I appreciate the gay, nonbinary and trans inclusion in gaming, but never forget: just because it was added to the game, doesn’t mean the people who worked on it were in for it. I’ve been working in video games for about 3 years in Quality. A friend from past job shared their office had to fire an employee, because he stopped a trans person in bathroom doors, demanded to see their genitals before letting them in and would complain about pride flags in the office on employer’s desks.
Also, Cyberpunk 2077 lacking a fleshed out bisexual romance option comes off as bit biphobic to me. The weirdest thing is, the gay male option character literally has a daughter. I’m not saying gay men never pretended to be straight and had children, but afaik Kerry had a daughter with a woman and homophobia isn’t a thing in 2077.
I also personally find adding pronouns a less-than half measure. You’re still only allowed to choose between either a very masculine male body or a very feminine female body. Not to mention, unless I’ve missed something, you cannot even opt-out of the voice selection (again, either a feminine female or a masculine male voice). I played games with body sliders as a child and could make my character to my liking. I don’t understand why character body customization feels less and less like a thing. The armors absolutely do not look and behave better to warrant this as an excuse.
I wish they’d add the option to choose between a feminine and masculine body, but then make body hair and breasts a separate option, and then also allow to have no voice selection so your character makes no noises (Dragon Age Origin allowed that, if I recall correctly, and I remember other RPGs where I was able to opt out of noises, I think even Larian’s games). I feel like these would be rather low effort, while having a high amount of inclusion towards nonbinary, intersex and possibly other people. I personally don’t care about my pronouns at all, but really wish I was able to represent myself body-wise.
Could you please explain how the inclusion of breast size sliders and body hair would affect arms? Because that was my proposal.
I grew up playing MMOs such as Perfect World, but also games such as The Sims. I believe Saints Row also includes sliders, but I may be wrong. Anyhow, I proposed a simplified approach of only slider for chest and then body hair options.
I was talking about the metal arms stretching, it stretches because it would clip horribly and wouldn’t follow the arm movement properly.
But for breast size, you have to make two versions of the armor with breasts and without breasts (flat like a man’s chest) that are basically swapping parts of the outfit out as a “slider” (these have to be remade completely). Then people like me will want breast sliders that are small breasts to larger breasts (these would be morphs so you can’t add or remove geometry to make them, instead you would try to mold them) and so you’re making quite a few different versions of the outfit just to make sliders work and high/low weights for them. The second set of sliders would be more popular but some games don’t even give us that lol. It takes development time for this stuff and making AAA video games is all about cutting corners, crunching, trying to do everything with as little money spent as possible, etc. Making sliders can easily double to triple the work required. Ever look at the baldurs gate 3 mod section searching for a larger breast version? You’re gonna run into clipping galore since every outfit has to be redone and the mods don’t redo every outfit. The Sims is the only game series I know that care enough about giving people sliders for everything.
I’ve played every major Sims game and they all had the clipping issue for hair and clothes. To make things like belts and pockets work they paint them on in the textures. Same way underwear is made. Saints Row had sliders but there was still clipping with it, for instance necklaces were floating on top of the outfits whether you had a shirt on or not (this also happened on Sims) just to try to minimize clipping. Another tactic used in games is to not have long hair, keep it above the shoulders as much as possible.
Body hair has to be remade for both character models, but that would probably be less work than sliders. Work still has to be done, it’s not as simple as copy + paste.
Anyway, that’s just my rambling. It takes a lot of development time to make sliders work which is why it gets omitted a lot. I hope more games allow more sliders, but I understand why a game wouldn’t do it.