In fairness, a spell in Inquisitorial prisons doesn’t tend to do have positive affects on personal appearances. Prison cultures in general don’t tend to incentivize conspicuous attractiveness. Likewise, conscription processes generally prioritize stamping out individuality and promoting conformity. Even otherwise generally attractive people may not look terribly attractive in such circumstances.
I’d note that at least a couple of these are in large part very propagandized portraits. If we want to look at the Minka Lesk cover, that character has enough makeup and cosmetics on for a runway walk, big open eyes, glowing lighting, zero sweat, no swelling or inflammation on any wounds, etc, and dirt that’s largely just an opaque splatter effect. Look at the dude over her shoulder, and it doesn’t really matter how physically handsome he may be, he’s not going to look attractive portrayed as he is. Likewise, the Severina Raine cover has her sporting enough eyeliner for a goth dance party.
I think for the Pariah cover, any attractiveness there is mostly the outfit and bearing. I’m fairly certain I’ve seen that same face, scraggly hair, and dead-eyed stare on a fentanyl addict a few blocks down from my place. Swap that character into some Darktide prisoner scrubbs and they’d fit right in as is.
That’s exactly the point - natural attractive faces would fit right into darktide without making it “not grim dark anymore”
We already have two or three “not totally f**ked up” faces - it doesn’t destroy the atmosphere. The problem is: 90% of female characters seem to use the same three faces. THAT is much more immersion breaking then that they look like human beings in a healthy enough state to engage in high intensity combat…
If you’re still pretty after 2 or 3 tours of The Torrent, you’re probably a witch. I can only imagine the volume of jagged rusty pointy bits and caustic/mutagenic chemicals you’d come across in an average 5 minute period down there.
Logically speaking, a reject could start beautiful, but they sure as hell aint’ gonna stay that way for long.
If that stuff affected your bone structure then you wouldnt be coming back alive in the first place. Skin is only a small part of what makes someone good looking. You can be covered in scars, burns, grime and whatever and still look good.
However if your bone structure is terrible, no amount of makeup is going to fix that. Which is what’s wrong with most our reject’s faces.
Also… 1/4th of us are a witch…
Drew this one 4 years ago, you can see she’s covered in scars and warpaint, both of her eyes are burned out but she still looks decent enough.
This is what i want, scarred characters that are product of their environment. Not in-bred troglodytes.
There are 90 billion people in tertium, and thats not even counting the entire system of atoma. Among those 90 billion there is bound to be a very decent amount of not only good looking but actually beautiful perfections. Since natural beauty is a product of random chance and inheritable genetics. And like 25% of your life growing up, but that one mostly affects your jaw.
But please, by all means, do keep those laughable arguments coming, im having a bad day and knocking them downs helps a little.
i would have guessed the other way around, that we have some more tired, beaten-up versions of the face we choose as starting characters, and the more we level up, the prettier we get with our access to doc krall’s services.
oh well, he could take some nice amounts of dockets to make us quite the lookers.
after all, a medicae can restore one from 1% to 100% in a second.
Sounds like you want an outlier, when the game gives you a representative sample.
Can you imagine what a planet (city?) of 90 billion is gonna look like? And this isn’t Star Trek, we have people literally crawling out of the sewers to grab a dusty rifle and fight corrupt plague zombies (um apologies if you’re a 40K lore enthusiast I don’t mean to talk down, just having fun with it ).
From the wiki:
Atoma Prime, the jewel of the Moebian Domain, who’s capital city is Hive Tertium, the greatest city in the sector, once had a population of 90 billion human souls living beneath it’s barely breathable skies and acrid, orange deserts. Some dare say Tertium is the greatest planetary capital for 3 sectors and that hive cities the pinnacle for human habitation. While laborers and dregs toil in the muck, the nobles squabble and conspire against one another for power and position. Faith, Steel, and a stagnant, fetid pool of squabbling nobles make up the glorious heritage of Tertium.
By “pinnacle for human habitation” I’m sure they’re not using the Nielsen Happiness Index. Not sure that one factors in Greely Worms, Razor Ants, or Sump Leeches…
As I understand it anyway, our characters are not necessarily from Atoma Prime. At least not my sexy, sexy Ogryn Grox-prodder
Lol, not even going to try to offer any counter argument? cmon, you’ve got to give me at least something. This whole topic is nothing more then 2 deaf people yelling at eachother anyway. An endless stress relief slugfest is its only purpose.
