Old Man Potter
Trakanon Raider
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You claim that sex is ‘merely presentation’ while race is a ‘mechanically meaningful identity.’ This is a blatant category error. In any rigorous system, ‘Body Type’ describes morphology: weight, frame, and musculature, not the fundamental biological reality of sexual dimorphism that defines our species. By collapsing the two into a single, sanitized label, you aren’t just ‘simplifying a UI’; you are attempting a linguistic liquidation of the human form to satisfy the current, mid-wit consensus of the HR-industrial complex.
You say you aren’t pandering, yet you’ve adopted the exact risk-averse, sterilized lexicon used by the very multinational corporations whose design philosophy you claim to oppose. Calling it ‘Body Type’ is a clear tell; it’s a compliance signal to a specific cultural class that finds the binary nature of reality ‘problematic.’ If it were truly ‘just visual,’ you wouldn’t need to obfuscate the term ‘sex’ at all. You are importing a temporary, trend-chasing fad into the code of your world, sacrificing the structural integrity of your setting for the sake of being ‘inclusive’ to a deracinated consumer that values comfort over the harsh, defining friction of reality.
Furthermore, you are being dishonest about the lineage of the genre. EverQuest and D&D didn’t arrive at the male/female binary by accident; it was the ontological foundation of the worlds they built. In those games, the engine, the scripting, and the player-made macros all recognize the binary. To claim it isn’t ‘mechanically meaningful’ is to ignore the actual architecture of the games you claim to be inspired by. You are trying to stand on the shoulders of giants while simultaneously dismantling the foundation they built upon.
This leads to a fundamental void in your world-building: If sex is reduced to a disposable skin, how do the humanoids and animals in Adrullan actually reproduce? If you have abandoned the binary, you have abandoned the mechanism of life, lineage, and population replacement. You are building a stage set populated by mannequins with no internal logic, not a living world.
Do not mistake cultural compliance for innovation. True innovation in this genre requires solving genuine problems of simulation, social complexity, or world-state depth, not simply adopting the industry-standard ‘inclusion’ checklist used by every major corporate studio on the market. You aren’t breaking new ground or pioneering a new way to build a world; you are merely mimicking the current institutional consensus. If your version of ‘innovation’ is to flatten the foundational binary of the species to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of a modern, rootless audience, then you aren’t a visionary, you are just another developer following the herd to avoid the social friction that comes with building a world based on objective reality.
If your game world cannot answer the most basic question of its own existence: ‘where do the inhabitants come from?’ then the ‘immersion’ you promise is nothing more than a shallow, surface-level veneer. You aren’t building a world; you are building a bureaucratic sandbox. You have traded the weight and gravity of a real world for a sterile, corporate-compliant aesthetic. In two years, when the ‘Body Type’ fad has evaporated, your game will look like a museum piece of 2020s corporate-sanitized design. If you want to build an enduring world worth inhabiting, you have to be willing to embrace the reality of its inhabitants, not just the sanitized, risk-averse buzzwords of the current year.
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