Just because Dontnod Entertainment's only two games, 2013's Remember Me and next year's Life is Strange, feature women in the lead role, that doesn't mean the studio is trying to make a statement. "That's not us trying to be different for the sake of being different," creative director Jean-Maxime Moris told Joystiq at Gamescom. "It's not as if we're trying to 'fix the industry.'"
The protagonist of Life is Strange is a college-aged woman named Max. There are other female characters who play prominent roles in the game, too, including Max's friend Chloe, and a missing woman named Rachel Amber. Dontnod art director Michel Koch said the studio has gone to great lengths to create a realistic world for the women, which has required a good deal of research.
"We have women in the dev team--not that many because it's still the video game industry and there are not that many women--but we have women working on the game," Koch said. "And our writer, which is an American writer we've worked with before, he's consulting with his nieces. He's showing scripts to them, to read it an d see if it feels genuine and fresh."
A recent study showed that women make up 22 percent of the global video game industry workforce, which is double the figure from 2009.
The topic of the repres entation of women in games has been a major talking point this year, following news out of E3 in June that Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 would not feature playable female characters. Opinions on the subject have flooded in, with some people saying Ubisoft was unfairly singled out, while others maintain that the industry should not shy away from the women in games discussion.
Following Remember Me's release last year, Dontnod revealed that before it landed a publishing deal with Capcom, other publishers didn't want to work with them because they thought having a women in a leading role would limit the game's sales potential.
Life is Strange was announced on Monday and launches in 2015 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC. It will be released episodically, much like Tel ltale Games' The Walking Dead. The game's unique twist is that Max can rewind time to see how events would unfold if she took a different course of action. For more on the game, which also has lovely hand-drawn art and is published by Square Enix, check out the video above.
| Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch |
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