Sexism in the Star Trek Online Graphics Engine?

I really like the relatively recent update to the initial character screen in Star Trek Online. It shows your heroic Captain as well as the 4 main Bridge Officers (BOffs) with your majestic starship up above. I recently broke my long tradition of only playing male characters in MMOs by creating a Klingon female Captain (I also created a Fed one even more recently). That’s when I started noticing that when my female Captain was drawn in the character screen, her boobs would come in first, then her outfit top, as shown below:

Klingon boobs

Notice that her BOffs’ boobs are also there before their clothing is. Then I noticed that my other Klingon Captain has an Orion BOff, and her boobs showed up before the top:

Orion boobs

Finally, I saw that some of my Federation BOffs showed up with teeny little panties (not part of their uniform, as far as I know) before their skirts popped in:

fed panties

Now this isn’t horrible or anything, but it doesn’t seem to happen with the men. They don’t show up chest first, then uniform, nor in boxers or briefs (at least as far as I’ve seen in my not-very-extensive study). A movie of the character screen that these stills were taken from is below so you can see how it all works:

I’m not offended by this, but it also isn’t they way I need to think about my BOffs and Captains – I’m not James T. Kirk, for God’s sake! If I wanted to play a sexy game, I’m sure I could, but I find the starships sexy in Star Trek Online, so I don’t need to see my crew in their undies. I also wonder if some of this isn’t intentional. It sure looks like that. There’s no real call for teeny panties, since there’s no viewpoint where anyone could look up my BOff’s skirt. So I’d prefer it if the graphics engine treated men and women the same and didn’t draw boobs and panties, but instead only rendered parts that were fully ready.

 

 


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