Hello! Eurogamer once again marks Pride with another week of features celebrating the intersection of LGBTQIA+ culture and gaming in all its forms. And if you’re just joining us, you can catch up on everything you’ve missed this week (and the past five years, actually) on our brand new Pride Week hub. However, today Eurogamer’s Ed Nightingale chats with developer Respawn Entertainment about providing diverse representation in Apex Legends.
The online hero shooter is a well-established genre these days, but Respawn’s Apex Legends has proven particularly popular, thanks in part to the diversity of its character roster.
Since its launch five years ago, Respawn has continued to add new Legends from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, most recently introducing the asexual Legend Alter. But how do these legends come about? How does Respawn ensure its representation is authentic and why is this important? I spoke with Narrative Lead Ashley Reed and Alter Writer Jaclyn Seto to find out more.
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Eurogamer: I’ll start with a really big but really obvious question: why is it important for players to feel seen through a strong representation in the Legends roster?
Ashley Reed: Wow, that’s a big question! There are a thousand very good reasons for this. It is important to me that people feel seen. I know what it’s like to a degree, to really enjoy a space, a medium, and feel like you’re not perceived as a part of it, even though you’re right there. Feeling overlooked, feeling left out is a bad feeling, especially when you want to be involved with the thing because you love it.
It’s also great for us to build that community, to have a larger player base of different people with different experiences. You get a much more vibrant community. And I like to be nice to people! I want people to feel like this is their space, because why shouldn’t it be?
EG: Going back to the first Apex Legends roster, how did you ensure diversity and strong representation from the start?
AR: This will be hearsay because I showed up when Crypto was being sent out. My understanding is that we focused a lot on: we have a very diverse world and we wanted to represent that and we wanted to represent the people we know. We don’t know just one kind of people, we know a lot of people. So we wanted to represent that in the game. It was kind of fleeting because it was the first time we really got into the game of ‘Okay, we want a big diverse cast and we want that to be the defining pillar of the project because this game is going to be about characters’. If you were to do a cast, then you focus on making these characters very interesting and unique and making them stand out.
The original version, as I understand it, was a lot of talking to developers who were either part of the group or were close friends or relatives of someone who was part of the group, and we were able to bring them in for consultation. Those were the very early stages of what we’re doing now, which is a more well-defined idea, working with staff and then the actual official consulting work.
E.G: How important is representation when creating new characters?
AR: We don’t open with whatever box we haven’t ticked yet because we don’t feel like that’s an authentic way of designing – it feels very mandatory and it’s not really what we want to do. We want to create these characters because we’re passionate about them and we’re passionate about exploring these identities.
We’ll start with the kit, because Apex is ultimately a design-first game. We want to make sure everything flows together naturally and everything feels cohesive, the characters are fun to play, fun to play against. So it has to come first before anything else. And then the art, design, storytelling and animation come together and we look at what kind of person would do something like that. Who would base their survival on that? And as we build it, we think, how do we feel about filling in the gaps with this character? First we come up with the personality and then we have to develop the character’s story. So about when we start looking at what is something that we want to do? what are we interested in? What do we feel is missing? When we were working on Catalyst, we actually talked for a long time about doing a trans woman character. In fact, there was a trans woman working on it in the very early stages who actually suggested the idea of ​​a techno witch that brought it all together and that fits very well with a trans identity.
“We want to create these characters because we’re passionate about them and we’re passionate about exploring these identities.”
EG: Once you decide on a character’s background, how do you ensure the representation is authentic?
AR: Once we’re pretty sure that’s the direction we want to go, in the very early stages we still do something similar to what we did with the original characters, where we start to involve people from the development team. We want to make sure we’re on the right track, this is the right direction for this character, we’re not tripping over any horrible stereotypes, it doesn’t feel weird or inauthentic. Especially if the character is going to speak another language, we’ll bring in people who speak that language. Then when we start writing the lines, we bring in proofreaders to check our work to make sure we don’t come across anything we don’t intend. Then we take it on board and adjust accordingly. The character went through roughly three different levels before coming out. I would say that the first person who was interested in creating that character – not always, but in my experience usually will – have some kind of connection to that identity. It is something they are interested in and want to explore. Then we have the inner level and then we have the outer level.
