Exactly the first thought I had when reading this topic.
Everyone, I’d assume, here on this forum is a critically thinking creative and should take no offense on how fellow creators express their creativity through their work.
The walk and gestures are different due to different anatomy, for sure.
The issue is that in real life, when average individuals are walking/moving in a natural fashion, these differences are relatively small. Noticable, but not generally enough to look really odd if used by the opposite sex.
In videogame, the differences are generally pushed to the extreme. Much more extreme than real life, even in a society with strong gender roles. I hate that, but let's be realistic, it's not going to change anytime soon.
The ideal solution would be to have multiple animations to be able to fit subgroups of both male and female population with gaits adapted to their profession, social status etc, but THAT would be expensive.
In this case, I suppose that characters have not only different sex, but also very different individuality and behavior lines 
that's why they swapping becomes so funny
In that case and the other one you mentioned though, it's a lot about 2D animation. You have control over every frame wanting or not, and you have to show personality because every second is precious. With 3D, there's a lot of reuse, physics, pre-made stuff, that significantly shorten how much the animation needs to be specific to a character. Again, not nonexistent, but it's so little that it's easier to promise for a future date than try and say it's too hard and never do it.
That still sounds like a bs excuse. 3D can make animation easier than 2d but using as an excuse to not take the extra effort to make it look good is creators being lazy. Plus, 3D has the ability to mo-cap people, which can help aid in animation.
My issue with a lot if 3D animation is that it looks very stiff. Richard William (the guy from the video and head animator for Who Framed Roger Rabbit) mentioned how with some movement, you might have to "break" joints inorder to exaggerate movement. A lot of schools teach to never break joints because "its not realistic" , however they end up with stiff animation.
Lmao, Batman's got a thicc booty. I love these kinds of swaps because they really show how differently male and female characters are sometimes treated in games. Especially the way the camera zooms into women's asses and does that full reveal shot (the one where the camera slowly pans up to show her figure).
A friend of mine loves the Metal Gear series and some of the female characters in those games... Here's a video from MGSV where Quiet and Ocelot are swapped and it shows how, I don't know, unnatural it is to look at a male character that the camera treats like a female. Quiet breathes through her skin so in-game she wears a bikini top, g-strings and pantyhose. She's half-naked because she needs to keep much of her skin free. How else is she gonna breathe? Than we see another one of her kind, an old man, and he wears clothes just fine...
I also can not stand the weird anime girl run trope. Arms up, knees too close together, and sometimes they have no chest support. They look so silly, no one runs like that. Is it suppose to be cute? It just looks so awkward.
Well the most blunt difference is the walking. Women don't walk the same way men do, because of the differences in anatomy playing a role in that. You can't possibly claim that anatomy is a social construct, can you?! Obviously there's gradations in that that can be amplified or negated by either the clothing or the person's decision, but it's still there, you still have either a female pelvis or a male pelvis.
I always was confused by this line of arguing. "It's fictional so you can do whatever" is exactly what it is: an excuse to not do your homework or put in any effort with the implication that "it's all a lie anyway, so who cares".
The base cost for motion capture is $4,000 a day plus $20 a second for data solving + re-targeting. Plus you'd have to edit and fix the mocap data EXTENSIVELY for it to be usable. There's a reason why mocap is being used only in productions with large budgets.
As a person whose work is 3d, it's kinda offensive to hear things like "but animating in 3d is easier than animating 2d!" ^^" It's the same BS as claims like "but you aren't really DRAWING in digital art, the computer does all work for you!"
It's suppose to be cute and girly. One of things I've learned about how Japan does anime and manga is that relies HEAVILY on character type or maybe stereotypes when making characters.
I wasn't implying that mocap replaces animation, I was implying that if a company thinks they cannot animate woman in a 3D environment, they could hire a woman to mocap to get a frame of reference. The same way Disney hired models to get frame of reference for their 2d animation. I know mocap is not realistic resource for small indie companies, but I've heard AAA games make excuses about women not being in their games because they were too hard to animate.
No matter small indie dev or large AAA dev, a female animations still need to be done and they still have to be paid for, since just slapping animations made for male model on female would just plainly look ugly, since they're actually just as exaggerated as the female ones, most of the time. And for the MC of the game that usually meaning basically doubling the animation budget for that character.
They just don't always want to outright state "we won't do that because we don't have necessary money".
