Wait, the mod removed the option to set a gender in the character editor? Why don't these people just make a male character and be done with it?
Because it's not actually about the pronouns. These people aren't actually angry about pronouns.
They're angry about trans and non-binary people. They're angry that people are growing to accept these people, who they do not think should be accepted. They are angry that a group they don't think is normal, is being accepted as normal.
I don't think it's even about that, they're angry because the want to be angry. The why doesn't matter, if the current right wing outrage du-jour had been... I dunno, left handed people rather than trans people, you'd see all the same people working themselves into a screaming tantrum if a game or movie had a left handed person in it.
Oh no, it's very much hatred. The same hatred they had for black or gay people.
And the "replaced white people". And the female leaders. If someone wants a taste, go through the Steam forums for the game. It's a complete deranged mess.
Steam forums are the absolute bottom of the barrel for game discussion, maybe tied with 4chan.
They need to force their views on others. If anyone believes what they believe, then they are suddenly just like everyone else instead of the bigot they know they are deep down
They aren’t really forcing their views on anyone though, they’re just jacking themselves off. No nonconforming person is going to download this and inflict it on themselves, and they have no reason to use it themselves unless they’re just really closeted and lack the will to not express their own nonconformity. It can literally only exist to rile people up who sought out the mod specifically, which includes only them.
If they weren’t trying to force their views on others they’d just make their character a guy and move on. They go through the trouble of coding this mod to push their agenda on others.
What I'm trying to say though is that most of them just do make their character a guy and move on. They don't need the mod and the people who they think do need it aren't going to install it. It's not just a transparent attempt to ignite culture war arguments online, but it's a stupid and ineffective one.
The point of the mod is not to change something in game, its to appear in the list of mods and remind some people that they are hated and bigots will never stop hating them.
Apparently nexus mods has some sort of ad sharing with mod makers. Could be a grift. Grift is popular among right wingers, possibly because they are on a fundamental level stupid.
Some grifter makes an anti "woke" mod that probably took 5 minutes. A bunch of stupid chuds download it to pwn the libs. Grifter makes money. Chuds feel good about their shitty lives.
The crazy thing is how hysterical they're being over something you can fail to even notice is there. It gave me male pronouns as I choose the male body type, and the button prompt to change it is hidden way down at the bottom of the screen. It's literally on screen for a few seconds and then never mentioned again in a game with hundreds of hours gameplay.
To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:
Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called "Starfield".
They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
Nexus decided they don't want to host this mod. It's hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.
That's about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don't even play the game. They're just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they'd just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.
Most of the people whinging about censorship
To further add on that, to complain about censorship for a mod that LITERALLY censors the game.
In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn't want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there's some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.
The root issue is what's being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called "him" or "her" independent of their appearance. To people who won't use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they'll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.
They're whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they're against anyone else having that option.
They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.
This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else's yard.
I didnt even think about that lmao
I'll add that my understanding is that you aren't even prompted to choose a pronoun in-game -- it defaults to one or the other based on your character creation choices, and you can then change it if you want to. It's literally a non-issue.
Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.
You don't need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don't need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It's perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that's awful, fuck off.
"but you need to hear BOTH side of the arg-"
No we don't.
We already heard the terrible arguments for intolerance and don't need to rehash it over and over again in every new piece of media.
Yep. Some questions have a right answer. Next.
Yea don't even give these dinks the light of day, they'll instinctively slink back to Voat and enjoy their hate echo chamber
In this case the guys who are leaving are literally trying to make one side shut up.
This is all fine and well, but am I the only one a bit concerned about how NexusMods is practically a monopoly in the modding scene? Why does literally every modder have to use a rate-limiting host as a platform, especially when Github exists?
Well, for one thing, Nexus gives modders a share of ad revenue. Under a different name, I have a mod that's a backend requirement for a big, popular mod, and that nets me a reliable few bucks a month.
That said, a good portion of the modding community also exists on Gamebanana. If you want BotW, ToTK or Source engine mods, GB is the go-to.
Wait I have a stupid subscription to nexus and idk why I haven't canceled it (used it for one month for some mod back in the day). I use nexus for all mods. Should I keep my sub then because all I care about is modders getting something.
I bought lifetime premium years ago when it was still an option and have never once regretted it.
I mean, github does exist. It looks like people just prefer platforms with a pre-existing community.
Mods uploaded to github does really suck for discoverability though. There's the roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. The modding scene exists entirely on Github and you'd basically never find them unless you go searching for mods on their Discord channel.
Steam workshop exists as well, for games that support it.
That's even worse though. Plenty of games (e.g. Stellaris and RimWorld) are also available on platforms like GOG or, ugh, Epic. But if you want to use mods and you bought the game on any platform other than Steam it's fuck you.
Even if you buy Terraria off of steam, you can use steam mods. Sounds like a per-game problem, rather than a steam problem.
I know it is, developers can block downloads unless the user is signed into a Steam account that owns the game. But as an end-user that's distinction without difference.
https://steamworkshopdownloader.io/ never gotten this to work myself but I put the least amount of effort in as possible. There may be others as well but I remember when I did my research a couple years ago that it was a real trudge and almost not worth it.
There's also steam workshop. Neither are shining examples of a free modding community. I think nexus mods starting out better and slowly enshittified but I don't know the extent of it.
I think it's just the internet being the internet. Or at least how it's been for awhile. There are big sites that a lot of people crowd to and that becomes the default. Like auctioning things off online. Ebay. That was where everyone went to. Need to order a few different things online? Amazon. Are there other online stores? Plenty. But Amazon is seen as cheap and convenient.
Nexus mods is just the popular site, but the moders have other options.
We don't. My ultrawide mods get thousands of downloads and I haven't uploaded a single one to Nexus.
There's also the Thunder store!
That's kinda like saying PlanetMinecraft monopolized sharing world's, isn't it?
