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Genderless/Ambiguously Gendered Characters

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NauticalSomnambulant
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Genderless/Ambiguously Gendered Characters

Ok, so one of the things that really annoyed me about the CoH series was how crazily it approached gender rigs. Everyone had to look like a caricature of a MAN or of a WOMAN from like, the 1950s! It was horrible. Even the robots and aliens had to have mammal sex characteristics, because that was how the rigs were built! And if you wanted to create a character and had to use a male or female rig, even if your character wasn't male or female (like mine frequently weren't) they still got called male or female because the gender title system that NPCs used to talk to you was fiercely binary and was based on the physical rig you used! How messed up is that?!

The recently released game "Sunless Sea" is notable for its (unfortunately at this point still quite novel) section of the character creator, where, independently of the sections where the player decided the character's appearance, backstory, abilities, etc, the player could select the form of address (Sir, Madam, Citizen, Captain, My Lord, My Lady, etc.) by which their character was referred. This step of separating the character's form of address from their physical appearance is commendable, certainly, and I definitely hope to see it in some form or another in this game, since it is not particularly difficult to implement and would make things so much less a bother.

There is also the problem of rigs, however. They make construction of character bodies much easier for everyone, but they do tend to need things to snap to one thing or another. Of course, in an ideal game, there would be no special preset rigs at all. Everything would be sliders, of varying sensitivity and function. Here, due to budget restraints, this likely cannot be. Even the addition of a third androgynous rig, displaying no secondary sexual characteristics of any kind, nor any bone structure that might lead one to believe it was one or the other, which would be the ideal solution in a rigged creation system, would likely be taxing on the time and resources of the creators.

Perhaps, then, the opportunity to use the sliders already planned to be implemented to a fuller extent than most games. In City of Heroes, most of you probably remember, the female rigs had a chest slider. What would be so difficult about adjusting the range of that slider so that one might eliminate the mammaries of a given character model completely, or to adjust shoulders and waist to proportions that do not suggest a stereotypically gendered appearance?

There are many paths one might take to allow for the existence of Genderless/Ambiguously Gendered Characters in the game, and allowing them to exist opens a variety of character creation options that otherwise would be difficult or require cutting corners! Like non-humans! Like spirits or plant creatures or aliens who have no reason to have mammalian secondary sexual characteristics! Like, you know, actual people! Who don't usually look like insane caricatures of people from 1950s pop art! Androgynous people, like myself! ;D

The crazy gender-binarism was just something that really annoyed me about the CoH series, and I hope that this is a fairly compelling argument, and that if you hand't thought about this previously, you're darn well thinking about it now!! :D

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Foradain
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Welcome aboard, Nautical

Welcome aboard, Nautical Somnambulant!

If you go back in the Update Archives, to around the end of the Kickstarter, you may find pictures of Andy. They may cheer you up. ^_^

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Nyktos
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I would assume you would have

I would assume you would have more of a variety of bodytypes in this game so you could have a hero, vigilante, or an villain with an androgynous body in City of Titans in comparison to City of Heroes, Champions, and DC Universe. I personally just like more options then hourglass as I am apparently one of the few guys at my age (I am 17) to not care about big boobs and an thin frame to qualify in the attractiveness department. One of my favorite races to customize in any MMO was the Sylvari from Guild Wars 2 as you could make both the men and women look attractive with a variation of bodytypes (You could make both genders look very androgynous and attractive at the same time)

Welcome to the forums by the way. I shall welcome you to the Newblood Club .

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NauticalSomnambulant
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Oh man, you're totally right!

Oh man, you're totally right! I just went back and saw the Genders thread in the suggestions forum, checked out the Andy model, and suchlike, and it all sounds totally awesome!!! You all seem so thoughtful about this! It's great! I suppose really the only thing this thread would then have to offer is the renewed discussion of pronoun selection, especially now that we have something in the same medium that does it to compare to and work with/against, but even that seemed fairly well covered in other threads. It's always something important to consider, though!

Also, I totally forgot to introduce myself! Hahahah!
I'm Nautical Somnambulant, but you can call me Nautical, because Somnambulant is a very long word to type! I had like 50 alts in CoH but my main, and the one for which I would be known if anybody knew me at all, was my Plants/Electric Dominator "Guardian of the Lost." Basically a monastic lorekeeper of the primordial persuasion. Big horned helm. Yggdrasil chest tattoo. Maybe you know me? I was on Union, mostly red-side, but, well, I was a rogue, so I wandered around blue-side a little too! Just for reference: Age-wise, I'm a young adult. Gender wise: I'm non-binary, and use They/Them pronouns!

