Humans Now Equal Opportunity Prey In Aliens: Colonial Marines

Gearbox has taken note of a petition making it’s way around the internet (accumulating an impressive 4000 signatures in a short time) about the lack of female characters and customization options available in Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Now we have news that there has been a response in the form of admission by CEO Randy Pitchford that female characters were always planned to be in the game both in co-op and multiplayer but there were no finished models and thus they were not ready to be shown.

Gearbox Community Manager, Chris Faylor, wrote to the petitioners, “I am happy to be able to confirm that female marines are playable in competitive multiplayer as well as co-op, complete with customization elements. This is something the team has been planning and working on for quite some time…”

This is relieving to quite a few women who I know on a gamer-to-gamer level and, I must admit, myself as well. Why am I, as a male gamer, happy that I’ll be able to roll as a female character? Whenever given the option, I do so for various reasons. The biggest two being the innate ability to be a smaller target for enemy fire and that the greater number of players (in my experience) play as males and I like to stand out a little.

I am proud to introduce the first female character revealed for Aliens: Colonial Marines, her name is Private Jennifer Redding Quintaro (disregard the incorrect names, like ‘Jennifer Running’ given by other publications).

Now we can all rest at ease knowing that, regardless of gender, we’ll be able to fully customize our characters to suit our tastes before the alien hordes start hunting us all when the game drops on February 13th, 2013.