Jump to content

Why female soldiers


Recommended Posts

Now, i know its many threads discussing this. But i didnt want my question to drown in them. Cause i am sincerely curious!

Why is it so important for many players with female soldiers?

Dont get me wrong, i am in noway opposed to the idea of female soldiers. But Chris has many times stated this is a very work heavy/time consuming thing, for low gain.

Perhaps its not a good comparison but if you could choose between one extra tileset instead, or a bigger research tree wouldnt you go for this instead?

Myself i wont complain at all about female troops, BUT i would choose Goldhawks time to go on other game mechanics than "chicks with guns" anyday in the week.

I mean its not an equality statement. Its a computer game.

Is it just because old X-Com had it?

How about som Sebillian females also? You would like that. Wouldnt you? You perverts. ;)

Cheers!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well I have started playing many games as female characters for some variation.

Hmm okey. I could agree upon this. I for one just started my second ME play through as a woman. Mostly because the female actor is 50 times better than the male counterpart. But this is strategy gaming, not character based, as ME for example.

Yes more female gamers indeed. But without any research to back my claim, i think i can safely say that they are still relatively "thin on the ground" when we are speaking turnbased strategy :).

Anyways its beside my point (because i am not against women in games), and that being i want it motivated with more than just catering to female gamers and nostalgia if i am gonna see it take a shitload of project time from more important gameplay stuff unopposed.

There are much more important stuff to focus on i believe. But then again, if a majority of the community really want Goldhawk to spend time on this, then i will shut up and let the girls fight also.

In short; i am worried a relatively pointless detail will take a lot of resources, and i wanna hear people argue their motivations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chris has said female soldiers if implemented would get

1) new portraits- maybe 30

2) Female versions of the armour equip screen -for all armours

All sprites on the battlefields would remain the same- once you have armour on who can tell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In short; i am worried a relatively pointless detail will take a lot of resources, and i wanna hear people argue their motivations.

Pros

I miss female characters from X-Com, waaaahh!

Extends a welcoming hand to a potential customer base of half the planet.

Increases the chances of more women looking at a turn based strategy game

Provides solid character roles for women. No skimpy chain mail here.

Adds variation to the portraits.

Doesn't look as though the game developers are misogynists.

Would work with only the portraits done, considering the bulky armour.

...and possibly one armour type (but it's not essential)

minimises the chances of half my squad being called Ethan again.

Cons

Combat forces of 1979 didn't have too many front line women. Solution: add in roles they did have/ ignore it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One way around the non-frontline troops thing is to have them mainly come from insurgent armies like Vietnam. Some NATO countries had female soldiers, but none saw deployment, but then again half the male soldiers have no combat experience.

Plus yeah, it's nostalgic. It also probably seems stranger to Americans than people in most other countries.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nostalgia, plus this isn't 1963 anymore. There's female gamers, and there's male gamers who care about the inclusion of females. Games have been about men more than long enough, and if we ever want to break into the "games are art" category (which I personally really wish for), the potential inclusion of about half the world's population is more than enough reason.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

... and if we ever want to break into the "games are art" category (which I personally really wish for), the potential inclusion of about half the world's population is more than enough reason.

Maybe, although as people have pointed out there is a certain amount of historical revisionism in having female front-line combat troops in a Cold-War era game*. To accurately portray a historical period, with the prejudices of that time intact, is not to imply that the creators of that work believe in those prejudices.

* yes, I know that having aliens is also historical revisionism

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It would help me with immersion, frankly. I know that 1979 wasn't exactly a beacon of tolerance and equality, but as a guy playing a game in 2012, female soldiers would be conspicuous by their abscence.

Also, I like to think of my secretive international paramilitary group being an equal opportunity employer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Games have been about men more than long enough, and if we ever want to break into the "games are art" category

I guess you are more likely to break into the "Games are politics category" then. Xenonauts is art in many ways women or not. And i dont agree with you at all when you say games have been about men. I can give you many examples of adventure games or roleplaying games of high quality that has women in them. Even some strategy games. Without being sexist about it at all, unlike the softporn movie Mass effect :)

And in those games the women did get same sprites or animations as the men. Cause IF chris implement women, he should do it right. Portraits and picture in equipscreen is not a good way to show "half the worlds population" that you invite them to join.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I honestly think they should just focus on making the game better and more expansive. I really doubt there's that many women out there that care more about being represented as soldiers in a game, than they do about the game actually being a better game.

As for theme, well, I don't believe it is thematically accurate at all to have many female soldiers in 1976. There have always been some female fighters in the world, but the chances of them ending up as one of the few dozen / hundred soldiers that pass through the ranks of the Xenonauts would be rather unlikely.

Even if the administration of the organization is very progressive, you've still got a bunch of grunts born in the 40's and 50's, from all sorts of national backgrounds, that would probably make it difficult for women on the front lines to operate. Politically, you would risk international incident to enroll women in a program where 10 - 99% of your troops are going to end up vaporized by plasma guns or much much worse.

But seriously? Theme doesn't matter that much here. The real meat of this issue is that design resources are limited and there's a whole lot of ground to cover.

