shepard is around 5'8"---and that's a generous height. I think the average height for white women in the United States is 5'5", and men are 5'10".

@lord_canti said:

why do all the none asari women now have the same hair and similar faces? we may never know

It seems worse in ME3, I seem to remember asari in the second not all looking like Liara.

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@SlashDance said:

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering what they did to Ashley.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one who's not upset with what they did to Ashley. I consider her new look a central part of the story. When she first shows up in the game she has just came out of a meeting with the Alliance Committee. Most people in the type of occupation Ashley is in tend to try and clean up when going before some form of government. So she let her hair down for the meeting and applied make up. Unfortunately game models probably will never be realistic, because if they were then we would be back to ME 1 Ashley as soon as she hits the battlefield. You can't exactly apply your mascara while getting shot at you know.

@AndrewB said:

Most of the women are close or shorter. Ashley makes sense, because she used to be a somewhat manly chick before Bioware went and Miranda'd her. I haven't noticed with *every* human female. However, I did notice this one female during one mission who was a bit taller than Shepard and had a gigantic looking head. I wish the 360 had some native way of taking screenshots... I don't know what happened with the scaling there.

And I wouldn't say they want to depict bodies accurately, considering every female still has immaturely proportioned super-tits, including the Fembots.

Yeah, basically this. I don't think they they even considered the whole realistic and proportional asthetics which were present in ME1 and ME2. I was kind of sickened by the opening scene of ME3 where my shepherd when up 2 cup sizes in the chest and looks like she had ass implants. God, just give me my ME1 fem-shep back please.

Did Bioware possibly hire a large influx of 14 year old male boys to their artists positions? Cripes, whoever worked in Biowares art department on this game, you should be ashamed of yourselves if you are over 17 years of age.

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@SlashDance said:

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering what they did to Ashley.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one who's not upset with what they did to Ashley. I consider her new look a central part of the story. When she first shows up in the game she has just came out of a meeting with the Alliance Committee. Most people in the type of occupation Ashley is in tend to try and clean up when going before some form of government. So she let her hair down for the meeting and applied make up. Unfortunately game models probably will never be realistic, because if they were then we would be back to ME 1 Ashley as soon as she hits the battlefield. You can't exactly apply your mascara while getting shot at you know.

Maybe because tall women are sexy? Also I'm sure there are technical issues behind it.

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@Delphic said:

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@SlashDance said:

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering what they did to Ashley.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one who's not upset with what they did to Ashley. I consider her new look a central part of the story. When she first shows up in the game she has just came out of a meeting with the Alliance Committee. Most people in the type of occupation Ashley is in tend to try and clean up when going before some form of government. So she let her hair down for the meeting and applied make up. Unfortunately game models probably will never be realistic, because if they were then we would be back to ME 1 Ashley as soon as she hits the battlefield. You can't exactly apply your mascara while getting shot at you know.

I don't know man, I think they just re-designed her so kids could jack off to her. Miniskirts, boob-jobs, let-down hair and botox aren't what I call getting ready for a governmental position.

It really depends how you look at it personally. There is not denying that Bioware redesigned her to have a bigger sex-appeal. It says so in the Art-book when you look at it. When I play the game I choose to focus more on the story. In my opinion I would like to think that Ashley always looked like that if she let her hair down and put make up on; however, if you're looking at it merely from a design to appeal to an audience standpoint then all you are going to see is what you described.

ME WANT SNU SNU!

Too much time on your hands man.

While they're at it, why aren't all the women in the Mass Effect universe in the kitchen? Amirite?!

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@Delphic said:

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@SlashDance said:

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering what they did to Ashley.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one who's not upset with what they did to Ashley. I consider her new look a central part of the story. When she first shows up in the game she has just came out of a meeting with the Alliance Committee. Most people in the type of occupation Ashley is in tend to try and clean up when going before some form of government. So she let her hair down for the meeting and applied make up. Unfortunately game models probably will never be realistic, because if they were then we would be back to ME 1 Ashley as soon as she hits the battlefield. You can't exactly apply your mascara while getting shot at you know.

I don't know man, I think they just re-designed her so kids could jack off to her. Miniskirts, boob-jobs, let-down hair and botox aren't what I call getting ready for a governmental position.

It really depends how you look at it personally. There is not denying that Bioware redesigned her to have a bigger sex-appeal. It says so in the Art-book when you look at it. When I play the game I choose to focus more on the story. In my opinion I would like to think that Ashley always looked like that if she let her hair down and put make up on; however, if you're looking at it merely from a design to appeal to an audience standpoint then all you are going to see is what you described.

Simple, boots or shoes that have enough to make them taller.

