*sets up soapbox*
Ahem. I know this is an issue which has been addressed before, but it is one that struck close to home for me and I feel I would regret not adding my two cents: female player characters.
As a woman, it is easy to feel forgotten or even alienated in the gaming industry. At all times I am surrounded by the very male demographic and games and advertisemants that pander to the testosterone-bearing, and to be fair, gaming has been for a very long time a masculine pursuit. It's nigh-impossible for me to be a gamer without being labeled immediately a "girl gamer," rather than just a "gamer," and to be frank it can be pretty frustrating.

I work for a technology retailer, and Brink is the first game which has completely unified my coworkers and I in our excitement for a game. I can't adequately express how amped I am to play this thing, so let me just get that out there on the table. Still, the label of "girl gamer" follows me. I find myself relegated to a sort of "second-chair" status among peers. Customers to my store will actually ask if there is "a man he can talk to who knows more about shooters."

Consequently, I have very mixed feelings on the prospect of female avatars. Not having that distinction really come into play is a very positive thing as far as I am concerned, but it's not necessarily the best solution - not finding representation for the kind of characters we envision in a game lauded for its creative mutability can be a major frustration ingame for a lot of women, and when we do it's often in the form of a very intensely sixualized and male-centric character design.

What I'd like to propose is a sort of compromise to please everyone, and I hope Splash Damage and Bethesda take this to heart (I'm quite the Bethesda fangirl): consider including female characters as a DLC option down the line, but please don't make them just for men. I don't want to create a character who has to run around the gameworld with a steel thong (I'm looking at you, Guild Wars). Maybe some people do (and I hope I never meet one), but honestly when bullets start flying I don't reach for my beach wear, I reach for some damn armor. The male characters in this game have a great art direction, but really they're not exactly the most handsome bullet-fodder in the world, so why should the female characters be an exception? Leave the big-briasted shoehorned-in female protagonists to Gears of War and give me a girl who actually looks like she came from The Ark. Give me a girl who looks like she could actually haul that rocket-filled backpack around. Give me someone I can identify with without putting me into that stereotype of "girl gamer," and I know a lot of ladies out there who will flock to Brink as a result.

Thank you.
*steps off of soapbox*

(Edited for accuracy, thanks The Zero :3)

I agree with you 100%, the most I can tell you is to wait and see what happens. Right now Bethesda and S.D. are waiting on sales expectations, if they do by chance exceed what they anticipated I will be sure that they will work very hard to implement this within the game.

Well first off, Bethesda is the publisher, not the designers of Brink. That's Splash Damage

Second they wanted to have female gamers in Brink but the didn't have the time and resources. They would have had to split male customization in two, and they didn't want to do that. Many of us Brink-goers are hoping for females in the futures DLC but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Splash Damage might be making a sequel in the future and we can have higher hopes that that sequel will have female characters for you women out there who wish to relate to your character, and us men who want to let our video game feminine side out lmao ^_^

If you actually have customers asking for a guy to talk to, you need to move to a more hip, culturally advanced location - maybe come forward in time to 2011.

Sorry - I am a female, been gaming for a looooooong time, along with quite a few other women friends and acquaintances. "Female gamer" is just not a unique or unusual thing anymore. :shrug:

With regards to female characters in BRINK - as I and others (some women, some men) have said before, it would be great if females were included, whether now or in the future. I love when games give me the choice of what gender to play. But at the end of the day, SD did not, for reasons that have been gone over in great detail in this forum - technical and time/development issues, not any sort of "hurr durr girlz dont play shooterz" type reason. Most of us still measure a game on it's actual gameplay merits first and foremost. And incidentally, you would want to address your proposal to Splash Damage, the developer of BRINK. Bethesda is the publisher of the game, a different role entirely.


I will let this thread stay open for a bit, but if I see the usual suspects in here with the same cranky remarks, I will close it.

As a man I fully agree with you. However, I also see as to why they didn't just put in female character models from the beginning. Your idea for DLC later on is a very interesting idea though. With this SD would have the amount of time to create said models while we were all getting comfortable with the game.
The main issue I have with the fact that there are no female character is strictly that this game takes place in the future. Are we to believe that woman for some reason or another have been taken out of military services? But just to reiterate, I am fully in support of your idea.

Thanks for the correction...I missed that in the proofread! Fixed.

Very valid reasoning.

I always just considered that the heavy female class would just look like a pseudo-valkyrie, which sounds cool on paper, but would be difficult as high hell to make look right, especially with the angular features of the art style.

And omitting a female heavy and only having mediums/lights would just scream inequality.

While I'm playing devil's advocate, I'm gonna throw out that it took GoW three games until it put females in, and most other FPSes (TF2, Cod) don't have women either. And don't all start sayign "BUT PYRO COULD BE ETC".

I know it's different because the game is very focused on customization, but think, a large group of people would give all their buffs/support to the female character model, with some inbuilt white-knight system in their heads, and thus would gimp the male players who just see the females as another target/ally.

