Starfield Can Go Beyond Picking They/She/He Pronouns
(gamerant.com)
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You can't win them. Don't bother trying. Even their examples of previous games show why you can't win:
"The Last of Us Part 2 faced controversy for its deadnaming and general excessive violence towards its trans teen character Lev"
So basically, if you have a trans in your game, it can't be the target of any violence what-so-ever. That character doesn't even suffer that much in the game compared to the others. I mean, hello?! His own sister has her arm smashed into pieces from a hammer, that results in hours of pain, screaming every second, and have to cut it cause it's just unrecoverable. Lev just gets slapped once or twice here and there. Sure, he's the one who suffered the most...
"the problem stemmed from its two voice selection options; if the player chose the feminine voice, V would be referred to as a female throughout the game, and if they chose the masculine, referred to as male. Among nonbinary and trans people, making assumptions based on voice tones often leads to misgendering."
Imagine having to voice hundred thousands of words, and then doing that multiples times for every possible pronuns in existence. All that, for 0.1% of the population that are just Twitter addict. Sounds like money well spent to me.
Starfield is going to make one tiny mistake somewhere, and all that "good will" will go back against them.
If they're spending money on that, they're not spending money elsewhere. Money is a finite resource. And for sure, diminishing returns exist, but there's ALWAYS areas that are lacking in some way.
You could pay a gender studies xiggy and thirty voice actors, OR... You could get 20 more beta testers and 2 more programmers to ensure the game is 100% bug-free... OR you could get 10 more artists and 5 more physics programmers to make sure that some minor aspect looks amazing, maybe hairworks or how clothes flow with motion and with airflow. OR you could get 5 pro gamers and 5 programmers to go through the game's activity and difficulty curves one more time and make sure it is engaging and reasonable.
These are either/or, not and, options. You pay the xiggy their danegeld and dump tens of thousands on pointless voice acting and scripting, or you improve the game.
Any company that says they should pay xiggy instead of make their product better, showcases that they have no interest in making a good product. Why would I want to buy a bad product? No game dev in existance is so rich that the money spent there could not have conceivably been spent somewhere else.
Not only that, but any creative work is the culmination of a trillion creative desicions large and small.
Ideology is making an increasingly larger number of those dicisions for them, by now the majority, and that's why everything made by ideologues is trash.
They're not doing this for 0.1% of the population. They're doing this because they're under the control of a brain virus that is compelling them to force into existence a new culture where hierarchies are formed with the woke at the top.