Speaking with Stevivor, Arkane’s Ricardo Bare explained the reasons that the upcoming Prey will offer the player the choice of a male or female protagonist.
“I think we did that largely just because we wanted to have as many people as possible be able to identify with the main character and be interested in playing them,” Bare said of protagonist Morgan Yu.
“I have kids myself. I have three daughters and I want my daughter to be able to think the game is really cool to and play somebody who she’s interested in.”
The decision had lasting ramifications all through development, Bare confessed.
“It definitely has a production impact in that suddenly now we have to have twice as many pronouns. Whenever somebody is talking to me and they say ‘he’ or ‘she’ at the end, you know, we had to fork the dialogue and have duplicate versions of things like that.”
Despite the extra work, Bare says it was worth it.
“We are kicking ourselves about that every day. We are just like, ‘Arg! We are a tiny team, why are we trying to do all this crazy stuff?’
“The saving grace of it is that because we rely so heavily on systems we get a lot of millage out of that, so we get a lot of leverage out of it. We do believe in creating very crafted, customised detailed experiences but we mix that with robust gameplay systems so a lot of millage comes out of that.”
Prey heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 next year. We recently previewed the game here.
This article may contain affiliate links, meaning we could earn a small commission if you click-through and make a purchase. Stevivor is an independent outlet and our journalism is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.
