How magical girls and everything pink came into first-person shooters

Shooting games have become undeniably cute these days.

Your character can shoot people with a rainbow-wrapped weapon while a fluffy shark romper In Fortnite. In Appreciationyou can achieve a narrow victory by cutting up your enemy not with a sharpened blade, but with a magical staff that radiates glitter. In PlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundsyou can play as a K-pop idol and wear a beanie with cute pink bunny ears. In two recent Call of Duty games, you can even dress up as Nicki Minaj in a chrome pink metallic corset.

Gone are the days when shooters had a more subdued and military-inspired look. Games like GoldenEye pitted people against camouflage-clad soldiers in sanitized government buildings. Halo leaned into the sci-fi aesthetic, but the scuffed metal and bullets from Master Chief still made him a Space Marine. Other hugely popular franchises like Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike cemented shooters as a genre that attempted to emulate the harshness of war.

Now, however, the 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 items, Polygon spoke to the Appreciation Development team at Riot Games.

When Blizzard released Watch In 2016, its bright and cheerful tone – supported by a relatively diverse cast of characters for the time – set it apart from other shooters. It became a hit and sold 50 million copies within four years. In addition, there are games like Fortnite have helped popularize the free-to-play model in games, which makes money through the regular release of optional cosmetic in-game items.

Appreciation set the precedent of games like Watch And FortniteRiot Games released the slick first-person team shooter in 2020 as a free-to-play game where players could purchase in-game cosmetics that changed the appearance of weapons.

Before AppreciationWhen , the development team had to make some important decisions regarding the first cosmetic items. Since they had to establish the unique aspects of the game first, the cosmetic items could not deviate too far from the tone of the main game. Associate Art Director of Appreciation Sean Marino told Polygon via video chat: “It’s very important that we 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 our first skin attempts was to recolor one of our base weapons, and we turned it gold,” said Marino. “And that’s something every game does. One of the designers on our team, Nick [Wu Smith]he just said: Yeah, how about the rose gold? Give me a pink version of that.”
“That was when the rose gold iPhone was popular,” added Appreciations leading cosmetics producer Preeti Pinto. “Exactly,” said Marino. “And he [Wu Smith] was like, I would definitely get this.”

For the Appreciation The team’s goal is to create cosmetics that touch on different genres of media, Pinto told Polygon. Think steampunk, comics, and – in the case of the Evori Dreamwings collection – magical girls and anyone who likes cute animals.

Pinto said the team doesn’t categorize players based on geography, gender, or anything else “except their taste.” Depending on the skin, Pinto would say, “This is for players who love a super clean aesthetic, [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] “Because the game has been out for a while, I think we have a lot more room 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 enabled the team to create a comic-like look Appreciation without bringing a new art style into the game. Marino said that even though the team is playing with a different genre, they will keep the “basic aesthetic” of Appreciation.

“But we get a great reach [so] that we can experiment with a lot of different things. I’m really happy to be working on cosmetics because we don’t feel so obligated to do 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 more choice. You can get dragons and sakura blossoms. Master Chief is still a Space Marine – but with cosmetic items he can wear cute little cat ears. Now players can try anything – military or not.