Non-binary option for characters, please?

[Niwashi]

I would go so far as to add a gender neutral toggle in character creation (or perhaps a separate character creation option to select your pronoun).

In a game whose developers can't even give equal treatment to the two main genders which it does support, because making gear to fit both is apparently just too much effort to be worthwhile, I'm pretty sure we're not going to see a third character model option for each tribe of each race. People are still going to have to pick which gender's character model they're going to use, and they're still going to be limited to the gear, hairstyles, poses, and emotes available to that character model.

At most, if this suggestion were implemented, it would be limited to dialog and titles.

I'm wondering what words you want used instead of "he" and "she". "They" could be used but ...

The request wasn't for non-gendered NPCs to be in the story. It was for the ability to make our own player character be non-binary. When NPCs are talking to the player character, the pronoun used for that player character is neither "he" nor "she". It's "you". That word isn't gendered in any of the game's four supported languages, so pronouns are really not the main issue here (though of course they often are in real life, which is probably why they're what came to mind and spawned a whole sub-discussion here about pronouns).

The gendered terms the game would need to adapt are things like lad / lass / ?, and lady / lord / ?, and probably a couple dozen or so other pairs that would need to be turned into trios of terms and phrases.

Regarding 'they' being confusing, it really isn't; there are occasions in normal conversation where you will use it, probably without thinking or noticing.

While a bit of a tangent to the suggestion (which as I said above, doesn't really involve pronouns), I did want to mention something about this. Certainly the word "they" can be and quite often is used clearly and unambiguously to refer to one person, but that's different than being able to just substitute it in wherever "he" or "she" is used.

At a rough approximation, I'd guess around 3/4 of the places a singular third person pronoun is used, the word "they" can be simply substituted without changing the meaning of the sentence. Another 20% or so can be reworded enough to make it clear. And then there's the other 5% of the time that it can be really difficult to come up with a clear non gendered way of phrasing what you want to say without the phrasing getting really awkward just to avoid gendered pronouns. Nobody is claiming that it can never work, just that it isn't a global panacea to the problem.

In order for pronouns to make sense, it needs to be clear who or what they're referring to. The gender of the pronoun often gives a clue to what its antecedent is, and in some cases even changes whether there needs to be an antecedent or not. A sentence like "they should do <xyz>" is quite often just a way of saying "<xyz> should be done", with the term "they" just representing a vague sense of "whoever does such things" rather than representing a particular person or people who were under discussion. "He" and "she" are not only different by being singular. They're also different by being clearly specific.



(EDIT: Wow, this thread got long fast. I'd read through the first page (at a 40 post per page setting) to then see this response end up on page 6. I probably won't read all the intervening posts, though I may skim through a bit.)