You may remember that the debut trailer for Battlefield V became controversial for its heavy depiction of women fighters, which some fans viewed as anti-historical. Shortly afterward, DICE General Manager Oskar Gabrielson posted a statement confirming that women fighters were in Battlefield V ‘to stay’.
Speaking with GamesBeat in an interview dedicated to War Stories (the game’s single player stories), DICE Design Director Eric Holmes returned on the topic and said that the War Stories will provide context to the choice that’s obviously missing in a trailer.
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Oskar Gabrielson from DICE has made the position pretty clear on that. I can’t speak to the multiplayer part of things, but Oscar has spoken about the game and his position being that women are here, and they’re going to be here for this game.
If you look at something like War Stories, we have the ability to create that context, which is great. When you play Nordlys I don’t think you question why this character is a woman. This is just her story. Even more strongly, you have a mother-daughter story. It’s funny. One of the women at DICE, I think she’s in business development, she came up to me and said, “I’m really glad you have a mother-daughter story in this game.” I had to think for a minute. “That’s right, it is. I can’t think of any other ones in games.”
We didn’t set out to do it because it was that kind of story. It just seemed to be the story that happened when we dug into the background and started to find out about women working with the resistance. It snowballed from there. I think it’s great that we have the luxury to explore who they are and why they’re fighting. Sometimes, when it’s in a trailer, it’s just there. It doesn’t have all the context that benefits it.
Battlefield V is due to launch on November 20th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It should be the first commercial game to support raytracing via NVIDIA RTX unless DICE decides to add it a later time via a patch.
