You, like me, might not have heard of the game Escape from Tarkov until a few days ago, when it exploded on Twitch, several years after entering early access. It’s a punishing shooter with some incredible, terrifying quirks. Your friends aren’t marked in the interface, so it’s easy to kill them. When you pick up a new clip of ammo, you have to literally check the clip to see how much is actually there. It’s also a game where you can’t play as a woman, a failing common to a lot of video games that might have been overlooked, were it not for the inflammatory comments made by the game’s developers in the past—and this week.
Why keep your mouth shut when you have a rabid audience of shitheads who understands your dogwhistles and become your own little social media defense army?
Wow a tiny group of independent white dudes making a hardcore multiplayer PC game for deeply invested PC gamers? And they turned out to be bigots? Based on that first sentence, I would have never guessed this outcome! To my shock and horror!
And the year or two before, AC Liberation happened and the devs on that game even pointed out in response to the Unity devs that they transferred roughly 40% of their animations straight from AC3.
Look, I hope we all (by which I mean both the users of this board, and games culture as a wider whole) are at the point where “adding women is too much work” is obviously bullshit and reflects a deliberate design decision.
No one is going to be swayed by examples of how it could be done, or has been done. These people knew, and still know, what they were doing here. No one should give them the benefit of the doubt and let them weasel out of the consequences.
It seems so easy, to me, to just say: “Well, we didn’t really consider female characters when we were building the game and, unfortunately, it’s just not on the timetable at the moment”
It won’t be a satisfactory statement for some, but it still seems better than pretending being an absolute fucking chud is some kind of stance.
There was also a Twitch Drops event for Tarkov where you could get in game loot by watching streams of the game that ended recently which could explain the decline.
