Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer gender options about 'appreciating' female fans
Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin tells Joystiq that adding playable female soldiers in Call of Duty: Ghosts was to recognize the franchise's complete audience. Women have been added as part of the multiplayer customization in Ghosts, set to arrive on November 5.
"Honestly, adding female soldiers to character customization wasn't about trying to lure more people into the game. It was actually just about acknowledging the people who already play our game," Rubin says.
Enngine limitations were another contributing factor in the franchise's lack of playable female soldiers.
"It wasn't until we rewrote the way character memory is handled - that we could do 'Create-a-Soldier,' that we could do customized characters - that the possibility of having female soldiers really came to fruition," Rubin explains.
"Bringing female characters into Call of Duty: Ghosts wasn't something that was limited generation, it was limited by the engine itself."
Rubin admits that female characters could have been added in previous games, but the franchise's old engine could not accommodate Infinity Ward's desire to have a more detailed customization feature. "Remember you sort of randomly picked which character you were using [in previous Call of Duty games]. So, I might be a woman sometimes and not a woman other times. It didn't really make sense until we created character customization," he says. The franchise's previous character selection process was a single character model linked to specific perks, which led to multiples of the same model in matches. The new engine, and its customization, attempts to give players their own unique character models.
When the new engine for Call of Duty: Ghosts was built and customization became possible, the ability to select a gender "was an obvious choice," Rubin says.
"There's a huge portion of our fans that are female gamers," Rubin adds. "It was less about getting more people and more about appreciating the people we already have."
