If it's something like Pokemon or a game where you play as character A or B, with no real customization beyond the colour of your hat, then I'll almost always play female. I think that also goes for games where you can only make one character.

Oh, haha, I'm just the opposite.

I guess you could say I'm more likely to play as something closer to 'myself' in those situations, or as close as I can get.

I usually prefer playing as a female character.
I'm more likely to play as a male character if there is a lot of customization involved, rather than if classes are gender locked (which is absolutely hate, by the way). I'm not really sure why, perhaps because I don't particularly enjoy playing male characters if they are really buff (which I feel gender locked ones often are).

That annoys me a little with Divinity: Original Sin. The guy is huge. It's hard to recreate a skinny thief with that!

Oh yeah I can see that! Female characters are usually not that much better though, they also have "perfect" bodies.
I just like playing as fairly androgynous characters wearing dresses and feminine clothing~

//Side note, but is that a good game? It's on sale rn on steam lol

It's a great game! Haven't played the new one, but I've enjoyed it a lot. You can get mods and such, and upload personal pictures for characters, but it's very fun when it comes to battles and such. You can use the terrain and play off spells and such, and your characters gets traits and such according to their interactions.

I like the GW2 character creator because the body shape options are more varied than you normally see, like hip size, bust size, hip to bust size, shoulder to hip, etc. I have three "human" female that all look fairly different in shape.

Yeah, I really, really wanted to make Yvon (my dude from Camelot) in Div OS, but, well, seeing as how the male model is like...three times Yvon's mass and volume...

Oh, there's a newer one? That one's not on sale, but has amazing reviews on steam, well they both have. I'm a sucker for great graphics, which the new one definitely has, but 45 eur is way more than I like to spend at once, the struggle.
The first one looks amazing as well, though... Decisions~

Oh yeah, I really liked being able to choose between different body types, even if it was just presets (at least i believe it was just presets, when I think about it that might not have been the case).
I feel like a tried a MMO that had even more customization when it came to the body. Black Desert or Blade & Soul maybe?

Yeah...I made Syrgei anyway. The first time was...unflattering. He's tall enough but not about to subtly fit through a window any time soon. Skyrim Syrgei came out all right, but when I put in a mod to smooth out the mens' faces, he looked a little excessively like Link from Twilight Princess. He's better now. ;).

Don't ask me about Fallout. -.-

There's a bunch of Divinitys. Divinity: Original Sin, Enhanced Edition is the one I've played. Divinity 2 is the new one. It has lizards and I think elves now, but the play is slightly different.

I heard Black Desert Online had a great creator but was a crummy game.

Div OS was on sale for relatively cheap during the steam sale. (Salone got it for me.) If I play Div OS2, I'm def rolling a lizard.

I used to play Blade and Soul. Should get back to that.

I do enjoy playing as a colorful lizard...
I just spent a hundred bucks on a switch game, I really shouldn't buy more expensive stuff for at least another month or two. I really want to though. - crying in a corner

Yeah, it's incredibly beautiful and has wonderful character customization, but I didn't find the gameplay all that interesting.
In fact, even though the graphics were "beautiful", they felt somewhat too much, as well as something else I don't really know how to describe. It just didn't really suit a game, I think.

Gotta go to bed, 'night!

Sort of an Uncanny Valley maybe?


I like Lizards. :), but always with the non humans for me!

I used to /only/ played Japanese/Korean-based MMORPGs. And then I went to college and discovered a newfound ability to *buy Steam cards* for myself, and now I almost exclusively play western RPGs. Hmm.

Yay, Western preoccupation with individuality and personal success?

Nah, more like, I just got really tired of the focus on aesthetics and very little attention to storyline.

Something anyone looking into Divinity OS2 should be aware of is that it is a VERY challenging game, even if you're like me and played the first one to death. The new armor/magic armor system makes fights extremely long and drawn-out, giving ample chances for things to go wrong, and it's often stacked against you pretty heavily. Even on normal difficulty, if you don't exploit every possible opportunity to steal items/gold, murder NPCs for xp, find and complete every single quest before moving on, etc, you fall behind extremely easily. And even when you're caught up, some of the fights are just nightmarish.

