Genshin Impact

Venti, Mona, Klee, Hu Tao, and Diona.

Amber, Kaeya, Noelle, Jean, and Diona.

Barbara, Ningguang, Xiao, Amber, Diluc

1.6 spoiler:The first two costumes have been leaked, it's Barbara and Jean in beach/summer outfits

Huh... Beach Episode skins. Sorry for the wrong speculation then.

Noelle, Qiqi, Lumine, Beidou, and Klee.

I asked for fewer heels. Seriously, there has to be at least one lady adventurer who prefers flat soles/not standing on their toes :p

Also, more body types. I like bishies as much as the next person, but I want some buff, built folks too :3

More or less what I requested too. Less high-heels and more practical shoes like boots and sneakers. More pants too, and more build/skin-tone diversity.

I also asked the guys to have less skin-tight suits/shirts and more a baggier or flowing aesthetic. Baizhu, for example, looks better to me with a robe.

I also asked for more body types, even overweight. I also made sure to ask for facial hair, as someone here wanted that.

I asked for more girls in pants. Should have asked for more but had a brain blank.

But thanks for helping with the facial hair!

Edited by Stage7-4 on May 7th 2021 at 12:07:00 PM

I wouldn't mind for chubby playable characters as well. Thing is, I don't think Mihoyo would do that. I don't know what the fat stigma is over in China, but it seems Mihoyo really wants to make their playable characters attractive or appealing by default, so that pretty much downs their chances.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on May 7th 2021 at 12:10:20 PM

From my limited exposure, it seems the stigma is about the same over there as it is over here in the west. But hey, hopefully this survey will encourage some more aesthetic diversity in the future even if it will take a while to see the results.

One thing that worries me is that Sumeru, a nation mainly made up of deserts and rainforests, doesn't seem to have a single-dark skinned person hailing from it. Lisa and Dottore are understandable as they may not be natives and just went to the academy from abroad, but the preview character is a pale-skinned Anubis-hood boy.

I'll be very dissapointed if Sumeru is entirely made up of people with the same skin tone as in Liyue and Mondstadt, it would be both a missed opportunity and kinda suspect at the same time. It would definetly be ten times worth the criticism of the whole Hilichurl debacle.

Edited by Makir on May 7th 2021 at 9:39:32 PM

Even looking at the chubby NPCs (enemies included), there are a lot more chubby male NPCs than there are chubby female NPCs. I recall seeing only six females with chubby builds: Jilliana (Church of Favonius), Brook (Springvale, she's the one Xiangling faces in a cooking contest in her Story Quest), Ms. Bai (Qingce Village), the one in Wangshu Inn whom I can't remember her name but argues with her husband over tea/wine, another one in Liyue Harbor who again I can't remember her name but she's that shopkeeper in the main plaza, and finally Manie (the one picking Jeuyun Chilis at Jeuyun Karst, and she's the most skin-revealing of the bunch).

In the manga, at least, Cyno is darker than Amber but lighter than Kaeya. Venessa is also darker due to Natlan heritage and the preview character backs it up, but at this rate it'll be the better part of a decade before we get there.

They should make Venessa playable; known, lore-important, still alive as a birdie, associated with Celestia, and a dark-skinned girl. What's not to like?

> "still alive as a birdie, associated with Celestia"

Yeah... About that, if what Dainsleif said in the "We Will Be Reunited" Archon Quest is true, it's possible that if Vanessa gets any spotlight beyond the lore, she would likely be introduced as an enemy to the Traveler. Her role in the Khaenri'ah destruction is completely unknown, but it's still possible that she may have played a part of it through association. If that turns out to be the case, it would be a major Wham Episode for sure.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on May 7th 2021 at 1:13:45 AM

I mean, that's part of why I think we need a Celestian. We have archons, Khaerani'ahns, even a Fatui member, so a Celestian would just make sense.

I haven't checked my game yet, but I'm probably going to also note the thing about high heels, and some actual darker skinned characters. There's other things that've popped into my head as well (in addition to the heels, are there any female characters that wear pants? It's all either tights or skirts, right? Jean's leggings are explicitly tights but look like pants, which is the closest iirc that we get) that I might note.

I noticed something in regards to why nearly all current female playable characters have high heels. By observing their models, they all share common base builds for two body types (teenager and adult), and these base models were designed to have heeled feet by default so the devs can create different high-heeled shoe types for each character. For a female character to have no high heels at all without her standing in an awkward tip-toe position, they would have to alter the base model to exclude the heel entirely and change the rigging of her feet to be perfectly flat. It wouldn't be too difficult of a change for Mihoyo to handle, but now the question is if Mihoyo wants to make that change. After all, they seem to have a creator preference for females wearing high heels. Not even the NPCs are exempt from this.

What doesn't make sense though is that the small girl body rig for Qiqi has heels (tiny kitten heels but still), Diona omits the heel and does an awkward tip-toe walk, and then Klee doesn't have heels and still has her feet flat on the ground.

So I'm not buying the shared body-rig excuse, it's definitely an aesthetic choice.

I mean, that's absolutely the rub in general for all of the body-type diversity in the game, right? There are exactly five bodies (male adult and teen, female adult and teen and child) and if the game can't even support playable Rosaria as adult-woman-but-with-larger-bust I don't expect anyone to break the current molds for a looooong time.

Klee has boots to disguise her feet. If you look closely, the heel is as high as ever.

Edited by IniuriaTalis on May 7th 2021 at 8:29:05 AM

I looked again and yeah, Klee is about as high as Qiqi's. The dark brown on light brown makes it a visual blur so I have trouble seeing the gap between heel and toe when she's moving.

Makes Diona even weirder though that they deliberately took her heels away but kept the high-heel foot shape. I know she's a cat but her dad is flat footed.

Diluc, Jean, both Travelers, Keqing.

What's the next banner after this one?

The Spindrift Knight herself, Eula. No word on which 4*s will come with her.

Xiangling is another weird case. It appears that she's wearing genuine low-heel boots optimal for exploration. However, a closer inspection on her feet reveals that the boot heels simply have more volume space to conceal the default high heel rig of the base model, because the length of her legs is still consistent with other characters of the same body type.