The chuds is right: Kay Vess does look weird. It’s not for the reasons they tell you, though!
It could be because of technical issues and limitations, or just because she was supposed to look like that. Whatever it is, it’s not because of a conspiracy against gamers to make women in video games more ugly.
Not everything is a conspiracy against you. Sometimes, games just look weird.
Stop sending people abuse on the internet. Long before Star Wars Outlaws launched, a very loud and very annoying subsection of the general gaming population had been kicking up a fuss about its protagonist, the scoundrel Kay Vess, looking ‘weird’ and ‘ugly’.
This was compounded by the fact that the actress who plays her, Humberly Gonzalez, is very beautiful and glamorous – countless people posted side-by-side comparisons of the character and her actress and complained that they didn’t look alike. Many say that the screenshots where Kay looks weird are cherry-picked from particularly bad angles, that she just looks like a scruffier Humberly without makeup, or that these people are otherwise kicking up a fuss about a perfectly normal-looking character.
Here’s the thing: it’s not wrong to say that Kay looks weird, especially in the game. I’ve played about 20 hours of Star Wars Outlaws, and several times, I’ve noticed some strange facial modelling.
Kay very often looks buglike, kind of like Guardians of the Galaxy’s Mantis, with big, dark irises. There are also times where she looks fine, but the facial animations more broadly aren’t amazing for any of the characters, and both things contribute to making her look a little odd in some cutscenes.
But most of the people complaining about this aren’t saying that a company like Ubisoft with this much time and money should have more refined character animation. Some are saying that Sweet Baby Inc., a consultancy firm that, as far as we know, has no involvement with the game, is intentionally trying to make female characters more ugly to make some kind of political point.
More broadly, the idea that Kay’s face is a result of ‘diversity activists’ trying to ‘uglify’ video game women is being pushed on gamers to drum up anger so that blue ticks on Twitter can make money off their ragebaiting. Despite what grifters on the internet will tell you, Kay’s face is not the product of a culture war.
There are a lot of reasons why she might look like that, and none of them are that developers and journalists are working in tandem to take hot women away from you. Maybe the facial mo-cap just wasn’t up to par – most of the characters don’t look super realistic, which triple-A games should be moving away from anyway.
Outlaws also runs on the Snowdrop engine, known for running games like The Division 2 and Mario + Rabbids, both games which are not exactly geared towards depicted cinematic narrative adventures like this. Or maybe the developers tweaked her face so she looks less like a very beautiful actress and more like you would expect a regular scoundrel on the run to look.
Of course, Star Wars Outlaws is just part of a larger trend of gamers being mad about not being able to goon to every woman in every video game, even when those characters fit into their worlds just fine. People complained about Horizon’s Aloy ‘looking masculine’ and having peach fuzz on her face.
There was backlash to Ellie and Abby from The Last of Us Part 2, even though those characters were fighting for survival in a zombie apocalypse and were simultaneously trying to kill each other. The conspiracy has always been the same – developers are making women less hot because they hate you.
It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. The reality is that developers probably hate you because you keep abusing them online over a baseless conspiracy.
