In a recent interview with publication Metro, upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077 senior concept artist Marthe Jonkers revealed the newest update for its character creation system.
Cyberpunk 2077 to ditch gender options
Game developer CD Projekt RED made it clear in previous events that it will provide the players with as many options as possible for the game. This was the focus for the character creation system, but there will be more to it than giving them background and facial feature options to choose from. This time around they will go further and will be abandoning gender options entirely to make it fully customizable.
Creating V will not have any male or female options. This time around, players are free to combine body structure, facial features, abilities, and more. Here’s what Jonkers had to say:
[With Cyberpunk 2077] we really want to make a video game that’s really inclusive. Of course, if you tackle certain subjects then you will expect people to have an opinion about it and we respect that. And it’s good that people give us feedback. And our character creation menu, for instance, compared to the last demo we now give you so many more options. For instance, you don’t choose your gender anymore. You don’t choose, ‘I want to be a female or male character’ you now choose a body type. Because we want you to feel free to create any character you want. So you choose your body type and we have two voices, one that’s male sounding, one is female sounding. You can mix and match. You can just connect them any way you want. And then we have a lot of extra skin tones and tattoos and hairstyles. So we really want to give people the freedom to make their own character and play the way they want to play.
Jonkers did confirm that all of these decisions were based from feedback. They took things to heart and only want to make the best game possible for the fans. Here’s more what he had to say:
Our team is very international and very diverse but we have asked for a lot of feedback. We always ask for feedback and even when we show these demos, we still ask people to tell us what they think. We just wanna know what we can improve on because we want to make a really good game [with Cyberpunk 2077] and we really wanna make a game that everybody is comfortable playing. But at the same time we’ll tackle difficult issues. It is a cyberpunk world after all.
The full game will launch on April 16, 2020. It will be available on PlayStation 4. After that, a lore book will be released on April 21, 2020.
Source: Metro GameCentral