I stand corrected. Though, that really depends on how important the character is. If it's a full on story mode you really can't transplant a rig, like the other poster said, but if it's just to populate a world with people doing random actions, everyone is probably going to look unnatural to begin with, so it's a little harder to talk about difficulty there. It keeps going from a general subject and back to that specific company's problem of playable characters, so I think a lot of people in the thread are making arguments that don't always direct to each other even if they're right.
And yeah, not breaking joints ends up looking meh especially in games with a heavier melee focus. Everyone jokes that Bayonetta doesn't move like a normal person with the 8 heads height, but that platinum polish wouldn't be as satisfying if the combos just had her doing normal punches and kicks instead of defying gravity to jab, which is also assisted by very big effects and smashing sounds.
...Oh dear...well, this blew up...
Damn, now I wish I could've been here for this, but I was busy freaking out about school (not working, just freaking out).
However, being late to the party never stopped me before. ;] * cracks knuckles *
...I genuinely don't think you understood a word I said. ._.
But, to answer to your weird question/accusation: YES, I recognize that people are different everywhere. That was literally my point.
Which is why I said that arguing that your female model REQUIRES all these extra animations because "realism" and because "women don't__" doesn't make any sense.
Funny how that works...
One video from one group of people naming their own reasons (which could totally be legit) does not disprove my whole argument.
That's like saying because one person killed in self defense, my criticism of murders should be retracted.
A. We don't?
B. Aaand just like that, this argument has collapsed. '_'
This is just my opinion, but: nah, art can totally be offensive. ^^ The whole point of expressing yourself in art is to reach other people's feelings and affect them with your work.
Well, guess what? Sometimes you affect people negatively. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Whether their particular source of offense is "warranted" or not really depends on the era and culture, but no matter where or when you are, not everyone is gonna look at what you do and go "wow I really hate this but y'know artistic freedom GREAT JOB BUDDY!!1!"
As a critically thinking creative, I took offense to some other creatives' actions and gave the reasons why. I think everyone should have the freedom to do that.
Anatomy is NOT a social construct, but it IS based on averages. And once you've learned basic scientific reading comprehension, you realize that 'average' automatically means 'not everyone'.
Not every woman's pelvis is 'wider' enough to make a dramatic difference in the way they walk. And even if it is, sometimes their body fat distribution makes it hard to tell (thigh gaps are not nearly as prevalent as media would have you believe).
And take this with a grain of salt, but from my personal experience in people-watching, the 'dramatic difference' is really not that dramatic to begin with. Like, if you saw someone walking towards you from 200 ft away, I doubt you could tell if they were male or female simply by the way their body moved. The differences are very subtle, so much so that if you were to just give everyone the same walk cycle I don't think you'd catch hell for it. 9_9
To be honest, I think 90% of what people imagine is "the female walk" is actually just the result of wearing heels, which actually DO change the way you walk dramatically and noticeably. They push your butt out, force you onto your toes, make you lift your knees and swing your hips to compensate, all that. But (a) women don't always wear heels (crazy, I know) and (b) if men wear heels, their gaits should change similarly...just food for thought.
That wasn't my argument. ._. What I was saying was, if you really can't be bothered to do your homework or just flat out don't care, why not just admit it, or even stay silent, rather than make up a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS to "prove" to everyone that you shouldn't be expected to care.
As a large Brest women I can say that the one accurate thing about that run is the arms up to hold your balloons. They need more support that bras are made for unfortunately. That’s pretty much the only time the anime ballon Physics at least feel accurate. XD
It was from the developers of the game.
A better source than the rep you sampled to inspire this thread.
There's more to this story.
And still the bigger issue is freedom of the creator.
Skip to the good part
There's just one problem with that...I wasn't referring to any specific game. Many of the arguments I saw that inspired this thread were, but I was not. =/
So, yeah. One video from one group of people naming their own reasons does not disprove my whole GENERAL argument.
No one, obviously! It's a hypothetical example of a bogus explanation based on all of the ones that I've seen, the ones that I JUST SAID l used to form this GENERAL argument.
Dude, if you prefer to believe that I'm lying, fine, but I feel I should warn you that you're gonna have a hard time proving it. When I want to call out a specific writer, or the creative team responsible for a specific body of work, I do it. I've done it before, several times.
The reason I didn't do it here is because I simply DO NOT HAVE that information. This is an opinion piece, nothing more. You can accept that, or you can continue looking for things that aren't there.