It's not only French and Russian soldiers who were left out of World War 1 in Battlefield 1 [official site] for later appearances in paid expansions: women are coming in DLC too. Soldiers from the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death will serve as the multiplayer Scout class for the Russian forces coming later this year in the expansion In the Name of the Tsar, DICE have revealed. They look pret-ty gnarly all right but it's such a shame they're limited to paid DLC.
DICE don't have much more to say for now, instead pointing people towards EA's big E3 livestream presentation EA Play on June 10th. Okey cokey.
Supposedly DICE did originally plan to include women soldiers in Battlefield 1 then changed their minds. Bedouin rebel Zara Ghufran is playable in part of the game's singleplayer campaign but the plan was to have female soldiers in multiplayer too.
As VG247 reported in June 2016, former DICE programmer Amandine Coget has claimed DICE chucked a uey on women soldiers and eventually conceded it was because their presence would not, as Coget phrased it, be believable "to the core audience of boys."
Women were rare on the frontlines but heaven forbid anything be less than wholly realistic in a wakka-wacky World War 1 with cartoon armies respawning endlessly and charging gleefully to their cartoon deaths, cartoon physics, and giant sharks leaping out of trench puddles.
I'll not quote Coget's entire tweet chain but here's the outline:
The original BF1 pitch given onstage was WW1, with one caveat: "screw realism, we're adding female soldiers, because we're way overdue".
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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A few months later, Coget says, an internal e-mail thread mentioned they'd been canned.
What ensued was a thousand-long shitstorm of a mail chain, culminating in Questions at the studio meeting and a few of us talking to leads.
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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I'll sum up the key points.
Turns out BF1 was going for realism after all! Female chars matter but "it's just not the game we're making".
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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If we go with this game? Check how many tanks were involved and how they worked. Check the lethality of parachutes. That's just two.
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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I did eventually get them to spit out the real reasons.
All that is believable but female soldiers are not, to the core audience of boys.
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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Making a new rig is expensive. Making double the barks is expensive. It would have to be TO QUALITY you see and that makes it too pricey.
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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And hey I get it. But you're still downpriotizing it - again - due to assumptions about your audience - again - and what's "credible".
— Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
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Neat as they are, the Women's Battalion of Death arriving in a £12 expansion is little consolation. Activision's rival arcadey warfest, Call of Duty, introduced multiplayer female soldiers in 2013 and yup, plans to have them in World War 2 too.
