"They were very comfortable with the fact we have these very realistic-looking men but they wanted the women to be not what we would think of as realistic at all. Up to and including running round in high heels which is just silly, right?"
Joshua Howard is talking about the female character models that were recently added to Warface, the free-to-play shooter he has been working on as executive producer at Crytek.
It's a global online gaming proposition and the discussion he and Wired.co.uk are having centres around how the game differs from region to region around the world.
The female soldier skins have come up as Howard explains how Crytek deals with different audience demands. "The female skins [are] a good example of how we see how culturally the different regions approach the same game in different ways," he says. "The skins we're showing right now are the skins that basically came out of our Russian region. They're not what our players at first requested in the Russian region. They tended to be considerably more extreme that what we ended up shipping with."
By extreme he means revealing clothing and rather unrealistic physical proportions. Oh, and those high heels skittering about the combat arena. From what Howard says, Crytek didn't rush to embrace the cartoonish depictions -- "it's our job to maintain that
Warface has an authenticity to it that makes sense for us" -- but neither did they ignore them. The same applies to the versions of the female skins being created for China. "We leaned a little Russian in these characters but we're doing another set of characters for our Chinese market, for example, and those are leaning in a different direction. It's interesting to see they are also somewhat unrealistic as compared to the males but differently than the Russians. [...] You look at the Chinese models and they're also disproportionate but in a way that's more...
Chinese? I don't even know what language to use for that but they're different. "You get these little differences you have to adjust for. The idea we were going to come up with one set of female skins across the world was clearly blown out of the water as we started to talk to more of our players and partners from different regions."
It's a concept which makes me uneasy on two fronts: one, that it positions female characters as an optional presence in the game; the other is that when they are included their physical representation is decided by what will appeal to a largely male audience. The final models have been moderated by the development team but you still end up with a female sniper likely to get extreme nettle rash all over her bosom as she lies down to line up her shot. "Are you tempted to say, that's not right -- we're going to do it our way and you either get on board with this or you take your misogynistic views elsewhere?" I ask. "There's a tension both ways," says Howard. "Early on we said we want to make this game appropriate for the different regions while maintaining a cohesiveness that's still Warface. Coca Cola is Coca Cola all over the world even though honestly speaking that mix is different in many different countries. [...] There are some products that are 100 percent identical in every region of the world and that was not something we wanted to do with a shooter because people around the world play shooters very differently."
The team has clearly had extensive discussions over the representation of their female characters from region to region and how far they are comfortable compromising between what swathes of the audience request and how they see their own game. But this is where Howard segues into talking about weapon recoil as another type of regionally dependent content.
The comparison with Coca Cola and the implicit parity between female skins and a specific gameplay mechanic like weapon recoil highlights the fact that the lady skins are being considered very differently than their male counterparts. It's not exactly unusual in the industry but it's the part at which you can end up talking at cross purposes with developers -- you say "cultural relativism", I say "inherently problematic".
The weapon recoil is itself interesting, though. It turns out that Russian players in general like their weapon recoil strong.
Asian regions? Not so much. Europe and North America occupy a Goldilocks zone of their own with a weapon recoil that's not too strong and not too slight. "The design approach we took for that was, well okay what's important to us is that with any environment it remains authentic.
So weapon A has more recoil than weapon B and that's true in each of these regions but the absolute amount of recoil is different."
In this case Crytek maintains internal consistency but tweaks the absolutes as the game releases around the world.
Weapons balancing can be a touchy subject, though. Treyarch's David Vondehaar was on the receiving end of death threats over minuscule tweaks to a small number of guns in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. I ask whether the prospect of a global first person shooter audience is an intimidating one. "We have a very committed audience in Russia. We have some characters in our Russian community but I would say nothing has gotten that crazy. We have players with very strong opinions about things and are not afraid to share that. That's part of what makes the community interesting [...] so I wouldn't necessarily call them an intimidating group of players as much as if you make them feel they're part of what you're doing then that changes the dynamic.
It's a lot easier to do that with an online game than it is with a console game or a traditional retail game."
Howard is positive on the subject of passionate communities around Warface and the idea of regional specificity within the game but towards the end of the interview he acknowledges a particular problem -- that of players competing across regions.
It's a big barrier if Crytek hopes to develop Warface as an eSport. "The fact that in region A this gun is like this but in region B it's a little different means it's difficult to think how you would have those people compete at a world level. We're not the only ones who have that challenge; it's a broader challenge for the industry.
Some genres do better because those genres have locked those variables more tightly but in the shooter genre we're delivering a good experience to different regions because we let ourselves make these changes and yet these changes impact our ability to perhaps deliver a really fair eSport. "Crytek is interested in eSports; Warface is interested in the idea that there's this high stakes level of play that's really exciting. I'm not necessarily sure that has to equate with eSports. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the future we saw a lot more about eSports from Crytek and you might even see something with Warface but, like a lot of things, it's not something we've announced or are talking about."
Howard concludes with a hat tip to Riot's League of Legends game. "I think you've got to be impressed by what League of Legends has accomplished. In some ways people saw what was happening with Starcraft in Korea and sort of explained it away as this strange thing happening in Korea. It's really exciting as an industry to see the Riot guys take the League of Legends and turn it into a product that's having that kind of impact on a much broader scale."
He sees Riot's work as a lesson for the rest of the industry but warns that the best eSports model in the world can't succeed if the game underpinning that is "still just 'meh'": "I don't think the world needs a million eSport titles. I think there are going to be a few key things that focus the attention and it still leaves plenty of room for other games to be great."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