But it's a hell of a good game, besides that, if you're into D&D or classic CRPGs, or even games like Final Fantasy Tactics.

As to the actual topic, I usually play females, but I also mostly only play games with robust character creation where I can make the same few characters I bring everywhere I'm able to. And when you get into heavily-moddable games a la Bethesda, the unfortunate reality is that there's a massive disparity in aesthetic mods for female and male characters (even if ~80% of the female armor/clothing mods can be written off immediately as... anachronystic, to put it lightly.). I remember when I was making all of the characters from one of my novels in Skyrim, and even with the 300-and-something mods I'm running, including pretty much all the best male aesthetic mods, finding appropriate outfits for them was a depressing experience.

I suppose I have more luck in that regard in that I seem to be less picky than you. ;). Is it a long coat? Yes. Is it blue? Yes. Job done!

It amuses that people seem to assume you are female online about as often as I get mistaken for male, though the characters likely don't help.

Well, to be fair, my first assumption when meeting people is not that they're genderless internet life-forms sustained by misanthropy and bad memes, either.

Also, more on topic that I just remembered, I spent my younger years playing and writing almost exclusively male characters, so I've really just more or less evened the balance at this point. Still kind of sick of grizzled old men grimly taking up swords to scowl and philosophize poorly over the corpses of young people at this point in my creative lifespan, though. :P

Even that is something of a departure from standard youth fantasy fare.

I've just blamed it on the 'he' bias in language. I used to be surprised it would persist even when I was using a femmy name and/or femmy avatar, but...

Oh wait. Were *all* of us gender swapped on GW2? ...Minus Salone, that is.

Looks that way.

IDK what it is with my friend groups and genderswapping on games. Has happened in...I think...all of the games I've played with friends so far?

Well Mel is female...and if you include everyone, the ratio is pro-female, 6-3, but Syrgei gets the bulk of the playtime if I'm not in a dungeon.

I think I'd add, for myself, my male OCs tend to... not be "cool", more so horribly broken wrecks of humans, so I end up not making them in RPGs where the main focus is to be badass and awesome. Although, most of the female characters I use in games besides Olivia started as Guild Wars 2 characters anyway, and I find the male aesthetic options in that game... not to my taste, so kind of a serpent eating itself there in terms of cause and effect.

But Evander?


If I ever make a character is supposed to be bad-ass, they usually don't stay that way.

Now that I think about it, I probably lean towards more male character if I feel like adding a titch extra mental/emotional distance between myself and a character in a game. I tend to get immersed in games to the point that it gets detrimental to my health. It feels more like a character and less like an alternate me if I gender swap, even if the females I make are not at all like myself.

Beastial races don't count.

Almost never gets played.

Evander deserves more attention. His GS animation is so glorious!

Granted though, dear half-brother Ezra doesn't see much screen time either.

Suze you should make a female Charrrrrr.

I dislike Charr. :|

BUT THEY'RE FUZZY

can we acknowledge how cool it is that here on trisphee we can easily change genders without having to pay up?

Dear gods yes. I don't understand sites where you need to pay to change your avi gender.

gold sinks prevent inflation, i think that's part of it. ;-;

Sure, but...that just doesn't sit well with me. Other ways to make gold sinks, and all.

Lmao since I'm used to playing old games, where the only gender you could play as was male I guess I stuck to it over the years.
Also, usually the styles for it looks better.
I also remember Dragon Quest with its gendered outfit shizzle which made me deliberately play as a guy because damn, the clothing for girls was weak.

I actually prefer going as the male gender in video games. Ngl, I'm kinda wondering why there's no nonbinary option in video games.

Probably because they don't want to make even more meshes and stuff.

How would you even portrait nonbinary tho. like... everyone interprets it differently. i feel like simply choosing pronouns makes more sense and then choosing from a feminine versus masculine character or something.