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Crytek’s free-to-play shooter Warface recently added a host of female character skins sourced from the game’s existing community.
The results are as you might expect – huge, exposed breasts. Which does nothing other than confirm the stereotype of exactly who is playing Crytek’s free-to-play FPS.
What’s disturbing is not that an online FPS community wanted the female characters to wear highly revealing, not-at-all-appropriate-for-warfare clothing but that Crytek was apparently happy to oblige.
"There’s a tension both ways," executive producer Joshua Howard told Wired. "Early on we said we want to make this game appropriate for the different regions while maintaining a cohesiveness that’s still Warface.
"The idea we were going to come up with one set of female skins across the world was clearly blown out of the water as we started to talk to more of our players and partners from different regions.
"We leaned a little Russian in these characters but we’re doing another set of characters for our Chinese market, for example, and those are leaning in a different direction. It’s interesting to see they are also somewhat unrealistic as compared to the males but differently than the Russians. You look at the Chinese models and they’re also disproportionate but in a way that’s more… Chinese? I don’t even know what language to use for that but they’re different.
"The female skins [are] a good example of how we see how culturally the different regions approach the same game in different ways. 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.
"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?"
