It’s indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it’s still better than the previous one.

Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.

Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won’t be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.

To me, the obvious answer is to do away with the concept of “gender” altogether. It’s a societal construct that doesn’t really need to exist in video game character creation, anyway.

Everybody is born one of two biological sexes: male or female. There. Those are your choices. Call it “apparent sex” and include a pronoun option to allow for players who want to roleplay gender nonconforming characters.

As a cis male, fwiw, I personally wouldn’t even think about it if the male body was option B or 2 or whatever, but what do you think about a feminine to masculine slider? I think Elden ring did that and it seems pretty clever. After that I think there were other sliders for options such as weight or fitness or whatever.

I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.

Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.

Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.

It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.

I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.

I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you’re describing. I think what could help is a third option that’s a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it’s not relevant, just don’t have a body type option.

I also don’t know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn’t necessarily match their gender identity.

Oh wow, I could never put to words why I didn’t like the body type system either, but you nailed it. Yeah, I also wish that games could just give you sliders and/or more presets or something to have actual variety. If a game will only support curvy girls and buff dudes, but won’t also let people make, for instance, cute androgynous cat boys, or anything else a person might fancy, then what’s the point of it?

One thing that always irks me with character customization is how often games have more customization options for girl characters. I have always assumed that developers only allocate so much time and resources to character creators and call it a day.

Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.

The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.

In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.

I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.

As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.

As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.

Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?

Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.

Its runescape, the difference between the body types is like 2 polygons

I’ve had this exact thought in my head the past few days, including the idea that having 3 or 4 different types would actually fulfill the goal of avoiding “Male/Female” choices - something that only Saint’s Row has done, AFAIK.

The issue is that they only changed the label and Body Type A and B are still clearly Male and Female, but for some reason people praise it as not being gender locked because…?

Its even more ridiculous in games like Monster Hunter Rise for example, where you get the Type A and Type B body options…and then you still get gendered outfits where one is fully covered and the other is baring their midriff and wearing dresses! Wow, I wonder which is supposed to be which!? /sarcasm

Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.

First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.

You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.

For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:

Starfield did this the right way, just as you are suggesting. it’s the only game I’ve seen so far that does it, but your character body exists on a wheel of buff, slender, thicker, etc. you can adjust every little part of this to get a truly unique character. i believe there were also at least 4 voice options. the rest of the game was meh, but maybe other games will start doing it that way. i think inclusion is still a very new concept in gaming, everyone is trying new things, and i appreciate the effort. it’ll get there.

As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”

Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!

It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!

A good option that I think could work could be “fat distribution”, instead of body type.

Selecting chest, abdomen and/or legs would be great for binary and non-binary people depending or their presentation.