Yesterday I got caught up in a twitter thread and I thought this morning it might be worth exploring it further. First however I need to take a step back and talk a bit about an issue that has been happening. Escape from Tarkov is apparently the new hotness with the streamers and has gone from a game that I knew existed to being something that is properly cemented into the zeitgeist. Recently it has reached the number one spot on twitch as far as games go for viewership. From what I can tell it seems to be a good game if you like that sort of game, but it has one frustrating omission for a lot of people. It completely lacks any form of female playable characters and at least in some part seems to be focused on building a character with gear and such.
This has been a thing recently in the gaming press because when questioned about this Battle State Games gave a rather hamfisted response. If you want to know more about this you can check out one of the many articles on the subject like this one over on the Verge. Essentially they are presented with another scenario like Ubisoft was with Assassin’s Creed and they made up some lore reason why women shouldn’t exist in the setting. The thing is… this morning I am not even really going to talk about this decision because while it was the prompt for this discussion it isn’t the purpose. I just felt it was a bit of a primer needed to explain why this topic this morning.
So one of my friends posed a question. Would you rather have female character models if it meant cutting some other feature from the game. My answer was essentially “Yes” because representation is super important in a video game where you are given the choice of playing an avatar. On some level I can understand that if I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn I am playing Aloy and not myself or if I am playing Uncharted I am going to be playing the character of Nathan Drake. However if it is a game that features any sort of customization it is super important that you are able to create a character you are happy to be playing. Gender is one of those super important elements that make up the puzzle of what represents you as a character in a game.
The above image is something that I had Ammo draw for me on the seventh anniversary of this blog. It is an amalgam of a bunch of my characters from different games. Left to right you have World of Warcraft, Secret World, Destiny, Rift, Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV. You should notice that there is a pretty strong theme between them minus the Exo but I will get into that character in a few. There is a character that I keep creating over and over which is effectively “Belghast” and if I am going to spend much time in a game I wind up creating a version of that character. If a game has the tools to let me assemble a reasonable facsimile of that appearance then I am super happy and chances are I am excited to be playing it. However if a game for some reason lacks the specific features I apparently want I am going to bounce super hard off of it.
There have been games that I absolutely did not play because they had shitty beard options. There are other games that I refused to play because every character was too much of a “bishounen” pretty boy. Hell there have been times that I could not get into a game because I didn’t like the armor or the weapons. In Destiny I wound up rolling a robot because of the complete and total lack of beards and even then I chose an exo that had a little chin stripe that I could at least pretend was a robobeard. If I am willing to stop playing games for stupid cosmetic reasons like this… or the fact that I couldn’t get my over the eye scar that I end up choosing each time… then damned well I get not playing a game because you can’t play a gender that you feel represents you.
I will always be on the side of all games needing gender choices. We recently reviewed Jedi Fallen Order on a few different podcasts and each time we wound up with the most frustrating part of the experience is that you are locked into playing a male character. There is nothing about the character of Cal Kestis, including the name I might add… that actually matters that it is a character of a specific gender. The game would have been infinitely better and more inclusive had they just let players choose who they wanted to play as. If I had my druthers pretty much every game experience would feature some sort of an option that allows you to tailor to at least the right gender if not being able to do full cosmetic customization. For me and many other players that I know… cosmetic options are pretty much the most important system in a game.
So we get back to the thing that spawned this discussion. Yet another game developer claims that it is too costly to add Female character models, and at least on some level I get that statement. Coming up with lore reasons to justify your position however is bullshit. The problem I have is that it shouldn’t even be a thing we are having to discuss and justify. Games should default to having multiple character options and not instead default to just having “Men”. If they support customization at all they should be designed from day one with the thought of having multiple character models to fit gear to. Sure I can see a period of time when you have one or the other but by the time you reach late stages of the game both should be expected.
