This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing
So recently OSRS (Old School Runescape) has joined a list of games that have replaced “Male or Female” with “Body Type A or Body Type B” with you selecting your pronouns secondary.
And it made me furious, but I had to sit down and ask why such a small meaningless thing that I only see during the character creator pisses me off. After all, isn’t this giving a seat at the table for Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary individuals?
So I tried thinking about this issue from the perspective of a Non-Binary individual. See I myself am female (Transgender MTF for what it’s worth), so the only thing I’m ever going to pick is the female option unless I’m doing a challenge run where I try to roleplay Guybrush Threepywood (Mighty Pirate!) while playing Fallout 3…
That’s when I realized why I absolutely hate Body Type A/Body Type B
This is not a solution to a problem, this is highlighting the issue.
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?”
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?”
It was only when I went “Let’s pretend I don’t exist in a male/female binary and see how I feel about it.” that I realized why I absolutely DESPISE Body Type A/Body Type B
Because when I look at it from that angle, I realize that if I am a non-binary individual, my options are to look like an overly buff dude but occasionally NPCs will refer to me as a They/Them, or like an overly curvy chick who again sometimes gets called They/Them…
That’s when I realized why Body Type A/Body Type B doesn’t do it for me.
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.
I realized that if the choices in Body Type were something like
A - Buff Dude
B - Slim Dude
C - Fat Dude
D - Skinny Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
E - Fat Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
F - Skinny Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
G - Fat Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
I - Curvy Chick
J - Buff Chick
K - Fat Chick
L - Slim Chick
Maybe have also an option for a big buff masculine dude who has big tits, because that’s just how he rolls, I dunno just thinking aloud here…
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.
I don’t know what more I have to say on this. I guess it’s just a revelation I had about something in gaming that bothers me…
So, wider gaming community. What do you think? Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you’re describing. I think what could help is a third option that’s a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it’s not relevant, just don’t have a body type option.
I also don’t know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn’t necessarily match their gender identity.
Oh definitely, heck, in Animal Crossing they might as well just ask for your pronouns and nothing else… In fact doesn’t New Horizons basically do that? But I’m referring more to the more common scenario of “Beefy Guy” and “Curvy Cutie”, which we see in World of Warcraft, you can pick whatever pronouns you want but it’s going to go on either on testosterone fueled bearded Dwarf you’ve ever seen or the hourglass with pointy ears we call a Night Elf…
When you only get two body type options and neither have any level of androgyny, what does pretending they aren’t gendered when they clearly are accomplish? That’s the part I have an issue with, it’s dishonesty being masqueraded as progress. Either have androgynous character options or don’t pretend “Body Type A/B” is a solution to a problem.
I feel The Sims 4 gets this right by letting you pick between male, female, or a custom gender (where you can decide if the sims pees standing up or sitting down, whatever pronouns you want them to have, whether the sim gets others pregnant, becomes pregnant, both, or neither), and ALL THREE of them have a healthy amount of customization options to go for whatever look you want.
Yeah I agree with you there. If you’re gonna just give two or three body type options and no other customization, there should be an androgenous option or at least they should all be generally androgenous. I think the issue with runescape probably stems from how the game was before.
One thing that always irks me with character customization is how often games have more customization options for girl characters. I have always assumed that developers only allocate so much time and resources to character creators and call it a day.
I don’t even know why you can choose between circumcised and uncircumcised in that game. It feels like they wanted to add more sex things but didn’t get around to it
Hah that’s true. I thought it was odd that they mentioned how you could customize genitalia and then they had 2 options for penis’s and only one vagina option. It definitely seemed like an advertising strategy more than anything
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe?
What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and
you’re the same person… but everything else is different?
And what if you can’t find your way home?
^ This, I much prefer this… I mean something about “Body Type A/Body Type B” just feels too “corpo” for my tastes… but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying “Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as”, didn’t even have to use words.
What if you’re a dummy thicc femboy with boyboobs?
You might think this identity is just a meme, but it’s not. And while some percentage of that is queer people secure in their identities, some of it is also questioning trans girls who aren’t comfortable selecting “female” yet but will try out exploring femininity through the “femboy” meme.
As an enby, I’ll pick body B most of the time, but I don’t like being called female. I’ll put up with it in an old game, but if a studio decides to not misgender me, I’m nothing but happy. I agree 100% that more options would be nice. But assuming that game companies aren’t going to spend money on artists to make diverse bodies, why yuck the yum I experience when a game at least tries to not misgender me?
