Warhorse called its system, “the ultimate character customization tool ever invented,” and added that your gear will get bloody and dirty as you slog your way through battles, and that many parameters of an avatar’s body can be altered.
That’s a pretty hefty claim to make along with the total exclusion of women and people of color.
It's a lot easier to make a detailed system for only one kind of body type than it is to make the same detailed system for a lot of body types.
Also, iirc, they said they were out to tell a very specific story about a guy who... I forget the details. But yeah, it's a specific story, so it's not really crazy that they'd put a playable female character after the stuff that would help them polish off that story. You can't just go "oh yeah, now the player's a girl!" I think they want to make that story they want to tell the best it can be, and THEN they'll look for other options.
I'm sitting here writing a video game right now. The protagonist is a girl. She
has to be a girl, because that's who she is in my head. I'm being even less flexible than Warhorse is; I won't allow any kind of gender swapping. The protagonist is female and that's final.
I think it's important to respect the work of the artist. If the artist wants to tell a story about a white male, cool, go for it. I, as an artist, have stories about white males, white females, an Indian guy, and a ton of other people I'm pretty consistently developing. I think if I started getting pressured to make the Indian guy a white dude, or make the girl a guy in my other project, I'd get angry, just like if someone told me that my white dude should be someone else.
Social Justice nonsense is social justice nonsense. Back when Fellini made La Strada, a bunch of social justice people got really mad at him, because Fellini, one of the foremost Neo-realist directors, had made this intensely personal film. Neo-realism, according to these social justice guys, was supposed to be about society, about criticizing its flaws and stuff. Instead, Fellini had made this incredibly beautiful film about how a man took advantage of and destroyed a woman--and I realize that sounds horrible, but the film is about how our actions affect other people. It says that destroying other people is ultimately destroying yourself. It's marvelous. There are stories of people who'd abandoned their families returning home after seeing the film. For all the power and beauty of La Strada, the only thing these stupid critics could see was that it wasn't doing the thing they wanted it to do. Never mind that it changed lives, made people better--it wasn't about society, and so it was bad. And they hammered it. This film went on to basically codify "Best forein language film" at the Oscars, though, and Fellini went on to make some of the best films of all time.
People who try to tell artists what they should say aren't people worth listening to, because they're so often wrong, or missing the point. Art should be good, but arguing for social justice is so often just nonsense from people who won't make their own art.
I really, really believe strongly in the integrity of the artist's vision, if that wasn't obvious.