EG: The newest Legend is Alter, who is asexual. Why was this particular portrayal important to this character?
Jaclyn Seto: The truth is, I’ve wanted to write an ace character for a while, but when it comes to creating a legend, you have to go in with an open mind so the character can become who they need to be without being pressured to conform. into preconceived ideas. As Altera’s personality and story came together, I began to think about her relationships and desires. Did she want some kind of love or intimacy? And if so, what was it? In the end, as she answered these questions, asexuality felt right for her as a character. I was lucky that it came about very organically. When it comes to representation, we always hope that people find something in our characters that makes them feel seen. If Alter’s addition to the cast reaches more people in this way, then we’re very happy for it! Our Legends can be a bit eccentric, but at the heart of it we try to make them a reflection of the world we live in.
EG: Do you think the diverse representation had a positive impact and led to the success of the game? Do you think there is a direct connection?
AR: I hope so. Hard to say 100%. But unofficially, from what I’ve seen from the community, we’ve seen a lot of really positive feedback from people like, ‘This is the first time I’ve seen a character like this, I feel very appreciated by the Apex team, I feel like because they’re here, I can to be here.’ And that’s exactly what we’re after. That’s what we want. We want people to feel like they’re not the first in the room, but the character is the first in the room.
EG: How does it feel as writers to get such positive comments from players?
AR: Happy but relieved! And the Legend is probably one of our toughest lifts in terms of features, taking about a year to build from start to finish. When you’re locked into a project that only people see internally and a select few external people, you get to the point where you iterate and iterate and iterate. And it’s like saying a word too many times, it doesn’t sound like a word anymore. So you launch it and people love it. It’s really amazing when the comments are rolling in. I was recently in Japan for Asia Fest and there were some amazing cosplayers. Vantage is not my character, but a Vantage cosplayer came up to me and there was a bit of a language barrier, but she was able to tell me “I love Vantage” and just pure emotion, real true love for this. character, it was like she punched me. So for a character that I didn’t even create personally, but knowing that this game made it available for that person to connect with that character, it made so much sense to me.
EG: Do you think having such diverse characters contributed to less harassment in the game for LGBTQIA+ players?
AR: I hope so. I think the reality is that it sets Apex up to be at least a little bit better than it would otherwise be. There are still a lot of arrangements to be made, it can’t just be that we have different characters and our work is done here. But if, for whatever reason, she’s completely intolerable around people who are different than you, then you won’t like it here and should go elsewhere. This is not the place for you. And if you want to be in a place with many different kinds of people and want to feel represented by someone in this big diverse cast, you’re welcome. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise because they are wrong.
“If you want to be in a place with many different kinds of people and you want to feel represented by someone in this big diverse cast, you’re welcome here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise because they’re wrong.”
EG: There’s a lot of wider discourse around enforced diversity in games and ‘awakening’, particularly through diversity consultants. What would you say to anyone who might accuse Apex of being “woke”?
AR: Where have you been? We’ve been doing it since the beginning. It’s been five years! But this is also interesting! Why do we want our games to be more boring, less colorful, less meaningful, less useful to fewer people? I do not get it. The alternative is simply, are they all the same? I don’t find it interesting. I would get bored doing the same character over and over and over.
EG: Are there any other areas of representation that you would like to include in the game? Have you considered greater representation of the disabled?
AR: Yes, that’s something we’ve thought about a few times. We briefly looked at what if the legend was blind? However, we have found that there are barriers in play that make effective representation difficult. But it’s something that we think about, we always think about what’s the next thing we can do? What is interesting for us? We also thought about the deaf Legend, we are still playing with some of those ideas.
It’s a very big world out there with lots of different countries and we’ve just scratched the surface of including people from all of them. Since launch there have been prototypes of characters with certain nationalities that we wanted to do. We just have to find the resources. If we could throw up all these characters into the game like ‘go!’ we would do it. But it takes time and resources are limited. But there are more and more characters from more and more parts of the world that we would like to include. That’s the dream.
This interview has been edited for clarity.