Pronouns???

[HollyJollyPaca]

Is it truly necessary?

I'll be honest, I truly don't understand what's the trend with pronouns in the past years, we all lived perfectly fine without it for centuries.
You want me to call you "she" rather than "he" or "he" rather than "she"? Why not, I don't care, nobody cares, just don't make a fuss if I make a mistake by force of habit.

And it's the same with the game. You're free to select your character gender... Genital, rather?
Is it that big of a deal to play a man that isn't called "she" or opposite?

Point remains the same, I don't think it would be difficult but would it be worth the trouble? Just to satisfy a handful of players, that letters display exactly what they want their character to identify as?
It's not quality of life, I don't see the point. Surely you wouldn't stop playing the game because of that reason, neither would you engage in a game because of that same reason?

EDIT: Actually just saw that great answer above about language barrier, meaning it would be actually difficult and only meant to please a very small percentage of the community.

It's not truly necessary no but just an idea that I thought wouldn't be hard to implement. Turns out language and programming is bit more of an obstacle.

[Rongway]

please know that it would NOT be an easy thing to implement. The dev team would then have to go through 10+ years of dialogue in this game and either tie it to w.e pronoun you made on your character. And that would be after theres a clear consensus of how many genders there are and how to refer to them in every instance of that dialogue.

It would be quite easy. You are overcomplicating it. Presumably there is a placeholder token in all lines of dialog where the WoL's personal pronouns appear. Presumably the game replaces the placeholder in all dialog occurrences with the corresponding pronoun via a conditional that calls the function that returns the character's sex. These are reasonable presumptions that any competent programmer would make.

I don't care how bad the game's code base is; there's no way it would take more than twenty minutes to add a gender selector to character creation, add the gender field to the character data, and modify the function that returns the character's sex during dialog pronoun replacement to return the character's gender instead. Then another twenty minutes to add a quick validation into the character loader that silently fixes any existing character data that doesn't have a gender selected to default to the gender matching the character's sex. Hardly any time at all for each localization team to provide add the word for "gender" into the localization dictionary. Maybe a little bit more time to code a dialog box that gives all existing characters the opportunity to set their gender on the first load after the feature is added.

As far as technical difficulty is concerned, this is not a difficult ask, by any means.

[HollyJollyPaca]

I know this is a fantasy world and all, but sometimes you have to establish rules in said fantasy worlds. World builders go to great lengths to set the rules for magic use, religions, etc. It's not beyond the reach of world building that gender is also established. Until the rules change, we need to be willing to accept that there are two genders in this fantasy world. It's fine and all if they want to change things down the road, but it would take a lot of work. Sometimes words like they/them don't work well with dialog either, so it's a little more extensive than simply changing variables.

For instance, what would you replace "lass" with in your example? How would you address the culture of NPCs in game having to use such language? It's the same kind of adjustment you'd have in the real world at any rate. If the devs missed something in the dialog somewhere, would your friend feel misgendered? It would take time to address every little problem like that.

I think it's easier to accept that it's a role playing game where only two genders exist. You're not playing as yourself. You're playing the role of another character. It doesn't have to 100% represent you in real life. They're not calling your friend "lass," but rather your friend's character "lass." I mean, your friend picked a Lalafell. Are they that small? I know I'm not over six feet tall with rabbit ears. Do they have this issue with other games where they can't pick a gender at all?

I wasn't really calling for a they/them option (though that would be cool), just being able to pick between the main two gender expressions. I agree that fantasy worlds aren't going to adhere to real world stuff but at the same time, it's the players that make up the game so anything to get one to fully immerse the better yeah? Obviously same sex marriages weren't too much of an issue to worry about cultural wise.

[Nayout]

It would be quite easy. You are overcomplicating it. Presumably there is a placeholder token in all lines of dialog where the WoL's personal pronouns appear. Presumably the game replaces the placeholder in all dialog occurrences with the corresponding pronoun via a conditional that calls the function that returns the character's sex. These are reasonable presumptions that any competent programmer would make.

I don't care how bad the game's code base is; there's no way it would take more than twenty minutes to add a gender selector to character creation, add the gender field to the character data, and modify the function that returns the character's sex during dialog pronoun replacement to return the character's gender instead. Then another twenty minutes to add a quick validation into the character loader that silently fixes any existing character data that doesn't have a gender selected to default to the gender matching the character's sex. Hardly any time at all for each localization team to provide add the word for "gender" into the localization dictionary. Maybe a little bit more time to code a dialog box that gives all existing characters the opportunity to set their gender on the first load after the feature is added.

This is not a difficult ask, by any means.

I think nobody knows, supposedly many things in this game should be easy but time has shown us otherwise and in any case, I prefer that these "resources" are used in other things especially in an expansion where the feeling of "little" content is many players.

[ZedxKayn]

Pronouns are about the last thing they need to work on for character creation.

[HollyJollyPaca]

It would be quite easy. You are overcomplicating it. Presumably there is a placeholder token in all lines of dialog where the WoL's personal pronouns appear. Presumably the game replaces the placeholder in all dialog occurrences with the corresponding pronoun via a conditional that calls the function that returns the character's sex. These are reasonable presumptions that any competent programmer would make.

I don't care how bad the game's code base is; there's no way it would take more than twenty minutes to add a gender selector to character creation, add the gender field to the character data, and modify the function that returns the character's sex during dialog pronoun replacement to return the character's gender instead. Then another twenty minutes to add a quick validation into the character loader that silently fixes any existing character data that doesn't have a gender selected to default to the gender matching the character's sex. Hardly any time at all for each localization team to provide add the word for "gender" into the localization dictionary. Maybe a little bit more time to code a dialog box that gives all existing characters the opportunity to set their gender on the first load after the feature is added.

This is not a difficult ask, by any means.

That's what I was thinking when it came to the programming part of it. Like if pronouns in game are tied to your sex then surely you could snip it and reconnect it to a new pronoun option. I'm not a programmer so I don't know who's right and who's wrong but this was my original thought process.

Language would probably be the real barrier then if you were correct.

[HollyJollyPaca]

Pronouns are about the last thing they need to work on for character creation.

Oh definitely. I rather them fix Hrothgar/Viera, update the facial options for all races, than focus on that. It was just a small lil thing I thought wouldn't be too much.

[Shibi]

This is a really good point. Both coding wise and language wise seems to be an obstacle sadly. :C

It is an obstacle. I feel for our French Canadian friends, who see English's fairly gender neutral syntax, and even if they use the pronoun "iel" or "ille" (a mix of il and elle and maybe close to our non-binary they/them) Or even words like "ul", "ol", "ael" or "ele" or "on" and they find that most people don't know how to use it in a sentence.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/gender-n...tral-1.5259027

We are somewhat lucky in English to have the non-binary they/them as English adapts fairly well, but a lot of people still have difficulty with this in the singular, as most people grew up with it as a plural word so have a new mindset to form.

So a phrase like "This is Jean, they like to go to Costa del Sol with their boyfriend Frederik" vs "This is Jean, he likes to go to Costa del Sol with his boyfriend Frederik" works for many people, but will grate like fingernails on a blackboard for some - and not just because they are gormless attack helicopters, but as it's bending English in new ways.

[Caitsithhh]

Less RP more TryHard Chads please

[Bright-Flower]

I'd be all for this being added to a new game and in theory It'd be all for it in FFXIV, but in practice it's probably not feasible for the dev team to go back and add this right now.