Well, canonically KOTOR2's Exile was a light side woman. And KOTOR2 was made by Obsidian. Soooo, yeah. It's not totally impossible.



Eh, that's something that's a little self-evident to anyone who's played any of the games in this genre. Every Bethesda game since Morrowind and probably earlier has had gender choice. Every Fallout game ever except possibly BoS has had gender choice. Most Obsidian games save for Alpha Protocol have gender choice. Most western RPGs in general have gender choice, in fact. Even ones where the character is fairly strictly defined, ala Mass Effect. In fact, the biggest wRPG that doesn't have true gender choice that comes to mind besides Alpha Protocol is Diablo 2. And that's just a matter of "you can't be a female barbarian or paladin; women are sorceresses or amazons." Diablo 3 is looking to change that too.

While the female characters might not get much screentime in the prerelease marketing materials, it should be pretty obvious to most gamers that as a rule, wRPGs have a female protagonist option. It's very much the exception when they don't.

That's also due to the same thing that caters to male - narrow minded marketing which is backwards and still living in a very different era. It's not just women who clean, men do as well, they also do the food shopping and cooking.
Times have changed, it's high time that marketing did the same thing.

They want more sales, progress beyond the narrow minded concepts and note the reality. Both male and female roles are mixed now.

Risen, the Arcania series, Deathspank and several more like Two Worlds, plus the majority of JRPG's, don't have gender choice. They're strictly male only, I avoid those. Had my fill of male leads, now I look for female leads, male leads only and I don't buy the game with only very, very few exceptions like Assassin's Creed, which badly needs a female lead before the series also becomes stale like so many male focused games are. No say, no play.

Actually you could argue what is cause and what is effect here. I am fairly sure that more girls would start playing games if the creators would start catering to them, or rather stop catering to the male crowd with stuff that drives the girls away. If a female is presented, she is likely to be heavily drawing male gaze instead of concentrating on really being a female character. It's kind of like Michelangelo's women.
You can combine a strong female character with appeal like that, but there are only three examples I could really recall right now. More Shepard please, less Ivy Valentine.

being a man, and i dont' really want to sound callous here, but i don't really care about who markets to whom and to which gender. honestly, who actually wants advertising directed at them? if i was female i'd be happy about that.

on the other hand the type of female characters in video games is in a very sorry state. partly it's the entire industry's lack of creating interesting characters. period. male or female. but the female side does get hit a bit harder. where are the peggy olson's? the Odrade's from dune? you look at the most famous female characters in video games, Lara Croft, Samus, and there really isnt much substance to them at all.

lately in rpg's i've been almost always a female lead simply because it's such an untapped idea in games to have a strong, realistic woman, that it makes my playthrough insanely unique.

but idealism aside, men are always going to play more video games than woman, regardless of the cause and effect of marketing. i see it more as an actual trait of the gender. not that the balance couldn't equalize more, just that i always see it as a male majority.

Possibly. It depends on how she's portrayed I suppose. A female character looking feminine isn't automatically a bad thing. Of course, a counterpoint to that is Samus, who manages to be a strong female character even though for most of the games she's wearing a faceless suit of power armor. Well, up until Other M where they assassinated her character by making her an indecisive woman who needs male approval and freezes up at the sight of Ridley, who she's already killed five times by that point.

The thing with the FemCourier is that she's totally defined by the player, so we'll probably have the same aggressive lines that males get. And she'll obviously not have to wear oversixualized attire unless the player wants that, or possibly for some sort of "dress up as dancer, infiltrate casino" quest.



The main reason I like FemShep is that she actually wears armor in ME2. All the other female characters except Tali and Liara wear these foolish cleavage suits.

I still prefer ManShep in general, but I like how FemShep wears actual armor and not some oversixualized skin-tight space latex "armor" designed more for distracting her male enemies than actually protecting her. And then they had to go and ruin it by making the Thane and Garrus romances.



I've never heard of any of those except Risen. Like I said though, all the big name RPGs tend to have gender choice. 'Cept for Borderlands, and that still gives you a strong female character in the form of... Hold on, Borderlands has a bunch of strong female characters. Helena Pierce, Tanis, Lillith, Steele... Huh. Borderlands is a lot less male dominated than I thought.

Borderlands is perhaps the only shooter in a long while to have a playable female lead, the last ones before that were Medal Of Honour: Underground, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 1, Perfect Dark - both, and a 60s based spy FPS game.
The majority of FPS games tend to just be the usual dull male lead doing the same old thing in every game - man have gun, man kill many.

