You've been pretty good about diversity. There will be female soldiers.
We revealed the Bedouin female soldier you'll get to play as part of the campaign. For us, we wanted to stick to authenticity but also do it in a respectful way and an inclusive way, where we portray the different armies - not always as it was, but to portray the multitude of soldiers that fought within the different armies, showing this war in a modern way as part of what DICE believes and what Battlefield believes.
Can you choose a female soldier in multiplayer?
No, not in multiplayer. Just in single-player.
We revealed the Bedouin female soldier you'll get to play as part of the campaign. For us, we wanted to stick to authenticity but also do it in a respectful way and an inclusive way, where we portray the different armies - not always as it was, but to portray the multitude of soldiers that fought within the different armies, showing this war in a modern way as part of what DICE believes and what Battlefield believes.
Can you choose a female soldier in multiplayer?
No, not in multiplayer. Just in single-player.
This seems like a rather odd choice to make, but then again they also didn't include women in the previous, modern-era Battlefield games either.
An example, i recently finished Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, the street gangs in that game are close to equal parts men and women which looks a bit like this.
Given the roles of men and women in the Victorian era i really can't see women thugs on the streets, enforcing their gang's will on the people of London, persecuting orphans to work in factories, it just seems... odd.
Women in WW1 performed the same roles as they did in WW2 for the most part, replacing the positions left when men went to war, this included plenty of hard labour, farming, factory work, police work, firefighting, security, so while it is wrong to say that women wouldn't have been capable of fighting, it's really only from WW2 onward that their roles in the military began to grow.
You can of course find references to female soldiers over the last thousands of years but it's scattershot, a female Tommy would look odd to me.
American reporter Bessie Beatty estimated the total number of women serving in these gender-segregated units at 5,000 in the fall of 1917, but only the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death and the Perm Battalion were deployed to the front.
1914 : Maria Bochkareva Russian: Мария Леонтьевна Бочкарева, née Frolkova, nicknamed Yashka, was a Russian woman who fought in World War I and formed the Women's Battalion of Death.
1914 : Flora Sandes, an English woman, joined a St. John Ambulance unit in Serbia and subsequently became an officer in the Serbian army.[27]
1914: British nurse Edith Cavell helped treat injured soldiers, of both sides, in German-occupied Belgium. Executed in 1915 by the Germans for helping British soldiers escape Belgium.
1914: Olena Stepaniv, a Ukrainian officer of Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Was the first woman to receive officer rank in the world.
1915: French artist Madame Arno organized a regiment of Parisian women to fight the Germans.[28]:18
1915: Olga Krasilnikov, a Russian woman, disguised herself as a man and fought in nineteen battles in Poland. She received the Cross of St. George.[28]:144
1915: Russian woman Natalie Tychmini fought the Austrians at Opatow in World War I, while disguised as a man. She received the Cross of St. George.[28]:225
1916: Ecaterina Teodoroiu was a Romanian heroine who fought and died in World War I.
1916: Milunka Savić, Serbian war hero,and the most decorated female fighter in the history of warfare, awarded with the French Légion d’Honneur (Legion of Honour) twice, Russian Cross of St. George, English medal of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael, Serbian Miloš Obilić medal. She is the sole female recipient of the French Croix de Guerre (War Cross) with the palm attribute.
1917: Julia Hunt Catlin Park DePew Taufflieb. First American female to be awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor in the First World War for her efforts in turning her Chateau d'Annel into a front line hospital.
More than 12,000 women enlisted in auxiliary roles in the United States Navy and Marine Corps during the First World War. About 400 of them died in that war.[5]
Over 2,800 women served with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps during the First World War and it was during that era that the role of Canadian women in the military first extended beyond nursing.[6] Women were given paramilitary training in small arms, drill, first aid and vehicle maintenance in case they were needed as home guards.[6] Forty-three women in the Canadian military died during WWI.
Single player is different, if they're telling the story of a woman during the war it could either be part of a larger woman's regiment as stated in your research, in which case it would be totally normal to have loads of female soldiers on the screen, but it sounds like we'll be following a noteworthy individual.
Given context they can make it seem normal, but for multiplayer it's army vs army, which on the front lines were 99-100% men, unless Russia is involved which seemed to have the most female soldiers, COD2 did a good job having women in the campaign. They could spawn in a woman every 20 matches or something to keep the number down but if you're going to include female soldiers at all you might as well have a regiment.