We recently discussed Call of Duty’s Black Ops: Cold War and now, we have received more updates regarding this highly-anticipated game. One notable change is the fact that you will now have the ability to make your very own character who can be referred to with gender-neutral pronouns.
In order to start your Cold War campaign, creating your character is first on the to-do list. During Gamespot’s preview, they noted that you can choose your name, gender, skin tone, military background, among others. However, you also have the option to choose “Classified.”
As for the gender options, you can choose between male, female, and classified. What’s exciting about this third option is that the game will treat it as a gender-neutral option. As such, your character will be referred to as “they/them,” even in voiced dialogue.
In a roundtable discussion, creative director Dan Vondrak discussed the decision to add a gender-neutral option. Vondrak said that they didn’t want to exclude anybody, and so they decided to add a “classified” option for the character’s background or place of birth in case players don’t find an option that they want. With regards to the pronouns, he stated:
“So when it came to gender, that same idea was thrown in: Why can’t we leave it classified? There’s no reason we can’t do that. We were already going to make [the game] change to he/she [for male/female options] so it was easy enough for us to use different pronouns [they/them].”
Understandably, these options won’t change the game drastically, but it’s a breath of fresh air to have a game be more inclusive. That being said, all spoken dialogue will refer to your character as “Bell.”
On the other hand, your character will not be voiced, despite the fact that you will have dialogue options at some parts of the game. Vondrak said that in part, this is because they want your character to be consistent with the idea you have in your head, and adding a voice to that could possibly ruin your preferences.
Asides from this, you can also customize your character’s psychological profile. In this customization option, you choose a pair of traits out of 15 possible ones and each has its own perks. For instance, choosing “Violent Tendencies” will increase your bullet damage by 25%.
So far, we’re highly impressed with what Black Ops: Cold War has to offer and we’re counting down the days until we can get our hands on this game.
