The Oblivion Remastered Edition has been censoring women. While these changes are small, it is clear that Bethesda Softworks is still going through the process of ”cleaning up” its games. If you compare the screenshot of my character on the left and the screenshot of a drawn woman in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, it is clear that there are two trends happening here.
Having Intimacy in Bethesda Games
Originally, Oblivion was rated ”T” by the ESRB in America. However, after mods in 2006 were taking the clothes off the female characters, the game was re-rated as “M” or mature. The same thing happened to other popular games such as GTA: San Andreas. The video game industry was much bigger than it had been in the 1990s but it was still under the cover. Many people were not paying attention to it.
However, it was clear that the transition of themes relating to relationships between characters began to change between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, where there is a clear shift in how Bethesda approached the issue of player choice and how they could interact with characters of the opposite or same sex.
Fallout 3 had many brutal and sensous characters. However, Fallout 4 was a strange game that did not repersent a progression of the mythos but more of a regression. The sequel was more about domesticity stolen than anything else. The game starts in the Pre-War suburbs of Boston and the all the beauty of domesticity and family life are broken by atomic bombs being dropped on America. Fallout 4 however refuses to allow the player to be anything but a mother or father searching for their son.
This trend meant that Bethesda did not want to make attractive women characters anymore. Any hint of any intimacy in the games was taken out and instead it was hidden behind violence and better shooting mechanics.
The charm that made the Bethesda games simply unique was taken away from the games.
What Tainted Grail can bring some beauty back into games
While this is only a small section of the game, having the image of a woman that is beautiful in a game is enough to garner some outrage in some circles. However, among gamers who think with the heads, are going to be okay with it. That is what matters here. They shouldn’t be trying to appeal to people who have no interest in playing video games. In my previous article on Tainted Grail, I say that it has the potential with becoming the next Skyrim. With the genre being so stagnant, it is clear that there is something needed in order to get to be needed to revigoriate it.
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