Battlestate Games give a terrible excuse for not including playable female characters in Escape from Tarkov
Well, we’re only eight days into the new year and we’ve got World War 3, a parliamentary system that seems to accept blatant lies so long as you wag your finger, sound loud and be really posh, and oh, this gem from the developers of Escape from Tarkov - Battlestate Games.
After repeated requests to put playable women in their game… Well, I’ll let you see their response for yourself.
So, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt for a second and go through your tweets here. First of all, when you hear a request for female characters, giving them NPCs isn’t really what gamers were looking for.
Then you say you playable women is not part of your lore? As if, god forbid, boobs will break the immersion for players across the globe.
Crazy theory - women exist. They exist in basically every other post-apocalyptic, military or Battle Royale shooter out there. It’s not a “white knight politically correct” thing to include playable female characters. It’s a common sense thing. 49.5% of the world’s population are female - not including them makes zero sense in this so-called lore.
And then we get the whole it takes a “huge amount of work” to animate them, undermined by the previous fact that they’ve already animated women as “main characters” in quests. But apparently, they have wildly different body shapes to men, to really be considered playable.
As one game dev said in the replies: “I get the sense here they failed to plan for female PCs and so they don't have a pipeline for player cosmetics. Which isn't a valid excuse, this has been a solved problem for over a decade.”
Going further through the debate under the tweet, it seems to have brought out some real gaming gammon - calling anyone who would possibly criticise this decision “cucks” and trying to apply some logic to this by saying “their vision is not your vision.”
In many other situations - if (as someone tweeted) someone wrote a story where all the women in the world were dead and people disagreed, a gameplay system pissed people off, or hell, even when a company decides to put oh-so-annoying grinding elements in games than can only be bypassed at a logical speed by paying physical money for it, I’d accept that reasoning. I wouldn’t agree with them, but in the words used above, that is their vision.
But all women are not dead here. They are very much present in this world. To call not having playable female characters their “vision” is a false equivalence, and after an interview from a developer of the game recently re-circulated (“we came to the conclusion that women can’t handle that amount of stress,” Pavel Dyatlov said at the time), it’s a clear failure of intent. Female characters were not a priority, at a time when many other testosterone-fuelled titles like Gears of War are starting to take representation seriously.
Simply put, it’s 2020. Excuses like this do not work anymore and only worked in the past because of the pretty obvious sexist tropes in gaming of old. This is not a “social justice warrior” rant. If animating women in a video game is just too much for your developers, then maybe they shouldn’t be making video games.
At best it shows you to be lazy and shortsighted. At worst, it’s obviously sexism. I’ll let you decide which one it is, dear reader.