There's stuff like Curseforge, but it's only for some games, mostly Minecraft. The problem, if someone considers it a problem, is really that communities for games generally centralize around one site for their mods for the most part, and Nexus has garnered a lot of trust and therefore has more pull/inertia for communities working those things out.
As for Github, I believe the vast majority of mods have Github pages, but Github itself doesn't really have a UI suited for mod downloaders, and no real incentive to implement one. So sites like Nexus and Curseforge are still a necessity.
I believe modrinth will be expanding to be more than Minecraft mods iirc.
I was really hoping thunderstore and mod.io would take off more since they seem more platform-agnostic and FOSS-like with their integration with git and versioning (and for some games they have), but people just prefer convenience of nexusmods and steam workshop unfortunately. They just have a bigger community and better discoverability in the end
R2Modman and thunderstore.io has grown it's catalogue quite a bit as of late, but it's mostly (don't know if it's entirely or not) unity games. It's my favorite modding platform with features that make sharing modlists for multiplayer a breeze.
Considering their policy doesn't allow for other stuff like this, yeah I am not surprised.
Content that may be generally construed as provocative, divisive, objectionable, discriminatory, or abusive toward any real-world individual or group, may be subject to moderation. This includes but is not limited to content involving politics, race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, or social class. We tolerate content related to real world issues and events as long as the appropriate tag ("Real World Issues") is used and the content is handled in a tasteful, respectful, and non-inflammatory manner. Users who do not wish to see such content should make use of our content blocking feature.
Reminds me of the time when a Spiderman mod removed the VERY few instances of a pride flag in a recreation of NEW YORK CITY and a Skyrim mod that removed any potential gay romances that only occur when wearing a very specific amulet (including a single dead skeleton couple off the beaten path.)
Those got booted as well cause.....come on now. Its blatantly targeting a group of people about their sexuality and gender who have BARELY any presence to begin with in these games.
Starfield is even more egregious as its LITERALLY just a menu option and the rare use in dialogue....
Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform.
I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I'm more convinced it's projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. "If i can't have that, you sure as hell can't--and if you do, you're gonna pay dearly" seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided...or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
It's only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I've always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What's true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren't right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn't belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they're doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
The thing is it's only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they're making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it's not that they're angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They're angry that Bethesda didn't put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they're just generally triggered over the word "pronoun." Triggered by words that describe words. There's something very wrong with these people.
Whenever you hear a conservative complaining about anything at all, it's always projection/admission or both.
"They're rigging the elections,"
"They're gonna riot if Biden doesn't win,"
"They're running pedophile rings under their favorite pizza parlor,"
I could go on.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts and status. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it's a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens next. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We've seen this happen for ages.
Does anyone even install these mods or do they just exist for people to get outraged at?
I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.
There's some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.
More's the pity...
option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage
Yeah I was there when BATTLETECH (still dunno why its name has to be so LOUD :P ) launched. Every hatefool was raging about it, apropos of anything or nothing. Try to talk about any part of it and it's "OH YOU MEAN FUCKING PRONOUNWARRIOR?!?!" and a bunch of incoherent senseless bile. There's a sizeable group of people who deeply love being offended, and it's not us (queerfolk/LGBTQIA+/QUILTBAG/GSM/whatever). Like, I'm neck-deep in queer over here and every time I play a game with a pronoun selector at the beginning I promptly forget about it but oohhhh nooo, not these bellends. They somehow think a button at the beginning of the game that matters like three times ever has entirely DESTROYED videogames with LIES and FALLACIES 🙄
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else (say, going to MWLL/other games, ranting about "pronounwarrior," pretty sure some critters got teamkilled over it...) for no good reason.
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else
My opinion exactly.
In ways, I actually feel sorry for them. In the first place, it has to suck just to be that angry and spiteful, but underneath that, it must really suck to feel so powerless and desperate and insecure that something as trivial and irrelevant as pronouns can send you into a compensatory rage.
My pity is greatly diminished by the fact that they're toxic assholes who try to force the world to accommodate their own failures though.
Wait, Battletech? The turn based one? From 2018?
That's amusing. I played that a couple months ago. I don't recall ever selecting a pronoun, but I'm sure I did and then just moved on like a normal person.
I've seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can't imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.
As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a "fix"? I think that number is pretty small.
But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.
I think that number's pretty small too.
I'm just saying that it's not zero.
Small government alpha males scared of having the option to choose he/him as their pronouns
How are these people not seeing that they are actively trying to censor shit with the shyte excuse "keep politics out of my games", and then turn around and yell censorship as soon as people ignore their bigoted crap.
Nowadays everything seems newsworthy... I would not be mad about it if Bethesda did not include a pronoun setting, i am not mad someone made a mod to remove said option, i am not mad nexus keeping its sovereignty to decide what they host...
What is everyone mad about? Just let ppl do whatever they do.
They finally give you something that controls how people refer to you in their games, and dipshits wanna remove it? This is as close as you're going to get to having characters refer to you as a choice you've taken other than Codsworth and Vasco having like 1000 generic names recorded to use.
Does it even affect dialogue? The PC is hardly ever referred to with pronouns, actually I can't remember a single line.
I believe it changes enemy barks like "He/She/They shot him!" and maybe a few dialogue lines?
Heh, I like how the enemies are considerate enough to figure out and use the correct pronouns mid-battle
Hey, you! What are your pronouns? ... Thanks, now eat lead!
I might be a paid killer, but I'll be damned if I'll misgender someone. Professionals have standards.
They definitely use your pronouns a lot. It's all they refer to you as, aside from cute nicknames like "Dusty," or "rook" or "renegade." Probably doesn't stand out if you chose your normal pronouns, since they'd just be say he/him or she/her or they/them.
