There aren’t many character creators in games that cater well to trans people. Pronoun choice and more diverse voice or appearance options have become increasingly commonplace, but the majority of triple-A titles continually operate from a cisnormative perspective. As someone going through their transition right now, counting on games to provide an experience where I can truly be myself has become a lost cause.
I usually don’t mind this too much. I know I’m a minority in the gaming sphere, and that catering to people like me will often have toxic idiots complaining that games have become too woke, or are changing themselves to appeal to a certain political agenda or overly sensitive demographic. I know that most character creators haven’t considered trans people previously, and I know it doesn’t break the game. But the reality is the world is changing as we move into the future, hoping to become a better place for everyone who exists within it instead of bowing down to an overwhelming mass of straight white cis dudes. Get used to it or get fucked is my mantra, and I’m sticking to it.
That’s why Cyberpunk 2077’s character creator was so disappointing at launch. CD Projekt Red made a huge deal about a world where you could create a futuristic vision of yourself without compromise, inhabiting a body, voice, and personality that was unabashedly you. Amazing - the sort of inclusivity I’d been waiting for. The reality was far more restrictive. You could slap a penis on a female avatar and a vagina on a male one before switching around the voice options, but beyond that the opportunity for gender non-conforming people to express themselves in Night City was minimal. Pronouns were tied to voice, and no they/them option existed at all. While that would be a little disappointing (but not unexpected) for a regular character creator, it’s a major let down in a game that touted itself as having a trans-friendly one.
It wasn’t good enough. A crying shame because some anatomical additions here are rather groundbreaking in some respects. I’ve yet to have bottom surgery, so being able to control a female avatar with male genitalia was initially thrilling, and not something the medium had ever tackled in a mainstream capacity before. It can be a source of dysphoria for many trans people, but being able to own it in Night City and have it become a confident part of your identity that nobody questions in the slightest felt amazing. It’s just a shame that the game never acknowledges your character when it comes to how they’ve been customised.
Sex is common in Night City, and despite having a body that we’re encouraged to own, they are always expressed in a cisgendered capacity. Your romance with Judy culminates in a scene where it is heavily implied for both women involved to be in possession of a vagina, while V’s romance with Panam concludes with a similar scene that implies the presence of a penis. That or she’s being pounded with a cybernetic strap-on or something. CD Projekt Red seems mostly vanilla when it comes to being super-duper horny, so I doubt it. Trans people are being left out in the cold here, making it clear that the character customisation system wasn’t even considered when these scenes were being drafted. I know it’s just a short sex scene in a game filled with distinct discoveries, but it’s part of a bigger problem.
One of our common criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 here at TheGamer is how many features it was missing at launch, such as being unable to customise your character at all once the game begins. Sure you can wear new clothes, but they all look like V’s driven a car through a Primark warehouse instead of feeling wholly cohesive to the world around them. Certain RPGs and other open world adventures also don’t allow for additional tweaks to be made in the midst of a campaign, but they aren’t built upon a world where changing your body through technology and drifting further and further away from humanity is a core thematic tenet. It is here, so being stuck in the same body with no way of changing it without mods felt like a glaring omission, and one that has only just been fixed with the next-gen patch.
Now I can return to my apartment to change my facial features, but some parts of my anatomy remain locked off, meaning that as I progress through my transition I can’t return to Cyberpunk 2077 with the hope of changing my character to reflect that. The role-playing aspect of this ‘RPG’ is criminally absent, only now being bolstered by things it should have had when it first launched. It isn’t good enough, stifled further by a world whose depiction of Cyberpunk is also very stilted, much of its storytelling failing to critique the sickening capitalism that brings Night City and its people to exist in such a broken dystopia.
It all feels half-baked, or like the genre was approached in a way that hoped to be sterile so as not to turn off a mainstream audience. This also meant failing trans players with a character creator that while somewhat ahead of the competition, still feels underwhelming because it tries to accomplish new things while never going far enough. Representation is and will never be a linear path, but when it comes so close to breaking new ground like Cyberpunk 2077 clearly hopes to, the more deflated I feel about the finished product. Things could still change, so I’ll be keeping an eye on CDPR when the first expansion rolls around.