Russian studio Battlestate Games is in hot water today following the resurfacing of an interview with one of its developers from 2016 and accusations of sexism in the development of Escape From Tarkov. In an interview with Alessio Palumbo at , developer Pavel Dyatlov spoke about the game and its features, playstyle, platform release plans,🐼 and towards the end of the interview, the absence of women.
When asked if they had considered having playable female characters, Dyatlov stated that, “We 🦩considered that, but we came to the conclusion that women are not allowed to be in the war.” When asked for clarification on the matter since women do serve in the military, continued, “…we came to the conclusion that women can't handle that amount of stress. There's only p🎃lace for hardened men in this place.”
On the one hand, it can be tricky to navigate such comments in today’s climate of video games and reaction culture. While these comments are from one individual, in this case developer Pavel Dyatlov, it would be wise not to attribute them to the opinions of all employees working on the project. The decision to only incorporate men could have been the 𒁏result of several factors during development that we are not privy to know as outsiders.
On the other hand, this inteꦓrview is from 2016 and the statement was never been corrected by anyone at Battlestate Games until pressed for comment recently. Since there are still only men as playable characters in the game, one could easily lean towards there being truth to the initial comments made by Dyatlov as representative of the studio’s mentality.
On January 6, Battlestate Games replied on Twitter, stating that Dyatlov was not a 𝐆key studio employee, and that the team respects women in wars and the military. Instead, they affirmed that the decision not to featur🀅e ay playable women characters had to do more with the game’s lore and “more importantly – the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc.”
Battlestate Games concluded its Tweets by stating that the employee was reprimanded and properly instructed, apologizing for any confusion this might have caused. Whethᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚer or not this will be enough in terms of damage control is yet to be seen, but ini💃tial reactions to the statements seem negative overall.
Video games artist Delaney King (@delaneykingrox) was quick to unleash a series o💝f tweets countering the notion that creating female cha༒racters in games takes a large amount of work and resources. After providing a long list of reasons why this reasoning was largely flawed, it seems that whoever made the statement at Battlestate Games was simply looking for something to pin this entire problem on other than sexism, but was ignorant of the process himself.
This🃏 is certainly not the last we will hear on the matter, and it will be interesting to s💮ee how Battlestate Games reacts in the coming months.
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