Nexus Mods removes the Starfield mod that got rid of player pronouns and stands by decision

As with many large-scale AAA game releases, there's a very vocal contingent that looks at all aspects of a release to see if there's anything "woke" going on - elements that promote or otherwise cater to a diversity of players. With the release of Starfield earlier in the month, the Steam forums for the game were briefly overtaken by conversation and toxic commentary about the game including an option to select a pronoun for your character.

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NexusMods currently houses a number of popular mods for Starfield.

In what amounts to maybe 15 seconds of screen time (text) for a game with well over 200 hours of content, the decision to let players choose from He/Him, She/Her, or They/Them was too much to handle - or a bridge too far. This is for a game set hundreds of years in the future, where They/Them makes a lot of sense to include, simply from a setting perspective.

As the discourse on the wokeness of Starfield has died down, and that YouTuber rant on the subject has become a meme, one of the most popular modding sites on the planet - NexusMods - has decided to remove a mod that removed the option to select pronouns in the game.

In an email sent to outlet 404 Media, the mods over at NexusMods wrote the following.

"Hosting this mod was not for us and it is certainly within our rights not to host content on our platform. It's not a 'political statement' or an 'alignment to one side or the other in the culture war.' 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."

And with that, the debate has reignited in some communities, with some calling out NexusMods for being cowards or censors, adding that they will no longer use the platform. NexusMods responded, "Frankly, we are not sad to see them go."