Sega’s upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines will scrap female characters

Growing up watching the Aliens franchise, I’ve always remembered seeing Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as the strong female lead and quite frankly the only person that could kick the crap out of the Xenomorphs. I’m not too sure how this is one will go over with fans. In a recent web chat with fans, producer Brian Burleson revealed that there will be no playable female characters in Colonial Marines. Originally around the time of the game’s announcement, Randy Pitchford from Gearbox wrote on a Sega blog stating that Aliens “inspired a generation. We can see all around us the clear and profound impact the films have had on our popular culture and our collective image of science fiction.”

Yeah, nice job on that one (insert sarcasm). He also went on to say

“Our vision is for the game to be fully featured with an exciting, suspenseful, thrilling and action packed narrative campaign that can be played alone or cooperatively combined with a robust competitive game where human players can take on the roles of Colonial Marines or Xenomorphs and do battle online.”

Obviously there already been an uproar from the female gamer community regarding this. There is a petition that has been created to include playable female characters in multiplayer. The original goal for the petition is at 1,000, but has already garnered 2,422 signatures. Looking back at the debacle that was the Mass Effect 3 ending and all of the fallout and petitioning that came from it, it will be interesting to see what will become of this. Is it that big of a deal that they omitted an integral piece that is known to the Aliens franchise?

Source: Examiner