Character Creation, Customization, and Gender

[Doopliss]

OP asked for this option in the most polite, lowest expectation way possible, without any implication of wanting the developers to rush or prioritize them, and yet there are still people in this thread getting pissy or fussy about them expressing the opinion at all, lol. Time is a circle and those uninvolved with such concerns continue to prove themselves to be some of the most sensitive people out there.

[Vatom]

OP asked for this option in the most polite, lowest expectation way possible, without any implication of wanting the developers to rush or prioritize them, and yet there are still people in this thread getting pissy or fussy about them expressing the opinion at all, lol. Time is a circle and those uninvolved with such concerns continue to prove themselves to be some of the most sensitive people out there.

I hope that wasn’t aim at me. I just think I needs to be placed in a correct window for development. Maybe my typo conflict with the answer I stated

“Fine a window where it doesn’t conflict with their workflow and I’m on board” was my intent

[Doopliss]

I hope that wasn’t aim at me. I just think I needs to be placed in a correct window for development. Maybe my typo conflict with the answer I stated

“Fine a window where it doesn’t conflict with their workflow and I’m on board” was my intent

I apologize for being aggressive. I only had a tinge of bother toward your comment because I feel like people only generally bring up worry for their workflow with these type of requests. Overall, though, you are far away from the type of person I had in mind.

[MikkoAkure]

While it would've been a nice option at launch, I think it's too late to go back and fix anything going forward.

They'd need to commission the work to re-record hours worth of dialogue, which would be awkward for the characters whose voices have been replaced in later parts of the game or whose voice actors have since deceased. There's the matter of having to re-code gear and dialogue options away from the binary and which words they'd use for miscellaneous gendered words like lord/lady or master/mistress. And then there would be the question of how to handle this in the 3 other languages because German, French, and to a different extent Japanese lack proper gender neutral pronouns.

For the bodies, the game is barely held together by ARR-era server coding that boils our characters down into specific options that already seem to be at their limit of what the system can handle, which is why if your race has an ear/tail slider, it won't have a muscle slider. We can barely get 2 new full races that can't even wear hats so I don't believe the devs have it in them to add non-binary gender information in for everything else.

Ultimately while it's something important to be aware of for any potential future game and I personally know people who would be interested in it, I think that ship has long since sailed for FFXIV and the amount of resources required to overhaul what exists most likely doesn't outweigh the interest and motivation of the dev team to do so.

[PercibelTheren]

I'm always all for more options.

[PercibelTheren]

Make your character more ambiguous?
IDK what people always imagine NBs and other more exotic genders look like, because all humans are bound to produce the same 2 hormones, which is Estrogen and Testosterone.

Plus, I'm not sure what the point is of a game catering to Americans wanting to feel special with something that only works in certain languages (English and Dutch), and how the Japanese view this whole topic anyway.

If you think non-binary gender identities are an American invention, you don't know a whole lot about the world and its many different cultures. That and then there's the fact that gender norms have VASTLY changed throughout history everywhere, too.

I'm not sure what hormones have to do with it? Do the levels of estrogen in my blood mean I can never cut my hair short and wear a suit or something?

[PercibelTheren]

If they revamp the character creator and add some options like this then by all means. If they just do this and use it as an excuse not to give me something then I have a problem. All in all sure but they don’t need to drop everything to cater to one group’s problem. Fine a window where it does conflict with their workflow slide it in

I believe it has been mentioned that they are planning to give the character creator an update. They're just not sure when. Whenever that happens, the more options we get, the better.

[Minali]

They'd need to commission the work to re-record hours worth of dialogue, which would be awkward for the characters whose voices have been replaced in later parts of the game or whose voice actors have since deceased. There's the matter of having to re-code gear and dialogue options away from the binary and which words they'd use for miscellaneous gendered words like lord/lady or master/mistress. And then there would be the question of how to handle this in the 3 other languages because German, French, and to a different extent Japanese lack proper gender neutral pronouns.

Rerecording voice lines of people who are no longer walking this earth would certainly be a difficult question, although I guess it depends a lot on who said what how much. Quite often the character is addressed with "you", nothing would need to change there. The general question of changing or adding to old cutscenes might occur sooner or later for one reason or another anyway, so I guess they can't table this forever. (When they included Duty Support for all duties there were one or two cutscenes that had to be changed for example. Just a small change, of course, but imo it's just a matter of time a change might require a solution for a cutscene with a deceased actor in it.) But yes, it would require some effort, time and money for sure.

