Although women avatars were in the works for the first sandbox-style, third-person shooter, which includes a selection of male characters, they were cut out due to technical limitations, explained Ruffian Games' creative director Billy Thomson, who was also the lead designer of Crackdown at Realtime Worlds.
"In Crackdown, the amount of memory that it was going to take for it to do all the actual animation, the texture sets and the models for the females -- we would've needed to massively reduce other sections of the game," Thomson told 1UP at PAX East this past weekend. "So rather than do two separate models, we cut it back and gave the player as much customization as we could on the male character and that allowed us to use that extra memory to do other things in the game."
But even though Crackdown 2 uses some of the same assets and had the development time, playable ladies still didn't make the cut the second time around.
"It's actually the same reason again," Thomsen said. "When it came to Crackdown 2, you've got four players (in cooperative play), and that means every single player can be a different character and that has to be in memory all the time. We had to save memory all over the place because we've got so much more content in this game than we had in the first game. We don't stream."
"It'd be great (to have female characters), but what we were going to lose didn't seem like it'd be worth it. If we had more memory, it'd be okay."
Thomsen also said it wasn't an option to just slap a female face on a male body, as I jokingly suggested. "That would not look good," he said laughing. "That would just be so horrible."
However, producer James Cope said to expect a very prominent female character in Crackdown 2.
"We have an important protagonist that is a female character, and it will become evident in the game that she is going to be very important for Crackdown as a franchise," Cope hinted.
He also said that although she's not playable at the moment, "we never know what happens in the future."
Originally published on 1UP.com.
