It is not.

To make a toggle, you need to add systems to handle the toggle, and to adapt other things in the system to handle both situations. When you have multiple people playing a same game, you gotta make a choice.
Same thing people dont understand about “Err to both sides”. When you decide to do something about stats, either one side, or the other, you have to choose what you are making a statement about in terms of game design. You will always be going against one design by choosing another.
A factual “statement” is the existence of “Cost of Opportunity”, which means the cost of doing something and not something else.
There is always a cost of opportunity in doing anything that you are not doing something else instead.
Putting a toggle does not mean you are allowing “both”, instead you are placing a choice.
Another thing people dont understand in general: Having a choice is not freedom, it is most cases, the removal of a freedom, as you are made choose among options that most of the times, are not selected by you.

But I dont blame this “functional misunderstanding” in the people who make it, because it is not something people are made understand in most cases, as it is something used to “advertise” “goodness” on people.

But no, offering a choice is not allowing you freedom, it is instead establishing patterns of behavior. It is establishing conformity all the same.

One nice quote about it is given in the game Mass Effect by Sovereign:
“By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire”.
Alluding to the fact later explained that they construct the citadel around the powerful mass relay that bring them from dark space so the powerful civilizations of that cycle are all concentrated around it and the mass relay network. That speeds up the harvest process and facilitates their logistics.

Establishing options or defining “mandates” always have the same purpose, developing along the paths the developer desire. That is also why you can make a game that looks like a sandbox but it is instead theme park, and why most games are not 100% either. There is always design choices and design techniques to funnel players into doing something, one of them is CHOICES.

Like the controls for example. Funcom states we have a choice, but we do not. Previously we have a specific control that is the basic unreal control scheme, and now we have a toggle and a drop down that do not accomplish the same function, not because we dont have “either option”, but because we cant choose it to be exactly the way it was anymore, instead, we have two choices that cant combine to form the previous control scheme.

Systems are in this position. You might not be able to allow choice and have it the way it is without a choice. Simply because of, again, cost of opportunity. If you have one “more broad scheme”, it might be not possible to resume in one or two choices all the options needed to allow for what X, Y and Z person wants, so they have to select what groups they will privilege with the options they are able to offer. So instead of working to make one more broad useful feature, they give 2, 3 choices that cannot satisfy beyond the 2 or 3 specific subgroups that want each choice.

Then there is the effect of plain field. By electing to break down those into choices, they might electing to privilege those who want those specific points to get optimal results, while not giving the same privilege to other that are not in those subgroups. With one specific choice only, everyone is in the same boat, and there are not subgroups privileged by the alternatives.

In terms of the specific thing about toggles, I already said, it does not matter to me, and if it did, I would mod it. What I am saying is that a “blanket statement” about options do not interfere with those who just dont want to toggle it as a general principle is WRONG. In this specific case it does not matter, but IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE.

However, it does set a pattern of making the game “not unique”. It is like asking a hentai game to have nudity toggle, or a fight game to have a violence toggle. Conan universe is predicated on gore, nudity and violence. I understand the legal problems with the nudity, which is unfortunately a reality in “your part of the World”. But the others, it is just bogus. Irrelevant, but bogus.

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