You can be a Girl in South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Last year's "The Stick of Truth" was well received by by fans of South Park and video games as a whole, given that the game seamlessly combined the timing-based turn-based combat seen in RPGs like Paper Mario, and the uncomfortable contemporary gross-out humor of the show. And while you could customize your own (mostly) mute protagonist in your quest for the stick of truth, you were forced into the role of a boy. So if you wanted to play a little girl crushing skulls with disproportionate force with a mallet, well, you were just plain out of luck.

Fortunately for all the feminists and catfishers out there, however, the latest South Park game, The Fractured But Whole (which would actually be a rather neat title were it not so obviously a butt joke) will change all that, and you will now have the ability to play as a girl... but... AT A COST.

In Stick of Truth we got halfway through the game, and we had narratively come up with the big Girls' Quest halfway through it. [The Girls] were a faction in the fantasy world. And then someone's like, "What if you want to be a girl?" Narratively, it didn't work. We'd have to sh- can the whole game. So we just left it the way it was. This time, we obviously wanted to add that.

But the boys are little boys, because it's really a story about little boys running around. So they don't care about [your character being a girl]? That seems weird. They always seemed to care about it in the show. Are they dumb about it, and they don't know? So you're in hiding? Or do they totally care about that, and totally treat you differently? So we ended up doing those things differently for different characters.

It actually turned out to be quite a bit more work. I'm also playing The Division - I'm not just saying that because it's Ubisoft. I made the character look like my wife, just because I thought that was funny, running around New York shooting people looking like my wife. But the game doesn't treat you that differently. The guys still shoot you. The game doesn't really react that much differently. That's cool for that kind of game. It's been a funny journey to go through, introducing something that we thought would just be a cool feature. You're a girl! But now they're going to treat you different.

So if you play as a girl, your relationship with the other characters in the game will change. That.. that's honestly really cool. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all about equality: but one of the things that bothered me about picking genders in games is how infrequently it actually means anything, beyond changing your voice or who you can seduce. Equality is great, but its not representative, and all too often it feels more like laziness on the developers part than a real desire to make a rich, truly equal world.

And I mean--girls and boys are DIFFERENT. Different yet equal, to phrase it in the worst possible way. I think it's nice to have a game that acknowledges that.

We'll get to see the extent of that acknowledgement come December 5th, when the game is released.