So we get back to the original question however. Would I want female character models in video games if it meant I would be giving up some other features? Unequivocally yes. The thing is… I am not going to likely play a female character because I am going to be trying to create “Belghast” in every single game. However I know how important having an avatar that feels like it represents you in a game is, and because of that I will always come down on the side of inclusion for character options. Feeling a since of connection and ownership to the character you are playing is extremely important and I want everyone out there to be able to play characters that feel like a little piece of them walking around in the gamespace. I’m not mad and have no bluster to rage against one developer or another… but I am disappointed that we are still treading this path over and over. Games are better when they support all of their players, not just a handful.
Where Belghast’s argument falls short is that he mentions Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted – specific character locked games, and doesn’t have much of a problem with that. We can also add in the Witcher, Duke Nukem, Tomb Raider, and many others of a similar vein. Yet he goes on to say that Fallen Order is a problem, simply because it has somewhat of a customization option. I find that line of reasoning, quite frankly, to be bullshit. There is nothing wrong with Fallen Order being gender locked any more than any of those other games. There’s also no reason why we couldn’t at least have the choice of an Allan, Natalie Drake, Witcherette, Daisy Nukem, or Larry Croft, if “inclusivity” and “representation” are so damn important to a game’s design. Lore be damned because it’s just made up any way, right?
I’m all for having as many options in an RPG type of game for character customization. In games that have an in depth system, I end up spending hours just creating my character. I play characters of all shapes, sizes, races, and genders, because like many other people, these characters are not an extension of myself, but a character in a story that I get to control. Many of my characters do and “say” things in a game that I would not dream of doing or saying if this was an extension of myself (such as a completely dark-sided Sith in SWTOR). However, while it may be somewhat off-putting, I have no problem with developers who decide to gender lock races, classes, or character creation as a whole. It’s their damn game and they have every right to decide how they want to design that game. If it’s a fun game, I will play it and like it. If it isn’t fun, then I won’t. Simple as that. The Tarkov devs may be trying to beat around the bush with their BS excuses, but I don’t care one whit what their reasoning is for not having playable female characters. That’s their choice and more power to them if they create a good game that ends up making them money. The game isn’t exactly my cup of tea, regardless, but I am certainly not going to jump on the manufactured outrage boat because it’s the trendy thing to do nowadays.
“but I am disappointed that we are still treading this path over and over” – I am also disappointed that so many people are obsessed with discussing such irrelevant topics about unimportant features when there are much more serious problems that exist and affect much bigger amount of players.
“Games are better when they support all of their players, not just a handful” – games are better when they support the gameplay styles of all of the players, from PvP needs of players who might enjoy huge battles involving 1000’s of players and huge, non-instanced permanently capturable areas to players who do not enjoy a forced PvP in NPC-controlled cities and territories (I am talking about MMORPG games but same is true for every kind of games, including survival FPS games which do not provide large enough areas to fit more PvP players or safe areas and activities for PvE-oriented players). The players will quit the game if it does not fit their gameplay preference, regardless of how many genders the game allows you to select or how many races there are (including fantasy races). This is an unquestionable fact and this is sadly being ignored by every MMORPG game developer (and many other game genre developers), including the developers which already allow you to play as female Night Elf or female Miqo’te. You can directly see the results of such ignorance – a lot of MMORPG games lose most active players between each major expansion and a lot of PvP-focused games do not attract enough PvE-oriented players from the very beginning or lose popularity after a while due to small PvP areas which fit small amount of players, this is true even for survival FPS games like Escape from Tarkov. So let’s focus on discussing that, providing the different styles of gameplay, from large PvP battles to plenty of PvE content, which will hopefully encourage developers to finally care about it in every game genre, instead of pointless topics about irrelevant to vast majority of players features such as gender or race selection (especially in a survival FPS shooter).
Also, to extremely narrow-minded people who just like to throw around words like “sexist” and don’t even care about gameplay or games in general – not having different genders for playable character is not “sexist”. It is simply a choice by developer, mostly dictated by amount of time and money they are willing to spend on the game. It is not “wrong”, even for a developer who might accept the amount of lost sales from few potential customers as “acceptable”. Complaining about it will absolutely have no effect on this (it is irrational to assume that a developer who already made choice about potential loss of sales due to limited gender choices will care about your complaint). Just don’t play it, or better yet – develop your own game where you are free to make your playable character as a male only, or a female only, or any other gender – I will gladly pay your game regardless of your choice if things that I care about (the story, the graphics, the gameplay variety) will be good.
