Battlestate Games explained why the studio’s Escape From Tarkov FPS has only playable male characters.

They had to publish a statement because the Internet has dug deep to find a 2016 interview on WCCFTech where Pavel Dyatlov, one of the developers at Battlestate, used an entirely different reason why no female characters could be controlled in the FPS. They „concluded that women are not allowed to be in the war,” and then he added that „women can’t handle that amount of stress. There’s only place for hardened men in this place.”

The reason why this old comment was brought up because Escape From Tarkov, currently in open beta, got popular on Twitch in the last days of 2019. The studio got reasonably criticised for Dyatlov’s comments, and Battlestate Games (who we shorten to BSG onwards) had to respond. Let’s see their statement: „Regarding the 3 years old article with points about women in Escape From Tarkov: the answers were done by one, not a key BSG employee which probably were misinterpreted and as a result didn’t reflect the official position of the company, that we always respected women in wars and military women. The employee was reprimanded and properly instructed. We are sorry for [the] caused confusion.” The case doesn’t end here, though – BSG had a reply with a somewhat different reason: „First – there are women in Escape From Tarkov already (trader, some future key storyline quests will have women as main characters) But there will be no playable female characters because of game lore and more importantly – the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc.” Dejavu…

Previously, Ubisoft ran into a similar issue: in 2014, when Assassin’s Creed: Unity launched, James Therien, Ubisoft’s technical director, said that the lack of playable women was a „reality of game development,” plus including them would have „doubled the work” with animation or costumes. A year later, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate fixed the issue, as most of the missions allowed you to choose between the Frye twins, namely Jacob, or Evie, the female twin…

If history repeats itself, then we’re going to see a 180° turn in Escape From Tarkov’s development, and the military FPS will expand towards playable female characters, too…

Source: Gamesindustry

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