I hope so too @Linshell.
I have been curious about this too ever since the ARG introduced the female characters like Eun Ha and Elizabeth Leighton. I still hope they make an appearance if the ARG and the games collide in the future.
I would like to have played Assassin’s Creed in 2007 but any trailers and game play have turned my stomach at the obsession with gory violence whether male or female characters. The city graphics, environment and wildlife look amazing. It’s a pity developers seem to have let blood lust grab headlines and not game play any more.
I used to love the fun game play, sound design and puzzles of the early Lara Croft games. Ignoring the publicity surrounding the early character development for the moment, the 2014 franchise reboot I purchased on Steam was sickening. The character has finally become a beautifully realised animation of arguably a more acceptable non-stereo typical female looking lead. However the developers seem to think extreme violence is needed to sell more units and assumes the game’s appeal is missing a more feminine lead. The violence and gore IS extreme. Very. I never completed the game as the violence crept in unexpectedly and got worse. Which is a shame as it was at moments gorgeous to look at and believable.
What is missing is the element of fun. Lara is no longer a decent human being. She has become a killer following the pool of many other games just like Altair in Assassin’s Creed.
As for No Man Sky characters they will have begun life as motion capture. I would like to think some of the character animation may be motion capture of Sean Murray running about… haha! It would be fun to know. The game is procedural and so a stereotypical character is the best base to begin and keep file sizes down. Motion capture will pick up the difference between male and female body shape, weight and movement. So it is inevitable we will be critical, as we are all so familiar with our counterparts in real life, unless you have a very good animator to capitalise on those differences to make characters distinct.
However with the variety of customisation and way society moulds us to think pink is more feminine than blue for example (generalising here) there are enough characterisation tools I think to create an excellent character that leans towards seeming feminine. Particularly with the more familiar human character (ignoring Gek and Vy’keen and Korvax). The tools are surprisingly well executed and fun to use too. The traveller NPC characters are the exception and seem to be modelled on human shapes obviously so, distinctly male and female even with the weird heads and even occasional lipstick.
With our character space helmets on it is very difficult to say specifically if one character is male or female. The animation or motion capture is however very telling Probably because our body language teaches us to fit into certain groups to feel safe. This is a huge discussion.
Ever since the ARG exposed the Dreamers I have been trying to decide on which character might wear which suit. To me some silhouettes are female. But a padded suit is a padded suit and generic character animation is exactly that. I expect (and hope) we still may actually meet an obviously female NPC dreamer in game perhaps once the weekly challenges take shape. Maybe.
In the meantime look at the picture of Lara Croft. She could very easily be hidden in the space suit in the other picture. Without the pictures side by side we might never make comparisons. What would Lara look like with a helmet on the leather jacket. If the space character took the helmet off would we recognise her. Probably yes. Would she wear it in pink though to be different to appear feminine? Probably not.
