Customizable pronouns

[Lunavi]

This will require reworking of the entire MSQ text for many languages or it will result in very weird and unnatural sentences. In english there would at least have to be quality control to make sure it all works OK. This is not a day or so thing.

Yes, I don't know how it is for other languages in all fairness, but for English this would be pretty simple.

As I said, it strongly strongly depends on how things are coded. The only time they would have to change anything at all is in all pieces of texts including our pronouns, and if this is a variable, such as [gender], they could search out all of these with an easy search function and only look at those specific cases, which aren't too many, and add a variable [s] that appears after first verb after each [gender] (as found by manual reading of course to avoid messups) and have the same variable triggering an if/else statement for is/are they and make the same thing with . Considering the length of the story, I would say this is a process that can't take too much longer than 1-2 days IF the code is well written to support something like the search function which would make it so easy to find the snippets of dialogue that could be in need to get changed.

I can't, however, speak for other languages if it is as easy as this, that I can agree on 100%, but they could also take help by localization team on this project to create an algorithm that helps with this process. I say help as while it would be possible to do an algorithm that did this all on its own, that one would be inaccurate sometimes which could cause unnaturally flowing text. My point is, that with some clever solutions it is possible to make this possible without having to review every single piece of dialogue manually, which would cut down the workload for this process to a very manageable one. Also, this would likely fall a lot on localization teams to do as well.
EDIT to avoid double post:

You mean the four supported languages? (Not counting China and Korea as theyre effectively operating on they're own system)

It's not like swapping pronouns when a fantasia is used brings the system to a halt so I dont see what the issue is.

The problem is grammatical errors that might occur, not that the system would break down, and while this is kinda easy to fix in English, while I do not know any of the other languages save for Germany, I know from people I know who speak French that it is a heavily gendered language that could cause issues on this area, which I due to my lack of understanding of the language can't properly measure how long it would take to fix, which is what was critiqued and a point that they are fully correct on.

[Gwenorai]

Yes, I don't know how it is for other languages in all fairness, but for English this would be pretty simple.

As I said, it strongly strongly depends on how things are coded. The only time they would have to change anything at all is in all pieces of texts including our pronouns, and if this is a variable, such as [gender], they could search out all of these with an easy search function and only look at those specific cases, which aren't too many, and add a variable [s] that appears after first verb after each [gender] (as found by manual reading of course to avoid messups) and have the same variable triggering an if/else statement for is/are they and make the same thing with . Considering the length of the story, I would say this is a process that can't take too much longer than 1-2 days IF the code is well written to support something like the search function which would make it so easy to find the snippets of dialogue that could be in need to get changed.

I can't, however, speak for other languages if it is as easy as this, that I can agree on 100%, but they could also take help by localization team on this project to create an algorithm that helps with this process. I say help as while it would be possible to do an algorithm that did this all on its own, that one would be inaccurate sometimes which could cause unnaturally flowing text. My point is, that with some clever solutions it is possible to make this possible without having to review every single piece of dialogue manually, which would cut down the workload for this process to a very manageable one. Also, this would likely fall a lot on localization teams to do as well.
EDIT to avoid double post:


The problem is grammatical errors that might occur, not that the system would break down, and while this is kinda easy to fix in English, while I do not know any of the other languages save for Germany, I know from people I know who speak French that it is a heavily gendered language that could cause issues on this area, which I due to my lack of understanding of the language can't properly measure how long it would take to fix, which is what was critiqued and a point that they are fully correct on.

1-2 days? No. Not by a long shot. It's not just in the story it's in every single quest. Even the main story would take longer than 1-2 days to rewrite all of that code to include this. And it's not as simple as just slapping in a neutral pronoun.

This is set in a medieval world, people address us in such terms. Example 'Lord/Lady' there is not a neutral term for this. 'Master/Mistress' there is not a neutral. 'Lad/Lass' there is not a neutral term. 'Sir/Madam' there is not a neutral, not one that is used in a time like this. All of this would have to be removed/rewritten.

[Lunavi]

1-2 days? No. Not by a long shot. It's not just in the story it's in every single quest. Even the main story would take longer than 1-2 days to rewrite all of that code to include this. And it's not as simple as just slapping in a neutral pronoun.

This is set in a medieval world, people address us in such terms. Example 'Lord/Lady' there is not a neutral term for this. 'Master/Mistress' there is not a neutral. 'Lad/Lass' there is not a neutral term. 'Sir/Madam' there is not a neutral, not one that is used in a time like this. All of this would have to be removed/rewritten.

I do agree with you on this point that it would be rough. However, you seem to have a misconception, I never suggested code for English but rather to search where the variable used to determine which [gender] response they should play, or even code to be used other than as a helping tool if it would be needed for for example French, which is a more gendered language than English to make the task more manageable (and to add, I do actually after some thinking believe that some languages would be way more annoying to fix than English and yes, I can't plausible see it being done in 1-2 days even with a strong team), and I don't know if you think I thought one person would work on this or if they would set up a team of people to do this as I agree that one person alone could hardly do it in one day. Those parts would be caught by the [gender] (term used as idk what the actual variable is called) and yes, it will require some rewriting. This is also why I said this is a very code dependent task as depending on the code this might be easier or harder to perform, and knowing this game's code it is likely the later, which means that yes, this might very well not be worth it at this point in time.

[Iscah]

You mean the four supported languages? (Not counting China and Korea as theyre effectively operating on they're own system)

It's not like swapping pronouns when a fantasia is used brings the system to a halt so I dont see what the issue is.

Swapping pronouns post-Fantasia doesn't "bring the system to a halt" because it's still doing what it always did: checking, at the time of displaying the text, whether the player character is male or female, and applying the correct fragment of text individually programmed into that line of script. It's not fetching the right pronoun from some external listing that could be altered independently.

Changing it to reflect additional options (even if it was just a pre-built choice of he/she/they - or even a free choice of the existing he/she) would mean changing the structure of character data to carry a new setting for pronoun choice, and potentially affecting everything that ever has to refer to that data. Then they need to find every single line of text in the game that uses pronouns or other gender-varied language, and change it to consult this new setting instead of the character's gender, plus add in new text for the 'they' option.

Retrofitting it would be a massive undertaking, and a very different thing to including it in a game as it's being built from the ground up. Perhaps we'll see it be an option in more games in the future, but it's not something that can be added to this one.

(Even long-term in a game where the option is built in, I doubt we would get fully-customisable pronouns without restricting the way players are addressed in the script - it wouldn't work for this one, certainly, where sometimes entire sentences are different based on the character's gender. I think it would be kept simple as he/she/they - and I think society overall will tend that way as well, picking a single 'inbetween' pronoun instead of everyone trying to establish their own.)

I do agree with you on this point that it would be rough. However, you seem to have a misconception, I never suggested code for English but rather to search where the variable used to determine which [gender] response they should play [...]

The thing is, there is no separate variable to determine which gender pronouns are used for the character. It uses the character's gender directly.

[Lunavi]

The thing is, there is no separate variable to determine which gender pronouns are used for the character. It uses the character's gender directly.

Then that solves that, this would make this suggestion pretty hard to implement then.