Quote Originally Posted by Alyzia View Post
I understand that the whole p*******e case makes this subject very... sensitive. But if there is any sort of bad conduct, then that is why others are allowed to report said players, is it not? I've noticed that the devs have done a more than decent job in trying to let players be the character they want to be. If you want to be the big and burly type, fine. be that. If you want to be the tiny, cute type. Fine, do that. Having playable beast races would be interesting, sure. We have seen plenty that are friendly, and some that could actually possibly work, even if they had to be given a different starting scene.
This is going to be my last post on this subject, because frankly it disturbs me to even edge close to the topics being discussed here. However, I feel it's important to bring up a few points for consideration amongst the die hard amongst you who still think making children playable is a good idea.

Cast your mind back to the last time you saw children in a video game. I can almost guarantee that whenever that child was in the game, they were inevitably out of harms way or saved at the last minute. Fallout, for example, has children which are all tagged as invulnerable so they don't take a stray bullet. GTA avoids it entirely by not adding them anywhere. There's a reason for this, and it's not just paranoid developers. Any content which has children in it undergoes MUCH heavier scrutiny than content with strictly adult characters.

Any time a child is considered 'in peril', and it only needs to be mild peril such as facing down beastmen or the like, it gets a few disproving looks from the ESRB and similar rating agencies. This, in exchange, tends to earn it a higher rating than it would otherwise. In fact, there's is a quest in FFXIV where a child dies but again, this is done off-screen and you never see the body. It's all told through exposition via text.

All of this is before we even come to the doubly sensitive topic of what manner of clothes they would wear. Even something you might consider relatively safe, like a decent length skirt, occasionally comes under fire because we have full camera control and the more perverse could simply look up their dress. That's before I mention clothing items like the Colosseum gear which is basically strappy leather. The ratings board would explode immediately, and who could blame them?

Remember, being childlike is the 'hook' some games use to avoid being labelled as crude. The "She looks young, but she's actually 200 years old" situation. Even that alone is often frowned upon in western society. When you make it an ACTUAL child, you open up that can of worms to a full debate, and it's impossible to rejustify it.

So no... let's not add playable children. Let's not ruin what could just be left as a nice easter egg in the game. Posts like this thread are more likely to stop SE ever adding something like this again more than encourage them to make them into full characters. If they patched these characters out of the game, I honestly wouldn't blame them after reading this forum. There have been some downright disgusting posts.