Okay, so this is a dumb article, but it's not quite as idiotic as it sounds.
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 they're really saying is that it would be twice as much work with two different modeling and movement algorithms running instead of a single, streamlined approach. It's not impossible, but considering the amount of work developers already have to do and the graphics the games are running, it was left out in favor of a smoother, finer experience.
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.
Memory issues because of customizability is a red herring.
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.
"Our previous engine would not handle that. The way memory worked in the previous engine, it never would have been able to do that." Where is bullshit man when you need him. I don't believe this for a second. Great CoD puff piece HN.
It's pretty common in game development to up against the wall in terms of texture memory or frame rate performance or way past your limits and needing to cut things before release. It's very believable they didn't have the spare memory for in depth customizable characters. It's much more efficient for the computer to have more characters to render that look the same. Maybe they had the exact same geometry for all players and the exact same textures and just a different label over their heads, or had only a color swap texture difference, etc.. If adding customization meant each player had to have separate data and that data didn't fit in fast caches, it could have broken the frame rate requirements. Writing games, I've spent months on optimizations to do things like draw as many objects with as few data/state/rendering changes as possible to reach frame rate requirements for a smooth game.
I posted it because I could not figure out how their reasoning actually made any technical sense. I suspect it is a total BS job, but maybe there is an actual technical reason.
Call of Duty was originally based on the Quake 3 engine. In Quake 3 there were female characters. Now they're telling us it was not technically possible before? I have my doubts.
I can understand if this was the case for the single player campaign. Where there might be limitations in scripting the story for a female as well as a male character. But for multiplayer, the explanation is a bit more difficult to swallow. I'm not a game designer, nor am I CoD player, but wouldn't a texture pack be able to easily solve this issue?
Female avatars existed back in Tribes, or even Unreal Tournament. I'm not a CoD player, but I'm frankly surprised that there wasn't an option. I thought this sort of stuff was a _given_ today. Guess I was wrong.
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.
I bet the hangup was the assumption that "if we add them they have to look really different or you won't be able to tell the difference at a distance!" Making women and men look easily distinguishable underneath all that gear probably couldn't be done fairly in terms of gameplay (because of visibility and shootable size.) It's a variant on a classic sexist catch-22: women are a threat if they're different from men and superfluous if they're the same.
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.
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 really like how there was no attempt made to fact check the interviewee. But then I guess if we started acting like real journalists we wouldn't get all these great inside scoops.
[+] [-] ryusage|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brimanning|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] infogulch|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scoofy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|12 years ago|reply
In other words they could have skipped custom character creation and just had static male and female avatars using the exact same engine.
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wetmore|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john_i|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schreiaj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragontamer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dkarl|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bluetidepro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thezilch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragontamer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshdotsmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] The_D|12 years ago|reply