One size fits all? Not if regional expectations have anything to say about the female figure. Crytek’s free-to-play shooter Warface has quite an array of female skins, though not all are present in a region’s edition.
The Russian audience tended to be ”considerably more extreme” in their expectations for female soldiers, with China doing the same - only in the opposite direction. There’s ”tension both ways.”
No one seems to mind the male characters looking realistically ‘gruntified’ in their gear, but the female roster ends up playing by a different set of ‘misogynist’ rules.
The female skins prove a ”good example of how we see how culturally the different regions approach the same game in different ways,” Crytek executive producer Joshua Howard told Wired.co.uk.
”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.” Russia prefers their female soldiers dressed to reveal all their assets, military or otherwise. Then there are the high heels they’re running around in on a battlefield.
Crytek aren’t keen on letting these ‘expectations’ reduce Warface to some cartoony shooter, ”it’s our job to maintain that Warface has an authenticity to it that makes sense for us”, argues Howard.
”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,” continued the executive producer.
Warface is available in beta via the official website.
