
Why Female Soldiers Were Finally Added to Call of Duty's Multiplayer - protomyth
http://kotaku.com/why-female-soldiers-were-finally-added-to-call-of-duty-1142063196
======
ryusage
Okay, so this is a dumb article, but it's not _quite_ as idiotic as it sounds.

Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just
somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally
didn't have the technology before to create them. That's just obviously flat-
out stupid.

What they're actually saying here is that their previous engine wasn't able to
support _custom characters_ , and so they never thought to try and make
characters who would be representative of their full audience. When they made
personalizing the character a focus, they realized they needed females to be
an option, and that prompted them to add it.

It's still obviously sexist that it never even occurred to them there should
maybe be a female in the game. There's no reason they couldn't have put one or
two as options in the game before. But they never actually said it was
impossible to do it. That's Kotaku's own not-very-generous interpretation.

~~~
brimanning

      Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally didn't have the technology before to create them.
    

What they're really saying is that it would be twice as much work with two
different modeling and movement algorithms running instead of a single,
streamlined approach. It's not impossible, but considering the amount of work
developers already have to do and the graphics the games are running, it was
left out in favor of a smoother, finer experience.

What you noted about creating an engine to support custom characters means
that those developers took the time to go back, refactor existing code and
optimize around different multiple different models running simultaneously
while keeping a smooth experience.

~~~
ryusage
Eh, I don't think they said that at all, and that doesn't make sense anyway.
They would need to add an extra 3D model or two obviously, so sure, that's a
bit more work, but in the big scheme of things it's very straightforward. By
"modeling and movement" algorithms, I assume you mean animations, and I don't
see any reason at all that they couldn't just use the same skeleton as the
male characters, which negates the need for new animation work.

I'm not sure what the point of your second statement actually is, but I
disagree with that too lol. I feel like you're making the easy parts sound
very difficult and then completely trivializing the part that's actually a lot
of work.

------
infogulch
Memory issues because of customizability is a red herring.

You've _never_ been able to choose what your player looks like in COD. You
play as one of the several pre-defined characters from your team, chosen
randomly when you spawn. (Edit: I guess there's a difference for players using
a sniper rifle.) From that perspective, I don't see any reason why there
couldn't have been a female character.

... except for callouts. In BO2, there are ~5 different models for each team,
all male. There are about a dozen different types of callouts that models make
in response to different actions, like reloading, killing an enemy, or seeing
an enemy. There are also 3-4 different versions of each callout for each team.
Since the models are homogenous, the versions of callouts are chosen at random
and have no bearing on which model you're currently using. If there were
female models the number of callouts that would need to be loaded in memory
would double because you couldn't reuse the male callouts for females.

------
scoofy
"Our previous engine would not handle that. The way memory worked in the
previous engine, it never would have been able to do that." Where is bullshit
man when you need him. I don't believe this for a second. Great CoD puff piece
HN.

~~~
protomyth
I posted it because I could not figure out how their reasoning actually made
any technical sense. I suspect it is a total BS job, but maybe there is an
actual technical reason.

~~~
Zergy
There is.

To maximize sales the COD engine is designed for the weakest system for it to
run on.

The Xbox 360 has half a gig or ram and that is shared with the OS, memory is
an extremely tight commodity. It is quite reasonable to think that another
mesh, texture map, and additional sounds clips will simply not fit in the
300ish megs that XBox developers have to deal with.

Of course that can be designed around by having an engine that smart about
pulling things in and out of memory. But that's hard to do especially when you
have to release a game every year.

I should point out I'm talking about multiplayer mainly. There isn't a
technical reason for the single player other than it is a lot of extra work.

------
lucb1e
Call of Duty was originally based on the Quake 3 engine. In Quake 3 there were
female characters. Now they're telling us it was not technically possible
before? I have my doubts.

------
john_i
I can understand if this was the case for the single player campaign. Where
there might be limitations in scripting the story for a female as well as a
male character. But for multiplayer, the explanation is a bit more difficult
to swallow. I'm not a game designer, nor am I CoD player, but wouldn't a
texture pack be able to easily solve this issue?

~~~
schreiaj
Sure, which is more to load into memory which is extremely limited... the
exact problem they cite.

------
dragontamer
Female avatars existed back in Tribes, or even Unreal Tournament. I'm not a
CoD player, but I'm frankly surprised that there wasn't an option. I thought
this sort of stuff was a _given_ today. Guess I was wrong.

Anyway, this may be a "puff piece", but anyone with half-a-brain can figure
out how much of a jackass move this was on --EDIT-- Activision's part. Why did
it take so long to create a female avatar?

Hell, Halo gave a nod to female players by making female spartans inside of
their famous armor. (ie: Nicole-458). You don't even _need_ texture mods to
officially play as a female in a lot of these games, lol.

~~~
thezilch
Unreal and Quake 2, before those, had female avatars. Now that I think about
it, Counter-Strike did and still(?) does not.

~~~
angersock
As did Half-Life, Thief, the original Rainbow Six, and Jurassic Park
Trespasser. This is not some magical new technology. Note also that the above
examples encompass both keyframe and skeletal animation--there's no technical
limitation of any meaningful sort here.

What's more interesting is the fact that sales seemed quite dapper despite the
lack of this feature, which does give somewhat inconvenient evidence towards
the idea that the depiction of women in games is not actually a big deal.

------
joshdotsmith
I really like how there was no attempt made to fact check the interviewee. But
then I guess if we started acting like real journalists we wouldn't get all
these great inside scoops.

------
The_D
Kotaku is link bait shitposting. Don't click for the sake of a clean
internets. Thank you, the entire internet.

