Gender Reassignment

[ViralNihility]

It's easy. It's simple. It's time. 
 

Let me change my character gender, thank you.

[TonyTricicolo]

I don't think it's easy or simple due to coding. Someone smarter than me can explain how. I'd give ya a like but apparently there is a daily limit. 

[xordevoreaux]

Sure would be fun to start to romance Corso as a guy! Start off a s a female character, unlock the romance, flip to male.

Edited January 14, 2023 by xordevoreaux

[turbomagnus]

I can't explain how - I leave the coding talk to others, they know that stuff, I don't - but I can explain part of why.

There are factors that check gender - certain armor pieces, relationships, how some NPCs respond to the PC - and the flags for those get set at character creation. Changing gender would require the game to flip all of those flags, which would partially result in it having Loth-kittens trying to sort everything out.

 

Example; Smuggler. Starts female, flirts with Corso, setting relationship flags all throughout. If, suddenly around the start of Smuggler Chapter 2, they could become male, then the game has to deal with all of those Corso flags being set, but none being properly set for Risha.

Edited January 14, 2023 by turbomagnus

[xordevoreaux]

Gender re-alignment is a thing in Everquest 2 as a token on their equivalent of the cartel market. Difference: no romance quests / storylines.

[Ominovin]

Back when I was still paying attention to WoW, there was a post in their forums where the developers explained that the reason characters were 'stuck' with the same 16 slot backpack that a vanilla starting character got was that this bag was actually hard-coded into the foundation of the game and changing it without breaking anything else would have been prohibitively difficult, so they just made bigger bags available for the character's other four 'bag' slots instead, creating a 'looks kinda weird, but gets the job done' situation.

I'm assuming 'gender reassignment' is a similar issue:  The game was just not coded with this in mind (maybe they never thought of it, or maybe they just ignored it in a rush to actually finish the game), so actually implementing such an option is probably much more difficult than you would think (for example, do you lose affection earned from prior flirts that are no longer an option for you?  Do you somehow get to re-do conversations you already had that now have flirt options for you? Can you now romance every romance-able companion by repeatedly changing your gender?) ...

The final thing, of course, is the eternal question:  Will investing the necessary resources to implement this option actually provide a decent return for Bioware/EA?  Offhand, I'm guessing the demand just isn't high enough to justify the expense...

[ViralNihility]

3 hours ago, xordevoreaux said:

Gender re-alignment is a thing in Everquest 2 as a token on their equivalent of the cartel market. Difference: no romance quests / storylines.

I wasn't ever a fan. Everquest until Planes of Power.

[ViralNihility]

38 minutes ago, Ominovin said:

Back when I was still paying attention to WoW, there was a post in their forums where the developers explained that the reason characters were 'stuck' with the same 16 slot backpack that a vanilla starting character got was that this bag was actually hard-coded into the foundation of the game and changing it without breaking anything else would have been prohibitively difficult, so they just made bigger bags available for the character's other four 'bag' slots instead, creating a 'looks kinda weird, but gets the job done' situation.

I'm assuming 'gender reassignment' is a similar issue:  The game was just not coded with this in mind (maybe they never thought of it, or maybe they just ignored it in a rush to actually finish the game), so actually implementing such an option is probably much more difficult than you would think (for example, do you lose affection earned from prior flirts that are no longer an option for you?  Do you somehow get to re-do conversations you already had that now have flirt options for you? Can you now romance every romance-able companion by repeatedly changing your gender?) ...

The final thing, of course, is the eternal question:  Will investing the necessary resources to implement this option actually provide a decent return for Bioware/EA?  Offhand, I'm guessing the demand just isn't high enough to justify the expense...

It isn't in demand because the solution is to simply reroll a character. Allowing players to bypass this would result in higher monetary gain.

[turbomagnus]

33 minutes ago, ViralNihility said:

It isn't in demand because the solution is to simply reroll a character. Allowing players to bypass this would result in higher monetary gain.

That depends on which they think might earn them more money; Gender Tokens or Character Slots.

[Ominovin]

1 hour ago, ViralNihility said:

It isn't in demand because the solution is to simply reroll a character. Allowing players to bypass this would result in higher monetary gain.

I kinda doubt there are that many players who are willing to spend real money to reassign the gender of their character:  You'd probably need hundreds or thousands of sales (not including the use of any 'free' cartel coins) to justify the implementation expense since everything would need to be heavily tested, and most potential customers would just create a new character instead (most players probably aren't out of character slots).