I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.
Starfield did this the right way, just as you are suggesting. it’s the only game I’ve seen so far that does it, but your character body exists on a wheel of buff, slender, thicker, etc. you can adjust every little part of this to get a truly unique character. i believe there were also at least 4 voice options. the rest of the game was meh, but maybe other games will start doing it that way. i think inclusion is still a very new concept in gaming, everyone is trying new things, and i appreciate the effort. it’ll get there.
I definitely have to say, Body Type A/Body Type B definitely feels like a groan-worthy growing pain that will be ironed out sooner or later. It’s just disappointing that we have to resort to such awkward terms that mislead players about how much variety across the gender spectrum is actually being offered. It almost feels like a vegan menu that still heavily uses animal byprdouct.
This almost makes me want to buy Starfield to support a proper way to revamp gender selection, but it’s going to need the same amount of work that FO76 getting it from how it was at launch to the awesome experience it is now for me to dip my toes in that…
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
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
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’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 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.
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
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.
Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won’t be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.
Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.
Then we’d be going back to having the vast majority of games having a cis male protagonist. No thanks. I don’t mind playing as them from time to time, but I want a choice, especially if the main character is one of those blank slate types.
I’m not advocating for that either and I don’t necessarily they think they would these days. Ubisoft is steadfastly ignoring the dumbasses around the black male / Asian female leads for AC, no matter how loud they whine.
Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn made me realize I vibe so well playing as a woman. If I had had the choice I probably would have picked the masculine option since that’s my gender. I’m glad that game forced my hand, now when I have a choice I give it a real thought.
Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc… something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!
I’m actually all for this as well, unless the game is some open-ended roleplaying experience just give me a character to play as and design the game around who this person is (I think the original Dead Rising did a good job of this with Frank West, the remake… well unless previews are from an earlier build than what we’re getting in September not so much)
And I mean a REAL open-ended roleplaying experience, not something like Fallout 4 that was blatantly designed for me to play as Nate, a lawful good heterosexual cisgender male military vet with predefined goals… with gay romance options and the ability to play as his wife Nora existing solely to give the illusion of choice… An Illusion I still appreciate because when I play I always wind up being Nora with Curie as my wifey.
(I feel like FO4 would be far less divisive if it was a spinoff about Nate’s journey rather than a sequel to a series that is known for player agency, and even then the Brotherhood of Steel suddenly being a bunch of Nazis is still stupid as hell)
See, I don’t really care that the player is referred to as “They/Them” in Deltarune, because it’s established that you are playing as Kris and those are their pronouns.
(and in Undertale, the monsters simply had no idea what Frisk’s gender was due to an unfamiliarity with humans so it’s kept intentionally vague… with they/them simply being the most gender neutral thing to call them and the fanbase having their own headcanons on what Frisk actually is. Personally my head canon is Frisk is male and Chara is female, which seemed to be the most common interpretation in the fanbase back then… my headcanon for Kris is that they’re intersex with they/them pronouns as I see them as being representative of both Frisk and Chara, but however you see the situation is just as valid unless the creator comes out and says “No it’s this specific way, everything else is wrong!” and to my knowledge Toby Fox has not done that)
Sidenote: First non-binary person I ever met used ey/eir pronouns, this was so long ago that ey called eirself “Genderless” instead of Non-Binary as the latter wasn’t a word. Ey was femme presenting, but very much not female. Sadly we’ve drifted apart and wherever ey is I wish eir well.
I always wished ey/eir had caught on instead of “singular they”, because personally I thought “ey” sounded cooler and was more straightforward than “singular they”. But hey I’m not non-binary myself so it’s not really any of my business.
On a similar note, I used to see shi/hir pronouns more often than I do now as well, though that was more for intersex individuals than non-binary. I still see some usage of shi/hir, though the people I see with those pronouns tend to self-identify as “hermaphrodite”, a phrase that is considered highly insulting by most. I guess what I’m saying here is that there are all kinds and it’s probably best not to make assumptions or assume gender to be a one-size fits all phenomenon.
I would like to thank you for taking your time to write this response. For some reason, I was feeling blue. Seeing the lenght of your comment made me feel heard and really happy. Thank you for sharing this with me, may you have a wonderful day/night!
