Customizable pronouns

[Gula]

This is so silly. You want to take the development team time and effort who could be fixing issues and preparing content to put a useless feature so you can feel better about yourself?

You can be a male/female in the game. You can role play whatever you feel like and pronouns are the problem? Lmao.

If it is really that important the NPCs call you the pronoun you want it you have some inner issues about yourself.

Golly, this is still going huh. But still, this.

You, OP, are a real person in the real world with your own preferences that people that you speak to face to face to can ignore or accept.

You know what isn't real? The player's character, the Source and the First. Therefore, your real world issues do not apply because this is a creation from a team of people with a vision that had nothing to do with you or your preferences from the start. They did give some care to consider players, yes. But when you hit sub .05% (BS numbers but I know it's not a million of y'all) of a target audience it really is not something to divulge thousands of dollars in resources into. That's a lot of paychecks to hand out to voice actors, writers, programmers in all languages.

[Demetri_Delethorn]

I mean, we have he/she/him/her. What else do we need? When I created my character, I was given two gender options. What's the argument here?

[TheRedChameleon]

Im gonna try to not look at this thread anymore but I would encourage everyone to go read the interviews that Yoshi-p has done on promoting LGBT representation in video games. The man is very much pro-LGBT and pro-trans identities and I feel like you should take what Yoshi-p thinks into consideration before spouting off about what you consider to be "wasting the devs' time".

[Gwenorai]

Im gonna try to not look at this thread anymore but I would encourage everyone to go read the interviews that Yoshi-p has done on promoting LGBT representation in video games. The man is very much pro-LGBT and pro-trans identities and I feel like you should take what Yoshi-p thinks into consideration before spouting off about what you consider to be "wasting the devs' time".

Just because you're pro something doesn't mean that you have the means to push something forward.
I'm pro antihomeless - meaning I wish to give those who are homeless, homes - yet I can't afford to do this because I am financially incapable.

Furthermore, yes, he's all about pro-LGBT and pro-trans identities and yet we have two races that are gender locked. Let that sink in.

So yeah, it's about time and resources - not because he's pro something.

[Saidosha]

I suppose I look to this as something that has to be coded from the beginning. As others surmise, any references to he/she or similar are likely determined by configuration set in character creation. From the simple coding perspective, this could treat 0 as Female and 1 as Male when various tags check the attribute. The problem with adding a 2, or beyond, is that the code is presently absent the logic to interpret that, which could translate to simply a blank space or the game outright crashing depending on code structure. Further so, with the enormous amount of text the game has, voice acted aside, all the tags that refer to this variable will need to be checked and assured to be bug free. The argument that this might not be financially sound winds up carrying a bit more weight with this understanding, further so if we may consider further cultural differences.

But like some others, I subscribe to the notion that this isn't Earth as we know it. As such, expecting it to follow the same social norms or the people within vulnerable to various preferences or proclivities is self-insert at best and backseat authorial overreach at worst. Personally, I can recall people being upset about how the people of Spira dressed in FFX, not just X-2. Women revealing as much skin as they did, or the impracticality of certain garments, basically oozed the forcing of our reality on a fictional realm when people tried to assert things should or certain be a certain way.

And forgive me if this has come up as I haven't read the whole thread, but I also perceive this request as a slippery slope. If visually identifiable male characters dictate a female pronoun request, what's to further stop them from wanting the feminine variations of clothing to wear, as well? And vice versa? We're already looking at manpower issues when it comes to gearing up the new races and them basically borrowing other class assets, but to do this would literally double the required equipment data and all requisite testing to further guarantee things don't drastically clip, aren't seam broken, and so on.

Again, things like this are something that arguably needs to be considered from the beginning, not nearly a decade after the project's initiation. I can certainly understand inclusion, and to some extent, you can have that within the RP sphere amongst people who further respect the process, but right now, the mechanical requirements will likely not come to pass with super specific representation likely relegated to NPCs. And just going through Japan's track record with anime, sometimes that's not going to be flattering.

[Mihana]

But like some others, I subscribe to the notion that this isn't Earth as we know it.

Thank you! I agree here so much. To be clear I'm all for individuality and expressing your uniqueness but so often many forget that you cannot apply the exact same real world logics to a fictional land and its inhabitants. Never mind a request like this would be an unbelievable undertaking for the development team drawing away valuable resources that could be used for other projects. But we see demands or controversies being created at trying to apply real world details to a fantasy world very often. The clothing worn by characters in a game, the way one gender may be portrayed, and so on. Like your example about garments worn in FFX.


Something else worth mentioning here too is different cultures around the world. For example same sex marriages aren't commonly recognized in places like Japan. Slowly of course that has been changing over the years, but SE had to be very careful about that when dealing with marriage in-game between two people of the same sex. This was referred to as "Eternal Bonding" instead to get around it and instead of being marriage, was a "union between two adventurers creating a bond between one another". Sure, on the surface it sounds different but that's exactly what marriage is. It took a long time for them to even introduce the bunny outfits as equippable by male characters and still is the only equipment that can be. Gender pronouns however are a whole other thing here. Going back to Japan for example, changing one's gender is acceptable but only if they undergo the actual operations and laws to change it. Even now it's wrought with challenges where in the US one can simply decide what gender or non-gender they wish to identify as.


Like it or not however, this is a game that originated in Japan from a Japanese company. Adding in pronouns even if you looked past if it would fit the fictional world would certainly cause a great deal of controversies and problems for SE in the east. It wouldn't be as simple as creating a change in the translations to refer to the player character as something other than the gender their model appears as, it would require extra coding specifically for the North American client or if applied to all clients a means of disabling the option in non-English clients. All-in-all more work than it's worth for them to do and the potential issues that arise from it all. But if I'm wrong and it's actually very easy to do and wouldn't caused hardships for the company then I'd say go ahead and add it in.


Truth of the matter however is that it probably won't be or otherwise you'd have seen it far more commonly added by now in other games.

[Inuk9]

My post got erased, so yeah. That's how I see this subject. If you disagree with OP or any progressive agenda in this forum you just get censured right away. Not posting in this circus anymore.

[Wilford111]

My post got erased, so yeah. That's how I see this subject. If you disagree with OP or any progressive agenda in this forum you just get censured right away. Not posting in this circus anymore.

You forgot to put quotation marks around "progressive".

[Izanagi_Fiaresu]

Why did this thread make it 30 pages?