Over or under representation is not a meaningful goal. High quality or low quality representation is.

As someone who has dabbled with writing, it's hard to write good fiction to an exacting politically motivated prompt. "You have to make your cast be proportionate to the population" counts as an exacting politically motivated prompt. Writers should be free to write whatever stories they want with whatever characters they want to create in whatever roles they want because the alternative...will suck.

I don't think that we should expect a male protagonist because the last game had a female one, or a female one because the industry lacks female characters. I think we should expect that if the writers choose to have a male protagonist, they should do it well. And if the writers want a female character, we should expect them to do that well. The only eyes I have are for quality because in a game industry where new games come out daily, quantity is effectively irrelevant.

No woman aren't overrepresented in games, that has nothing to do with the complaints people have. The complaint is that these games are bending over backwards to shove politics into their games and then show it off like a circus event. E3 is supposed to be about cool video games, it's not a gay pride parade.

Tell me, when you go onto a game like Slither.io, does it not bother you that about a fifth of the players have names like "Trump is King" and other more derogatory political messages? I honestly can't stand them.

In all honesty, republicans are ENORMOUS hipocrits on the matter because I see them doing it far more than I see any liberals doing it. But as a liberal, I refuse to stoop to that level and I will happily call out the bullshit on my own side.

The Last of Us 2 is not a gay pride parade. Sure, you can make Ellie gay, but why is that being advertised as a core element of the game in the reveal trailer?

Aloy from HZD is my favorite Character in a game this gen. I don't mind women protagonists as long as the story surrounding them is good. Aloy also isn't your typical super model heroine, she is good looking but she looks believable like girl next door looks.

In a fantasy setting, I don't think it matters all that much. The gender of the cast is up to their creators of that universe. Can be all girl, all dude, or preferably (for me) an even mix of the two.

In a realistic setting, I mean, I guess I don't care personally, but I can see why some people might get upset. The use of token characters is present in all media though, and it's up to the creators to make those characters feel naturally incorporated. Personally I don't really like to see blatant attempts at filling a diversity quota, not because I have an issue with diversity of course, but because that type of thing just takes me out of the universe and makes me all too aware it's just a game, movie, etc.

That being said, it doesn't need to feel blatant either. I'm all for a nice diverse cast that fits well into the setting...though I suppose that's a bit subjective as to what that entails.

The Order and Battlefield aren't the same thing. Poor comparison. Works of fiction don't have to adhere to the facts, however Battlefield has made it a point to adhere to the historical time period it takes place. It's predecessor went back WWI and it's campaign focused on real battle units using only the weapons of the period. Battlefield isn't Resistance, The Order, or even a further outlier like Valkyria Chronicles. Those games tell you from the outset that they aren't shooting for accuracy. That aside, the situation is completely unnecessary. It's WWII game. There was country, Russia, that had women on that did serve on the front lines. Having a someone with a prosthetic limb on the front lines of game that only uses weapons of the period is just silly at best. The things she does would be difficult to do with prosthetic's of today. Why not add rail guns, stealth fighters, and hover packs too.

I don't believe so. Hell, women of color are represented even less.

Over-representation or under-representation doesn't matter to me, whether a game is good or not does. In terms of AAA video games, I'd say the representation of women is probably on par with the female audience of those games.

You didn't ask me but his answer was fairly close to what I would have answered that I'll answer this from my point of view.

For me, the answer is immersion and believability. The female prevalence in Battlefield V simply breaks the immersion for me. Battlefield has a tone serious enough for things like this to break the immersion. Female characters aren't the only issue (personally I'm also quite annoyed by all sides having the same guns and the prevalence of fully automatic weapons), but so far, female characters seem to be the most glaring one.

I haven't played The Order, but if it has werewolves and sci-fi weapons, I'm already willing to bet it has quite a different tone than Battlefield.

Hope this is a joke....

In regards to the representation, it is more of an issue of pandering and putting women front and center in an industry that has been and still is male dominated. Unless you are some kind of communist that needs to see equal outcomes in every setting in defiance of human freedom of choice and association, the actual numbers of men/women in the industry don't matter. If women want to be a part of something let them earn their way like everyone else. Don't slap a female character on the cover of otherwise male dominated franchises just to pander ... make a woman focused game and see if it can stand on its own 2 legs. Even though I thought it was trash, Horizon Zero Dawn is a positive example of this (although i would speculate that the majority of its playerbase is male) while Battlefield 5 is blatant pandering. 

Video games have been and still are male dominated and that is just fine ... no one complains about female dominated industries like fashion / etc not having enough male representation. 

As far as I can tell, DICE never "pandered" to SJWs with the inclusion of women. They simply wanted there to be more options for people to play as the gender they prefer. It didn't turn inherently political *until* the backlash, and even then I don't recall any specific statement from DICE regarding feminism. People made it political and then went from there, reverse engineering the discussion. It reminds me of how when Star Wars Episode 7 was releasing, I automatically assumed that Rey and Finn were just ways to pander to an audience, not realizing the irony behind judging people based on their race or sex.

Of course the counter-argument to this is that, some pandering is just so blatantly obvious that it is easy to criticize. News to me, considering I have not seen a single tweet that was inherently "SJW". The closest thing is a tweet about inviting Anita Sarkeesian to DICE ... 6 years ago, and one where they congratulate her 4.5 years ago. Wow, shocking damnation of DICE.

People want "diverse" characters to be given a reason to exist, when many stereotypical characters are not given the same requirements. I think it says a lot that we have gotten to a point where we are so concerned about companies possibly having different ideologies than are own, that we start to say that diverse characters should either have an extremely detailed reason for existing, or should just fit into the background as if they were any character in any other game. So either you're one of the best written characters in games, championing the very purpose of having different perspectives in gaming, or you're a gay guy that is just a regular guy because obviously gay people are just like everyone else right? No happy medium.

The sad thing is that very little comes from genuine bigotry. It's just paranoia. This is what happens when you have to worry constantly about being force fed a message you don't agree with. And I don't agree with the message either. But frankly, there is so little correlation between art with a diverse cast and far-left ideas, either because A ) the creators are not far-left and the want for diversity (which is not mutually exclusive to such ideologies) is misinterpreted or because B ) the company's inspiration for having a diverse cast is from political discourse, but the product itself doesn't really reflect as such (I would say this is the case for Star Wars, because although Rey is a very overpowered protagonist, the age of modern blockbusters are kind of built on overpowered protagonists ... then again, I haven't seen any film after 7, who knows).

And goddamn am I tired of seeing people say that there is "no one that are mad at Battlefield 5 for having women", or that it's a "misunderstanding" or "wrongful accusation". It's so overplayed and wrong. People only jumped to this defense after the fact that these kind of statements were common. If you have to lie about what group of people agree with your ideas, then you yourself are letting it pass. It is better to just call it out when you see it instead of being insecure.

What "Anti-SJWs" fail to recognize is that they politicize just as much as SJWs do. I don't even think politics should be out of games (they are a core component of any art form), but if they just needlessly cause controversy and don't affect the medium in any positive way than I would say both sides need to just stop the silliness already. It sucks because most of the time I'm fighting for ideas that I don't even necessarily agree with, but it's because the counter-argument for those ideas are so sloppy and I think actively hurt discussion worse. I don't like DICE, I don't like Naughty Dog for the most part, and I do think that the idea of representation for representation's sake has some possible fault lines. At the same time, if you realize that representing under-represented people does not make the game automatically better, you can not go around championing that because you think a developer is pandering that it makes the product automatically worse.