Maybe it's better to keep some stuff for us to discover for ourselves. I for one do not mind that we haven't seen any footage of the female protagonist. The lack of exposure is actually influencing my decision to play as a female protagonist on the first play-thru.

You won't really find anyone that says 'no' to more Fallout information/footage (whether it features the female SS or not) - now more than ever.

I'd also enjoy some additional gameplay footage with the female protagonist. Especially if it highlighted the differences in voice acting.

If they choose to give us this type of footage (or chose to make a female protagonist in the first place) based on inclusiveness or not, the footage will be identical. Recognizing that there are different types of players out there and designing your game accordingly doesn't mean an automatic decrease in quality.

No way they do a cinematic trailer with a woman protagonist. Sorry it just will not happen.

There is little money to be made off of it and a lot of potential confusion to be had amongst the casual crowd. "Wait wasn't it about a guy last time???"


However some gameplay videos with a woman SS would work nicely. I still am waiting for a game that actually treats you differently based on your six. That way gender really could play a role.

Edit: I just noticed that this is one of the first Gender specific topics asking for more prominent women that has had no real fights between the SJW's and the MRA. Good job guys.

Oh, definitely. In game footage I totally get. I was referring to why some companies include certain characters. For example, and Bioware is a huge offender, they include differences in characters and make them atomic to that character. Take Dorian, for example. Despite being one of my favorite characters, I see him as my gay mage buddy. They made him being gay this huge thing to the point that it became one of his strongest characteristics.

Arcade Gannon? I look at him as my former Enclave buddy. His "difference" barely registers on the radar for me, and that's how it should be.

The male and female sole survivors are their own distinct characters, rather than a "what if" scenario where it's the same character that makes the same decisions, but with a different set of organs.

I hope that makes sense. Piper and Preston, and even our PCs all have their own unique viewpoints, and it makes things worthwhile to show their interactions in trailers. Their primary reason for existence doesn't have to do six, race, etc.

I personally never play a female character...if I'm not a dude I don't wanna play...imo

That's what I'm most disappointed in. Bethesda hasn't given Courtney hardly any attention in the marketing and pre-release materials.

I was pretty ticked off in the "Meet the Dev Team" videos when Courtney received MUCH less attention than Brian. And I thought it was a slap in the face when she not only hardly got to talk, but they had Brian close with "Let's go, pal!" in character, and didn't get Courtney to do the same thing.

I almost always play a female character in Bethesda's games. It actually makes it easier for me to play a ROLE, and not self-insert myself into the decisions.

Come on, Bethesda! Step up. Don't let EA of all people beat you with equal gender marketing.

See more female SS would be nice but I don't believe we ever saw a female Dragonborn so I'm not expecting it. Heck just some more cut scenes and dialog with her would be great. We've got to hear so little of her so far.

Would also like to see the female form in the new vault suit ... for science of course.

PS - I wonder if Piper looks her up and down when she's talking to the female SS?

Remember, everyone is Bi in the Wasteland.

I don't really care what character they use to market the game since I always play as a male. But I wouldn't mind seeing if the female voice is better.

Well Courtenay is already a more established and popular voice actress, for Brian this might be a bigger deal as it's his first player character.

Bethesda in their minimalistic approach of spoiling gameplay went with just one character to tease with, and they went with the male protagonist. Might be some historial basis for that as in Fallout 3 and i believe NV the faceless player character was male, just as with Skyrim. Maybe it's marketing, as the largest demographic playing is probably males. Maybe it's to show off that the "not quite as well-known" voice actor also has what it took. Or maybe Courtenay was just busy? From an interview i understood she was doing two more projects along with Fallout 4 at some point.

I'd love to see more from the female protagonist as well. But lets not turn that we haven't seen as much of the female protagonist as we have of the male in trailers and teasers into some gender issue.

Both characters received great care from Bethesda, are fully realized and fleshed out, and are voiced by carefully picked professionals.

It would be nice to get more voice acting samples. And I hate being "that person" but it is annoying that the dude is always the default.

But it IS a gender issue. Half your potential audience shouldn't be ignored in your marketing.

Mass Effect 3 showed that is was possible to do marketing with both male and female protagonists. And Fallout 4 isn't like previous Bethesda games where you could choose a gender. These are voiced and acted roles now.

I'm not asking for a live action female Sole Survivor trailer, but a few screenshots would be nice. And how hard would it be for Bethesda to show us the Codsworth conversation with a female protagonist. That's like 30 seconds of footage they'd have to record and throw on Bethblog.

If we assume the same player demographics as Mass Effect, than 20% of the player base play female. (It's probably more, but let's low ball it.) If the same audience that bought Skyrim is buying Fallout 4, that means 4 MILLION players of Fallout 4 will play as a female Sole Survivor. I just want a little token acknowledgement from Bethesda to the fact in their marketing. I thought it was incredibly cool of Bioware to include reversible coverart with Mass Effect 3 to reflect the player's choice.

Several "what will you play / what did you play" polls during the run up & after the release of Skyrim, with a few hundred responses each, also came down to about the same 80/20 split that the Mass Effect stats did.

(Given how much people on the net talked up FemShep & Jennifer Hale, I was kind of surprised by the stats. Just more evidence on the "the internet forum crowd does not represent the general playerbase" pile. )

There is nothing I can add here that wont make seem sleazy. Except, Yes I hope so as well the cage fighting girl body shape was ...... Giggity.

I also hope they do a few female SS adds I will get around to that run just because I Can not let voice acting go to waste, but I always have to do a 2-caps run first.

I wouldn't mind ingame footage but I don't think it matters for me since I'm going it almost as blind as possible.

This is just silly. Will you also call foul on Vogue, or the Cosmopolitan for focussing on women?

