Gaming

To me, the obvious answer is to do away with the concept of "gender" altogether. It's a societal construct that doesn't really need to exist in video game character creation, anyway.

Everybody is born one of two biological sexes: male or female. There. Those are your choices. Call it "apparent sex" and include a pronoun option to allow for players who want to roleplay gender nonconforming characters.

I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you're describing. I think what could help is a third option that's a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it's not relevant, just don't have a body type option.

I also don't know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn't necessarily match their gender identity.

I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.

Like if the engine doesn't support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There's only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren't working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.

Is it better to have "Body Shape A/B" or "Male Body / Female Body"? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.

It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.

I don't think it's fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3's developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.

Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.

Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won't be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.

While I agree having more options is always a better thing, I really can't see body type A and B with pronouns choosing anything other than more inclusive, a good thing, and not something that deserves getting up in arms about.

I don't really see how it could be seen as not more inclusive. Sure it's not more inclusive than having full blown sliders that let you change every bit of a character's body, but it's adding more pronouns and not forcing those pronouns on a certain body type. If we look at number of options, it is more than the previous "male and female" options. Thus including a broader set of people

S L I D E R S

Fucking Saints Row 2 had this shit figured out

PS: I like when the game just shows you a bunch of presets and says "pick one". It's more elegant than "which of the two body types do you want"