We can't be far from text-to-speech tweaking a ton of voice acting. Might have to pronounce or IPA your custom name, to get an AI voice to nail it... but maybe it's better-off being wrong. There's disarming verisimilitude in schmaltzy NPCs confidently fumbling your character's name. Or if some characters heard it, but haven't seen it, and you catch some mutter 'so that's how it's spelled.'
Whether that name is Paarthurnax, Heloise, or Ng.
I am just picturing the orc noble who uses words incorrectly/mispronounces shit. Forgot what those are called, but they have similar characters in most of their games. In Starfield, they even called him "Dumbrosky." Dumb Bro ski.
This is a big deal because it's a Bethesda RPG so you are going to spend 76% of the time in the character creation screen.
Basically one of the only reasons I played Bethesda games LMAO
I used to have a lot of respect for Az from HeelVsBabyface as a content creator back when he did WoW videos. Many of the fanboys who play Blizzard games dismissed him as a whiny bitch when he complained about issues with the game long before other more respected creators (i.e. Bellular, Asmongold, Sodapoppin, Preach) jumped on the very same 'fuck Blizzard' bandwagon.
Watched him a lot less after he branched away from WoW stuff because his content was more anti-woke and not really of my interest.
His two minute anti-pronoun rant made him look like a clown and was the last straw that made me unsub to his YouTube and unfollow him on X.
What people like Az seem to forget is that Starfield is set hundreds of years in the future. I can understand why a pronoun selection menu would look out of place in a medieval setting like The Elder Scrolls, but not in a game set 300 years in the future.
Also, nobody is forcing you to play as a trans or non-binary character. This is not discrimination against white men as Az pointed out in his nonsensical rant. You can make a white male character that identifies with he/him pronouns and not be placed at a disadvantage in the game.
Yea, if you create a male looking caracter it will even default to he/him, that rant is just reducles and silly af!
His two minute anti-pronoun rant made him look like a clown and was the last straw that made me unsub to his YouTube and unfollow him on X.
Part of me wants to have a "NO PRONOUNS" option. Just replace all uses of he/she/they/you/etc with the characters name, no matter how awkward that makes it read. Give Az exactly what Az wishes for.
No one will ever refer to Az by a pronoun again, Az will simply be Az regardless of if referring to Az in that fashion sounds weird as fuck and not like the way anyone would ever actually talk. But then Az will have to find another issue for Az to complain about, likely that other people are allowed to play as they see fit, even though Az is also allowed to play as Az sees fit.
Nexus Mods has had some controversy in the past but they seem generally solid.
I can get behind the whole: "i'm playing games to escape from the world, stop dragging the real world politics into games" sentiment, but!
I made a trans character in cyberpunk because haha look a penis and boobies, Apparently Diego is now in a gay relationship with Sam...something about Sam and Cora (i find them adoreable, i'm just sad i can't give her all the books i steal) made me prefer them and...well i'm gay it seems lol.
Even more layers to roleplaying yay.
Gender identity is only political because conservatives made it political. Choice of pronouns shouldn't be political. What gender you are shouldn't be political. These people make it political and then it has to be removed from apolitical discussions. Just like how climate change has been made political, it's not, we're all going to fucking die, that's not political.
I'm finding it very difficult to phrase this comment. I want to share my thoughts, but I know that if I am perceived as a bigot, everything I say will be seen as something to be defeated rather than understood. But tiptoeing around the subject doesn't convey my meaning any better. So please, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to hear me out.
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
Nexus has considerable influence. For many games, particularly Bethesda games, they are seen as the default and complete source of mods. When looking for new mods to install, most people wouldn't bother checking other sites since everything is on nexus. If players aren't aware a mod exists, in other words they are unaware an option exists, that hinders them from making that choice. Also, their vortex mod manager makes installing mods from nexus super simple. By removing the mod from their site, they are making installing the mod at least a little bit more difficult.
I have seen multiple people posit here that removing the mod is fine because it does something so silly and pointless that no one should care about it. But we all care about silly, pointless things from time to time. I have spent days comparing all of the ways of getting unified GTK and QT themes on my desktop to try and get them just right. That was entirely pointless. But I wanted it that way, so I made it that way. I don't have to justify it to anyone, and neither do the users of this mod. Installing the mod will only affect their game, no one else even has to know about it. Nexus' decision does effect other people. They do have to justify themselves. Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn't have bothered removing the mod.
People also claim that the political implications made by the mod are dangerous, and must be suppressed. I know you'll roll your eyes at me, but yes: I'm making the free speech argument. It really is important though. If we, as a society and as individuals, accept suppressing speech for it's ideological contents, then we are begging the question: which ideas are ok, and which aren't? The ability to control public discourse is powerful, and highly coveted by anyone who wants to bend society to their will. It has been done before, and we know how horrible the consequences can be. It is incredibly dangerous. Answering that question at all is only justifiable in the face of a comparable danger. Is the idea of not being asked one's pronouns really a comparable danger? Nexus seems to think so.
Of course, free speech also protects Nexus' right to control what they put on their platform. I am not saying they shouldn't have that right. But nexus is a platform, not a person. They position their site not as a place for them to share their own content, but for others to share theirs. Any modification to the contents of their site is a modification to other people's speech, not just Nexus's. They ought to use their capability in this regard responsibly and sparingly. Their actions here are neither.
I thought that others here on Lemmy believed in the same principles I do. That people should have total control over their own software and activities with it. That neither corporations nor governments should take any action to unduly control what they do with their own property. The belief in FOSS and decentralization seemed to go hand in hand with that. But if something like this can make you all turn on those principles, then maybe the resemblance wasn't even skin deep.
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
I don't think you're a bigot, but I also think you're off the mark.
First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don't care about during character creation, it really isn't hard. It's hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.
That alone though isn't a reason to remove the mod -- Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.
Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn’t have bothered removing the mod.
You don't have to select a pronoun. The default will match the phenotype of the body you select.
