Female co-op character was considered for first Gears of War

The Coalition studio director Rod Fergusson hassaid that he suggested offering players the ability to choose between a male and female character in the the first Gears of War’s co-op multiplayer mode.

When I first joined Epic, one of my first ideas I had for Cliff [Bleszinksi] was ‘Hey, how about we get to pick the gender of your co-op player,’” Fergusson toldIGN. So there’s Dominic and Dominique and you get to pick whether you want to play as male or female. Cliff laughed at me and we never did it.”

Expanding on the technical reasons why offering a choice of gender would have been challenging for the team, Fergusson said: We would have had to write so much branching dialog, and we basically would have [had] to create two stories. Gears 1 was a trial by fire, and so to create one more scope by saying ‘let’s double the amount of dialog we need to have’ – it’s not a free choice.”

Develop has more details.