The female characters featured in Warface, Crytek Kiev’s free-to-play shooter, aren’t exactly coated in armor and ready for battle. Instead of covering up vital part of the body in preparation for war, the characters in this wildly popular PC title insist on wearing clothes that expose both cleavage and midriffs. It’s pretty standard for our medium, but according to lead producer Joshua Howard, it could have been much worse.
"The female skins [are] a good example of how we see how culturally the different regions approach the same game in different ways,” Howard told Wired in a recent interview. “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."
What stopped the team from giving in to player requests? Howard argues that it was authenticity that determined the look of the female characters.
“It's our job to maintain that Warface has an authenticity to it that makes sense for us," he continued. "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?"
The game continues to break records in Russia, but unfortunately, Warface isn’t exactly leading the charge when it comes to positive representation of women in games.
