Volition’s recently released Boss Factory tool for the upcoming reboot of Saints Row has revealed that the developer has made a number of changes to its character creation options, including the removal of binary gender choices and a reduction to its max allowable breast size.
Made available to players during the Summer Game Fest 2022, the Saints Row Boss Factory allows players to play with the game’s full character creator and transfer their completed ‘Boss’ into the full game.
Players who make use of the tool and upload their creations online prior to the game’s launch even have a chance of winning fabulous prizes.
While many players were initially entranced with the sheer expansiveness of the tool’s offerings, players such as YouTubers GameRiot and FireSpark81 quickly uncovered some interesting details about how it worked.
Most notably, these players found that instead of a male, female, or even, as offered in previous titles in the series, non-binary, players now ‘create’ their gender with the use of a slider.
A ‘figure’ slider alters the shape and size of a character’s shoulders, hips, and thighs, with a slide to the left making one’s character more feminine, while a move in the opposite direction leaves characters looking more masculine.
While there are slight changes to the neck and edges of the jawline (likely more a result of attempting to match these features with wider shoulders) the character’s face otherwise remains unchanged, and is edited through other options.
A triangle ‘Build’ slider, its points representing fat, thin, and muscular, allows players to adjust their avatar’s weight and musculature.
Likewise the Chest and Groin sliders offers players the option to grow breasts or present male genitalia regardless of where their character fell on the Figure slider.
Further, while in past games players could select their exact race – as well as freely customize their exact skin color and facial details afterwards – there are no such options at all in the Boss Factory demo.
Instead, players can pick their skin from color from palettes of standard and non-standard options. The game also offers prosthetic limbs, vitiligo, and fantastical options such as metallic skin or fangs.
Further, as seen in a comparison video shared by YouTuber Mafia Game Videos, the Saints Row reboot has not only renamed a ‘Sex Appeal’ slider to simply ‘Chest Size’, but also reduced the upper limits of what the slider will allow.
Saints Row IV, Saints Row the Third, and even Saints Row 2 all offer max settings that are noticably larger than what the reboot allows. Interestingly enough, the latter even had a slider for “Body Shape“, the maxing of which would eventually produce a bra over the character’s chest, irrelevant of the sex they selected.
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“It seems the developer or publisher didn’t want to offend trans people, and the LGBTQLMNOP community,” Mafia mocks in their video. “Because now in 2022, sex and gender is now a controversial topic, and I guess Volition wanted to play it safe, but removing the options for male and female is a bit too much in my opinion.”
Mafia later posits that a woman with a large chest who wanted to self-insert into the game would now be unable to do so.
While Mafia Game Videos does make the erroneous claim that you have to select a preset build to change your character’s race or gender (both being technically adjustable from what the creator offers), he nonetheless found it a nuisance, criticizing the presets for being too restrictive and and speculating that these options were removed to avoid controversy.
“People are more politically correct than before, and the so called ‘wokeness’ is actually causing more division than unity,” Mafia theorized.
However, despite these criticisms, Mafia ultimately concludes that the game looks “pretty damn good” and he will hold full judgement until he can play it for himself.
Have you tried the Saints Row reboot Boss Factory demo? What do you think of the character creator? Let us know on social media and in the comments below.