Infinity Ward Includes Female Soldiers in Call of Duty: Ghosts to Represent Their Whole Fan Base

For an entire hour last night, Activision were showing off loads of Call of Duty: Ghosts footage, yet the biggest talking point from the presentation was all about the final moments of the multiplayer trailer.

After brutally murdering many, many, many people, the soldier with the trigger happy finger was revealed to be a woman. This marks the first time that players will be able to play as a female soldier in the game’s ever-popular multiplayer mode, via the Create-A-Soldier feature.

Speaking with Polygon, Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin was quick to point out that including women as playable characters isn’t a ploy to gain more favour with different gaming demographics:

“It wasn’t us saying, ‘How can we attract women to [our game]?’, That’s not going to do it and that wasn’t our goal. What we wanted to do was acknowledge the fan base that already existed. We have a lot of different kinds of people who play [Call of Duty] and we want them to be represented when we do character creation.”

CEO at Activision Eric Hirschberg said that among the many requests that the publishing house get about Call of Duty, this is one of the most common:

“If I had a billboard chart of requests, this would be near the top of the charts of things we hear from our community. It’s certainly something I’ve wanted to do for a while. We have a lot of female players that want to play as female characters.”

There will be no difference in how the two genders play, either. Rubin said that when they were creating the female models, they had to “bulk up their gear” so appearance is similar – in turn, there will be no difference when it comes to hitboxes.

While it’s great to see equality in Call of Duty, it seems strange to me that Rubin said the reasoning behind lack of women before was because  character customisation wasn’t there and with this new engine, it is possible.

Regardless, in the long run, it’s certainly positive to see females being represented in the game and hopefully this will become the norm rather than a way to shock people at the end of a trailer, in future.