Flying Lab Software has revealed details of the new female avatars in the game, which have undergone a make over to make them look less masculine.

In the past couple of milestones, the character team and our graphics programmer have been working to make our female avatars less masculine.

The reason that this has been an issue is because of a choice, made long ago, to have only one skeleton shared between both men and women avatar models. The reasoning behind the choice was one of savings, both in the production pipeline and in the memory footprint of the game. With only one skeleton, we would only need one set of animations and not one for each skeleton—less work for animators on the back end and a smaller animation database in the game. The price for this savings was a compromise to have either masculine looking women (broad shoulders, no hips), feminine looking men, or blah looking both. We went for masculine looking women and while the character team did their best to feminize our broad-shouldered, slim-hipped women, they were never satisfied with the results.

Now that the game has been live for some time, we’ve set out to fixing things that have made us unhappy. When I sat down with the character team they unanimously remarked that the most frustrating character issue was the masculine bodied women.

Read more here.