In my effort to figure out why Hogwarts Legacy was trending this far away from release, I discovered two things. First, an extremely anonymous report that Hogwarts Legacy 2 is in development (I mean, of course) and second, in relation to a current Starfield controversy.
A very angry British man has been making the rounds in a viral video that shows him flipping out about Starfield allowing players to pick their pronouns during character creation, including a they/them option. This led to similarly-minded folks getting similarly upset with some claiming they had even refunded the game during character creation because of How Mad this made them.
Hogwarts Legacy, meanwhile, is being brought back up again to show the pretty absurd amount of hypocrisy shown here by the exact same crowd.
The Hogwarts Legacy devs had to bend over backwards to separate themselves from JK Rowling’s very public, very anti-trans views that she has plastered her Twitter page with over the last few years. That led to a culture war earlier this year between those who said even playing the game was tacit support of her views, and those who said they were playing the game “out of spite” to somehow stick it to that crowd.
But the end result was that Avalanche made a character creation system that allowed players to disconnect terms like Witch and Wizard and masculine or feminine voices from their character, in order to avoid locking players into specific genders/presentations. The game also featured a high-profile character who was a trans as part of some different sidequests, presented in an unequivocally positive light.
Now, it is possible to go through all these people’s profiles and find just how much they were praising Hogwarts Legacy as a way to claim victory over those protesting it, while conveniently ignoring the same gender-inclusive options that Starfield now has. Anything to declare a game “woke.”
In reality, it is incredibly easy to miss Starfield’s pronoun selection in the first place. The game will auto-assign you she/her, he/him based on your body type (which some are also not thrilled about), and you have to manually pick if you want it changed. But it’s easy to just type your character’s name in and miss it entirely.
As for the “political” content of Starfield, it doesn’t have all that much to say about anything, really. UC “space cops” are generally considered good, albeit you can betray them and side with pirates. Freedom-loving Freestar citizens are cowboys, but also sort of cops themselves. Sometimes rich people in power are corrupt. Sometimes they’re not, including Constellation’s main benefactor. I don’t think anyone mentions race in the entire game. You can romance any main character with any gender of player, upsetting a few, but this has been par for the course for many RPGs for decades.
In short, this is a deeply a-political game in an era when honestly, it’s often hard to do that, especially with 250,000 word script. This is all stupid, and that’s highlighted further by this group’s professed love for Hogwarts Legacy, which does almost exactly the same thing.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read the full article here
