Battlefield 4‘s executive producer Patrick Bach hopes the franchise can one day fully incorporate female characters.
Female characters in shooters seem to be all the rage these days, as publishers extend an olive branch to women, trying to break the stereotype that FPSs are “a man’s game.” While Call of Duty: Ghosts probably had the most publicized revelation of female soldiers, sci-fi FPS/RTS Natural Selection 2 actually did it first.
Regardless of that, it now appears that DICE isn’t about to let its competitors one-up it, and is seriously considering adding playable female soldiers to its soon-to-be-released Battlefield 4. He says that he hopes the franchise can one day fully incorporate female characters, but some sacrifices would be have to made to make this happen.
“We have been talking about it quite a lot. We’ve been looking at how much it’s worth, compared to how much we’d have to sacrifice. Because it’s quite complicated, It’s not just [creating] the actual character models, it’s all the voice-over work. We have hundreds of thousands of lines that would need to be duplicated, because even now we’re cheating quite a lot – we have random male voices, and then you have to multiply that by two. If we do it, we’ll do it right, not just to tick a box or something.”
So there you have it. We probably won’t be seeing female soldiers in Battlefield 4 any time soon, but when they are added, it will be done right.
Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin previously said that Call of Duty: Ghosts undertook a “massive overhaul” of the game’s engine to make female soldiers possible.
Source: Official Xbox Magazine
