I mean, this was EA 18 years ago.
It's not a matter of "It's <current year>". Female characters in FPS games did not make anyone blink in the late 90s, early 2000s. Delta Force? Female playable characters. Rainbow 6? Female playable characters. Medal of Honor? Female protagonist. There were five FPS games in 2000 with female leads. Something changed in the mid 2000s. A demographic and ideological shift. DICE could have put female fighters in Battlefield 1942 and there would have been very little outrage. Of course some would have raised objections and questioned the game's balance of fun and historical accuracy. But those discussions are inevitable. Nothing like the current internet fury.
I think there's this very misleading idea that we started out dudebro and we're slowly getting "better". But it's really not that simple. Doom was originally supposed to have male and female protagonists. Tom Hall got kicked out, and we ended up with Doom Guy instead. But those protagonists ended up in Rise of the Triad, which was a reasonably popular game.
You know what? If Doom had featured a female protagonist, the public would not have cared in the 90s. They would have assumed Doom Girl was some Ellen Ripley figure. (Remember that Doom was originally based on Alien.) Fast forward to 2018, and something that would have been wholly uncontroversial in the 90s is suddenly a big deal. (Female protagonist in the low budget Doom movie attracts a lot of hate, for instance.) If the next Doom game had a female protagonist there would be so much petty internet outrage. Boycotts. Petitions. Hate mail. Something changed 10-15 years ago. Around the time the "teenage boy-slash-screaming-10-year-old" demographic became the primary focus for publishers. In particular, the FPS genre began to attract (and target through marketing and design changes such as removing female characters) a sort of hard to pin down "jock" demographic. Very competitive, very male, very American. That ended up shaping the FPS genre in a pretty extreme way. edit: Remember when Call of Duty games weren't all about America? I can. After Modern Warfare, the international aspect of Call of Duty was rapidly eroded. You might have non-American team-mates, but you were almost always a red blooded American man.
