Why Female Soldiers Were Finally Added to Call of Duty's Multiplayer
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally didn't have the technology before to create them. That's just obviously flat-out stupid.
What they're actually saying here is that their previous engine wasn't able to support custom characters, and so they never thought to try and make characters who would be representative of their full audience. When they made personalizing the character a focus, they realized they needed females to be an option, and that prompted them to add it.
It's still obviously sexist that it never even occurred to them there should maybe be a female in the game. There's no reason they couldn't have put one or two as options in the game before. But they never actually said it was impossible to do it. That's Kotaku's own not-very-generous interpretation.
Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally didn't have the technology before to create them.
What you noted about creating an engine to support custom characters means that those developers took the time to go back, refactor existing code and optimize around different multiple different models running simultaneously while keeping a smooth experience.
I'm not sure what the point of your second statement actually is, but I disagree with that too lol. I feel like you're making the easy parts sound very difficult and then completely trivializing the part that's actually a lot of work.
You've never been able to choose what your player looks like in COD. You play as one of the several pre-defined characters from your team, chosen randomly when you spawn. (Edit: I guess there's a difference for players using a sniper rifle.) From that perspective, I don't see any reason why there couldn't have been a female character.
... except for callouts. In BO2, there are ~5 different models for each team, all male. There are about a dozen different types of callouts that models make in response to different actions, like reloading, killing an enemy, or seeing an enemy. There are also 3-4 different versions of each callout for each team. Since the models are homogenous, the versions of callouts are chosen at random and have no bearing on which model you're currently using. If there were female models the number of callouts that would need to be loaded in memory would double because you couldn't reuse the male callouts for females.
In other words they could have skipped custom character creation and just had static male and female avatars using the exact same engine.
To maximize sales the COD engine is designed for the weakest system for it to run on.
The Xbox 360 has half a gig or ram and that is shared with the OS, memory is an extremely tight commodity. It is quite reasonable to think that another mesh, texture map, and additional sounds clips will simply not fit in the 300ish megs that XBox developers have to deal with.
Of course that can be designed around by having an engine that smart about pulling things in and out of memory. But that's hard to do especially when you have to release a game every year.
I should point out I'm talking about multiplayer mainly. There isn't a technical reason for the single player other than it is a lot of extra work.
Anyway, this may be a "puff piece", but anyone with half-a-brain can figure out how much of a jackass move this was on --EDIT-- Activision's part. Why did it take so long to create a female avatar?
Hell, Halo gave a nod to female players by making female spartans inside of their famous armor. (ie: Nicole-458). You don't even _need_ texture mods to officially play as a female in a lot of these games, lol.
Of course there's no need for men and women to look obviously different from forty feet away, but in the past, it might have been a bigger deal. I remember that when I was a kid, it was a huge thing when a man mistook a woman for a man or, much worse, a man for a woman. If a man mistook a long-haired man for a woman, even from a hundred feet away, he would be the subject of derision from his friends, and he would be panicked and furious. The mistake would be blamed on the questionable sexuality of one or both parties. From where I'm sitting it looks like there's been a massive cultural shift in that regard, and I don't think anybody will be playing CoD filled with homophobic terror at the thought of mistaking a character's sex. It might have been a concern for game designers in the past.
Besides sexism on the part of the game designers, there's also the fact that the U.S. armed forces very recently decided to officially allow women into combat roles. CoD will have the game out before the new policy fully takes effect.
What's more interesting is the fact that sales seemed quite dapper despite the lack of this feature, which does give somewhat inconvenient evidence towards the idea that the depiction of women in games is not actually a big deal.
Team Fortress 2 is another game where there are no obvious female avatars. But before we call "Valve" completely sexist, they were also the publishers behind Portal / Portal 2, which arguably was mostly composed of a female cast. The main character and the villain are obviously females.
For a reverse example, there is the indie-hit series "Touhou", which is famously composed of a 100% female cast of characters.
I wouldn't call these games "blatantly" sexist however, perhaps because I've played them and enjoy them. I guess its a more complicated than I first assumed.
I dare say, if TF2 tried to make a female character, it would have to be sexist as all hell just to fit in with the "feel" of the game.
There are other differences between the characters in TF2 other than their nationality that do not get their own sterotypes. Why is it necessary that as soon as a woman appears, sexism is necessary? Why isn't the reverse true? Do you think that it may have something to do with male being considered a "default" gender?
I'm a male gamer, and I don't mind. (in particular, because the gameplay is so damn awesome).