As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!
I’d highly recommend Stolen Realms. Pretty cheap too
It’s a hex grid turn based game. You can have up to 6 characters (difficulty scales per character) and can each control as many in the party as you want. Turns are taken as enemy, and players with the players able to act at the same time so you aren’t waiting too long if you are communicating about what you want to do.
It has multiple “classes” with skill tiers that require you to take a few from that “class” but you can spec however you want.
The roguelike mode is very fun for quick sessions and will reward you with a choice of random skills and armors after every fight, but it also saves if you need to go and play later.
Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.
The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.
In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.
I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.
As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.
As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.
Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.
If they were labeled something like masculine or feminine, buff or curvy, or anything that doesn’t imply a hierarchy that would have been an improvement.
“Dude and Chick” aren’t terms I’m saying they should use instead, I’m saying Body Type A and B come across as disingenuous and better terminology could be used. “Masculine” and “Feminine” would work, as you can be masculine without being male. I’m a short-haired tomboy who strongly prefers she/her pronouns, I’d be considered “Masculine, but not male” even if I was cis!
Heck I myself am in a relationship with a cisgender male who presents feminine with many of his behaviors, but that doesn’t make him less of a man aynmore than being masculine makes me less of a woman. We’re all adults here we know that pink can be for boys and blue can be for girls, this isn’t kindgergarten in the 80’s anymore.
In fact let’s take a look at how Old School Runescape handles it. This image is… not great…
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
That’s not the only problem with the UI as we’re still seeing rigid reinforcement of the gender binary.
The example picture of the more masculine build has a beard and the example picture of the more feminine build has a skirt, as if to reinforce gendered stereotypes while trying to avoid using the word gender, which is a mixed message at best… And to really draw the point, she/her is located just under the feminine option, and he/him is under the masculine option as if to imply these are the “correct” options.
The message this gives off is “Look, we call these A and B, but you and I know what’s really going on here eh fellow cisheteronormative? Gotta check off that box for corporate”
When the message they should be giving off is “He, she, they… whatever, it’s all good. All we have is that you have fun playing our game and try not to let anyone else tell you who you’re supposed to be!”
I agree we should be more inclusive, but we should do so in a way that feels less insulting and backhanded.
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
“Type A” and “Type B”, I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for “I don’t want to name it but can’t call it foo and bar either because normies will be seeing it”.
As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided “male” and “female” because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you’re not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn’t consider the alternative.
That is: You’re assuming intent when there’s simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.
Its a dialect. But i assure you if a Sardinian, a Pugliese, a Siciliano and a Valdostano all speaks their dialect only, there won’t be any communication going
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren’t putting that much thought into character creation.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work
Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.
You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.
And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
As a cis male, fwiw, I personally wouldn’t even think about it if the male body was option B or 2 or whatever, but what do you think about a feminine to masculine slider? I think Elden ring did that and it seems pretty clever. After that I think there were other sliders for options such as weight or fitness or whatever.
So max femme makes you look overly and cartoonishly feminine? I’m sorry I’m not understanding the problem. I’d imagine any slider pushed to one extreme end would give you an extreme result.
That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.
As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”
This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the “secondary” option “the female one”? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.
If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too “feminine” for you?
Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in… Smh
yikes, OP wasn’t calling this secondary any more than Simone de Beauvoir was when she published The Second Sex… it’s an actual problem that deserves recognition, and shitting on someone for recognizing it? you’re the one reinforcing the problem now!!
OP was merely gesturing at another instance of patriarchal culture treating the feminine as secondary by putting it second. not a controversial revelation tbh quite trite really
I’m not saying that women are inferior or that anyone with tits is a woman… I’m saying that by labeling the feminine option as the “B-Grade” option instead of just the “Feminine” option there is an uncomfortably misogynistic implication that needs addressing.
As you can see from OP’s response to you, my primary issue is that OP is still calling the option the “female” or “feminine” one. The developers specifically removed those labels to be inclusive and OP is adding them back. The complaint about the order was the secondary issue.
Oh come on, now you’re just feigning ignorance. The body types correspond to both modes of human sexual dimorphic presentations. Just because you take away the names doesn’t mean the dimorphic traits are absent. It IS a sexually dimorphic character creation system. So within that, let’s look at who gets to be the default and who gets to be the “second sex” (highly recommend reading de Beauvoir, again). OP is taking issue with not just the veiled binary but also the hierarchy within it.
Let me put it this way. Imagine if the body types were no longer sexually dimorphic but had varied skin tones. And despite the fact that we know skin tones present in a variety of ways, they only offered light peach skin tones and dark skin tones. And they made the secondary one the darker skin tone. Maybe you or I would have a problem with it, maybe we wouldn’t. But could you understand why someone might take issue with that? It’s a fair objection to make, whether we can conceive of a solution or not.
And hey I think OP’s solution would apply pretty well here: let us create characters with a variety of presentations! Or maybe just take away the “light” and “dark” options? A lot of people in this thread responded with great rationale from game dev standpoints, and that stuff is valid. I can see why devs do things the way they do. But I can also see why OP doesn’t like it.
I remember when Mega Man X DIVE ended, and then turned around and released an Offline version with all the non-PVP content and none of the microtransactions. That was beautiful. Wish I could play a version of Marvel Heroes that was like that.
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