Not having female characters in a “create your own character” means I won’t play it. It just ruins immersion for me. Even for “you’re playing as this specific person who has a set gender” games it has to be really up my alley and gotten incredibly good reviews for me to play it (ex: Witcher III, which I finally started playing). I’m not sure about this specific game and if I’d play it if they did offer a female playable character, but when they don’t I’m getting the message: the game is not for me. I probably would be playing the Star Wars game already if I could play as female, but instead it’s got “maybe I’ll play this if I run out of stuff to play before Cyberpunk 2077” comes out. And given how many games are out there, that’s highly unlikely.
Also, in Cyberpunk 2077 you’re not choosing a gender, but a body type and voice, etc. That’s the best way to go.
If you’re sexistic and don’t want women in your game, say so. Saying that it would take too much time or that it doesn’t work in their lore, is the most “unmanly” thing ever.
If you’re for toxic masculinity and support old gender roles, stand up for it, but don’t give us this half-hearted bs of “mimimi animation takes time mimimi in our FICTIONAL lore women don’t fight at the frontlines”.
Especially because it’s FICTIONAL you can implement female playable characters. Especially because you’re striving right now and because your game is hitting off right now, you should be listening to your community and pause the release of new weapons and gear-pieces and instead animate new models, because now is the time to influence the most people and to tell people that 2020 is not 2019 and that you aren’t sexists.
to think that 2020 starts of with something like this… Oh my.
directed at the game company, not belghast
The more reason is particularly sexist. “We don’t feel like spending time on it” fine, whatever. But this is extra shitty.
Personally, I’m not happy with games that only offer a choice of male or female HUMAN characters. Clearly I’d be even less happy with only getting male OR female. My preference, whenever and wherever possible, is for several genders and several species and I’m going to choose the shortest, cutest combination.
The whole concept of character representation in video games is very complex. I have a longstanding objection to the use of the term “avatar” because I don’t generally see the characters I play in games as extensions or versions of myself. I see them as characters with their own individuality, whose actions I direct as would the director of a movie. They aren’t me and therefore they don’t need to represent me. I try always to use the word “character” for that reason, although sometimes I’m lazy and slip into the regular vernacular of the genre.
Regardless of my personal tastes, though, I can’t see any good reason not to include a wide range of genders, body types, skin colors and other distinguishing factors. What’s the downside for the developer? If the costs of animating different genders and body shapes is prohibitive for a small team, surely they could at least pay lip service to the concept by using the same models and animations but labelling them differently and using different appearance options. At worst, they’d just have some unconvincing models and animations, which is hardly unusual even in games with multiple races and genders.
Team Ratonga for life 🙂
I usually prefer playing female characters anyway, but will happily use male ones from time to time (or if I like them better). On the one hand I can understand people who find this important so I’m all for it, on the other hand I personally simply don’t care. I’ve been put off by the graphics of so many games in general where I don’t like how the characters look, gender is the least of my concerns. But maybe I’m special insofar as I don’t care. I think the last time I picked “male character because I am male and feel represented better” was over 20 years ago, since then I’ve been going strictly by “which model do I like more”.
Players are never gonna be happy, so I guess it’s always “how do I piss of the least amount of people who will buy my game” – I suppose cutting content is a good way to shove that percentage below 50%.
Also maybe it’s time to go female character by default so the other half of the people can now complain for 30 years? I think that’s only fair. 😉
On the topic of how much work, there’s the thing about pronouns, so it’s not exactly zero coding/text changes involved if your game was all-male before, but I guess it pales in comparison to a translation (and let me tell you, adding several languages is not easy, to any kind of software) and even more against modeling, just for the record because it came up in earlier comments.