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I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you’re describing. I think what could help is a third option that’s a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it’s not relevant, just don’t have a body type option.
I also don’t know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn’t necessarily match their gender identity.
Oh definitely, heck, in Animal Crossing they might as well just ask for your pronouns and nothing else… In fact doesn’t New Horizons basically do that? But I’m referring more to the more common scenario of “Beefy Guy” and “Curvy Cutie”, which we see in World of Warcraft, you can pick whatever pronouns you want but it’s going to go on either on testosterone fueled bearded Dwarf you’ve ever seen or the hourglass with pointy ears we call a Night Elf…
When you only get two body type options and neither have any level of androgyny, what does pretending they aren’t gendered when they clearly are accomplish? That’s the part I have an issue with, it’s dishonesty being masqueraded as progress. Either have androgynous character options or don’t pretend “Body Type A/B” is a solution to a problem.
I feel The Sims 4 gets this right by letting you pick between male, female, or a custom gender (where you can decide if the sims pees standing up or sitting down, whatever pronouns you want them to have, whether the sim gets others pregnant, becomes pregnant, both, or neither), and ALL THREE of them have a healthy amount of customization options to go for whatever look you want.
Yeah I agree with you there. If you’re gonna just give two or three body type options and no other customization, there should be an androgenous option or at least they should all be generally androgenous. I think the issue with runescape probably stems from how the game was before.
One thing that always irks me with character customization is how often games have more customization options for girl characters. I have always assumed that developers only allocate so much time and resources to character creators and call it a day.
Not always true; I was quite disappointed with the lack of labia options in Cyberpunk 2077.
I was disappointed that I spent time crafting my sausage but at no point in the game was I allowed to waggle it around to show dominance.
I don’t even know why you can choose between circumcised and uncircumcised in that game. It feels like they wanted to add more sex things but didn’t get around to it
Hah that’s true. I thought it was odd that they mentioned how you could customize genitalia and then they had 2 options for penis’s and only one vagina option. It definitely seemed like an advertising strategy more than anything
S L I D E R S
Fucking Saints Row 2 had this shit figured out
PS: I like when the game just shows you a bunch of presets and says “pick one”. It’s more elegant than “which of the two body types do you want”
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person… but everything else is different? And what if you can’t find your way home?
I get this reference
^ This, I much prefer this… I mean something about “Body Type A/Body Type B” just feels too “corpo” for my tastes… but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying “Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as”, didn’t even have to use words.
What if you’re a dummy thicc femboy with boyboobs?
You might think this identity is just a meme, but it’s not. And while some percentage of that is queer people secure in their identities, some of it is also questioning trans girls who aren’t comfortable selecting “female” yet but will try out exploring femininity through the “femboy” meme.
As an enby, I’ll pick body B most of the time, but I don’t like being called female. I’ll put up with it in an old game, but if a studio decides to not misgender me, I’m nothing but happy. I agree 100% that more options would be nice. But assuming that game companies aren’t going to spend money on artists to make diverse bodies, why yuck the yum I experience when a game at least tries to not misgender me?
I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Now how much gear is there in Runescape?
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.
Its runescape, the difference between the body types is like 2 polygons
Starfield did this the right way, just as you are suggesting. it’s the only game I’ve seen so far that does it, but your character body exists on a wheel of buff, slender, thicker, etc. you can adjust every little part of this to get a truly unique character. i believe there were also at least 4 voice options. the rest of the game was meh, but maybe other games will start doing it that way. i think inclusion is still a very new concept in gaming, everyone is trying new things, and i appreciate the effort. it’ll get there.
I definitely have to say, Body Type A/Body Type B definitely feels like a groan-worthy growing pain that will be ironed out sooner or later. It’s just disappointing that we have to resort to such awkward terms that mislead players about how much variety across the gender spectrum is actually being offered. It almost feels like a vegan menu that still heavily uses animal byprdouct.
This almost makes me want to buy Starfield to support a proper way to revamp gender selection, but it’s going to need the same amount of work that FO76 getting it from how it was at launch to the awesome experience it is now for me to dip my toes in that…
shattered space might be a perfect time to try it. that dlc is just 1 planet so it’ll most likely be made how previous bethesda games were
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
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
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 said the developers removed the labels to be more inclusive and OP (and now you) added them back.
There are technical reasons (pointed out in many comments) for why they might not have full sliders to make any body type you want.
Exactly.
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 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.
