Beyond the usual handful of narrowminded people who think dissecting a game's style and design choices is more "superficial" than writing a list of its most obvious mechanical elements would be, I've already gotten a lot of interesting feedback about this post. Pleasantly enough, one of the most insightful comments yet has come from a BioWare employee...

Why is it that feminine fashion in video games always seems to indicate something about the character wearing it? Why is it never just a matter of taste? It's the case in countless games, including BioWare 's Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the subject of my latest article for Paste. As much as I love Inquisition and its stunning fashions, the way those fashions deal with femininity fits a little too well into some all-too-common media tropes.

@samusclone Speaking personally, I do feel that in trying to mitigate inane sexualization that I can overlook general femininity. — Allan Schumacher (@AllanSchumacher) December 10, 2014

@samusclone An over correction on my part, I think, so it's useful to get feedback from fans and articles like this. Cheers! — Allan Schumacher (@AllanSchumacher) December 10, 2014

According to his Twitter profile, Schumacher is a QA analyst on Dragon Age. That means that he likely didn't have a say in how any characters were dressed, and of course he is only speaking for himself and his own perspectives. Even so, he's absolutely correct to point out that the fight against ridiculously oversexualized costumes, especially within the genre of fantasy games, could have lead to a degree of "over correction" by designers trying their best to do right by their female characters.

And that's a double-edged blade. One of the reasons that it's so hard to find examples of more "feminine" fashions presented in a neutral way is because what we consider neutral often errs on the side of masculinity. And you know what? If I trust any AAA game developer to get this right one day, it's definitely BioWare.

Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.