Battlegrounds recently changed their female underwear texture to remove visible labia, and that’s great. I still have one gripe though. The bra texture in Battlegrounds is just egregiously, obviously bad.
If you play Battlegrounds, you will see the underwear textures at least once. You start off in your underwear by default, but most players equip cosmetic clothing items. Some players will run around in their skivvies to be trolly, and you’ll probably see some underwear in the lobby before the game begins. Still, despite how infrequently these textures show up, it is immediately clear how off the bra is. As someone with breasts this detail is hard to ignore, even if it doesn’t show up that often. If they changed the underwear, they should really change this bra too.
I’m not exactly a bra expert, but my slightly unusual bra size means that I end up going to frou frou lingerie shops and picking the employees’ brains. I know what an ill-fitting bra looks like.
Before we go too far, I made a slideshow explaining some bra terminology, just so we’re all on the same page:
Female characters should be wearing a sports bra if they’re going to be doing physical activity like running, jumping, and shooting a lot of guns. But even if this specific bra was situationally appropriate, it’s still not great. It looks like they just modeled bare breasts and painted over them. The straps don’t look like they’re holding anything, nor do the breasts themselves look like they’re being supported by the band and cups.
This is all the more frustrating because the male underwear looks totally fine. It looks like plain, functional boxer briefs. I’m not asking for anything fancy, just that the women’s underwear also be as plain and functional.
To get a better sense of what was wrong with the bra and how to fix it, I went down the street to the lingerie shop and asked the employees about it. When I showed them a picture of the character, both of the women behind the counter grimaced.
“What you could do,” one of them said, pointing with her nail at the outer edge of the bra’s cups, “is bring in the sides, and make the curve higher.” They both told me that part of the problem is that the cup is too low. Thus, the underwire isn’t anywhere near her breast at all, but instead sitting on her lower rib cage. The gore, which is the triangle of fabric in the center of the bra connecting the two cups, was alright, but both agreed that moving it up higher would be more flattering.
“It makes her look like she has saggy breasts,” one said. The other woman nodded, saying, “Not good.”
I then came back to the office, and hastily drew their suggestions on a screenshot of the Battlegrounds bra:
Despite all their criticisms, they both liked the color. In a tactical situation where you need to wear a full coverage bra so that your breasts aren’t bouncing when you run, the silver grey seemed appropriate to them. It’s understated and a little classy.
What was most interesting about my trip to the lingerie store is that these women immediately identified the problems and how to fix it. It took a total of five minutes to explain how a bra should actually look on a human body.