Escape From Tarkov Won't Add Women For This Reason

Escape From Tarkov is a two-year-old shooter that is exploding in popularity. Now that it's in the public eye, however, the game has been put under the microscope. Players have asked repeatedly why there aren't any playable female characters in the title. Now it appears we have a rather unsatisfying answer.

Escape From Tarkov developer Battlestate Games tweeted a response yesterday, stating, "But there will be no playable female characters because of game lore and more importantly – the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc." Unsurprisingly, this answer didn't go down well with the internet. Many replied to this tweet saying that they wouldn't be buying the game, or that this was a bogus reason to exclude half the world's population.

This "game lore" reasoning is a perhaps less controversial than a previous comment from 2016. At that time, Battlestate Games said that the fictional Russian city of Tarkov was "too stressful" for women. Yesterday, the devs clarified via tweet that this isn't their official position and that "we always respected women in wars and military women."

So what part of the "game lore" is keeping women from participating in this MMO? Tarkov, again a fictional location, is being ravaged by two paramilitary factions trying to gain control of the area. Maybe these paramilitary factions don't allow women?

When it comes to the comment of female character models needing "a huge amount of work" for animation considerations, we're a bit skeptical. Ubisoft gained some serious infamy after saying that creating female playable characters for Assassin's Creed Unity would be too much animation work. Animators later said that adding in women really wouldn't have been a monumental task — a few extra days of work at the most. Women aren't that complicated, guys; we promise. 

Right now, Escape From Tarkov is one of the biggest things on Twitch right now. The game is still in open beta and players are enjoying the intense, and potentially hilarious, gameplay even if it only features half the world's population.