Equality would be great, but it has it's issues, because most people don't see genders as equal.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a she-hulk pigtailed Nord warrior raining explosive hell down on the enemy, and I'm pretty sure the only reason they HAVEN'T been included is that the customization would be even more hassle, and since tattos/topless blokes is a part of gameplay, it would imply a bunch of DoA-style costumes for those who prefer their warriors scantily clad, and that'd be a whole other kettle of fish for SD to wade through and get past the ratings board. But if it could be done, definitely do it.

Oh, and I imagine that canonically, the women and children are kept waaay back from all the civil war skirmishes, just to make sure that at least part of the human race lives on.

It's a really old-money sort of area...a lot of these people probably don't know what year it is in the first place...



Fixed! Was my stypid typo ^_^;

With regards to technical limitations, I certainly understand. I wasn't expecting to revolutionize all DLC, just to get another viewpoint out there with the hopes of keeping the idea in peoples' minds. Still, thank you for the prompt reply!

There's actually a screenshot of what women would look like if implemented in Brink. Wish I had it, but I don't. They looked pretty good being done in stylized realism.

Found it: http://i52.tinypic.com/2zhldo0.jpg

It's true, haha...the same topic comes up all the time in the TF2 forums and really the technical (and balancing) issues are just glaring. A female character is shaped differently, so how do you establish the hitboxes for female characters to keep them fair with the males? When you have an engine that burns a lot of RAM on things like animations and textures, where do you put all of the extra content necessary to add three entirely new character types?

The technical issues have been addressed, but to be honest as long as it's a possibility for either this game or a sequel, I'd like to make sure the devs know there're a lot of different viewpoints out there :3

I thought Bethesda and S.D. were not going to do anything with it unless it sells well, plus they are focused right now on a new game, thats supposedly coming out in 2-3 years from now.

If only you could put this directly to Splash Damage.

I don't completely understand why they left females out and I've read about their reasoning. The Ark looks exactly the type of place where females would become tough, feisty and battle-hardened - btw, not all women are stay-at-home mothers.

I'm from Belfast, I live amongst the "resistance" here and throughout our troubles I've watched thousands of women become battle-hardened through it.

And for me it's an ongoing topic in my household because my sister is an avid gamer. She is an excellent FPS player especially. She regularly tops scoreboards in all the top shooter games and she always misses the lack of female characters, leading her to buy and play games that are based on female characters that she can relate to but her favoured games involve male-only characters. We usually team up in co-op/multiplayer games and people assume she's a male because in-game she looks male and kicks most players' butts.

It should be a norm in the vast majority of games and I dare say it's not very difficult to adopt for most. I'd sign a petition for Female Character Addition DLC.

To be perfectly honest I just don't know how they could pull off a Heavy Female without offending women or just making it look way too hilarious for it too even be allowed in the game.

That's awesome, but again, seems like they'd look a bit... interesting with a heavy build. And if it was a slenderer heavy build, from afar they'd just look like a medium guy, most likely. Unless they had major... assets.

No problem

I don't know what's wrong with being labeled a girl gamer. Well I guess if people treat you as a lower gamer than a male I could see the problem. But I respect girl gamers entirely. I often enjoy playing with or against girl gamers more then men. It's that feeling when you get pwned by a girl, and say "AW HEEEELLLL NAW" and you try to 1-up her and get pwned again. Then you cry in a corner. :sadvaultboy: It's quite fun and frustrating.

It's the idea that a large, muscular female is automatically hilarious that I hope to dispel. So much media describes them as unlikely and hideous that there's just no other way to make a heavy female in most peoples' minds, but to be honest I have met a few very tall, muscular and attractive women.

I mean, if you stick a bra on Johnny Bravo he's going to look silly...the only way to fix that awful image in peoples' minds is to make a strong female protagonist and to do it well. It's just too big a risk for most people. Remember the debate on Trishka from Bulletstorm?

Women put up with a lot when playing video games. Being hit on, once the fact that they're a women is revealed, is one of the major ones.

I know plenty of women who are like that and would demolish your average man with one knuckle.

The exaggerated feature design in Brink could develop something suitable for heavy/medium/light female.

An design example for possible heavy female gunner in Team Fortress..

[img]http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/7870/femaleheavy.png[/img]

Cool,

A female that is a "team orientated" player. Nice! I sense maturity.

I totally agree with your writ. I think it will happen, this game I definitely see expanding into many areas before pt. 2 pop's up.


Hey I am looking for team mates myself. Send me a request if you'd like


Xbox: odi0n (that is a zero after the i)


Enjoy this magnificent game.

That's a very valid point, but a creeper is gonna creep whether you stick him in a LIVE headset or a public place, it's not just in gaming.

Sheeva from Mortal Kombat build for Heavy. Though... Without the 4 arms and revealing outfit: http://gamesnet.vo.llnwd.net/o1/gh/131560-9.jpg

I find hitting on someone through a video game to be quite foolish.

Already have a team, see you online (my gamertag is the same as my forum name :3)

Shojimbo: I DO love that female heavy.

I call for creeper filter within the chat options. Hands down.