Regarding gendered languages though, as a German who knows people working in localization: It is possible. After all, as PercibelTheren just pointed out, nonbinary people are not an American invention created five years ago. The very real and very much not recently born nonbinary Germans are having to face this difficulty daily and there are some ways how you can phrase things to make them genderneutral. There is also a number of neopronouns, although we don't have this huge advantage of "they", a word that was already there and could just be repurposed, so there's no "official" way so far.
The more important question is if the German SE team would finally decide to educate themselves. It was very disheartening to read the fae in Shadowbringers are not nonbinary but were asigned male and female pronouns. Same as with the nonbinary loporrits in the loporrit tribe quests, basically erasing nonbinary representation just because they couldn't be arsed to do their homework. Going by an interview with the localization team leads from a few years back, the French localization head said translating the fae was a challenge but they made it work. (Can't say how well or not, I don't speak French that well.) The German person didn't answer (or the answer wasn't printed, at least there was nothing in the article about it.) Was kind of hoping this might give them the idea they should handle it differently in the future, but then I checked the loporrit quests in German and.. nope.
Whole books are being written genderneutral or with nonbinary people in German and they don't sound "warped" either, maybe a bit unusual because the genered language is simply what many people are used to. It's sad when a rich company like SE doesn't manage to do it just because they don't want to bother with modern language.

So personally I am all for more options and wouldn't mind a more inclusive character creator. I know many nonbinary people who play this game and wouldn't mind having better choices. However, I can see how this would be a lot of work and I am, as rude as it may sound, not entirely sure if all teams are up to the task, based on what they have done so far. But hey, you never know.

[TBerry]

If you think non-binary gender identities are an American invention, you don't know a whole lot about the world and its many different cultures. That and then there's the fact that gender norms have VASTLY changed throughout history everywhere, too.

I'm not sure what hormones have to do with it? Do the levels of estrogen in my blood mean I can never cut my hair short and wear a suit or something?

Honestly, why should I not believe that Americans only want to use it for a self-serving purpose? NA DC is filled with ego, greed, and chronic Main Character syndrome, and lack of respect for anyone and anything.

[EDIT]
I'm going to include my original reply here. The reason I changed it because it was too... aggressive.

Hormone therapy exists for a reason genius.
There is no NB look. You either tell them or people will just assume. A natural NB look, that is, not style or something.

Also you can smell the ulterior motive from a kilometer away.

Franklly, I don't believe you. Whenever it came up, it was for nothing but your own motives (general you not you specifically).

[KisaiTenshi]

Rerecording voice lines of people who are no longer walking this earth would certainly be a difficult question, although I guess it depends a lot on who said what how much. Quite often the character is addressed with "you", nothing would need to change there.

This can be handled respectfully with AI just taking the existing line, and having it say the exact same line with the pronoun swapped, and would carry the same cadence. The problem with this is that this only works for specific characters that refer to you in third person. The game will sound more awkward if they changed every she/he to "they" just to not offend a few people who get upset, and it then offends people who don't like seeing it at all. You can't win, so you don't try.

Going forward though there are easier things the game can do. They could normalize the height scaling so that everyone gets the lalafell treatment (eg, male and female models have the same magnet options so that you could reasonably make female models taller and more/less busty, and male models shorter and less "masculine." That may require some gear to be off-limits (Eg gender-coded outfits like maid dresses, 2B's outfit, swimsuits) to those magnets to avoid "missing geometry" that require having a bust because it shows cleavage.

Like one of the reasons you don't see what "pokemon go" did more often, is because male and female animation rigs are different. If you try to normalize to a "one-gender" model, what you instead get is a very poor representation of any gender. You can see this effect in the VRoid software and a few other games that let you reconfigure the animation set. Realistically, a game has to have the gender split primarily because people get that uncanny valley vibe if the model doesn't look solidly male or female. But nobody said the female model couldn't go from AA to DDD, or any model go from 3'0 to 8'0. The only legitimate reason we have ANY restrictions on this at all is so people don't RolePlay as children, and certain gear would break because they aren't textured to stretch that much.

Honestly the adjustments to the bust size isn't even that controversial. If people forget 1.0, the bust size was tied to the face selected. You couldn't adjust it. People were just mildly annoyed that there wasn't options. No people were more annoyed about the miqo'te butt nerf with the release of 2.0 which was a consequence of making hyur and miqo'te models use the same gear, with all the terrible clipping on the tail. It would be nice to have, but it doesn't take from my enjoyment of the game.

To which I say to the OP, I hear you, but I don't see it too much ever changing with the character creator. There is clearly room to make different character body types without making them one-off (Dulia-Chai Mewlah and a few other unnamed characters in Eulmore basically a Miqo'te with lalafell animations.) But I think the most we will ever get in service to NB is seeing more configurable chest sizes at the expense of gear that can be worn if set too small or too big, if that's even a thing they want to consider. There are lore reasons for things being the way they are and outside of cross-overs we never see core changes.