I don't even bother playing Rockstar's games anymore because not once have they bothered to have a female lead in their games when it comes to single player, and encourging the killing of women in Red Dead Redemption was just one step over the line too far for me after the constant refusual to grow up and move on past their boring male characters.
The video game industry may be largely male dominated, but that badly needs to change so that it's an even mix of male and female developers, characters and more. Without change things stagnant, and video gaming is stagnanting due to the constant catering to males.

You know, I remember the announcement. Lots of redundant Nintendo sequels, blablabla, new Metroid, me "yes", crowd still, made by Team Ninja, crowd cheers wildly. And I thought I was going to be sick. Team Ninja taking up a strong female character. The guys who think strong female means "has ginormous briasts and beats people up". Urgh.

Cleavage suits also fit the characters who wear them in this game. Apart from some minor stuff, ME is actually a quite equally designed game. Only the FemShep romances bothered me, yes. The one exclusive to FemShep in ME was alright, despite me not liking Kaidan - it was about two soldiers, two people who could actually work stuff out and get into a normal romance. And then in ME2 they ruined that appeal by making FemShep so very feminine and far more sensitive than would be right. And then I saw the yeoman "romance". Urgh again.


Anyway, we are drastically drifting off-topic. If anyone wants to make a thread about gender roles in gaming... Feel free to do so. ^_^

I've been topics like that before in other forums and been attacked many times by males for it since they feel it takes away their manliness. So I just avoid making such topics now, tired of death threats.

Right, this discussion is pretty tangential. Anyway. Point is that in NV, it's up to the player to define their courier. I'd hazard a guess that a reason we don't FemCouriers in the trailers and marketing materials is that, honestly, it has to be generic. The courier is defined by the player, so they can't flesh them out for the marketing materials because there's no true "character" to flesh out until the player gets their claws on the game. They could show a FemCourier in armor walking away from the explosion, I suppose, but why? Is five seconds of a random female character shooting stuff or walking away from a big boom really an indication of strength? The only thing it does is tell the player that FemChars are an option... If that, and that should be pretty obvious to anyone who's played past games in the series.

But not everyone is the same age, there could be brand new female gamers who have never played a Fallout game before and only heard of it, they might not know about a gender choice since it's never mentioned. So having the female character choice shown would be a way of saying 'You can select the gender of your character'. That would then lead to interest from any new female gamers and they might end up enjoying the game and telling their friends who then play the game.

But it tells people out there that you can even play a girl who blows stuff up. That is an improvement that might draw in a few people. Heck, I could interest me love in StarCraft 2 when I showed her that one of the main characters is an interesting and endearing female villain.

Bottom line: female character pictures don't hurt anyone, quite to the contrary.

So what, appeals to the pyromaniac female demographic?

Not every female gamer is a puppy cuddling, Cooking Mama fan. Those are the minority in fact, the majority enjoy blowing things up and a good RPG.

You would be amazed as to how many of us like action movies for the explosions (and of course gorgeous heroes), and are then disappointed in the damsel in distress syndrome. Very feminine appearance doesn't change that, at all. And if they start gaming, why not go for the real games? Even if my mind is differently woven from theirs in one department, I still think very female and don't have problems with those games. ^_^

"Oh save me, save me!" "I'll be your hero!" "Actually, mate, looks like you'll be saved by a woman if there's one who can't stop laughing at you. You just had to go storming in guns blazing, well done, you got fooled"

Why can't it be a man in distress for a change and the women being the hero? The whole damsel in distress thing is well dull.

Interestingly enough, I just heard a big op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about this very topic. In the United States the results are not what most people would expect, but All of (men and women alike) have grown up in this generation of violent TV, video games and action movies. They say that the Majority of Gen X/Y women actually prefer the aciton movies and games Much more these days than in generations past, and I see this every day in my wife and daughter.

The barrier of stereotype and stigma around women playing video games and enjoying violence on TV are gone or fading fast, and anyone with an eye to the future will recognize this and relish in their further emancipation. I for one am glad that we're finally seeing more women in games and gaming - for far too long it has been dominated by testosterone. Now I can come to the forums and interact with (still too few) women and men on a much more equal basis. In this case I think we have the right trend going in the US, and hope the equality in video gaming spreads around the globe.

To the point at hand, in the future such questions won't even enter the minds of gamers. Of COURSE there is a female version of the armor, determined by the six of your player.


Miax

You know what'd be funny? If there was a quest where, say, Veronica is captured by and you have to go rescue her. Except when you get there, you find a large number of bodies and Veronica trying to hack the door to escape and find you, having already broken out and killed all her guards.

It does so over here, too. I have a lot of friends, most female, who gather for roleplaying sessions regularly, enjoy LAN parties and generally just bathe in nerdiness. And they are not pudgy pizzafaces, either. ^_^

Let's see what change comes. I mean, it has to come from the other side too, since insecurities in many male players lead to strange behaviour when a girl gamer appears.

