Comments by Escape From Tarkov developer Pavel Dyatlov on women being “unable” to handle the “amount of stress” in its war environment have resurfaced, in the midst of the survival shooter rapidly rising in popularity.
If you’re unfamiliar with Escape From Tarkov, it’s essentially a brutally unforgiving first-person shooter with survival elements. Such situations are always tough in video games (nevermind in real life), but some comments made by a developer back in 2016 have recently been highlighted on the internet.
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The comments took place as part of a 2016 interview over at WCCFTech:
Did you consider having female characters playable?
We considered that, but we came to the conclusion that women are not allowed to be in the war.
But these days, women are in the military…
I can agree with you and we discussed it for a very long time, but we came to the conclusion that women can’t handle that amount of stress. There’s only place for hardened men in this place.
Escape From Tarkov has escalated in popularity recently, with a bunch of streamers playing the game and even sending it above Fortnite on Twitch’s most-viewed games list. However, with the spotlight back on the hardcore FPS, Dyatlov’s previous comments were once again brought into question:
Yeah, fuck Escape from Tarkov. What utter garbage. pic.twitter.com/sZWN7KVPoB
— John Phipps: Turnip Knight (@MagitekDad) January 5, 2020
The interview was from several years ago, so it’s possible that the Escape From Tarkov dev have changed their mind. But for now, it seems that they’ve upset a fair few people with their views. According to LinkedIn, Dyatlov still works at Battlestate games, and he posted the recent 0.12 patch update on his profile so he’s obviously still active at the studio.
Update 1/6/2020 1406 EST:
Apparently, some were confused as to who actually gave the interview. In response to posts attributing the above quotes to him, Battlestate’s COO, Nikita Buyanov stated the following about the controversy:
“never said that! i do really respect women in wars. I never said that bullshit that “women are not allowed to be in war”. “women can’t handle the stress of real combat” ?? WTF? I never gave such answers in any of the interviews.”
Of course, with the development team behind Tarkov not speaking English as a first language, there are bound to be issues with translation. Hopefully, the studio will be able to clear up their official position on female avatars soon.
