Both. Some Ubisoft dev said they weren't when people were upset about the face scan in that star wars game, but Kojima disproves all their excuses with Death Stranding
at the first seconds of the trailer I was laughing my ass off already thinking it was going to be a REMASTER of Dad of War 1, but hoo boy, it was somehow worse than what I expected.
I do believe they purposefully make their characters ugly, and they seem to do it usually during the second game X female character appears if it wasn't already ugly from the get go, you may know the previous examples already, alloy, mj and others, that gravity rush movie that got leaked counts too.
Nigga I cringed HARD at every moment she talked, from a loving mother that just died to a GIRLBOSS? I know that she's in an unknown world but fuck off, "hit me again and I'll kill you-" literally from the manual of cliches, I bet you tree fiddy they'll repeat the "VOW TO YOUR KWEEEEN" line too. Also, in theory they're all dead already.
I really hate that cube from fucking DnD, these retards really can't help themselves, they HAD to add a "le quirky big chungus character that talks a lot and helps you in battle". I really expected nothing, NOTHING from this and I'm still disappointed, surprised even, on how shit it's gonna be P.S: The surprise is gonna be mine if they don't have that bald nigger wilson as one of the main characters since it's already present in the wolverine game, as the cherry on top of that pile of shit.
at the first seconds of the trailer I was laughing my ass off already thinking it was going to be a REMASTER of Dad of War 1, but hoo boy, it was somehow worse than what I expected.
I do believe they purposefully make their characters ugly, and they seem to do it usually during the second game X female character appears if it wasn't already ugly from the get go, you may know the previous examples already, alloy, mj and others, that gravity rush movie that got leaked counts too.
Nigga I cringed HARD at every moment she talked, from a loving mother that just died to a GIRLBOSS? I know that she's in an unknown world but fuck off, "hit me again and I'll kill you-" literally from the manual of cliches, I bet you tree fiddy they'll repeat the "VOW TO YOUR KWEEEEN" line too. Also, in theory they're all dead already.
I really hate that cube from fucking DnD, these retards really can't help themselves, they HAD to add a "le quirky big chungus character that talks a lot and helps you in battle". I really expected nothing, NOTHING from this and I'm still disappointed, surprised even, on how shit it's gonna be View attachment 9096855 P.S: The surprise is gonna be mine if they don't have that bald nigger wilson as one of the main characters since it's already present in the wolverine game, as the cherry on top of that pile of shit.
I think there's a mixture of various factors; the quick explanation is that yes, they are making characters ugly on purpose, but I think the real answer is a bit more nuanced—they have cornered themselves into a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation:
The sloppification machines don't work as well as they want to believe. This varies from studio to studio, but the allure of having a machine that turns marketable pseudo-celebrities into characters with a metaphorical push of a button is too strong to resist. The worst case I can think of is in Star Wars Outlaws, where the MC looks like a PS4 texture pasted into a PS2 model with PS1 hair. I don't think they tried that hard to make her ugly; everything and everyone looks bad in that game.
Despite being proven time and time again that if you absolutely have to have real people in your game you need to stylise and change the character for it to look good, they refuse to do it when it comes to female characters (probably for cultural reasons). Capcom is usually good at finding a middle ground between actor and fictional character. Male characters tend to look much better because they can afford to change them up and tweak them a little without people getting their panties in a twist. The new Wolverine game's model would look as uncanny as Faye if they didn't take some creative liberties when translating his face to the game, but nobody gives a fuck about that.
The Buffalo-Bill approach to character design, stretching some poor actor's digital skin over a soulless 3d model and hoping it fits, mixed with a focus on "hyperrealistic" models and textures transforms the uncanny valley into the uncanny Mariana Trench; very minor imperfections or features that can look good on a real person can quickly trigger a fight-or-flight response in people without face blindness when applied to a 3d model. Also, some parts of the face, like the eyes, always seem problematic when translated into a digital avatar. A very common example is eyelid skin that looks half an inch thick (which is pretty egregious in Faye's case, IMO). This is also one of the reasons why I think Debra Wilson spends 20 hours every day in a motion capture cubicle: there's nothing that the MC process can do to those eyes to make them look less human.
The design space for female characters is kept incredibly restrictive by design. This goes beyond the inability to make those characters hot; there's so little you can actually do with them, from clothes to accessories to attitude, so they end up being jarringly bland and boring, made even more obvious in cases where they are replacing a much more iconic male character. Kratos is instantly recognisable even in his most basic form; a small child could draw a doodle of him and you'd recognise him right away. If there was a Funkopop made of this version of Faye you wouldn't be able to tell her from dozens of other characters if you lost the box it came in.
Even in this concept art, where Faye looks more or less conventionally attractive, she doesn't look cool or interesting. There's no reason for anybody to want to play as a character that looks like a mid-level NPC from a 2010's MMO, and that's before the motion capture nightmare machines transform her into that nice lady from accounting but with the eyes of Chucky the doll.
All of this is usually made ten times worse when they try to overcompensate by giving the characters boastful and abrasive personalities, and the now extremely tired girlboss tropes, but that goes beyond art design.
Realistic people don't belong in every genre and look out of place especially in high fantasy or wacky science fiction settings. Naughty Dog can get away with people who look like they belong in your local Walmart in TLOU, but heroic settings demand heroic characters. Having plain versions of real people (even if they are attractive in real life) exacerbates the uncanny valley effect, which makes them look uglier than the sum of their parts.
An often-ignored factor in this discussion is what I call the "Miranda Lawson effect": when studios tie a real person to a fictional character so hard, they don't want the heat that comes from that character's model being infamous for featuring in every disgusting uncanny-valley CG-generated porn act imaginable.
The real solution to this problem, without giving a win to the Chuds, would be to stop trying so hard to become Hollywood 2.0 and distance actors from characters, and not to rely on 1:1 motion capture so damn much, but they love parading those poor b-tier schmucks around.
"Hey GOW fans! Do you want to see other pantheons?"
"Yes!"
"And have badass combat?"
"Yes!"
"And awesome setpieces?!"
"Yes!"
"And control a particular badass that is the most important person of the setting?"
"YEEEEEEEEEEESSS!!!!!!"
"And have a companion cube?!"
"Urgh-what do- uh, we mean YEEEEES!!"
"WE PROOOOUDLY PRESEEEENT GOD OF WAR LAUFEY!!"
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if a million fans cried out in disappointment and were suddenly silenced under the threat of being socially ostracized
I fear something cringy and yet unsurprising has happened...
It's completely intentional. The tech to make good-looking (in the "accuracy" sense, not the "oh god she's gorgeous" sense) women based on IRL models has been around for over a decade. They're taking the extra step to deliberately scuff up whatever accurate models their tools produce, to make the women uglier on purpose (because they hate conventional western beauty standards ... and no, that's not a joke or exaggeration).
Dark Souls retards are so bad that this guy called Fromsoftserve, a pencil necked faggot undid 3 years worth of progress he made on his re-remastered mod. All of his efforts in unfucking the broken lighting were undone. All the feedback we gave was for nothing now that he went back to the dogshit default shiny look the demaster has. The whole fucking point of fixing the remaster gone. Not that there was ever any hope with his early deviations from the developers intent, and not like it matters since the switch port was sadly the best form of ptde audio aside. He loves ds2 trannies.
literally from the manual of cliches, I bet you tree fiddy they'll repeat the "VOW TO YOUR KWEEEEN" line too. Also, in theory they're all dead already. 
