like we have to get all excited about being able to hear super spatialized raindrops but utilizing presets to handle a personâs gender expression is Too Much, apparently
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AAA is terrified of a review bomb from bigots fucking with their metacritic score.
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yeah I know you ordered a sandwich but throwing all the ingredients uncut onto a plate at random was just the easiest way to do it. Running a restaurant is hard, ok. What, do you not know how to cut ham yourself?
itâs not just game dev, iâve seriously had a client who refused to add more than 2 genders to their system and update things to not consider a family 1 man + 1 woman + 1-4 kids because it would be Too Hard
tech is rife with outright bigots but for every nazi thereâs 10 worthless coward centrists whoâve let capitalism replace their sense of empathy and care with a fucking excel spreadsheet. capitalism is poison to the heart and mind
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Yeah, to be clear, itâs absolutely worthwhile work, itâs just something that might actually have a fifteen-month runway to be implemented.
And I donât want to defend them but itâs worth keeping in mind how much US culture has changed in the last four years around this and how little they seem to understand basics about the US like, as noted, the way to write any reasonable non-white LA characters.
wtf i am legally required to love this now
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Regarding the cultural gap between the US and europe itâs probably also worth noting native language plays a role in shaping the approach to these things like you wouldnât believe.
For example, in french (and a quick lookup suggests polish works the same) we donât have the âtheyâ pronoun option for a singular person (closest we have is an âitâ but it is strictly used for abstract objects so no one wants to be called an it, obviously) and for that matter the plural âtheyâ is gendered so that means we just donât have a spoken or written equivalent and the very notion of a gender-neutral personal pronoun wonât pop in my mind unless Iâm specifically reminded of it by a non-binary they/them mention in someoneâs english writing.
So the thing here is itâs not just a LGBTQ+ thing, itâs an english LGBTQ+ thing and Cyberpunk is a game designed and written in polish, merely localized to english by a different team. That means the whole thingâs been hardwired for two pronouns (well, not even that, for two voices from the sound of it) from the beginning so itâs way too late to change without sizeably overhauling the code.
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WellâŠyes and no.
Youâre right: language does have an impact on how easy it is to convey gender beyond the binary. Spanish, to speak to the example I actually work with, not only presupposes binary biological gender, it also works it into the language in the form of a binary grammatical gender, which means that stuff like vidcons or music or hammers have gender, and that large parts of the grammatical structure are set to make use of that genderâarticles, most adjectives, and pronouns all must match the gender (and number) of what it is youâre talking about. A phrase like âThe angry beautiful rich enby was tired.â has precisely two words one word that would not be gendered in Spanish, along what would be, on paper, a binary divide.
That said, there are three things to consider here to consider. One, Spanish-speaking grammarians non-binary people, and others, have been working at this issue for a while: no normative resolutions have come forward, but there have been quite a few nonnormative ones, and some more-or-less-widely used ones as well, (Latinx). Two, translators have been dealing with stuff like thisâthink of all the various pronouns in Japanese, tied to things like respect, which donât have obvious English equivalentsâfor centuries. Itâs a complication; itâs not a new or insurmountable one. Three, all of this difficulty is largely one-sided: all of this means is thatâwith a few really interesting exceptionsâtranslating nonbinary concepts from English into a binary language like Spanish is much harder than what Cyberpunk 2077 is doing, which is translating all of that into English. That part is actually eminently doable, and if they canât find someone to do it, itâs most likely because they donât care.
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Oh yeah, Iâm convinced they donât care in the least. But thatâs the thing Iâm saying though, Iâm not arguing the language thing is making it hard to translate the game, Iâm saying it creates the blind spot that, among other things, makes them not care because the notion didnât make it all the way to them.
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dragons dogma does this for some of the other voice options but in effect it just puts your characters voice on a spectrum of chipmunk to voice sample in a vaporwave track
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yâall it ainât language limitations? cdpr had a social media guy tweeting shitty anti-trans memes a few months ago & another preview for this depicted a woman with a comically oversized dick bulge advertising an energy drink called âMANticoreâ.
theyâre doing this on purpose because theyâre reactionaries & regard trans folks as a joke at best
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And that shit was a year ago at E3. They had a dozen interviews in which the artist who drew the MANticore gave a fucken spinal tap âwhatâs wrong with being sexy?â line and at least Kotaku and Vice ran stories about how much it sucks.