I dont see your point.
Quality of life does not affect the height of your cheekbones. Genetics and random mutations do. and welll… i guess physical force as some poor egyptian sods found out after being born in the ancient times… But i highly doubt atoma has a policy forcing the citizens to wear bone shaping torture devices to make them as ugly as possible.
Unless you prodded a Grox too hard, that’ll do wonders for your complexion!
Again, may I direct your attention to:
Sounds like you want an outlier, when the game gives you a representative sample.
This whole “genetics” points goes both ways, and it’s all made up of hand-wavium anyway, so… I think it’s more about art than science here. The vibe is not “you’re a hero, go forth and conquer” – it’s “you’re a reject, get diggin’”!
Um, also might be worth pointing out that exposure to radiation certainly messes you up. Not just your skin, either.
Your argument would be perfect if only we didnt have the option to choose our origin in the char creator.
Not all of us are sewer rats, some of the “rejects” came from shrine work, attending scholastia Psykana, whatever refer to this response because me lazy…
I doubt there’s much radiation in Scholastia Psykana i imagine. Otherwise i’d make for a very very poor military school.
If fatshark wanted all of us to be disgusting sewer rats then why did they give us all these origin options?
Also even if those origin options werent available then do still consider that 40k imperium cities are not equal, there are levels of wealth, i imagine the vast majority of the population is the lowest possible barely human sewer rats. But even if 50% were in the sewers, 30% were lower middle class and 10% higher middle class then we’d still have 9billion? amount of people of the hi-middle class that can be one of our rejects.
Since also take into consideration that it doesnt take much to be convicted for execution/prison in 40k imperium.
You literally can be executed for something as little as complaining about the taste of your corpse starch…
As for how long we were rejects for, fatshark never said, so we could be completely new pichi pichi fresh day 1 convict or could’ve had spent last 50 years in there.
This very handsome guy became a POW not long after heading to the front, then he spent 3.5 years in concentration camp. This is what he looked like after he returned. So that’s not 4 years of fighting and in the trenches, that’s 4 years of starvation and oppressive toil…which is how most souls live in the 41st millennium, especially with such insane population density in places that don’t even have sunlight.
So yeah, anyone living a gruelling life in this world is going to look weathered.
HOWEVER. I don’t see anything wrong with having a few less weathered faces/features to roleplay a “fallen from grace” or “framed” higher class figure. That is obviously plausible.
But you can surely see why FS have given most characters a few stress lines…
Why? Do our combattant slave operatives, with the never ceasing threat of death or execution, get to put their feet up for a year? Maybe a nice holiday somewhere? Lol
Are we looking at the same photo? I can’t help but think you’d not be saying that if you couldn’t see his before shot.
The number of options is very small and half of male and female options chose that one halfway decent facial option, which is why this is more like clone wars. You can’t always tell, because of the helmets.
I personally would wish for more female hair options in particular.
Do you think this poor fellow was in the physical condition to participate in several commando raids?
I don’t think this man’s suffering does reflect the conditions our fictional video game avatars logically have to be in to do what we they do…
If you look at pictures of German stormtroopers of 1918 you’ll see men who went through the hell if trench warfare (and though they had better rations then regular German infantrymen they still were chronically malnutritioned in comparison to Entente soldiers) yet they still look a lot healthier as they needed to be that to conduct trench raids.
And you only make an argument for having the broken faces we have - not against having more healthy attractive additionally.
You can look as hard as you want - you won’t find any canon source stating all human beings in 40K look like broken drug addicts.
Yeah and people need to stop with this. Its such an over exaggeration.
No they don’t.
Well let’s be honest, no human on earth would be fit enough to do what our characters do in any given mission (killing 1000 enemies!) but this guy was in a concentration camp and so was probably subject to nonstop strenuous physical labour every day and would have been shot if he didn’t comply. That would certainly take a great deal of resilience and strength to bear.
I’m just responding to people saying that the average 40k citizen wouldn’t be haggered, which I find absurd. However…
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