Treyarch talks about having a playable female character in Black Ops 3 campaign

Treyarch’s Jason Blundell sat down with IGN to talk about their decision behind allowing female playable character in Black Ops 3. Blundell says they originally wanted to have an option for male or female in Black Ops 2, but couldn’t because of limited technology of last-gen.

“The power of current-gen meant we could do it,” he explained. “We actually thought about it back during Black Ops II but we knew it’d end up getting cut because of the amount of time, space and assets needed to fully realise a customisable player character. It just wasn’t worth it. But this time we thought we could do it justice in terms of personalisation, with full mocap and VO data for everything.”

“It’s interesting, because the movie Alien? That was actually written for a man but then they hired Sigourney Weaver and just left the script alone. That’s why she comes off as such a strong, confident character. So we did the same – we wrote a gender-neutral script and the actor brings their personality and gender to the words… but it doesn’t pander to either.

“Then the other reason was talking to our military guys, they were really pushing the fact we’ll be seeing a lot more women in military roles going into the future. We’re talking about 2065, not just in support roles, but in active combat. So we have a female protagonist, but also on the battlefield as well – there’s women there too.”

SOURCE: IGN