Black powder, pink bows: how archers became cuter

Shooting games have become a lot of fun these days.

Your character can shoot people with a rainbow colored pistol while carrying a rifle a furry shark onesie in FortniteIn . Braveyou could win a narrow victory not by slicing an enemy with a sharpened blade, but with a magical rod that emits glitter. In Battlegrounds from PlayerUnknownyou can play as a K-pop idol and wear a hat with cute pink bunny ears. Two recent Call of Duty games even let you dress up as Nicki Minaj in a chrome pink metallic bodice.

Gone are the days of shooters that tended toward muted, military-inspired looks. Games like GoldenEye humans versus camouflage-clad soldiers played in sanitized government buildings. Halo leaned on a sci-fi aesthetic, but Master Chief’s scuffed metal and bullets still made him a space marine. Other hugely popular franchises, like Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike, solidified shooters as a genre that attempted to emulate the grittiness of war.

However, nowadays cosmetic items in the game are more inspired by the art of Lisa Frankthe magical girls of Sailor Moonand fashion icons like Ariana Grande. To learn more about this trend and the creation of these pieces, Polygon spoke to the Brave development team at Riot Games.

When Blizzard came out Overwatch in 2016, its bright and cheerful tone — fueled by a similarly diverse cast of characters for the time — contrasted with other shooters. It became a hit and sold 50 million copies within four yearsIn addition, there are games such as Fortnite have helped popularize the free-to-play model in games, where revenue is generated through the regular release of optional in-game cosmetic items.

Brave continued the precedent set by games like Overwatch And FortniteRiot Games released the streamlined first-person team shooter in 2020 as a free-to-play game, with players able to purchase in-game cosmetics to change the appearance of weapons.

In anticipation of Brave‘s release, the development team had to make some crucial decisions regarding the early cosmetics. Because they had to establish the unique aspects of the game first, the cosmetics couldn’t stray too far from the tone of the core game. Associate art director of Brave Sean Marino told Polygon over video chat: “It’s really important to differentiate ourselves as a game from other shooters that are a little more serious or a little more silly. We had to find our place.”

“One of the very first skin attempts was to recolor one of our base weapons, and we made it gold,” Marino said. “And that’s something that every game does. One of the designers on our team, Nick (Wu Smith), was just, Hey, how about that rose gold? Give me a pink version of this.”
“This was when the rose gold iPhone was popular,” added Brave‘s leading cosmetics producer Preeti Pinto. ‘Exactly,’ Marino said. ‘And he (Wu Smith) said something like, I would absolutely get this.”

For the Brave team, creating cosmetic items that touch on a variety of media genres is the goal, Pinto told Polygon. Think steampunk, comic books and — in the case of the Evori Dreamwings collection — magical girls and anyone who loves cute animals.

Pinto said the team doesn’t categorize players geographically or by gender or anything “other than their taste.” Depending on the skin, Pinto would say, “This is for players who like super sleek aesthetics, (or) this is for players who like really dark edge lord fantasies.”

Developers are constantly updating games to add new outfits, weapons, and more.

“Now that the game has been out for a while, I think we have a lot more freedom to experiment with a lot of things that you don’t normally see in a lot of other shooters,” Marino said.

Skins like Radiant crisis allowed the team to introduce a comic book-esque look Brave without introducing a new art style into the game. Marino told Polygon that even if the team is playing with a different genre, it will still retain the “core fundamental aesthetic” of Brave.

“But we do get a lot of reach (so) we can play with a lot of different things. I feel really privileged working on cosmetics because we don’t have to feel so tied to doing the same thing over and over again,” Marino said.

Ultimately, the rise of pink and feminine aesthetics in games seems to be an attempt to give players a wider range of options. You can get dragons, and you can get sakura blossoms. Master Chief is still a space marine — but cosmetic items let him wear cute little cat ears. Now, players can try anything — military or otherwise.