I am now totally confused as to what is even going on. After reading multiple top level comments, many responses and then reading the article (gasp I know... blasphemy) I can't tell if conservatives are mad about pronouns being an option or not being an option. Many of the comments made it sound like they added pronouns, the way the article is written makes it sound like they removed the ability to choose pronouns.
So which is it. Who is mad, and why exactly?
Edit: Okay, maybe I understand now. Someone created a mod that removed pronouns. The place that hosts mod downloads, removed that mod from their list of downloads. Now people are mad it was removed. Do I have that right? If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can't see their pronoun(s)?
Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don't touch that option, done.
From a developer's perspective it's dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk's free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you're planning for it from the start it's also easy.
Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don't have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it's again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it's hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it's easy.
If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can’t see their pronoun(s)?
It's a singleplayer game. Nothing you do can have any effect on the experience other people have with the game.
I think this is the reply that prompted me to reply at the top of the post. Does your edit mean I was of some help? You appear to have the right of it, yes.
As to your second question: what mod loadout a player has will have zero bearing on another's experience. If one were to use the mod, others would not be affected.
Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun.
No, it defaults to body type.
This option is literally nothing to people who don't care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We've had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don't need to endlessly litigate whether we've been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.
A website saying 'no thank you' to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That's what moderation... is. That's why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.
In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won't brick your computer, it's plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.
You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn't been erased from reality. It's just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.
And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don't want to deal with that shit. You can't make us, and still pretend you care about choice.
This mod is taking away a choice though.
I'm pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are. So choose that option and play the game.
Why should Nexus devote resources to a mod that removes options from a game? There's no point to this mod for anyone that's of sound mind. The only reason for it's existence is some petty bullshit from people that hate trans people so much they will install a mod in a feeble attempt to feel like they hurt people in some small way.
If the mod just totally skipped character creation and the goal was to just save time, I could see the purpose. But its clearly not there to save anyone time; its just there as an excuse to tirade against certain demographics for existing.
I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are.
If you're a hardcore heteronormie, congrats, the default behavior of the game conforms with your worldview. Simply choose a male or female body, and don't even touch the pronouns. They're automatically what they're "supposed" to be.
Everyone showing up late to go 'well I don't see why they removed it!' --
You are why.
Trolls escalate. They keep pushing until they get smacked down, then cry and scream and pretend they've been proven right. Being ignored doesn't just embolden them, it bores them, and tells them they need to get worse to get attention. No matter what happens - no matter what anyone says to them - they get to use it in their stupid little word game.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
You have to simply get rid of it, and the sooner, the better.
Tbh I don't even know why the option even exists. I have 2 days worth of playtime and not once does it go on about pronouns or anything like that. So to me the menu seems completely pointless. If i can recall i also don't think the NPCs have even referred to me as male or he/him. Maybe Bethesda added it last minute or something to try to appeal to a larger group of people idk. I'm just enjoying my spaceship man.
When you meet Sam & Cora they'll refer to you by your pronoun while they talk about you.
The whole thing is just to make the character generation non binary, that's it. I don't see why this is such a big deal for some people. I'm a cis male, I select a masculine body type and go with he / him, or maybe they / them, and be done with it. It does nothing but help others feel more included.
Ohhhh. Wow i never noticed that tbh. I was so focused on trying to win sarah over. Never met a more picky person in my life. Now she resides on europa because she bitches every time i steal or a innocent sounding dialog option makes her mad. Sam is cool every ounce and a while he says something about me stealing but it's not as annoying. I've yet to come across cora. I spend so much time in the ship builder.
I'm not super far in, but I have heard it. The first time I remember hearing it is in the opening act when Lin is telling Barrett about you. Also when Sam talks to the marshal about you in Akila City. I suppose there are only so many opportunities for other characters to talk about you while you're standing right there, but it does pop up, so it's nice to have the option for those moments.
Of course is Kotaku coming with a whole tempest in a teapot over this.
Kotaku is an absolute joke, but that's not new, they are the laughing stock of game journalism for a reason.
I don't see the big deal about the pronoun mods. You have to download and install it. Just don't download the mods.
It has no reason to exist besides being a middle finger to a queer minority.
This is a website deciding not to become a Nazi bar.
By the same token, I don't see a big deal about the pronoun choice. Just choose She/Her or He/Him. You don't have to choose They/Their.
Huh, just considering practicality, how many new characters would one have to create in order to save rather than waste downloading this? Given the time required to download, read, and set up, I’d guess somewhere in the range of 20-30 characters.
Speedrunners might download a mod to skip setup entirely, not a single option. Of the millions who purchased starfield, perhaps a few dozen might use this ergonomically. Neat.
Speedrunners might download a mod to skip setup entirely, not a single option.
I'm pretty sure that this would disqualify the run, unless it's specifically allowed in a particular category.
Practice mods are occasionally used if, say, there’s a tricky section 1.5 hours in. With route highlighting or landscape deemphasizing, if necessary. Speedrunning has slowed to a crawl in the last decade so that seems unlikely.
Just pick your pronouns when you create your character. These are people getting their panties in a twist because they are being reminded that other people can choose different pronouns.
These are people getting their panties in a twist because they are being reminded that other people can choose different pronouns.
That's nothing new. The vast majority of far-right reactionaries know exactly zero trans people. They're getting upset because a stranger, who exists entirely in their imagination, may have an opinion about their own body that the far-right have not approved as "okay to have".
Of course, there's probably deeper reasons that they won't say out loud. What if they accidentally find a "man" attractive? What if they have to treat a casual acquaintance with basic human decency?
Wait, the mod removed the option to set a gender in the character editor? Why don't these people just make a male character and be done with it?
Because it's not actually about the pronouns. These people aren't actually angry about pronouns.
They're angry about trans and non-binary people. They're angry that people are growing to accept these people, who they do not think should be accepted. They are angry that a group they don't think is normal, is being accepted as normal.
