Sorry, ladies, but it’s just too ding-dong-dang difficult to put y’all in Escape from Tarkov. That’s the cited reason why the game’s developer, Battlestate Games, has affirmed that there will be no playable female characters or even lady NPC combatants in the game. It’d just take too much time and effort to model female characters according to the official Twitter account, disregarding that the game apparently already has female NPCs not in combat.
The statements are an effort to attempt damage control following the game’s bump in popularity on Twitch and an old interview in which an employee claimed that “women can’t handle that amount of stress” as justification for the lack of playable ladies. The updated statement claims that this absence is due both to huge amounts of work needed for animation and due to the game’s lore. Official tweets attempted to distance the studio from the original statement, although the actual official statement of “because of lore” is dubious in its difference.
You may note that “women just take too long to animate” does not exactly ameliorate the issue; you may also note that it sounds wrong, something that has been confirmed by experienced developers. You may additionally note that far from fixing the statement about women handling stress, it subtly doubles down on that stance. You may further assume that the Twitter thread is full of exactly the sort of people who you would expect to insist that no one cares about playable women because that’ll save you the time of actually reading it.
You may also remember that the last major incident noted with Escape from Tarkov was the developer abusing DMCA takedown notices to kill videos that were critical of the game. So, you know. Context is everything. The game is getting noticed again due to a sudden jump in viewership on Twitch, if you’d altogether forgotten about it before now.
Regarding the 3 years old article with points about women in EFT. The answers were done by one, not a key BSG employee which probably were misinterpreted and as a result didn't reflect the official position of the company, that we always respected women in wars and military women
— Battlestate Games (@bstategames) January 6, 2020
But there will be no playable female characters because of game lore and more importantly – the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc#EscapefromTarkov
— Battlestate Games (@bstategames) January 6, 2020
