Deep Rock Galactic dev says female characters aren’t “on the table”

pcgamesn.com:

Deep Rock Galactic is one of those games that you simply can’t put down. If you’re playing with your friends, the addictive qualities show themselves tenfold. Unfortunately, a lot of us dedicated girl gamers can’t create the dwarf we’ve always envisioned ourselves as since Ghost Ship Games hasn’t added any female characters to Deep Rock Galactic. Adding them isn’t as simple as it sounds though, as the developer has explained why.

It’s no secret that Deep Rock Galactic has found its dedicated community among players who love co-op games and fast-paced shooters. It stands out with its unique twist on the FPS genre, featuring a cast of mining space dwarves and hordes of alien enemies. Despite its popularity, there are no playable female characters to choose from. “Female dwarves were on the wishlist and roadmap for a long while,” the developer writes on the matter in a Reddit thread.

“We had some internal concepts, but they never got to a proper place.” The studio then expresses its reasons for not yet implementing female characters, despite wanting to. “It’s not really about the voice lines,” the dev says, “although that is a giant workload, too.” A year ago, Deep Rock Galactic had almost 4,000 lines for the male dwarves, “so all of those would have to have a female equivalent.”

The voice lines aren’t the main issue, though, as the dev states that the biggest problem is actually the character rig itself. The team would have to “redo it from the bottom up” as the old one is “ancient” and only “made to accommodate the single potato-ish body type.” Right now, the dev feels that adding female dwarves is “such an enormous task that it’s not currently on the table.”

Many fans have responded under the dev’s comment,