Comment on I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness
delmain@beehaw.org 2 months ago
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.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
HatchetHaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Now how much gear is there in Runescape?
Sterling@lemmy.one 2 months ago
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.