Now that is nice idea.

Truly, this is a wonderful time to be alive, global recession nonwithstanding!



Well, remember that a lot of the guy gamers on, say, XBL are thirteen year olds, or guys with the mental age of a thirteen year old. Can't exactly expect them to act maturely.

That would make a change for sure. And the comments would be good if the player is using a male lead - "I'm here to save you" "I don't need saving, never did. These idiots couldn't watch over a corpse if it were cemented to the ground"

I wish the marketing departments for gaming would note that the divide between the kinds of things both genders enjoy is changing, they still seem to view the world in a very narrow minded, old fashioned way. Also many developers are male and tend to still have the frat boy mentality where in their eyes, women are weak, inferior and only made for men. Rockstar is the worst example of that.
It's long past time that the marketing for the video game industry and much of the media world, plus video game developers and publishers, opened their eyes and saw that the world has changed, the social structure has changed. If they want a slice of the pie, then they need to stop catering to only the male side of things and start catering to both the male and female side of things, to note that there are plenty of female gamers who quite enjoy violence in video games and movies and so on and wouldn't mind having the choice of a female lead instead of the usual generio male.

Times change, it's time that change appeared in everything.

I'm not particularly hung-up about a guy on the cover, or whatever. If that's the design brief, that's what it is. Despite being female-friendly, I realise that most gamers in this genre are guys, so market it for maximum impact.

It's more: I'm paying the same as anyone else for this game, I would like to see what I'm paying for (re Promo Shots of preorder items and such). That's not too much to ask, and not doing it seems a bit.. well, more lazy than thoughtless.

Not that I would mind whoever is on the cover, but http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090927170161/gameinfo/de/images/7/70/Fallout_Artwork.jpg combines awesome with equal allure. Still one of my favourite Fallout pics. ^_^

Well, we could always pretend that the guy on the cover is actually a girl underneath that NCR ranger armor. We know there were female NCR rangers from FO2 after all.

Heck, we can assume there was a girl on all of the Fallout game covers! There's no way to tell underneath that armor!

the reason why games with strong female characters don't get cast very much is because male gamers cant relate to them most of the time. 99% of the time when a female character is written, the writers have her look at the situation from a purely women's point of view to try and get as many women as possible to play the game/see the film (which men cant see very well and therefore cant relate to) when the film Alien was written, the role of Ripply was originally cast for a man and so the writers wrote the script for a male point of view. when the male actor originality cast for the film dropped out however the director replaced him with Sigourney Weaver but didn't change the script making ripply a strong female character who everyone could relate to.

and with the video game audience being mostly male. if a character is written to only see a situation from a women's point of view then your turning away most of the audience who wont buy the game because they cant relate to the protagonist.

if men only wanted women to be eye candy in games then games such as 'Dead or alive beach volleyball' and 'Playboy the mansion' would have been massive hits but as we all know they where flops. also name me a game that has an attractive female character and no attractive male character at the same time.

the way forward for women in games is not to write a script from a purely women's view. but instead a unisix view, just like what Bioware, Obsidian and Bethesda have done. or two different scripts differing for both genders.

Men don't look at games and think "ugh there's a women protagonist, i don't want that" they look at the story and the game play and like iv said before if there is only a women's view they will find it boring.

the games industry is only biased against women because they need to make money and the majority of the money is in mens wallets and with the stereotype of gamers being spotty geeks in their bed room all day its only natural that girls aren't going to be interested

what we need to do is get writing that both men and women can relate to and get rid of the Gamer stereotype. then we will get more women playing games and more women making games.

i read an article in the paper yesterday that said: British Game studios would hire more women if more women would apply for the job. You cant hire someone if they don't apply.

i rest my case

Love everything you said but this - its very badly stereotypical in the wrong direction. I tend to think that most of the devs that get hired into the industry are pretty mature if not already seasoned professionals and corporate citizens by any other name. I can't speak for them all, but I'm fairly confident that a Large body of devs would strongly disagree with this notion. As was mentioned by others, games are marketed to a target audience - and while that audience is changing, it is not changing overnight.

Remember too that in these games, the content is heavily reviewed by Many people, including the managers, producers, marketers, testers and owners - there are no individuals in the gaming industry that Could be solely responsible for major thematic changes in a game. If a game seems like it was made for 13-year-old boys, then you can bet good money that it was intentionally built that way and that the content will be geared to that audience. What matters most is that in the Big games, the trends are changing fast and that we should embrace. 10 years ago I couldn't find women anywhere in my gaming worlds, now they are everywhere - so time is definitely on our (your) side with this.

Miax