For those of you lucky enough to have played WildStar once the game started firing on all cylinders you’ll recognize these guys
The chua. Tiny, brilliant, a little insane (ok, a lot insane), balls of fluffy terror whose individual gender is unknown to anyone other than maybe another chua. Yes, like the dracthyr dragon form they didn’t have a male or female body option. And honestly, that’s cool. I’m totally down with that idea.
Thing is, it was incredibly easy to make a chua that read as male and very difficult to make a chua that read as female. They had tons of male-reading options like beards, mustaches, goatees and that sort of thing. Basially, if you wanted a chua to read as female you had to not use any of the face customization options and probably use the pink fur (mine used red but that’s whatever). It also didn’t help that the chua underwear was a pair of men’s briefs, they had a male-sounding voice, and they did the male dance.
Here’s a character creation video I found today. Does a pretty good job of showing the options.
And before anyone starts in, yes, women can have facial hair. Yes, lore-wise, male and female chua looked the same. A chua with the biggest mustache and fullest beard could easily be female in the game universe. I’m talking about how things read here in the real world. If a character has an indeterminant body and a big bushy beard you’re going to assume it’s a male character until you’re told it’s a female character. Then it’s like ‘Oh, that’s cool’ or you go have a gigantic meltdown on the game’s forums.
So, the problem with the chua boils down to this: they tried to make a genderless race, which is a neat idea, but then they made it very easy to make the race read male and nearly impossible to have them read female (honestly, it felt like they made the male chua and added the genderless lore just so they didn’t have to make the female. Save dev time). Ideally they shouldn’t read as either, but if they’re going to add male-reading options they should have added as many female-reading options.
Which brings us to the dragon form dracthyr. Right off the bat, they do a much better job than chua did. I totally admit that. However, after playing around in beta for a bit, it’s much easier to make a dragon that reads as male than one that reads as female. You can easily make a ‘Yeah, that’s a dude’ but closest you can get on the other end is ‘Yeah, that might be female?’
And I get that it’s tough with dragons when you’ve decided they don’t have breasts (which is fine, even though all your female humanoid dragons have had them since the start of the game, but that’s whatever). But if you’re going to make a very male-reading body type you could make the closest to female-reading body type read a bit more female. The waist is narrower making the hips look wider, so that works, but the shoulders are still very straight and broad and the chest flat as a cutting board. I’m not saying add a bust but maybe push the chest out a little bit all the way across that area instead of making it as flat as humanly possible. Like it could just read as muscles, but it also could read a little more female.
And again, like chua, dracthyr dragon form shouldn’t read as male or female. Male shouldn’t be the default body and female be some weird variation. You get what I’m saying, right? “This is our new race, they’re genderless” (whole race looks male) is a bit of a problem.
Honestly, as much as I like the androgynous dracthyr dragon form idea, the four body options probably should have gone from clearly male, like they do now, to clearly female, even if that meant adding a bit of a nonsensical bust. The two options in the middle could be the androgynous ones. You’d still have androgynous dragon form lore and all the (LOL “all”) more of the players would be happy.
One last little bit, if you’re going hard on the genderless dragon forms but then give us male and female visage forms… Yeah, kinda defeats the purpose. Makes it feel like the no gender (but looks male) dragon form was just a timesaving idea and not some sort of, I dunno, progressiveness. Like ‘We’ll save time and just make the males and say the males and females all look the same’. Just like the chua.