Compare this idea to new species options:

1. Species seem mechanically simpler to implement (they require new graphics but don't otherwise interact with the game code, so clipping should be your worst issue to troubleshoot).
2. Species probably sell better than a gender reassignment option as they is no other way to play that species.
3. We've only seen three new species added to the game over 11 years, which kinda indicates they aren't viewed as particularly profitable.
   1. It might just be they are largely purchased by players like me who never actually buy cartel coins and therefore don't actually 'earn' any actual money.  Coins for subscriber or Galactic Seasons rewards make it really difficult to tell if an item is actually making money for Bioware (Technically speaking, Bioware only cares how many coins you purchase and not what you spend them on, so the profitability analysis has to be something along the lines of 'are coin sales higher than we expected after we rolled out this new item?')
   2. The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to determine if an item actually earned Bioware any money:  Even if you bought the item with coins you previously purchased, Bioware doesn't actually 'make' any money on that sale until you purchase more coins to refill your account...

Maybe there is a bigger market for this than I think, but I'm guessing Bioware doesn't see this as a profitable option (or they just don't have the resources to do it even if it were profitable)...

 

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

Not that I really care, I mean, that's fine if ya wanna make that change an available option, but, this one is just a little bit weird.

It's like, okay, I've been playing this character for a while now, but, I think the natural character progression here is I wanna start wearing bras.

I really don't get it heh. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

Edited January 15, 2023 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[SteveTheCynic]

20 hours ago, ViralNihility said:

It's easy. It's simple. It's time.

It's highly unlikely to be either easy or simple.  "It's time," is a highly subjective judgment (opinion), so I won't debate it here.

The problem is that your character's sex(1) has a strong influence on the progression of various bits of story, especially as they made the romanceable-during-origin-story companions (e.g. Aric and Elara for Troopers; Kaliyo, Raina and Vector for Agents) all fixed-orientation.  They're all straight during the origin story, but what matters is that their orientation is *fixed*.  If Kaliyo, to cite a frequent example, had been made lesbian (goes only with female character) instead of straight(2) (goes only with male character), her orientation would still be fixed.

That means that none of the companion's dialogue that mentions the sex of the character has an alternative version that mentions the opposite sex.  I know for sure that Aric Jorgan mentions that the Trooperette is a woman (something about seeing/thinking about the *woman* inside the armour rather than the CO inside the armour).

So, what would happen if they implemented this suggestion *now*?

How would they handle the dialogue that depends on the character's sex?  Would they make all the (romanceable) companions playersexual?(3)  Would they just cancel the current romance, and disable the romance for the opposite player sex?  (If you switch from male to female after the conversation point where Corso is drunk and propositions the smugglerette, you can't access  the romance.)

Think about those things before blithely asserting that it would be easy and simple.

Oh, and think about this one as well: if they made the companions playersexual rather than straight, what about all the people, like a certain @SteveTheCynic that you might have heard of, who would have preferred to have their F!Trooper romance Elara?  What would BioWare tell them?

Alternatively, the *suggestion* is simple to desribe and easy to post, but it is neither simple nor easy to even decide what, as seen from the outside, to do, never mind how to develop it.

(1) There's a distinction that's sometimes made by certain pro-T+ folks in the LGBT+ debates, between "sex" (the body parts) and "gender" (the "I identify as" stuff).  I don't have a lot of time for those folks, but that one is a useful distinction.  I mention this because I think you're referring to *sex* change, since the character's *gender* (see above) is entirely up to you.  If you want to think that your character has gender dysphoria but is too proud to act on it (or too scared, or something else), go for it.

(2) Lots of people assert that she should be bisexual, romanceable by either a male or a female Agent.  I'm deliberately avoiding that debate.

(3) Making Doc go with a make JK seems ... off.  He's a classic lounge lizard, and his full first name should probably be Lawrence rather than Archibald.(4)

(4) Leisure Suit Larry - Wikipedia

[Traceguy]

Yeah, this isn't possible without wiping the player choices to a vanilla preset. Like when starting a boosted character.

And now you got a bunch of space barbies running around named John Doe.

[ViralNihility]

On 1/14/2023 at 9:37 PM, WayOfTheWarriorx said:

Not that I really care, I mean, that's fine if ya wanna make that change an available option, but, this one is just a little bit weird.

It's like, okay, I've been playing this character for a while now, but, I think the natural character progression here is I wanna start wearing bras.

I really don't get it heh. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

It's the other way around. I was trying to find ways to make my character look cooler and figured the outfit I made would be better applied to a man.

Edited January 18, 2023 by ViralNihility