I don't think it's even about that, they're angry because the want to be angry. The why doesn't matter, if the current right wing outrage du-jour had been... I dunno, left handed people rather than trans people, you'd see all the same people working themselves into a screaming tantrum if a game or movie had a left handed person in it.
Oh no, it's very much hatred. The same hatred they had for black or gay people.
For sure. And when there’s not enough people focused on trans people they’ll shift their focus to some other marginalized group to harass.
These limp dicked losers have literally nothing better to do but jerk each other off in their seedy racist forums and message boards.
And the "replaced white people". And the female leaders. If someone wants a taste, go through the Steam forums for the game. It's a complete deranged mess.
Steam forums are the absolute bottom of the barrel for game discussion, maybe tied with 4chan.
They need to force their views on others. If anyone believes what they believe, then they are suddenly just like everyone else instead of the bigot they know they are deep down
They aren’t really forcing their views on anyone though, they’re just jacking themselves off. No nonconforming person is going to download this and inflict it on themselves, and they have no reason to use it themselves unless they’re just really closeted and lack the will to not express their own nonconformity. It can literally only exist to rile people up who sought out the mod specifically, which includes only them.
If they weren’t trying to force their views on others they’d just make their character a guy and move on. They go through the trouble of coding this mod to push their agenda on others.
What I'm trying to say though is that most of them just do make their character a guy and move on. They don't need the mod and the people who they think do need it aren't going to install it. It's not just a transparent attempt to ignite culture war arguments online, but it's a stupid and ineffective one.
The point of the mod is not to change something in game, its to appear in the list of mods and remind some people that they are hated and bigots will never stop hating them.
Its a weird "I was here, and I hated x people".
Apparently nexus mods has some sort of ad sharing with mod makers. Could be a grift. Grift is popular among right wingers, possibly because they are on a fundamental level stupid.
Some grifter makes an anti "woke" mod that probably took 5 minutes. A bunch of stupid chuds download it to pwn the libs. Grifter makes money. Chuds feel good about their shitty lives.
The crazy thing is how hysterical they're being over something you can fail to even notice is there. It gave me male pronouns as I choose the male body type, and the button prompt to change it is hidden way down at the bottom of the screen. It's literally on screen for a few seconds and then never mentioned again in a game with hundreds of hours gameplay.
Then they couldn't do their performative outrage, which is all they have.
Because REEEEEEEEE
Because they're little fucking babies.
To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:
That's about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don't even play the game. They're just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they'd just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.
To further add on that, to complain about censorship for a mod that LITERALLY censors the game.
In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn't want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there's some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.
The root issue is what's being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called "him" or "her" independent of their appearance. To people who won't use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they'll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.
They're whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they're against anyone else having that option.
They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.
This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else's yard.
I didnt even think about that lmao
I'll add that my understanding is that you aren't even prompted to choose a pronoun in-game -- it defaults to one or the other based on your character creation choices, and you can then change it if you want to. It's literally a non-issue.
Good for Nexus
Happy to continue using their services
Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.
You don't need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don't need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It's perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that's awful, fuck off.
"but you need to hear BOTH side of the arg-"
No we don't.
We already heard the terrible arguments for intolerance and don't need to rehash it over and over again in every new piece of media.
Yep. Some questions have a right answer. Next.
Yea don't even give these dinks the light of day, they'll instinctively slink back to Voat and enjoy their hate echo chamber
In this case the guys who are leaving are literally trying to make one side shut up.
This is all fine and well, but am I the only one a bit concerned about how NexusMods is practically a monopoly in the modding scene? Why does literally every modder have to use a rate-limiting host as a platform, especially when Github exists?
Well, for one thing, Nexus gives modders a share of ad revenue. Under a different name, I have a mod that's a backend requirement for a big, popular mod, and that nets me a reliable few bucks a month.
That said, a good portion of the modding community also exists on Gamebanana. If you want BotW, ToTK or Source engine mods, GB is the go-to.
Wait I have a stupid subscription to nexus and idk why I haven't canceled it (used it for one month for some mod back in the day). I use nexus for all mods. Should I keep my sub then because all I care about is modders getting something.
I bought lifetime premium years ago when it was still an option and have never once regretted it.
I mean, github does exist. It looks like people just prefer platforms with a pre-existing community.
Mods uploaded to github does really suck for discoverability though. There's the roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. The modding scene exists entirely on Github and you'd basically never find them unless you go searching for mods on their Discord channel.
Steam workshop exists as well, for games that support it.
That's even worse though. Plenty of games (e.g. Stellaris and RimWorld) are also available on platforms like GOG or, ugh, Epic. But if you want to use mods and you bought the game on any platform other than Steam it's fuck you.
Even if you buy Terraria off of steam, you can use steam mods. Sounds like a per-game problem, rather than a steam problem.
I know it is, developers can block downloads unless the user is signed into a Steam account that owns the game. But as an end-user that's distinction without difference.
https://steamworkshopdownloader.io/ never gotten this to work myself but I put the least amount of effort in as possible. There may be others as well but I remember when I did my research a couple years ago that it was a real trudge and almost not worth it.
That went so well until your proposed alternative was Microsoft.
At least github is easier than the shit that is nexusmods
Also there are alternatives
Gitlab.. sourceforge..
Ive downloaded a lot of mods from sourceforge over the years
I know what Microsoft's general reputation is, but it's undeniable that GitHub has only seen improvements since Microsoft acquired it.
There's also steam workshop. Neither are shining examples of a free modding community. I think nexus mods starting out better and slowly enshittified but I don't know the extent of it.
I think it's just the internet being the internet. Or at least how it's been for awhile. There are big sites that a lot of people crowd to and that becomes the default. Like auctioning things off online. Ebay. That was where everyone went to. Need to order a few different things online? Amazon. Are there other online stores? Plenty. But Amazon is seen as cheap and convenient.