If they can get another artist whose job it is to just make more portraits, then okay, making those 30 female portraits is just as vital as adding more male portraits, so have at it. I would just hate to think they're going to have less terrain tiles or a few less research options due to lack of pictures for them, just so they can add a feature that might actually detract from the Cold War setting, but that probably won't happen.

So, if this stretch goal actually helps get much more funding, then hopefully that will translate to plenty more time spent polishing and expanding the game. I just disagree with the notion that, in and of itself, this is very important. If it gets them more funding, cool.

(edit): I don't know if it's all that wise to make new animations for female soldiers. In uniform, soldiers pretty much look like soldiers, and that's by design. Trained soldiers hold guns like any other soldier, they scale over fences like soldiers, they run like soldiers-- having gendered animations rather implies a lot. Besides which, once the heavier armors come in, or even just the Jackal armor, the bodies are really going to look the same at least from your zoomed-out view.

So, even with female soldiers added in and implemented, I think having their own animation set would add very little to realism or immersion. Furthermore, if they wanted to animate a whole nother body and put it into the game, wouldn't it be a lot more useful and interesting to have another type of alien or a new set of body armor for your troops? Again though, if people want to help the studio reach the stretch goal just so they can have female troops, then it's no skin off my back.

Edited by Stromko
Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing i would much rather want than female soldiers in this game are female and child civilians.

That would be great for the fear and horror factor of the game, seeing children and women being mowed down in the streets by Sebillians. As now, Xenonauts streets are purely made of men.

And that is a lot more strange, than having no women in the most elite fighting force of the world.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing i would much rather want than female soldiers in this game are female and child civilians.

That would be great for the fear and horror factor of the game, seeing children and women being mowed down in the streets by Sebillians. As now, Xenonauts streets are purely made of men.

And that is a lot more strange, than having no women in the most elite fighting force of the world.

Agreed on women civilians; since civilians don't carry weapons they're easier to put into the game.

Not sure about children though; I think in some countries you can get into some serious ratings issues if you have children potentially being killed, which is why games like Skyrim refuse to allow you to attack children

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing i would much rather want than female soldiers in this game are female and child civilians.

That would be great for the fear and horror factor of the game, seeing children and women being mowed down in the streets by Sebillians. As now, Xenonauts streets are purely made of men.

And that is a lot more strange, than having no women in the most elite fighting force of the world.

Alternative ending of the game:

The only surving soldier (of course with your name/nickname) survive the resque of all the kidnapped women on the mothership...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not sure about children though; I think in some countries you can get into some serious ratings issues if you have children potentially being killed, which is why games like Skyrim refuse to allow you to attack children

Ohh i see... lame. Not that i feel that you must be able to attack children. Just for realism and immersion and all. But i guess sometimes one must just accept the fact that we live in an anxious and slightly retarded world sometimes

Actually i think the guys with shorts and white t-shirts in original X-com were supposed to be young boys. Quite tall for that age perhaps but i always saw them as youngsters.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1.)

I always liked to rename my soldiers after my friends. This way I'm even more attached to them and feel the pressure to keep them alive during a mission. As it happens, some of my friends are female. That's why I'd like to have at least female portraits or something that indicates I'm ordering a female soldier around.

2.)

Sometimes I rename my soliders after characters from pop-culture. Like I rename one team after SG-1 from Stargate. Samantha Carter with a moustache? No, thank you.

Even if the devs don't decide to implement females, I hope they put somewhere in the code a distinction between female and male. Otherwise female names and portraits made by the community will be mixed randomly with the existing male names and portraits.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1

Even if the devs don't decide to implement females, I hope they put somewhere in the code a distinction between female and male. Otherwise female names and portraits made by the community will be mixed randomly with the existing male names and portraits.

Supposedly that should be pretty easy to modd. I believe it had to do with the way the game handled nationalities. You could add a hidden string so that female Canadian soldiers came from Canada_female or something (but would still only show them as comming from Canada ingame). Then that soldier would pull names and portraits from the names list and portrait pool connected to Canada_female.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To make it clear, I don't want female animations/sprites. I just want female portraits and in the best case a female equip screen option. I don't see how this would take away from the quality of the final game (it's not like the artist is the same person as the lead programmer and the AI coder), and I also don't see how including "just" portraits and a new equip screen would be half-baked and irritate people more than totally leaving the feature out. Really, Goldhawk is getting a lot of fresh money, and they don't have a fixed deadline to meet - how in the world would the inclusion of female portraits impact on the quality or feel of the game? There's enough resources to implement this nicely, and even if no single female or male gamer is interested or happy about it, it still wouldn't take away from any other feature.

Plus, female soldiers were in the original. I think this is in fact an important point. No single review of Xenonauts ever will miss the opportunity to comment on how everything from the original was implemented plus then some, except for female soldiers. It would, in my opinion, forever be a scratchmark in the (otherwise hopefully) pristine surface of Xenonauts, much more so than say the absence of levelling tanks or RPG-inspired special NPCs with associated dialogue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...