Starfield's pronoun removal mod banned by NexusMods

Starfield, on the whole, has proved to be a colossal success. Certainly, some fans have taken issue with a couple of immersion-breaking features - like fast travel and loading screens - but there’s no denying that Bethesda has created something truly special. In our 10 out of 10 review, we called Starfield’s vast scale “revolutionary”. In fact, some players are saying that it gets ‘weirder’ when you reach a fourth or fifth playthrough (something to look forward to). It’s easy to see how Starfield has already amassed six million players, making it Bethesda’s most successful game of all-time.

Unfortunately, Starfield did stir up some entirely unnecessary ‘controversy’ when a minority of players took issue with the character creator’s inclusion of pronouns. The viral rant that started this off came from YouTuber HeelVsBabyface. The following quote contains hateful rhetoric that some readers may find upsetting. HeelVsBabyface exclaimed, “I love nothing more than to be dragged out at every f**king conceivable opportunity so that you can f**king current-day us. Sorry, you wanted to get immersed in our world? Guess what, f**king pronouns! F**king gender ambiguity! F**king current-day Californian s**t.”

A mod was subsequently created by an unknown user which allowed players to remove the pronoun selector from the game but NexusMods has now banned that from the site. As reported by Eurogamer, NexusMods said that the removal was "not a political statement or an alignment to one side or the other in the culture war,” adding, “We stand for diversity and inclusion in our community and the removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community."

"A reinforcement that this has been the best course of action has been some of the hatred, vitriol and threats of violence coming from a very, very small minority of the community," NexusMods said. "Frankly, we are not sad to see them go." They told 404 Media, “Hosting this mod was not for us and it is certainly within our rights not to host content on our platform.”