games

I think it may be related to the lore

Humans in this setting are said to be born of the Erdtree itself (at least for as long as Marika has been a god) and the lore implies that sex isn't even something any of the people in the Lands Between do for fun anymore

So within this setting, gender itself could be seen as a vestigial tail of sorts that cannot be fully shed by humanity because evolution has been halted which is just part of the larger themes of stagnation and imperial decline

Or I could be high and maybe it has nothing to do with the lore

It's possible that they did intend to separate out those things at some point in development, but never actually got around to doing it.

The scale-creep of Elden Ring makes it so that the game is, in a lot of ways, weirdly less "polished" than other Fromsoft "Souls-Borne" titles when you consider the significantly increased development resources available to it.

It's part of a marketing strategy to get comment sections arguing about whether it's woke.

it's just liberals trying to be inclusive and instead being ridiculous because they've never talked to any of us

the purpose is appearances and some manager feeling good about himself

Does anyone give you pronouns in the game? They just call you either you, tarnished or champion or whatever as far as I can recall. Saves on having alternate lines if nothing else.

You can mix voices and body types I believe

I assume they just find and replaced the words male and female in their otherwise old school character creator

liberal baby step i guess that ultimately fails at making the text meaningfully less cisnormative

The purpose is the game being about skillfully slaying monsters. You're not supposed to create a character representing "yourself", you're supposed to hit stuff, hard. The story is barely something you can call a story. You're going to put a kettle on your head and hit stuff with an anchor. They simply didn't care about representation or even character customization very much, just about the gameplay and visual diversity of the world around you.