Sydney Leroux is apparently too hard to draw.
I have to say, this is the saddest excuse I've seen yet for why a videogame company didn't offer the option of female players. Electronic Arts, who makes games for the FIFA soccer franchise, says that twelve female teams will be added to the next version, for the first time in 20 years.
http://arstechnica.com/...
While adding women’s teams is “something we've talked about doing for a while,” Shannon said the developers were waiting on the technology needed to capture female players properly in the game. “The key for us was when we brought it into the game, we had to bring it in properly, and we needed some supporting technology to be able to do that... We've been looking each year as to 'can we do it' and comparing to priorities at the time as well. Once the technologies were in place, we could do it properly.”
One of the major technical difficulties in adding female players was getting the hair animated properly, Shannon said. Moving hair has been available in FIFA replays for a while, but the developers have never been able to get it animated in real time, at a full frame rate, during gameplay. It would look a bit odd for the longer hair on many women players to be an unmoving, static blob during the game.
Yes. Women are just too hard to draw, what with all the moving parts they have. And those extra bumps!! Remember how twenty years ago, all the male players were totally photorealistic?
They just didn't have the technology to draw women realistically! (1994)
Adding women to the game also required updates to the motion capture technology used in the game, Shannon said. Specifically, the technology used to capture players’ heads has now evolved to the point where it can capture the nuances of female hair and skin tone variations with the requisite detail, he said. “We've scanned heads in the past, but we're evolving that all the time, changing and evolving as anything in development,” Shannon said.
OMG! Women have different skin tones than men!
Women, completely unlike men, have differing skin tones! (2011)
Guys. Own up to your myopia. You just didn't realize people wanted to play women, and you didn't make it a priority until you had daughters who wanted to play. I'm happy for you that you now have hair animation technology. But, we've been playing soccer as long as you, and we're not so hard to draw.
