This just goes to show that no amount of time is too little to push identity politics into a video game for “inclusivity” by excluding everyone else.
Terraria, the 2D pixelated sandbox adventure game developed by Re-Logic, recently marked its 13th anniversary. Initially released on the Steam store in May 2011, the game has since evolved from being dismissed as a “Minecraft clone” into a unique experience, thanks to significant updates over the years.
Even after all these years, the game remains incredibly popular, consistently drawing over 25,000 concurrent players on Steam at any given time. As of July 2024, Terraria has sold over 58.7 million copies.
However, the long-running sandbox game is set to make a seemingly minor change in an upcoming update that has significant implications.
The upcoming 1.4.5 update for Terraria will feature a collaboration with Dead Cells, a roguelike Metroidvania game. This crossover is expected to introduce content from Dead Cells into Terraria, though specific details such as new weapons, enemies, or biomes are still under wraps. What has been teased so far includes various whip weapons and vanity items.
As with previous major updates, players can anticipate new items, weapons, and equipment, potentially including new crafting recipes, gear sets, and accessories, further expanding Terraria’s already vast inventory. Re-Logic, the developer behind Terraria, often introduces new gameplay mechanics or features in significant updates.
While specifics have not been confirmed, there is speculation that the Dead Cells collaboration could bring new biomes, NPCs, bosses, and events, leading to substantial changes in the game’s existing mechanics.
Unfortunately for players, the 1.4.5 update will also bring the end of the option to select your character’s gender during creation. This change was hinted at in a screenshot of a 1.4.5 debug build shared by the developers a year ago.
Previously, players could easily generate a character at random and select whether or not they wanted said character to be male or female with five individualized presets for both sexes available with the added options of individually changing fixtures such as hair, color and clothing.
A notable trend in modern game design, influenced by a focus on Western ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles, is the push to make games more diverse and inclusive.
This often leads to developers moving away from traditional sex terminologies, incorporating additional gender pronouns, or, in most cases, removing sex terminology altogether.
For example, games like SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada, Elden Ring and Palworld have adopted “Type A/B” presets instead of using male or female designations alongside Dragon Quest III HD-2D by Square Enix, a major follower of ESG ideology.
In Terraria’s upcoming 1.4.5 update, the option to select your character’s sex is set to be removed. Instead, players will choose from various presets, a change that will likely be presented as offering “more customization” by woke loyalists.
You could argue that removing gender and sex definitions in games is meant to make them more accessible to transgender individuals. However, the vast majority of trans people still identify as either male or female, making the removal of these terms seem unnecessary.
Such changes appear to cater mainly to those with more ambiguous identities, such as an Apache Helicopter.
These changes were never requested and tarnish the rock solid reputation that Re-Logic has built for Terraria over more than a decade.
By incorporating identity politics, the character creation process is made unnecessarily complex, all in an effort to avoid offending a small fraction of the population, while alienating or complicating the experience for 99.8% of players who are male or female.
Re-Logic have forced identity politics into their monumentally successful game more than 13 years after release, they genuinely don’t need ESG finances as the small development team is run privately.
There’s no set release period for the 1.4.5 update other than the fact that it’s certain to release in 2024 and with it the removal of sex definitions to pander towards the abominations of humanity, since the game is so monumentally popular, having sold nearly 60 million copies the only rightful thing for players to do is to do what they’ve always done.
Given that consumers ultimately have no power or authorities say when it comes to modern game design, the only way for developers to hear our voices is to vocally share our disdain by collectively review bombing the game and switching reviews to negative.
Don’t allow yourselves to be swayed or swindled by liberalized individuals masquerading as gamers, appealing to triviality because such a change is “insignificant” or “doesn’t matter.”
More than likely following the release of the 1.4.5 update gamers will probably produce a mod that reimplements sex terminologies which will most certainly be removed by the usual platforms in Nexus Mods and Game Banana but ultimately, this doesn’t excuse Re-Logic’s actions one bit.
