Is aimed at the serious female gamer
wall.”
In fact, the idea of then adding Corvo — giving players the option of playing the game’s entirety either as Corvo or as Emily — was somewhat secondary, and there’s certainly the sense the game’s narrative is best served as seen through the eyes of its banished queen.
It’s very much her story: of a woman thrust onto the throne of Dunwall after her mother’s assassination, though only after her bodyguard and father Corvo Attano restores her rightful place in the face of deceit and corruption — marking the events of the first game. Now, Emily faces a new threat when Delilah Copperspoon arrives to the city and claims to be her mother’s lost half-sister, and thus the true heir of Dunwall.
Yet, what’s so immediately engaging about Emily is her complexity of emotion, rendered in a way that’s so rare to see in mainstream titles; as lead narrative designer Sachka Duval explains, “she’s a strong female character; but at the same time she’s not a confident Empress, she doubts she will ever be as good a politician as her mother — and in fact she isn’t. She was born into this role and didn’t choose it.”
The move towards creating more layered, relatable female characters was perhaps most notably seen in 2013’s reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise. Sure, Lara Croft in her traditional guise will always be a beloved staple in gaming; but she also exemplified the kind of one-note, tough gal hyper-sexualisation which has always dominated the industry. There is no getting around that implausible balloon chest, really.
But what both 2013’s Lara Croft and Emily achieve is a clean break from those stereotypes and towards something more akin to a kind of everywoman role: hesitant, inexperienced, but with a steely determination to succeed against the odds and rise to greatness.
This kind of diversification is a great, if small sign of what the future might bring; part of what seems to be an important first push for awareness of gender disparity in gaming, specifically when it comes to major franchises declining to include female characters over multiple games.
There’s certainly an evolving conversation on the subject; following Assassin’s Creed Unity coming under fire for jettisoning female playable characters due to the extra workload (never mind that the most famous assassin of the French Revolution was, indeed, a woman), or Battlfield 1’s claim that male gamers wouldn’t find it believable that women fought in WWI — even though they did. THE INDEPENDENT
“She’s a strong female character; but at the same time she’s not a confident Empress.”