I was not aware of this slider, as I don’t really go for Souls-Like games, but it sounds like a perfect solution.
lol you should see what the slider does. it’s not great. max femme makes you turn cartoonish puffy and red
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.
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.
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.
Don’t they already have scripts to re-size cosmetics based on height/weight for basically every game with a height/weight option?
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.
true, but it might also open up some creative new things like character too skinny/fat for a certain armor etc.
That would be a fun can of worms
skeleton race
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
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
I really appreciate your points and this comparison, but the pictures are giving me Attack on Titan vibes lol
Hold up…
Runescape has a mod scene?
Well, there is an OpenSource client, and private servers with custom rules. That makes every modification possible.
Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.
Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won’t be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.
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This is absolutely unacceptable here
Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.
But what about games that require you to distinguish yourself from other real-life players as in all massively multiplayer games?
Then we’d be going back to having the vast majority of games having a cis male protagonist. No thanks. I don’t mind playing as them from time to time, but I want a choice, especially if the main character is one of those blank slate types.
I’m not advocating for that either and I don’t necessarily they think they would these days. Ubisoft is steadfastly ignoring the dumbasses around the black male / Asian female leads for AC, no matter how loud they whine.
Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn made me realize I vibe so well playing as a woman. If I had had the choice I probably would have picked the masculine option since that’s my gender. I’m glad that game forced my hand, now when I have a choice I give it a real thought.
Yeah, hopefully the inclusiveness trend continues.
Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc… something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!
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keep the character creators, but only let the player use a randomizer button and a silliness slider.
sea of thieves style
I don’t know whether we would have ever gotten the absolute brilliance that is Turg if proper customization weren’t available.
I’m actually all for this as well, unless the game is some open-ended roleplaying experience just give me a character to play as and design the game around who this person is (I think the original Dead Rising did a good job of this with Frank West, the remake… well unless previews are from an earlier build than what we’re getting in September not so much)
And I mean a REAL open-ended roleplaying experience, not something like Fallout 4 that was blatantly designed for me to play as Nate, a lawful good heterosexual cisgender male military vet with predefined goals… with gay romance options and the ability to play as his wife Nora existing solely to give the illusion of choice… An Illusion I still appreciate because when I play I always wind up being Nora with Curie as my wifey.
(I feel like FO4 would be far less divisive if it was a spinoff about Nate’s journey rather than a sequel to a series that is known for player agency, and even then the Brotherhood of Steel suddenly being a bunch of Nazis is still stupid as hell)
This reminds me of that “vessel creator” troll from Deltarune
See, I don’t really care that the player is referred to as “They/Them” in Deltarune, because it’s established that you are playing as Kris and those are their pronouns.
(and in Undertale, the monsters simply had no idea what Frisk’s gender was due to an unfamiliarity with humans so it’s kept intentionally vague… with they/them simply being the most gender neutral thing to call them and the fanbase having their own headcanons on what Frisk actually is. Personally my head canon is Frisk is male and Chara is female, which seemed to be the most common interpretation in the fanbase back then… my headcanon for Kris is that they’re intersex with they/them pronouns as I see them as being representative of both Frisk and Chara, but however you see the situation is just as valid unless the creator comes out and says “No it’s this specific way, everything else is wrong!” and to my knowledge Toby Fox has not done that)
Sidenote: First non-binary person I ever met used ey/eir pronouns, this was so long ago that ey called eirself “Genderless” instead of Non-Binary as the latter wasn’t a word. Ey was femme presenting, but very much not female. Sadly we’ve drifted apart and wherever ey is I wish eir well.
I always wished ey/eir had caught on instead of “singular they”, because personally I thought “ey” sounded cooler and was more straightforward than “singular they”. But hey I’m not non-binary myself so it’s not really any of my business.
On a similar note, I used to see shi/hir pronouns more often than I do now as well, though that was more for intersex individuals than non-binary. I still see some usage of shi/hir, though the people I see with those pronouns tend to self-identify as “hermaphrodite”, a phrase that is considered highly insulting by most. I guess what I’m saying here is that there are all kinds and it’s probably best not to make assumptions or assume gender to be a one-size fits all phenomenon.
I would like to thank you for taking your time to write this response. For some reason, I was feeling blue. Seeing the lenght of your comment made me feel heard and really happy. Thank you for sharing this with me, may you have a wonderful day/night!
It’s indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it’s still better than the previous one.