Microsoft and Xbox came under fire after announcing a reboot of the beloved Perfect Dark series that features a dramatically different-looking protagonist.
The original game was released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000 as a spiritual sequel to the smash hit “GoldenEye” game, which sold over 8 million copies.
The original Perfect Dark is 3.2 million This copy featured one of the most iconic female protagonists in video game history, Joanna Dark.
After years of development, Microsoft, Xbox and its studios decided to reboot the franchise, revealing never-before-seen gameplay during the 2024 showcase.
Fans saw a much more androgynous-looking, much less feminine protagonist, and their reaction was far from positive.
“Perfect Dark will transform you into the ultimate secret agent. Joanna Dark’s perfectly symmetrical and masculine jawline makes her the ideal candidate to disguise herself as a man on the most dangerous missions. One day she’s Joanna, the next day she’s Jonathan,” wrote the account, which has 20,000 followers.
of X Post The faces of the female characters were compared to those of the male characters, who were surprisingly similar.
“I will never forgive them. Joanna Dark is being treated like a ‘modern audience’. It’s disrespectful,” wrote Melonie Mack, a gamer with 250,000 followers on Twitter. X.
“I think Joanna offers a lot of contemporary opportunities.”
Many viewers have begun to evaluate woke character reboots as treating them for a “modern audience,” which essentially means making formerly feminine characters uglier or more masculine.
In fact, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer revealed that this could have been planned as early as 2021. IGNSpencer said the character gave her an opportunity to focus on a female protagonist.
“I think it’s great for us because it allows us to focus on female protagonists in our lineup, which we don’t have a lot of in first-party games. [lineup]”I think Joanna offers a lot of contemporary possibilities, as much as I’d like to see a focus on a team with strong main characters,” Spencer explained.
The treatment of Joanna Dark, who was originally feminine, Eastern European This reflects a growing trend among major gaming studios to remove femininity from their core characters.
This is also true for the latest Star Wars game, Outlaws, which uses character models inActivist“
“It’s not enough to make female models look plain. They need to be ‘trained’ to look more masculine.”
Conversely, the Korean developers of the game Stellar Blade were accused of making the protagonist a sexist female stereotype, even though the protagonist was a body scan of a real person.
“There’s a trend in updates and remakes to make older games more ‘realistic’. Unfortunately, they interpret this to mean that female characters should steer away from stylized ideals, but this never seems to be the case for male characters,” the game designer said. Mark Kahn.
“That’s even extreme. It’s not enough to make female models look plainer, they have to be ‘muscular’ and make them look more masculine. This comes from the mistaken idea that in order to achieve equality, women have to be portrayed as possessing the physical virtues of men, being able to do everything men can do in combat and physical strength. But this is not the fantasy that female or male gamers want,” he continued.
The new Perfect Dark game is being developed by Crystal Dynamics, a studio known for giving its in-house female hero, Lara Croft, the “modern audience” treatment.
On why the studio is doing this, Khan added:
“I think there’s another reason for recasting so many female characters as men, and that’s the current war to define what a woman is and give the transgender community something in between. It’s redefining female beauty standards to fit modern definitions of what a woman should look like.”
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