Nexus mods is just the popular site, but the moders have other options.
We don't. My ultrawide mods get thousands of downloads and I haven't uploaded a single one to Nexus.
There's also the Thunder store!
That's kinda like saying PlanetMinecraft monopolized sharing world's, isn't it?
There's stuff like Curseforge, but it's only for some games, mostly Minecraft. The problem, if someone considers it a problem, is really that communities for games generally centralize around one site for their mods for the most part, and Nexus has garnered a lot of trust and therefore has more pull/inertia for communities working those things out.
As for Github, I believe the vast majority of mods have Github pages, but Github itself doesn't really have a UI suited for mod downloaders, and no real incentive to implement one. So sites like Nexus and Curseforge are still a necessity.
I believe modrinth will be expanding to be more than Minecraft mods iirc.
I was really hoping thunderstore and mod.io would take off more since they seem more platform-agnostic and FOSS-like with their integration with git and versioning (and for some games they have), but people just prefer convenience of nexusmods and steam workshop unfortunately. They just have a bigger community and better discoverability in the end
R2Modman and thunderstore.io has grown it's catalogue quite a bit as of late, but it's mostly (don't know if it's entirely or not) unity games. It's my favorite modding platform with features that make sharing modlists for multiplayer a breeze.
Considering their policy doesn't allow for other stuff like this, yeah I am not surprised.
Reminds me of the time when a Spiderman mod removed the VERY few instances of a pride flag in a recreation of NEW YORK CITY and a Skyrim mod that removed any potential gay romances that only occur when wearing a very specific amulet (including a single dead skeleton couple off the beaten path.)
Those got booted as well cause.....come on now. Its blatantly targeting a group of people about their sexuality and gender who have BARELY any presence to begin with in these games.
Starfield is even more egregious as its LITERALLY just a menu option and the rare use in dialogue....
Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform.
I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I'm more convinced it's projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. "If i can't have that, you sure as hell can't--and if you do, you're gonna pay dearly" seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided...or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
It's only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I've always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
You're overthinking it.
Conservatives don't believe things. Conservatives believe people.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What's true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren't right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn't belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they're doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
The thing is it's only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they're making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it's not that they're angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They're angry that Bethesda didn't put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they're just generally triggered over the word "pronoun." Triggered by words that describe words. There's something very wrong with these people.
Whenever you hear a conservative complaining about anything at all, it's always projection/admission or both.
"They're rigging the elections,"
"They're gonna riot if Biden doesn't win,"
"They're running pedophile rings under their favorite pizza parlor,"
I could go on.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts and status. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it's a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens next. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We've seen this happen for ages.
Does anyone even install these mods or do they just exist for people to get outraged at?
I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.
There's some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.
More's the pity...
Yeah I was there when BATTLETECH (still dunno why its name has to be so LOUD :P ) launched. Every hatefool was raging about it, apropos of anything or nothing. Try to talk about any part of it and it's "OH YOU MEAN FUCKING PRONOUNWARRIOR?!?!" and a bunch of incoherent senseless bile. There's a sizeable group of people who deeply love being offended, and it's not us (queerfolk/LGBTQIA+/QUILTBAG/GSM/whatever). Like, I'm neck-deep in queer over here and every time I play a game with a pronoun selector at the beginning I promptly forget about it but oohhhh nooo, not these bellends. They somehow think a button at the beginning of the game that matters like three times ever has entirely DESTROYED videogames with LIES and FALLACIES 🙄
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else (say, going to MWLL/other games, ranting about "pronounwarrior," pretty sure some critters got teamkilled over it...) for no good reason.
My opinion exactly.
In ways, I actually feel sorry for them. In the first place, it has to suck just to be that angry and spiteful, but underneath that, it must really suck to feel so powerless and desperate and insecure that something as trivial and irrelevant as pronouns can send you into a compensatory rage.
My pity is greatly diminished by the fact that they're toxic assholes who try to force the world to accommodate their own failures though.
Wait, Battletech? The turn based one? From 2018?
That's amusing. I played that a couple months ago. I don't recall ever selecting a pronoun, but I'm sure I did and then just moved on like a normal person.
I've seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can't imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.
As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a "fix"? I think that number is pretty small.
But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.
I think that number's pretty small too.
I'm just saying that it's not zero.
Small government alpha males scared of having the option to choose he/him as their pronouns
Mostly the outrage.
Are you sure about this picture? I'm sure that instead of nice cool looking ships most I make are just flying bricks or dicks.
Errrmmm, disks, I mean disks.
How are these people not seeing that they are actively trying to censor shit with the shyte excuse "keep politics out of my games", and then turn around and yell censorship as soon as people ignore their bigoted crap.
You don't need to answer, it's rhetorical.
Incredibly petty mod to make in the first place, so Nexus might as well be petty too and remove it.
Nowadays everything seems newsworthy... I would not be mad about it if Bethesda did not include a pronoun setting, i am not mad someone made a mod to remove said option, i am not mad nexus keeping its sovereignty to decide what they host...
What is everyone mad about? Just let ppl do whatever they do.
They finally give you something that controls how people refer to you in their games, and dipshits wanna remove it? This is as close as you're going to get to having characters refer to you as a choice you've taken other than Codsworth and Vasco having like 1000 generic names recorded to use.
Does it even affect dialogue? The PC is hardly ever referred to with pronouns, actually I can't remember a single line.
I believe it changes enemy barks like "He/She/They shot him!" and maybe a few dialogue lines?
Heh, I like how the enemies are considerate enough to figure out and use the correct pronouns mid-battle
Hey, you! What are your pronouns? ... Thanks, now eat lead!
I might be a paid killer, but I'll be damned if I'll misgender someone. Professionals have standards.
They definitely use your pronouns a lot. It's all they refer to you as, aside from cute nicknames like "Dusty," or "rook" or "renegade." Probably doesn't stand out if you chose your normal pronouns, since they'd just be say he/him or she/her or they/them.
