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:

Its runescape, the difference between the body types is like 2 polygons

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

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 think that trying to please everyone is generally a bad idea, especially when it comes to niche social justice issues and identity, because everyone thinks their personal rules are universal these days.

With that said, body type over gender is step in the right direction.

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”

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.

A good option that I think could work could be “fat distribution”, instead of body type.

Selecting chest, abdomen and/or legs would be great for binary and non-binary people depending or their presentation.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

It’s indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it’s still better than the previous one.

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”!