Call of Duty’s Old Engine Prevented Addition of Female Soldiers

One of the biggest pieces of news coming out of the Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer reveal was the inclusion of female soldiers into the game’s deep customization tools. Although this seems like an addition that should have been seen years and years ago, Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin has told Joystiq that it was the studio’s out-of-date engine that prevented the gender from making it into prior projects.

"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 said in a recent interview. "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.”

It wasn’t the generation that was preventing females into making it into Call of Duty: Ghosts, “it was limited by the engine itself."

"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," Rubin said.

Not only will females make an appearance, but maps will now be more destructible than ever before. If you’re interested in the other changes that will impact the moment-to-moment action, check out the list we recently put together. Look for this cross-gen project this November.