“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is a saying in science. We build on the work that came before.
Same with Rockstar. Go back and play GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas.
You really feel how these were built on the same engine/platform and how each game kinda just feels like the game they made while making the other game. If you look at the timelines San Andreas came quickly after Vice City (by modern standards at least). Imagine if they didn’t upgrade and reuse assets? If everything was to be built from scratch.
And they probably scan your surroundings and upload it to the cloud. Only thing creepier would be Amazon making the same thing and then sending you ads for stuff that goes with whatever they saw you had or replacements for old stuff you have.
Well, the player can choose which gender V is, plus there’s a lot of catering to gender fluidity.
It’s definitely a conscious choice, but I can’t say if it’s to not have to record more variations of dialogue, and maybe NPC’s use it less so not to draw attention to them not knowing V’s gender.
That said, nothing that really bothered me, although I still haven’t gone through the entire game.
But maybe it’s just how they picture 2077? Just look at recent history and draw an exponential curve and assume pronouns just went out of fashion?
Likely this price model is worth a lot to them anyway, because there likely some big fish that are stuck in, and who are better off just paying Unity than sinking all that development cost to switch to a different engine.
The small projects that go under or jumps ship is probably not worth that much to them anyway, but probably generates an ongoing support cost neither way.
Thus, cynically speaking, Unity is probably better off like this, and they even got some PR out of it. Wether good or bad.