Female Leads In Games

[Esiar]

Hiku said:

Esiar said:

I feel like some games have female leads for the sake of having female leads, and not because they think that should be the direction of the game. Not Tomb Raider, but perhaps something like that Dinosaur Robot game  that was announced at E3. Like to make it more "unique", and like it is breaking gender stererotypes like guys being the hero.

I dunno, it just seems like that to me.

This is rather backwards.
I dunno if you were around when the original Tomb Raider games came out, but back then Lara looked like this.




As for Horizon, it seems the idea was to have her be female from the start, but they were worried it might not be recieved well, and considered changing her to male:

"She’s a female lead character. That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?

The concern came after the game was in development. We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.

Looking at our press conference and other’s press conferences, many teams our doing it now. Like there is a new lead in Assassin’s Creed, and Mirror’s Edge is back. I feel great that there is more diversity in the kind of worlds and kind of characters that we are making as an industry."

For Tomb Raider, I wasn't alive when it came out, but I was thinking of the older games when I made this thread.

And for Horizon, though the vision has always been for a female lead, I think it is possible that they wanted to make a female lead before the concept, and worked around that. But I do think the female lead in the game is fitting.