Precisely, so wouldn't you think that they might want to send a few more women to the front lines?

unless they are saving them for when they free the ark and find salvation or stop the terrorists and it's safe for women and children again.

Frankly, it does take longer.

A male will always have the same body. Only the facial attributes and skin tone differ.


A female has a different body, thus needs modified clothing as well. And if you make all clothing unisix, people will complain that their female avatars are not sixay enuff.

Sorry if this has been covered, but there are a lot of post here and I tried to read them all.

It does take a lot of work to add a 2nd gender, more so then race. Race can easily be adjusted by skin tone. In fact the game doesn't even account for facial features. You can easily make a Caucasian character with a face that has more African american features and vice versa because race is just tied to skin tone. I'm pretty sure, from what I've seen, you could have a black skinned character, with predominately Asian features with a British accent.

However to add females, they have to have different models for the body types as females are not built like males. They then would have to redo all the models for the different armors to accommodate these new body types. They then may even have to adjust the skin for that model to make up for the changes in the model. Right now, each armor requires 3 different models, if they add females, they would now require 6.

Do I believe there story, to a degree. Is the fact that they expect the majority if not most of the players to be male a factor, almost definitely. Does this excuse now having females, that will very based on your preference.

Finally who says these girls would be cute? They guys in the game tend to be rather unattractive. This was stated in interviews and videos that most of these guys carry their life on their faces, much like Danny Trejo. Why would the girls be any different? I would have to assume most of the females would be just as hard and just as unattractive.

This was not an oversight. SD had originally planned to have female characters but they were cut.

When I say oversight, I don't meant they forgot about it, I mean how much it would have upset part of their fanbase. I'll change it to mistake though to make the meaning clearer.

Indeed. I remember coming across a quote by the Art Director on the SD forums regarding this. They did have ideas and concept art-things for
the females, but due to the resources issue, they had to cut them out. If anyone wants it, I can try to find it again in the old pages of the SD forums, lol.
They had to make a choice---one gender, deep customization or, both genders and limited customization.


Is it me, Wraith, or are we repeating ourselves here, lol? I swear, I (and you and many other posters) have mentioned this fact, like, a thousand times
at this point.

EDIT: "When I say oversight, I don't meant they forgot about it, I mean how much it would have upset part of their fanbase. I'll change it to mistake though to make the meaning clearer." Oh, that's what you meant. Sorry about the misunderstanding! Well, unfortunately, I don't think most FPS's have much of a female fanbase (or acknowledged to have enough of a fanbase, anyway).

Isn't it rumored (regardless of conformation or not) they may have a patch/update where they could put female options in?
Again rumored...

I also know there's a dev quote (Art Director again) that said something like, "If Brink is successful and gets a sequel, female characters will be one of our top priorities."

That's what I thought, thanks for the conformation...

You know why I know? Because when I first heard about the no-females (my sister joked about it being a Dude Island), I was a little stung/irked too (as a female) there were no females, so I searched the dreaded (for me) SD forums and went to old pages that had this topic using search.

For those who don't believe moi, the proof is in the pudding (or, in this case, from the Devs' mouths themselves, lol):

Okay, so here is the 22-page topic and devs' replies at the bottom:
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?p=209517#post209517

Here is the specific "if Brink is successful, we would love to include females and other features" quote:
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?p=208442#post208442


Yes, I actually take the effort to research this kind of thing, lol! ^_^

The Brink devs are very nice and polite. I like them. :yes:

End of discussion, lol.

Hey kids! Guess what we added to the FAQ!!:

Any of you recognize yourselves? :stare: Notice some posts randomly disappearing from this thread because they were a pointless gripe about using search and having seen this topic before, and in no way actually, you know, contributed to the discussion? So, just for emphasis:

If you don't want to be involved in this new thread because you've discussed it many times in the past there is nothing forcing you to respond

Honestly folks, it's a forum. Stuff gets discussed. Questions get asked many times over. If you want to answer it again, I thank you, newer members thank you. If you don't want to answer it again, that's cool. No one will mind.

On topic: I do find the guy-centric argument that "well, what would they do with creating a female heavy? All you girls will get pissed off" a bit odd. (I am paraphrasing the argument a bit. ) Have you no imaginations? Does Heavy mean the character model must be some over-bulked she-male? I'd be interested to see what the developer could come up with, should they ever opt to go down the route of adding playable female characters to the game. Maybe Heavy will be a male only class and they come up with a separate interesting female only class. Maybe they come up with a kind of cool bad ass female model that believably looks like she could handle heavy weapons that is in the same exaggerated vein as the male models they already have. I think the male heavy model looks absurd and I wouldn't play it. :shrug: Just a personal preference, doesn't mean I take offense to it.

And I have said this before, about the no female characters argument - it's disappointing not to have a gender choice in charGen, and I definitely prefer it when Developers do offer such a thing, but for the vast majority of female gamers out there - it's not really an issue. At the end of the day - is the game good? Am I having fun? That is what will ultimately matter. Oddly, this topic seems to bug some of our male members more than it does females.

I imagine something like this
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Elena_Seiple.jpg
But with armor and guns

Maybe just having fit females that look like they can handle a big gun (and not have to be so over-exaggerated like the Heavy males like some posters are saying) would be just fine with me. ^_^

I'm buying this game because it looks interesting and it looks really, really good. But.... inside, I'm still hoping the devs add females in the next game because they themselves said they would love to add them in the future (whether it's a sequel to Brink or another IP, I don't mind).

