Posted in: Games, Movies, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, games, horizon, horizon: Zero Dawn, playstation, playstation 4, shuhei yoshida, sony, video games

Sony Were Initially Worried About The Female Lead In Horizon: Zero Dawn

I selected Horizon: Zero Down as a nomination pick for Game of the Show at E3. I m really impressed with the game and I'm dying to see more.

I am genuinely excited to see the game being designed with a female protagonist too. The showing of great female characters at this year's expo was great to see. At one point in Horizon's development though, this very issue did at least give Sony pause. Speaking to Polygon, Sony Entertainment boss Shuhei Yoshida said quite candidly:

She's a female lead character. That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?

The concern came after the game was in development. We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.

Looking at our press conference and other's press conferences, many teams our doing it now. Like there is a new lead in Assassin's Creed, and Mirror's Edge is back. I feel great that there is more diversity in the kind of worlds and kind of characters that we are making as an industry.

It seems things went well in focus testing then.

He also added that he'd like to see more women in actual game development. He said:

As an industry, I think we should continue to make efforts to have more females in studios on the development side and to get different perspectives. Games have become more and more popular in terms of who plays, especially in terms of mobile. We have a chance to further increase the reach, from a PlayStation standpoint, to a bigger more diverse audience. In order for us to do that, the games we create have to appeal to a broader audience.

I absolutely agree with Yoshida's sentiment here. I want to see new stories told form new perspectives. Games let us see things in the shoes of someone else. Seeing them from the place of someone who isn't a white dude sometimes can be refreshing.

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