Identity Override within Video Games or how my custom woman character became a man in the sequel.
Identity Override within Video Games or how my custom woman character became a man in the sequel.
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This problem has annoyed me for a long time. I think the KotOR franchise is another good example of this. The one time they allowed the main character to be canonically female, it was only because they killed her off in a book.
I could never understand why Fallout 4 made the choice to give the female and male player characters different backstories when in every other Fallout game both protags had the same backstory.
Turning a custom protagonist into a white dude in the sequel has started to annoy me more and as time goes by. Even if I played a male character myself. Because I might have played as an elf or a dwarf or another fantasy race and the sequel turns them into a human man.
I hope we can get past “Man is the default, woman is tacked on” one day.
I liked that Dragon Age Inquisition lets you choose to import world history, including gender/race/class of your PCs, from the previous two games. It’s the only time I’ve seen something like that. IIRC, if you start a new game and don’t make any changes, the PC from one of the earlier games defaults to female and the other to male.
I don’t expect every sequel to get that in depth, but if they’re going to reference past installments it sure would be nice if they popped up a dialogue box during new game setup to ask “did you play (previous game) and do you want to set your previous character’s info?” So the pronouns would at least be right. I can’t imagine it would be any more involved than whatever toggle function sets the current PC pronouns to he or she. Or at the barest minimum, just use a gender neutral “they” and leave it at that.
i truly hope that if/when TES6 ever sees the light of day, the dragonborn will be referred to with gender neutral pronouns (obv assuming the game is set after the events of skyrim). i know it’s very popular to argue the dragonborn *has* to be a Nord and *has* to be a man, but dammit, if they can join every faction under the sun and pledge their soul to 90% of the daedric pantheon, what’s stopping them from being a khajiit or an orc?
The only thing I would bring up here is that the box art for Mass Effect 3 is reversible and has Femshep on one side. Still sucks that you have to reverse it yourself because the default is the male one though.
As much as I enjoyed its story, Pathfinder: Kingmaker had this problem in the game itself without even needing a sequel to override the player to be some generic white guy.
In the game there are “book events” that always have a hand drawn picture of whatever the event is about and your companion characters are pretty easy to pick out in those pictures. However there was always this generic knight looking guy who it took me a while to realize was supposed to be the player character.
Honestly given the incredibly diverse set of character customization you can do in Pathfinder I’m baffled they would bother doing that. Heck I even remember a man complaining about it since some generic knight dude didn’t match the ancient wizard he’d played as. Give the man his pointy wizard hat! (Actually maybe this is the only ethical use of AI I can think of, train it to match character customization in things like this or even player names in games with voiced dialogue and customizable characters.)
Honestly that game didn’t really respond to player customization as much as I’d hoped (I blame Baldur’s Gate 3 for my expectations in RPGs now). I was an inquisitor of Shelyn and there’s a companion whose entire arc revolves around Shelyn and it just… never comes up the entire time that she’s following a queen who worships Shelyn. The only two mentions I can remember in the entire game are during that companion and another’s “tell me about yourself” dialogue trees briefly mentioning it and that’s it.
Also the word “Kingmaker” but that’s an issue with language more than anything I think. Plus the game is based on the Pathfinder adventure book of the same name.
Reposting this article since it was removed for self-promotion. Understandable since those are the rules of the sub, but I think it deserves its own post!Â
Edit: u/Robin230592 is the original poster – I hope you don’t mind that I reposted your article. I think a good discussion was starting before it got removed.Â
This bothered me so much when playing the sequel to Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth that I just never bothered to beat it despite how much I loved the first game >~<
Thanks for sharing this and I appreciate the perspective as it’s something I’ve noticed as well being an older gamer. I instantly thought of Fallout and Mass Effect and it’s definitely something to be discussed and brought to a larger light.
Midnight suns was real as fuck for using the female protagonist for the boxart
I feel like on one hand, it makes sense that the developers have to pick a canonical identity for custom characters, when referencing them outside of the original game. For BG3 to reference the character from the previous games, they do need to come up with some kind of concrete character.
On the other hand the fact that this canonical character is pretty much always a white dude is a pretty clear sign of the bias here.
In theory they could find ways to incorporate saves from previous games to customize the character, but even that is often not practical. And what do we do if you don’t have a save for that character?
I think this is pretty much just a matter of representation at this point. If the canonical characterizations were diverse enough then it wouldn’t feel so much like deliberate exclusion.
I hate the existence of Abdel Adrian and crazy male white Revan. Both have no business being anywhere in media.
I liked, that Larian stayed vague in Baldurs Gate 3 and never referenced Gorions Ward as a specific race or gender. I don’t think, anyone likes Abdel, not even the straight white male fighter player.
Same with Revan: I was so pissed that my very kind hearted asian lady became that crazy male in SWTOR ( and some novels).
Yup, Revan will always be a woman to me, no matter what SWTOR does with the character
Thank you so much for reposting my article! I’m glad to see my points resonating with so many peeps! Also it’s nice to get such lovely comments after the horrid ones on r/gaming Thank you all so much!