’Escape From Tarkov’ Won’t Include Playable Women Characters

Welcome to the first of Replay in the new decade! It might be a new year, but we're up to our old tricks: namely, bringing you the latest videogame news. Quite a bit has happened since our last installment. Fret not, we'll catch you up. Let's get started.

Do you remember Escape From Tarkov? If you don't, that's OK. It released quietly a couple years ago as another gritty military simulator game in a whole world of gritty military simulator games. But over the past couple of months, it's seen a meteoric rise on streaming platforms, which has thrust the game into the spotlight and given developer Battlestate Games a delightful chance to … double down on its questionable decisions.

Decisions like refusing to put playable women characters in their game, which features fairly anonymous, personality-free playable characters. As Kotaku reports, the creators at Battlestate have reiterated that, no, the game will not have playable ladies, because it would require "a huge amount of work" and also, uh, "game lore." Now, it's not clear how much work would go into such a thing—this has been brought up as an excuse before and debated before. But let's be honest: Everything in game development is a huge amount of work. It's a hard job. But which difficult things you choose to do indicates your priorities for what your game is going to be. As of right now, Battlestate does not see playable female characters as one of those priorities. Now you know.