I have a gripe, and I'm going to impose it on all of you.
About a year ago, I got Baldur's Gate 3. I was pretty excited, I loved the original 2 games ages and ages ago. I found myself very irritated with this one though, for two reasons. The biggest reason was that the character creation had gone out-of-the-tree gender ideologue. You get to choose your body shape (male or female physique), you gender identity (woman or man), and your pronouns (he, she, they) AND you also got to decide how big your breasts were and what facial hair you have, whether you had a vulva or a penis, and whether those genitals were bushy or clean-shaven. None of those choices were tied together. So you could make a female body shape with huge breasts, a dangling bushy dong, full beard, identify as a man, and use "they" pronouns. And you had to go through all of the creation phase, you couldn't just pick a default and roll with it. They were essentially forcing all of their players to buy in to transgender crap. The second, lesser reason, was that from very early on in the game the NPC interactions had a lot more flirting and sex-related content than I was interested in. I want to fight dragons and demons, I didn't pay for an interactive porn. I ended up abandoning the game entirely after maybe 10 hours, because it was just too pushy about it's porn-fueld childish fantasy, and that's not what I'm into.
Why do I bring this up now? Because Veilguard is this month's freebie game on PS5, and I've always been a huge fan of Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. They've been great games, with amazing stories and extremely well developed NPCs. But yeah. Similar approach to Baldur's Gate. Character creation involves body shape, pronouns, breast size, bulge size, and facial hair. DA & ME have always had NPC romance as a part of the story, but it's also always been 1) challenging to achieve though continued interactions and conversation to build an actual relationship and 2) PG-13. I think DA1 *might* have shown a boob at worst, in low light, and for one particular choice among several in the game - one that's not even available in all cases, if you made different choices prior to that point. But now I have to *deselect* nudity being shown in the game while also being force-fed the notion that humans are Mr. Potato Head with plug and play parts available in any combination you can imagine.
So... back to Elden Ring I go, where every character is pretty androgynous, and it doesn't matter anyway because you pretty much never really see your own character anyway. No porniness, no mix and match genitals. Just a vaguely male or female shaped body, with clothes that make it irrelevant as soon as you put them on.