We can't be far from text-to-speech tweaking a ton of voice acting. Might have to pronounce or IPA your custom name, to get an AI voice to nail it... but maybe it's better-off being wrong. There's disarming verisimilitude in schmaltzy NPCs confidently fumbling your character's name. Or if some characters heard it, but haven't seen it, and you catch some mutter 'so that's how it's spelled.'
Whether that name is Paarthurnax, Heloise, or Ng.
I am just picturing the orc noble who uses words incorrectly/mispronounces shit. Forgot what those are called, but they have similar characters in most of their games. In Starfield, they even called him "Dumbrosky." Dumb Bro ski.
Malapropisms.
Never was so much cared by so many about something so meaningless.
This is a big deal because it's a Bethesda RPG so you are going to spend 76% of the time in the character creation screen.
Basically one of the only reasons I played Bethesda games LMAO
I used to have a lot of respect for Az from HeelVsBabyface as a content creator back when he did WoW videos. Many of the fanboys who play Blizzard games dismissed him as a whiny bitch when he complained about issues with the game long before other more respected creators (i.e. Bellular, Asmongold, Sodapoppin, Preach) jumped on the very same 'fuck Blizzard' bandwagon.
Watched him a lot less after he branched away from WoW stuff because his content was more anti-woke and not really of my interest.
His two minute anti-pronoun rant made him look like a clown and was the last straw that made me unsub to his YouTube and unfollow him on X.
What people like Az seem to forget is that Starfield is set hundreds of years in the future. I can understand why a pronoun selection menu would look out of place in a medieval setting like The Elder Scrolls, but not in a game set 300 years in the future.
Also, nobody is forcing you to play as a trans or non-binary character. This is not discrimination against white men as Az pointed out in his nonsensical rant. You can make a white male character that identifies with he/him pronouns and not be placed at a disadvantage in the game.
Yea, if you create a male looking caracter it will even default to he/him, that rant is just reducles and silly af!
reducles -> ridiculous
Part of me wants to have a "NO PRONOUNS" option. Just replace all uses of he/she/they/you/etc with the characters name, no matter how awkward that makes it read. Give Az exactly what Az wishes for.
No one will ever refer to Az by a pronoun again, Az will simply be Az regardless of if referring to Az in that fashion sounds weird as fuck and not like the way anyone would ever actually talk. But then Az will have to find another issue for Az to complain about, likely that other people are allowed to play as they see fit, even though Az is also allowed to play as Az sees fit.
I'm fine with it too!
Nexus Mods has had some controversy in the past but they seem generally solid.
I can get behind the whole: "i'm playing games to escape from the world, stop dragging the real world politics into games" sentiment, but!
I made a trans character in cyberpunk because haha look a penis and boobies, Apparently Diego is now in a gay relationship with Sam...something about Sam and Cora (i find them adoreable, i'm just sad i can't give her all the books i steal) made me prefer them and...well i'm gay it seems lol.
Even more layers to roleplaying yay.
Gender identity is only political because conservatives made it political. Choice of pronouns shouldn't be political. What gender you are shouldn't be political. These people make it political and then it has to be removed from apolitical discussions. Just like how climate change has been made political, it's not, we're all going to fucking die, that's not political.
I'm finding it very difficult to phrase this comment. I want to share my thoughts, but I know that if I am perceived as a bigot, everything I say will be seen as something to be defeated rather than understood. But tiptoeing around the subject doesn't convey my meaning any better. So please, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to hear me out.
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
Nexus has considerable influence. For many games, particularly Bethesda games, they are seen as the default and complete source of mods. When looking for new mods to install, most people wouldn't bother checking other sites since everything is on nexus. If players aren't aware a mod exists, in other words they are unaware an option exists, that hinders them from making that choice. Also, their vortex mod manager makes installing mods from nexus super simple. By removing the mod from their site, they are making installing the mod at least a little bit more difficult.
I have seen multiple people posit here that removing the mod is fine because it does something so silly and pointless that no one should care about it. But we all care about silly, pointless things from time to time. I have spent days comparing all of the ways of getting unified GTK and QT themes on my desktop to try and get them just right. That was entirely pointless. But I wanted it that way, so I made it that way. I don't have to justify it to anyone, and neither do the users of this mod. Installing the mod will only affect their game, no one else even has to know about it. Nexus' decision does effect other people. They do have to justify themselves. Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn't have bothered removing the mod.
People also claim that the political implications made by the mod are dangerous, and must be suppressed. I know you'll roll your eyes at me, but yes: I'm making the free speech argument. It really is important though. If we, as a society and as individuals, accept suppressing speech for it's ideological contents, then we are begging the question: which ideas are ok, and which aren't? The ability to control public discourse is powerful, and highly coveted by anyone who wants to bend society to their will. It has been done before, and we know how horrible the consequences can be. It is incredibly dangerous. Answering that question at all is only justifiable in the face of a comparable danger. Is the idea of not being asked one's pronouns really a comparable danger? Nexus seems to think so.
Of course, free speech also protects Nexus' right to control what they put on their platform. I am not saying they shouldn't have that right. But nexus is a platform, not a person. They position their site not as a place for them to share their own content, but for others to share theirs. Any modification to the contents of their site is a modification to other people's speech, not just Nexus's. They ought to use their capability in this regard responsibly and sparingly. Their actions here are neither.
I thought that others here on Lemmy believed in the same principles I do. That people should have total control over their own software and activities with it. That neither corporations nor governments should take any action to unduly control what they do with their own property. The belief in FOSS and decentralization seemed to go hand in hand with that. But if something like this can make you all turn on those principles, then maybe the resemblance wasn't even skin deep.
I don't think you're a bigot, but I also think you're off the mark.
First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don't care about during character creation, it really isn't hard. It's hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.
That alone though isn't a reason to remove the mod -- Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.
