Dragon: The Playboy shoot was silly, as most things in Playboy are. But it also meant introducing CDPR's work to a lot of people who otherwise would overlook it as 'just a game'. The magazine's content may be silly, but the magazine itself is a cultural icon, and the shoot is therefore something of a debutante ball, something announcing to an audience of non-gamers that the industry is moving beyond caricatures like Chun-Li, Tifa, and Lara Croft. That's a good thing, isn't it?
Corylea: re Ves: I'd say of all the scantily-clad women in the Witcher games, Ves is the one whose attire is most perfectly justified. She tells you why she doesn't cover herself in armor if you spend time talking with her: not directly, but she certainly lets you know that men habitually underestimate her thanks to her looks, and that that characteristic has come in handy for the Blue Stripes. Non-Iorvethophiles get to see her demonstrate it soon thereafter, and Dandelion elaborates on it in her journal entry. So, sure, she'd be safer if she wore Blue Stripe standard-issue medieval-SWAT-team armor, but much less likely to turn heads (so they can be snuck behind, chopped, stabbed, bludgeoned, shot, etc., etc.)
What's more, the game didn't stop at offering a cozy rationalization for her tarted-up appearance, but made a point of showing how she felt about it - how she understood how her, ah, natural talents, made her particularly useful to the Stripes, how she wanted an adversary to take her seriously in spite of their distractions for once, and how she nonetheless did not want to be 'one of the boys'. She's written to be one of the most interesting and believable characters in the series, and it's all made possible because the writing isn't the only place she's fleshed out. If she weren't so, she'd be someone totally different.
At any rate, you're right when you say I read the thread as much with my fears as my eyes. The Witcher series is among a very, very small number of games that write their heroes as men, not androgenous 'player characters' (as most RPGs do) or cutouts (as most FPSes and action games do), give these men (and thus, their players) permission to behave badly, even be pigs every now and then, in moderation, without making them apologize for it, and yet do not degrade them by making knuckle-draggers or neanderthals out of them. Geralt is neither a cookie-cutter super-soldier (Kaedweni jokes aside) nor a conflicted, tortured wuss; neither a saint nor a Duke Nukem-grade slob. He isn't someone you could be in real life, or, for that matter, really should be in real life, but to escape for a little while and live vicariously as such a man is a breath of fresh air.
