> rare shooters with a female protagonist
It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate.
Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be either man or woman.
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Seems the author also realize the thing with the pattern and likely gender of the cat:
> After all, I do need to give the protagonist his fair share. [image] (Yes, I know it's a female, but call it convention rooted in dialect.)
Not a "shooter", but the "No One Lives Forever" franchise is another example of a female protagonist in a first person game.
Edit: I completed forgot Chell from Portal, too!
Unreal actually also has a female protagonist.
https://unrealarchive.org/wikis/the-liandri-archives/Prisone...
Unreal gives the player their choice of protagonist. The default choice is not canonical.
https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/Prisoner_849
> The character of Prisoner 849 is commonly speculated to be Gina, as her model (Female 1) and skin are the first character to appear in alphabetical order; this is even reinforced by UnCreature giving the female player a bio while the male player bio just reads "See Female Player". However, the character of Prisoner 849 is completely up to the player's choice, hence the use of neutral nouns in this article.
If Portal counts, so does Control
Control's not first-person. You are looking at Jesse's back for pretty much every moment of gameplay.
They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old. Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
???
Mirror's Edge has a female protagonist, but it's not an FPS (First Person Shooter). It's a parkour simulator which technically lets you shoot a gun in limited sections of the game, but the protagonist is a pacifist and you get a bonus for decommisioning guns rather than firing them.
If the thread would like some hard data:
- 19,526 games on Steam tagged "female protagonist" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208&ndl=1
- 13,578 games on Steam tagged "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=1663&ndl=1
- 727 games on Steam tagged both "female protagonist" and "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208%2C1663&ndl=...
So it looks like the two categorisations, for the most part, don't intersect.
Notable counterexamples would include Rise of the Triad, Ion Fury, No One Lives Forever, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Far Cry 6, but definitely rare. You'd be clutching at straws to describe Portal or Alien: Isolation as FPS (they're a puzzle game and survival horror game respectively), likewise the Resident Evil / Clock Tower / Fatal Frame / etc. games with the novelty option of switching to first-person view, they're naturally third-person perspective. Left 4 Dead has one female character out of four you can play. You might count that one DLC for Bioshock: Infinite where Elizabeth gets a shot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E1lh-pb6Is). You might count the few FPS RPGs that there are with customisable characters (so yes Fallout, but not Mass Effect as it's third-person). But female protagonists are massively more prevalent in survival horror, metroidvania, third-person shooters (Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc) and other genres besides FPS.
> They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old
You probably didn't play many FPS recently: from the top of my mind, CS2, Battlefield {1, V, 6}, CoD {BO3, Vanguard, MWIII}, Control, the Borderlands, Far Cry {5, 6}, CP2077, Fallout {3, NV, 4}, Destiny, Prey, Valorant, Rainbow 6, Apex, Overwatch, all have female player characters.
And if CS2/CoD/BF/Valorant/Destiny/Apex have female players, that's more or less 90% of the current market.
I took a glance at the the most played FPS list from Steam[0], but I was too lazy to scroll far enough to find one without a playable female character.
[0] https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=1663
> Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
Choosing one specific example when I also made more recent ones, isn't such a big dunk you think it is.
> If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
Sure, I agree, I'm not saying it's more popular, just that I don't think it's that rare, but I guess ultimately I'm a bit nitpicky (sorry) and we're just disagreeing with the specific definition of "rare".