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@Delphic said:

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@Delphic said:

@Vegetable_Side_Dish said:

@SlashDance said:

While on the subject, am I misremembering Mass Effect 2 or did Dr Chakwas get breast implants ?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering what they did to Ashley.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one who's not upset with what they did to Ashley. I consider her new look a central part of the story. When she first shows up in the game she has just came out of a meeting with the Alliance Committee. Most people in the type of occupation Ashley is in tend to try and clean up when going before some form of government. So she let her hair down for the meeting and applied make up. Unfortunately game models probably will never be realistic, because if they were then we would be back to ME 1 Ashley as soon as she hits the battlefield. You can't exactly apply your mascara while getting shot at you know.

I don't know man, I think they just re-designed her so kids could jack off to her. Miniskirts, boob-jobs, let-down hair and botox aren't what I call getting ready for a governmental position.

It really depends how you look at it personally. There is not denying that Bioware redesigned her to have a bigger sex-appeal. It says so in the Art-book when you look at it. When I play the game I choose to focus more on the story. In my opinion I would like to think that Ashley always looked like that if she let her hair down and put make up on; however, if you're looking at it merely from a design to appeal to an audience standpoint then all you are going to see is what you described.

Fair enough! I like to think, in my opinion, story wise, she fell on hard times and took up a job as a porn star, which is the rational reason for her make over in ME3.

Fair enough. :)

Yeah that's the unrealistic part, not the part where people can travel light years in space and not have centuries pass by...

@Milkman said:

While they're at it, why aren't all the women in the Mass Effect universe in the kitchen? Amirite?!

Because saying women are shorter than men is just as sexist as saying they can only do house work. Let me select Sammitch on Liara ability wheel. Actually sammitch should totally be an engineer ability.

Also something that has bothered me is that women that are supposed to be these soldiers in games are never really built. They carry heavy equipment but they always are so frail looking.

@mpgeist said:

Probably the same reason they had giraffe necks in the first two games. I always assumed it was to keep eyelines the same across both genders in dialogue and stuff so they wouldnt have to do the work twice.

Makes sense.

In the Future, some feminist scientists got together and made the women the same height as men. Boom!

Shepard looks about 6'0 180 lbs to me.

@big_jon said:

Shepard looks about 6'0 180 lbs to me.

Yea, FemShep's a big girl.

@Jep said:

Am I the only one who is noticing that women in a lot of games lately are pretty much just as tall as men? What's the point of this? Male Shepard looks like he's a good 6'2", 200lbs, yet in conversations with Ashley or any human female, he's dead-eye level with them. For a game that seems to want to depict the male and female bodies accurately, it's a huge contradiction to make the women so tall. I'm still very confused about why games are doing this. Do people actually think it's sexist? Men being visibly larger and taller than women is a biological fact about our species, and making them the same height kind of looks cartoony.

Sadly, I think people actually do think it's sexist to assume women are shorter. It's really pathetic that political correctness has come to the point where ignoring biological traits of our species is actually encouraged. What I would consider a similar scenario is the narrator of a nature documentary saying, "Male lions can weigh as much five hundred and fifty pounds; females, up to four hundred. But not every lion's weight has been recorded, so we're not going to be sexist and say that male lions are generally larger, because that would hurt the female lions' feelings."

 @Jep said:

I like women, but hasn't it become cartoony and ridiculous to pretend they can physically do what men can do? I'm being asked to believe that a woman has been "in the trenches" fighting alongside men with four times her strength. It's almost disrespectful to women. There might be a non-PC stat out there that says most women who actually have a genuine desire to be a soldier are lesbians. You have to pass multiple strength tests and be able to carry every member of your squad to be on the front lines, and Female Shepard is built like a fashion model. This politically correct stuff is getting way too intense. It would make perfect sense to depict a future in which just as many women are scientists/engineers, but a great majority of actual soldiers still men. I think real sexism is pretending women in general can even do a fraction of what men can physically, because it's pure fantasy.

'm not certain, but I would say countries that allow women in serious combat do so on limited basis. It could also be argued that our denial of women in front line combat is one of the very reasons we have the strongest military. I'm kind of speechless that people perceive the statement of FACTS about women or minorities as being sexist/racist. It's a fact that I'm typing right now; it's also a fact that women are inherently far less strong and aggressive than men. People like you can't get your heads around uncomfortable facts about people who aren't white men. It's actually kind of pathetic, to be honest. You're asking all these questions that I answered in my original post. Why can't women fight on the front lines? Because that's asking a strong military to use precious time and resources to include in combat a section of the population that requires much more training to achieve what men can. It was probably concluded long ago that women would simply be too much of a burden for what the effort to include them would be worth. Your opinion about this is like someone saying, "I think the military discriminates against cripples. They should allow people with no legs to fight. Everyone is equal!" It's ridiculous.

There's less gravity in space to compress them down.

That and something technical about modeling, animation, and characters interacting with the environment being easier if everyone is the same height. Maybe?