It's awesome to watch the development of this game continue to progress, and I'll try to provide helpful input and suggestions whenever it is relevant!! :D

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Nyktos
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There is a great deal of

There is a great deal of friendly people around here so you should be fine. The only questionable people I see had no avatars and didn't post very much.

And yeah I don't think age matters. I'd only be slightly surprised if there is any other teenagers or young adults on here as I have heard of families playing City of Heroes (I was in a supergroup with one way back in the day). I really doubt there will be many people around here to take issue over something like that.

Formerly known as Bleddyn

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Lutan
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We all love variety and

We all love variety and choices, the more flexibility in character creation we can get, the better. Maybe this love for variety is the reason this forum is so friendly. I like to think so. So welcome, NauticalSomnambulant. Helpful input and suggestions are always good, we can not have enough of them.

TTheDDoctor
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Huh, I always found that

Huh, I always found that rigging androgynous characters was quite easy. You can take a male rig, lower the physique, set the shoulder width as low as possible, and widen the hips in order to get a reasonable character. Likewise, using a poorly-endowed female avatar with broad shoulders and narrow hips also seemed to work in some cases.

However, I can see what you mean when some secondary sexual characteristics just refuse to go away. That tends to be quite a nuisance. I suppose that being able to slide the secondary characteristics to "zero" would be our best bet if we were going for androgynous looks, along with the aforementioned pronoun customization. It would certainly make for a much more exotic game and bring out what people really are inside when making self-inserts, so I'm in support of it.

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Kiyori Anoyui
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Hiya Nautical Somnambulant

Hiya Nautical Somnambulant(copy and paste does wonders :p) I also couldn't imagine it being very difficult to create androgynous characters. In other threads many people are talking about the use of more sliders then rigs so hopefully that will be the case in CoT.

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Lothic
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I believe the idea that games

I believe the idea that games MUST have dedicated male and female body models is a temporary limitation of the current state of graphics technology that'll eventually be relegated to the dustbin of history at some point in the not too distant future.

It's not that games like CoH or CoT technically want to deal with two strictly separate gender models and all the headaches that come with handling two completely different sets of costume items that only work with one or the other. The main problem all along has been a matter of graphics processing power and the efficient use of polygons to render extreme differences in possible human body detail. In simple terms it has just always been easier from a software/hardware point of view to have separate male and female models. For instance the limited polygons used to render a female's larger breasts can be repurposed to render a male's larger arms/shoulders. Everything is compromise when you can't have it all in one universal model.

But as we all know computer technology is getting better all the time. Every year companies produce new GPUs that are many multiple times faster than the ones from the year before. What this means is that we are fast approaching the point where you can efficiently generate a single universal human body model that contains enough polygon detail that it can all by itself represent the entire range of both traditional male and female body shapes. Once that happens we'll be able to have a single body model that can be (through the strategic use of sliders) morphed all the way from Incredible Hulk to Tinkerbell and anything in-between. When that finally becomes practical to implement we'll truly have "androgynous" characters not to mention a huge simplification in costuming. When you only need one set of costume items to fit one single body model the line between "female clothes" and "male clothes" vanishes.

Unfortunately for CoT we didn't quite make it to the "Holy Grail" of a single body model. The Devs apparently did try to work with a single "Andy" model but as I understand it they were not able to make it work quite as well as they wanted it too. This means CoT will have dedicated male and female models. The good news is that the full range of possibilities for CoT should be far more flexible than CoH allowed for. As AAlbusUUmbra and Kiyori Anoyui mentioned being able to "feminize" the male model and/or "masculinize" the female model should be much more possible than ever before. The Devs have also made the point that they will try to keep the costume item sets between the two models as equal as possible to keep the occurrence of male/female only items to an absolute minimum.

TL;DR version: CoT should represent a decent step towards the ideal of blurring the lines between the genders. It won't be perfect, but if we're lucky it'll be one of the closest attempts to make a game "gender neutral" at least as far as the body models go.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Well said Lothic!

Well said Lothic!

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