If they wanted to course correct, they could have.
Different games, different scale, sure, but they know.
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AFAIK Watch Dogs Legion has it to be able to accomodate the high number of player characters, supposedly thereâs only like half a dozen voice sets that work as archetypes and whichever you get then has its pitch adjusted (also regarding something that was mentioned earlier this doesnât have to mess with lipsync, these days the algorithm to change pitch without affecting speed should be well within reach for realtime use and the chipmunk effect shouldnât be too noticeable as long as you stay within certain ranges).
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ableton live can v easily pitch shift vocals and keep timing, it shouldnât really be an issue for games
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AI-generated voice-recasting is something coming within five years and something we assume EA and Ubisoft are working on; pitch-shifting is considered appropriate for exertions but not for spoken dialogue.
As always, absurd fidelity bars are the killer.
An example: when Assassinâs Creed: Unity was pilloried for not supporting female characters and gave the excuse, âitâs really hardâ, Monolith responded with a female skin for Shadow of Morderin a few weeks â simple, it just played all the male Talion animations. But they were able to do that as a cheaper, scrappier game. When building the sequel, directors and artists made very clear that we would not be allowed to do that again. Instead, we would build a new set of animations replicating every Talion animation for our female skin. It cost close to a million dollars and shipped months after the game. The takeaway to those who control the budget? Fidelity bars will keep rising so weâll just need to add this as an expense and start working on it earlier.
Fidelity is destructive to creative and flexible works.
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as far as genders in localized languages go, on the project I last worked on we had the entire thing recorded and released in english before we did any localization, so this was supposedly the âdifficultâ scenario where we didnât plan for it, and all we ended up doing was asking our localization team to just translate the lines so that if a line had pronouns in it, it wouldnât in the localized language. this isnât ideal, obviously, but it turns out that the amount of times you actually need to use pronouns in a larger game isnât as big as you would think
they ended up translating the whole game into like six languages without using pronouns and it was fine? and itâs not great, again, but we werenât a studio with a ton of money when we did this and it was fine, I would imagine a much larger company with way more resources could handle this better. a lot of these âdifficultiesâ are self imposed and itâs frustrating because the bar for all of this is so low culturally but, as @BustedAstromech says, the bar for fidelity is absurdly high
especially considering most people are playing fortnite or roblox or minecraft or something like that
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How much work is a character creator generally?
I think a nice one is a relatively high return for time for some players, but I have no idea what work it entails. Destiny has had the same one since 2014 so it canât be totally trivial.
is the bar really that high tho? like who is actually complaining when a woman player characterâs animations arenât stereotypically feminine other than like, weird tradcaths on twitter
like dragonâs dogma handles this with an âintimidating â demureâ slider that affects your characterâs idle stance and animations, which is really what folks are talking about when they talk about âmaleâ vs. âfemaleâ animations. itâs just an imposition of gender stereotypes (men are strong, forward, & aggressive, women are reserved, fey & passive) on a particular body type.
these are limitations of thinking not of technology imo
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so having the ableton live model of pitch shifting is great when working on recorded stuff but itâs a lot tougher in real time when you donât actually know what pitch the player will prefer their voice at until they make that selection. and outside of doing some big VO re-bouncing at the preferred pitch after they make that selection, there isnât really a way to not do it in real time
that said, I doubt it would be expensive enough to not do? the main issue is asking the other teams to give audio a bigger CPU budget but at this point no one cares about audio enough to allow them to do more with more, most of the audio innovations in the last few years involve performance efficiency increases so we can do more with less (ambisonics, real time HRTF calculations, etc.)
this is exactly what I mean when I say that these difficulties are mostly self imposed - no one actually notices and the people who would both a. notice and b. decide to write a bad review about the game because a few of these are happening are people you donât want playing your game anyway
at some point the industry internalized an obsession with fidelity because reviewers and audiences were always responding to how âgoodâ games looked, but like, no one is even paying attention to things that closely anymore
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