As to the question… I guess I’d actually prefer them to have at least 2 different models in general, but again that’s easy to say if you’re not someone who devours content all the time at a quick pace…
They’ve pretty much admitted that they already have a female model created (for traders and other NPCs) and even models in those roles need a lot of groundwork design to function. That’s the hard part already done. From there they can transfer the more complex animations, for example, fighting moves etc. from the male models and tailor it to the female.
Yes it’s a bit more work, but that’s not what this standpoint signifies a few other things to me:
1) Females belong as NPCs, but not as the playable character which essentially is the video game equivalent of saying women belong in the kitchen.
2) They’re really not up with current player concerns, or simply do not care because the issue of only having a male character design has come up many times in the last few years. There was Assassins Creed Odyssy and I’m not sure if it came up with Jedi Fallen Order, but I know personally I wasn’t happy to know it was just a male character especially when the KOTOR games had male AND female playable characters.
3) KOTOR’s just one of many examples of games where players have been given that option so this leads me to my third point; a very poor design team and planning. It makes me wonder if they actually blew their entire budget and they had to cut something, so that got the cut. Or they realised their mistake, but rather than holding their hands up to say ‘yep, you’re right we’ll fix it’ they’ve given a really crap answer which has probably just tanked their sales. That was probably the worst answer they could have given. I don’t see their social media team keeping their job after that one.
I pondered if I should make this comment or not since I don’t feel the ground for my argument is 100% solid. But if it ends up being a weak argument then it won’t be any worse than the one the developers of Escape of Tarkov did, so let’s do this! :p
The argument about adding female characters taking away “game features” just seems such bullcrap for me. First it is very vague. Secondly to me personally game features means game mechanics which means coding.
And as far as coding goes, adding an extra gender shouldn’t take that much more work.
Now in terms of character model and wearable gear, yes, that would take some more work but the people who would be working on it are the art team who have absolutely nothing to do with the coding of the game or dealing with its mechanics.
But there are also other things that the art team will also have to work that won’t change in anyway because of the character gender: weapons, environment, props, etc.
So, I don’t the costs being so prohibitively high that a female choice couldn’t be implemented. Even more so if we consider that having a gender choice could attract more people which means more potential revenue.
Sorry for the rambling. Like I said, I don’t feel like my ground with this argument is very solid so I am having trouble articulating it.
You make a good point, even if you think it’s not that strong. Even if we don’t have the data to support our point, it’s a good point to make. Most of the work will go to the art department, and maybe some to narrative design. But creating a world in which there are no or little females already requires the narrative team to write additional lore on why that is.
I realize that creating female character models and such aren’t done overnight (like adding in 300 additional pokemon, which should only take 5 min). And giving a piece of armor a male and female look will take up more time. But that should be factored in before they start the project.
If a developer doesn’t, that means it’s a design decision. A conscious one. And that’s something we as gamers shouldn’t accept. Making the conscious design to exclude a gender out of your game is unacceptable, especially in this case.
Thank you! The reason I didn’t feel it was on 100% solid ground is because I don’t know how much work it is to adapt say a piece of clothing between genders, how much cost they could cut if they planned for that, etc.
As far as animations go, I think they could just use the same ones for both genders without too much issue. At least with a game like this. I mean, how many games you see females and male characters have completely different animations for an attack? Do women really hold a gun any different from men?
I know there were games where they even used the same skeleton for both genders in the past. I believe Oblivion was one of those cases. Not too sure about Skyrim or Fallout 4…
Great post. I’d encourage other bloggers to pile in and explore and expose the utter fallacy of Battlestate Games argument.
It’s insane that this is even being discussed. Having two (or more) genders, or masculine and feminine, characters models should be the default. Like you said. If the player can customize their avatar, having different body shapes and sizes shouldn’t be ‘extra’.
I’d happily give up features or more cosmetics if that means having a character I’m satisfied with. Even gender locking classes (like in BDO) annoyed me. I get race, but gender feels wrong.