I agree with all of that; it's why I took Blood and Steel in such a completely free-roaming direction, even to the extent of making it game about conquering Calradia, which probably wasn't ever really intended in Warband, and quickly quit worrying about History; if people want History, they can play Brytanwalda or the other specialized products made for them. On that note, if Taleworlds wants to sell History, it'd probably serve them best to do it as side-projects (which is pretty much what I think WFaS was regarded as, up until a late date), because I honestly think that's the smaller portion of their potential audience.
More on point, most of the women in the thread have expressed that if they'd been able to play a female, but it cost them, like it did in Warband (if you've never done it, try that once, it's like half the game is missing, in terms of major features that either aren't there or are arbitrarily harder) they'd have been fine with it. It was the total removal that caused all the stink.
I could see a lot of cool things being done that could make playing a female in this time and place very interesting; for example, being forced to use your wits during key dialogs, having to put more points into CHR than male characters to get good responses to some events (or, even better, playing a high-CHR woman suddenly opens new opportunities; never underestimate the power of Beauty).
Heck, in a world populated by the Three Musketeers, men could fight duels over your honor, or you could get enemy Lords to fight each other for your favors, which would be in perfect keeping with the setting and provide women with a great experience. I know all of that takes it into "too much work" territory, but meh, that's what mods could be about.
Lastly, in terms of hard choices and morality, I'm with you, although I've steered a fairly conservative line; while you're allowed to kill everybody in a village in Blood and Steel (more hardcore and vile than the somewhat-nebulous handling in Warband), I decided to avoid rapine entirely, simply because it's not something I want on my conscience, should some player show up and talk about how awesome it is to rape everybody (you know it'll happen) and wasn't quite sure how I'd punish people enough to make it not worth doing, ala the way choosing to be really, really Evil in Fallout tended to ruin the ending you got. Part of that is simply that I've never quite gotten around to writing a decent ending sequence for Blood and Steel, so it's still the default Warband one, which is lame- that is one area where WFaS is a considerable improvement, imo.
That, and with a mod, you never know if you're putting it in front of kids. Even Fallout didn't let you do
that particular crime- you could slay the children and convert them into bloody gibbets, but Black Isle drew a line
But I agree that choosing to do good or bad is something that should be in a great game; that's largely what gives a game like this its greatness in the first place, frankly; being able to make constructive choices and moral decisions, and then having to live with them.
Aaaaanyhow... yeah. I think the problem is just that it's missing, like a missing arm; it didn't have to be fancy, or the preferred track of power-gamers, to have avoided lots of screaming. It could have been even more cruddy than in Warband before there would have been a lot of complaints.
However, what if it had been more interesting and potentially richer? Imagine, if you will, what would have happened if women gamers were showering the game with compliments, not rocks! Amongst other things, I predict that reviewers would have been kinder; note the attention that adding the marriage feature garnered Warband; the fact that WFaS added some very constructive things to the series, like coherent endings and stronger storylines, but still got very mixed reviews thus far says both a lot about the state at release, in terms of polish, but also about how it was missing things to give reviewers something really new to talk about. Dueling over women would have done it, imo, and if you could instigate a duel as a woman, that would have made a lot of reviewers perk up.
Ah well. What's done is done.
