This coming off the 'type 1 type 2' bs from Oblivion but I've noticed this as I am currently playing both Fallout 4 and Skyrim Aniversary edition on and off.
In Fallout 4 I have a female character, because it doesn't really affect the game, I don't care about the companions beyond perks they give and mostly play it to create the ultimate settlements/skyscraper fortresses.
In Skyrim, no matter what race I pick, Dunmer, Redguard, Breton (though fuck being a High Elf) my character is always male, since I enjoy the story and quests and even the Harthfire marriage and kids aspect of it.
I started applying this to older games with player created characters, was ALWAYS a Male Shep in ME, ALWAYS Male in Fallout NV and 3, was always male in Dragon Age EXCEPT DA inquisition but that also dropped massively in writing quality.
Maybe I'm over thinking it, but I'm wondering if subconsciously this 'type 1/2' bs is also indicating how shit the writing and world building is since as players, the more invested we are in the world, the more we want to create a character like us in the game to play as including gender, just at peak performance lol.
Similar journey here. I used to be some white male fantasy-spinoff version of myself all the time in customisable games. It definitely was a function of how invested I wanted to get in the world of the game. The woke culture warriors love to latch onto this as an example of how representation matters, except that those games also always allowed you to create women and blacks. In that era I had no problem playing as a fixed character that might be a black man (TWD) or a woman (as recently as Thronebreaker, 2018), in a story-centric game.
In the past few years I've pretty much written off the storytelling potential of newer games, so my investment on that level is zero. So in Nioh 2 recently I just made some redhaired, white woman eye candy, rather than a character with a more plausible aesthetic, as I would have done before. She functions just fine for the stilted cutscenes and text dumps of that non-story. Hand in hand with that, I now steer more or less totally clear of any game with a female or negro fixed MC, because I have no interest in propaganda which hates me.
I’m fully non-buynary these days. I straight up won’t buy games with unsexualized female protagonists or non-white/gay protagonists. Firstly, because this strategy is the only way to guarantee that my media isn’t leftist trash. Secondly, because I want to contribute to the lack of sales that might eventually result in either a return to sanity or an industry collapse. I prefer oblivion to gay black communism.