Last, but not least, the curse of neutrality aka the Nazi bar thing.
Oh, EDIT:
You don't have to select a pronoun. The default will match the phenotype of the body you select.
I am now totally confused as to what is even going on. After reading multiple top level comments, many responses and then reading the article (gasp I know... blasphemy) I can't tell if conservatives are mad about pronouns being an option or not being an option. Many of the comments made it sound like they added pronouns, the way the article is written makes it sound like they removed the ability to choose pronouns.
So which is it. Who is mad, and why exactly?
Edit: Okay, maybe I understand now. Someone created a mod that removed pronouns. The place that hosts mod downloads, removed that mod from their list of downloads. Now people are mad it was removed. Do I have that right? If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can't see their pronoun(s)?
Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don't touch that option, done.
From a developer's perspective it's dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk's free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you're planning for it from the start it's also easy.
Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don't have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it's again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it's hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it's easy.
It's a singleplayer game. Nothing you do can have any effect on the experience other people have with the game.
I think this is the reply that prompted me to reply at the top of the post. Does your edit mean I was of some help? You appear to have the right of it, yes.
As to your second question: what mod loadout a player has will have zero bearing on another's experience. If one were to use the mod, others would not be affected.
Look up the paradox of tolerance.
No, it defaults to body type.
This option is literally nothing to people who don't care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We've had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don't need to endlessly litigate whether we've been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.
A website saying 'no thank you' to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That's what moderation... is. That's why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.
In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won't brick your computer, it's plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.
You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn't been erased from reality. It's just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.
And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don't want to deal with that shit. You can't make us, and still pretend you care about choice.
This mod is taking away a choice though.
I'm pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are. So choose that option and play the game.
Why should Nexus devote resources to a mod that removes options from a game? There's no point to this mod for anyone that's of sound mind. The only reason for it's existence is some petty bullshit from people that hate trans people so much they will install a mod in a feeble attempt to feel like they hurt people in some small way.
If the mod just totally skipped character creation and the goal was to just save time, I could see the purpose. But its clearly not there to save anyone time; its just there as an excuse to tirade against certain demographics for existing.
If you're a hardcore heteronormie, congrats, the default behavior of the game conforms with your worldview. Simply choose a male or female body, and don't even touch the pronouns. They're automatically what they're "supposed" to be.
I mean we already have seen this before with Marvel's SpiderMan pride flag removal mod.
Everyone showing up late to go 'well I don't see why they removed it!' --
You are why.
Trolls escalate. They keep pushing until they get smacked down, then cry and scream and pretend they've been proven right. Being ignored doesn't just embolden them, it bores them, and tells them they need to get worse to get attention. No matter what happens - no matter what anyone says to them - they get to use it in their stupid little word game.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
You have to simply get rid of it, and the sooner, the better.
Tbh I don't even know why the option even exists. I have 2 days worth of playtime and not once does it go on about pronouns or anything like that. So to me the menu seems completely pointless. If i can recall i also don't think the NPCs have even referred to me as male or he/him. Maybe Bethesda added it last minute or something to try to appeal to a larger group of people idk. I'm just enjoying my spaceship man.
When you meet Sam & Cora they'll refer to you by your pronoun while they talk about you.
The whole thing is just to make the character generation non binary, that's it. I don't see why this is such a big deal for some people. I'm a cis male, I select a masculine body type and go with he / him, or maybe they / them, and be done with it. It does nothing but help others feel more included.
Ohhhh. Wow i never noticed that tbh. I was so focused on trying to win sarah over. Never met a more picky person in my life. Now she resides on europa because she bitches every time i steal or a innocent sounding dialog option makes her mad. Sam is cool every ounce and a while he says something about me stealing but it's not as annoying. I've yet to come across cora. I spend so much time in the ship builder.
I'm not super far in, but I have heard it. The first time I remember hearing it is in the opening act when Lin is telling Barrett about you. Also when Sam talks to the marshal about you in Akila City. I suppose there are only so many opportunities for other characters to talk about you while you're standing right there, but it does pop up, so it's nice to have the option for those moments.
I did notice it when creating my character but the only thing I thought was "Oh hey, cool"
Edit: I thought you said you didn't notice the option even exists but I'll just leave this here anyways
Of course is Kotaku coming with a whole tempest in a teapot over this.
Kotaku is an absolute joke, but that's not new, they are the laughing stock of game journalism for a reason.
I don't see the big deal about the pronoun mods. You have to download and install it. Just don't download the mods.
It has no reason to exist besides being a middle finger to a queer minority.
This is a website deciding not to become a Nazi bar.
By the same token, I don't see a big deal about the pronoun choice. Just choose She/Her or He/Him. You don't have to choose They/Their.
Huh, just considering practicality, how many new characters would one have to create in order to save rather than waste downloading this? Given the time required to download, read, and set up, I’d guess somewhere in the range of 20-30 characters.
Speedrunners might download a mod to skip setup entirely, not a single option. Of the millions who purchased starfield, perhaps a few dozen might use this ergonomically. Neat.
I'm pretty sure that this would disqualify the run, unless it's specifically allowed in a particular category.
Practice mods are occasionally used if, say, there’s a tricky section 1.5 hours in. With route highlighting or landscape deemphasizing, if necessary. Speedrunning has slowed to a crawl in the last decade so that seems unlikely.
Just pick your pronouns when you create your character. These are people getting their panties in a twist because they are being reminded that other people can choose different pronouns.
That's nothing new. The vast majority of far-right reactionaries know exactly zero trans people. They're getting upset because a stranger, who exists entirely in their imagination, may have an opinion about their own body that the far-right have not approved as "okay to have".
Of course, there's probably deeper reasons that they won't say out loud. What if they accidentally find a "man" attractive? What if they have to treat a casual acquaintance with basic human decency?
The horror.
Internet brain worms
problem solved