Yes, this topic does seem to bother the males (both here and especially in the SD forums) a lot more for some reason. (Maybe they think we females are whining too much or asking too much or something?) :laugh:

EDIT: Sorry about the text sizing, Leydenne! It came out bigger than I thought it would, lol. (My computer must have made the font look smaller or something, hehe). :sweat:

Seriously, it's not that easy at all.

Different Races don't boil down to skin-tone, it's a lot more than that. In fact, if you are a person like me who mainly recognises people by their faces, you will recognise that there are certain face-types which you will see in many different peoples faces.
For the more obvious part, far-eastern people have narrow eyes. For the less obvious part, Norse people tend to and (colured) African people have wider noses and sometimes distinctive jawbones.

My old http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/521/revoluzzerearly.jpg for example looks fairly unique, because although the face is essentially Caucasian, the nose is typically African and the eyes are more similar to Asians.


Funny that he mentions Saints Row.

Because the female animations in Saints Row 2 were quite poor.

Your APB character looks really, really nice! :wub:

Oh, I still have not seen most games actually get female animations right, lol! Except maybe Bayonetta and Dead or Alive 3/4 and other fighting games (very exaggerated in some aspects, though) maybe, but they are very.... um.....flexible, lol! :tongue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jfzh2s3jlE

Being a girl gamer (not that i'm putting down the game in anyway, cause it looks AWESOME!) but I would like to know why there aren't any female characters too. Look at Borderlands, It's a first person shooter, themed much like Brink and they have an awesome girl character. Another example, Mirror's Edge with the free style jumping around and running. I'm not saying it's a bad game for not having girls in the customizable characters but it would be super cool. I'm all for the character customize in games... but regardless if they don't have girls i'm gonna get the game.

P.S. An update with playable girl characters would be awesome Game Developers! :thumbsup:

Completely different kind of game than BRINK, though. And it's a RPG in the first place.


Mirror's Edge doesn't have customisation and no option to play a male character.

I'll just say it one more time (like someone did on every of the last 7 pages )
- It would need too much memory(every archetype,face... has to be remodeled)
=> Two options:
1. Cut half of the male models => less customization(spelling right?) => people crying about it
2. No females => people crying about it
And it would need too much time(every archetype,face... has to be remodeled)

Borderlands is way more shooter than RPG. Do you consider BRINK an RPG? Both have levelling up, abilities unlocked through experience, quests (objective wheel). Boderlands has lots of loot, but BRINK has a deep character generator, unlike one I've ever seen outside of an RPG (excepting Saints Row 2).

They both have RPG elements (hell so does CoD), but when it comes down to gameplay they're clearly shooters.

Borderlands is a shooter. Yes it's an RPG too, but RPG isn't the genre that defines how the game is played (mechanics, visuals, etc.)



Perhaps it isn't that the subject bothers them more, but rather how the argument evolves. As I said, Female character models being absent doesn't effect me directly because the two most important women in my life aren't going to play it anyways, but the reasoning of why they are absent isn't as strong as people think it is.

The developers made a decision not based on the "time constraints", but rather on the stereotyping and stigmas attached to having female game models.

There are numerous faces created, a few could easily have been female. There are three different bodies one of which could easily be female. Having unisix clothing options that aren't "sixy" has no more negative effect than not having women at all. Women don't move the same, well neither do men and with the facts that this is a rather embelished art style and you're in the FPS view it is again no more of a negative than not having women at all.

It's concern for how male fans would react if there was no freerunning lightweight male option, or how the immature players that still treat women as objects would behave (go look at at least half the graphics created in CoD:BO), or how people might react to having female characters getting shot infront of them.

It's fear of reaction and I don't fault the developers for that. This is business and they're doing what they think they need to, but as a community (a society) those issues won't go away without us accepting them as the issues and working through them. I hope SD decides to go forward with them for (fingers crossed) Brink 2, but their absence in Brink, while probably not noticed by most and certainly not in the heat of battle, is unfortunate.

That and I still find it strange that this overpopulated, self sufficient society is lacking women in roles of power. :biggrin:

I'd just wish to point out, as many have before, but reading your comment makes me think you missed it, that SD cut the females out only, and only because they wanted to have great amount of detailed customization.
They couldn't just throw one female there and leave it at that. They wanted to do it properly. If they added females they would've had to create a duplicate of every single garment in the game, so that the females can have as much customization. Partly it was a question of the long time it would require, but the other major reason was that there was simply not enough capacity in the engine to do it.

From what you've said it sounds like you don't understand that the customization for both genders would've been cut in half if females had been fully added.
And whether you recognize this or not doesn't really bother me, but I hope you wouldn't say SD did the decision of leaving out females for "stereotyping and stigmas attached to having female game models" because that is complete and utter nonsense and I have no idea where you got that idea.

I have always viewed this topic purely from the point of gameplay, and I would like the idea that male and female were somehow different body types, like the light and heavy.
This is purely for the reason of balance. If females wouldn't be as big as the males, it would break the balance, because the hitboxes would be unfair. This could be fixed by debuffing some other feature of the female though, though I have no idea what that debuff would be. I like more the clarity of binding the genders to body types. But then again, this would go against the high level of customizing, so I'm not sure.

see, see? even Moders agree with the same thing i've been saying since the first female topic 2 million years ago.

males are increasingly losing the Y chromosome making them girlier and women are increasingly gaining testosterone.in a few hundred(maybe thousand i forget) years men will be all gone,scientists believe at that point women will be impregnable by rubbing against each other and giving themselves the illusion of pregnancy ,they're brain makes them pregnant even without a male donor. this theory was largely supported by the lizard who does this exact thing in the desert.

maybe this is why men are more sensitive too this subject?