Jennifer Hale was AMAZING as FemShep. The female voice actors seem to be more comfortable showing range and emotion. Many male voice actors feel a need to remain stoic and gruff through everything, and it hurts the performance.

No. But we aren't talking about magazines marketed to women, for women. We are talking about a game franchise that makes a big deal out of providing both gender options, and has a fan base of 4 million female players, and doesn't do any marketing that isn't male centered. There is a big difference, and I hope you can recognize that. It's a problem in the game industry when marketers act like showing a woman protagonist will cost them sales amongst the bro-dude crowd who might feel like "the girls are invading the tree house".

No i dont recognize this as a big issue.

Big gender issues are things like not having any reproductive rights. Not whether or not a videogame makes sure it has just as many trailers with females characters as it does male characters. Because it so matters.

Mostly everyone agrees it would be awesome to see more content with the female protagonist, no one is worried about "girls invading any tree houses".

But for a marketing department i can understand that if you know your demographic is predominantly male, you will market it with male characters. Just as for yogurt commercials they always seem to go with female actors, because i guess women like yogurt more than men. Should i feel offended now because i too like yogurt? Or is that yogurt less delicious as a result?

I would like it just because I think it'd be a good thing to advertise that you can play as a female character as well. Also I kind of want to make sure they didn't just copy the male movement animations for the female.. (I doubt they did but ever since Saints Row IV I'm scared of this kind of thing.)

We didn't even... get to see... the female presets...

The problem is that most people, including academics and various people in the industry, have a very narrow perception of what is actually a very broad and global industry.

Females have been featured prominently since the 1980s, if not earlier. Females have been in the industry as creative talent as well as players. Females have also been in the industry from the business side as managers (at various levels) as well as part- and full-time staff. This is particularly true for the Japanese market and industry, of course, which may be one reason that Japanese gaming led the industry for decades until fairly recently (and is still very popular and well-received globally, of course).

The whole "females are a minority" perception only became a "thing" (i.e., political talking point) in the mid-1990s. Various people in the industry as well as academics have not helped, either, because they refuse to listen to people (myself, for example) who have grown up with the industry since it began, who have worked in the industry as well as studied it academically, and who have both played and worked with women in the industry as well as consumers/players. Some of the comments I have read or heard from academics as well as people in the industry simply make me sick because they are so inaccurate or even flat-out wrong (i.e., they only apply to a very limited and biased perception of a much broader industry and market than what such people perceive).

As Roberta Williams said in 2006 when asked the (now typical) question of what it was like being a woman in the so-called "male dominated" gaming industry, no one ever brought up or asked such a question when she co-founded Sierra Online with her husband Ken and no one ever brought it up as any kind of issue during the subsequent 10-15 years that she was developing some of the most well-received games of the time. Instead, people only considered her talents and capabilities. Her six simply was not an issue at all because a person's six was not made an issue until later, after she had retired.

Having said all of that, of course it would be nice to see a developer such as Bethesda showcase a heroine even in games where there is a choice. Japanese games feature heroines quite often either as main characters or as key supporting characters. In the latter case, it is quite common for heroines to be essentially the lead character even if the product is pitched as having a male as the nominal lead. Another key aspect is that such heroines are not shown simply "being badass" (i.e., acting in stereotypically masculine ways) but instead are shown as very feminine yet extremely strong and capable in their own way. Think of heroines such as Alis in the original Phantasy Star, Shion in Xenosaga (or the many other heroines there) or the many heroines in the Tales games, or heroines in franchises such as Langrisser or Growlanser, or Star Ocean... the list goes on and on. For Western companies, it is much less common, of course, although there are exceptions such as Guild Wars.

Western companies, or at least their marketing people, have never had a real clue what the market actually likes even when Japanese games have demonstrated great success and popularity worldwide. Why haven't Western companies paid proper attention over the decades? Who knows. As I said, though, the various industry and academic voices that have been most vocal have not helped, and I would say have actually hurt the perception of the market and industry a great deal. Thus the myth continues and many people continue to pursue it as a phantom that will never be caught because it doesn't exist.

Regarding the Bethesda "Meet the Team" spot, keep in mind that Courtney was late and almost missed the entire panel. There was not much that could be done by the time she arrived as they were wrapping up everything at that point.

Regarding surveys for products like Skyrim or Mass Effect, everyone should be aware that the results of ANY survey mean nothing as far as the actual reality is concerned. Claims that the vocal people on the Net don't represent the actual player base of such games based on survey results is an oxymoronic claim because surveys are inaccurate and generally non-representative by nature. This is particularly true for the types of surveys being mentioned here (i.e., non-academic, informal surveys with no oversight or proper attention to minimizing bias, offering statistically meaningful results, etc.). Surveys are commonly used in various research because they are simple and because they lend themselves to quantitative anolysis. The latter element introduces its own bias which qualitative researchers such as myself find exasperating, to say the least, because so many people, including many academics, think that quantitative results are somehow more reliable than qualitative anolysis even though reality does not work according to quantitative/statistical principles. Bottom line, though, is that such surveys for games/players mean nothing at all aside from giving marketing departments something to refer to even though that reference is enormously biased and basically worthless as a research tool.

Final Fantasy 12, Vaan is the main protagonist and yet Ashe is the story lead

well u guys need to realize is just to make all the marketing about the same protagonist, is like Mass Effect no meter what Shaper is always a dude on the trailers and stuff, and u can make him a girl on the game

Don't do the straw man thing. Just because there are bigger problems in the world doesn't mean this isn't one.

No one is asking for Bethesda to match Female Sole Survivor marketing 1:1 with Male Sole Survivor material. But doing something as simple as the 1:5 ratio of their player base would be nice.