Hello! Eurogamer is marking Pride once again with a new week full of features celebrating the intersection of LGBTQIA+ culture and gaming in all its forms. And if you’re a new member, you can catch up on everything you’ve missed so far this week (and the past five years, to be precise) in our brand new Pride Week hub . Today, though, Eurogamer’s Ed Nightingale talks to developer Respawn Entertainment about delivering diverse representation in Apex Legends.
The online hero shooter genre is a well-known one these days, but Respawn’s Apex Legends has proven to be particularly popular, thanks in part to the diversity of its characters.
Since launching five years ago, Respawn has continued to add new Legends from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, most recently adding the asexual Legend Alter. But how are these Legends created? How does Respawn ensure that representation is authentic, and why does that matter? I spoke to story lead Ashley Reed and Alter writer Jaclyn Seto to find out more.
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Eurogamer: I’ll start with the really big, but also obvious question: why is it important for players to feel seen by having strong representation in the Legends roster?
Ashley Reed: Gosh, that’s a big question! There are a thousand really good reasons for that. I think it’s important for people to feel seen. I know to some extent what it’s like to really enjoy a space, a medium, and feel like you’re not seen as part of it, even though you’re there. Feeling ignored, feeling pushed away, is a bad feeling, especially when you want to engage with that thing because you love it.
It’s also great for us to build that community, to have a bigger player base of different people with different experiences. You get a much more vibrant community. And I like being nice to people! I want people to feel like this is their space, because why wouldn’t it be?
EG: Going back to the initial Apex Legends roster, how did you ensure diversity and strong representation from the start?
AR: This is probably hearsay, because I came out around the time that Crypto was shipping. My understanding is that there was a lot of emphasis on: we have a big, diverse world, and we wanted to represent that, and we wanted to represent the people that we know. We don’t just know one kind of person, we know a lot of people. So we wanted to represent that in the game. It was a bit of a fly-by-night, because it was the first time that we were really thinking, “Okay, we want a big, diverse cast, and we want that to be a defining pillar of the project, because this game is about the characters.” If you were doing an ensemble cast, the focus would be on making those characters really interesting and unique and making them stand out.
The original version, as I understand it, was a lot of talking to developers who were part of a group or were close friends or family members of someone who was part of a group, and we could bring them in for consultation. That was the very early stages of what we’re doing now, which is more defined ideation, engagement with staff, and then actual formal consultation work.
For example: How important is representation when creating new characters?
AR: We don’t start with anything that we haven’t checked off yet, because we don’t feel like that’s an authentic way to design – it feels very obligatory and that’s not really what we want to do. We want to create these characters because we’re passionate about it and we’re passionate about exploring these identities.
We start with the kit, because ultimately Apex is a design-first game. We want to make sure that everything flows together naturally and that it all feels cohesive, that the characters are fun to play, that they’re fun to play against. So that has to come first, before anything else. And then the art, design, story, animation come together and we look at what kind of person would do these things. Who would base their survival on this? And as we build that out, 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 backstory of the character. So then we start looking at what do we want to do? What are we interested in? What are we missing? When we were working on Catalyst, we had talked about doing a transgender woman for a long time. There was actually a transgender woman who worked on her in the early stages who came up with the idea of the techno-witch that tied it all together and that really fits with a transgender identity.
“We want to create these characters because we’re passionate about them and because we’re passionate about exploring these identities.”
EG: Once you’ve chosen a background for your character, how do you ensure it’s authentic?
AR: Once we’re pretty sure that this is the direction we want to go, the very first phase is still something that’s similar to what we did with the original characters, where we bring in people from the development team. We want to make sure that we’re on the right track, that this is the right direction for this character, that we’re not falling into horrible stereotypes, that this doesn’t feel weird or inauthentic. Particularly if the character is going to speak a different language, we’ll bring in people who speak that language. And then when we start writing the lines, we’ll bring in authenticity readers to check our work, to make sure that we don’t run into anything that we don’t intend. Then we take that and we adjust it. By the time the character comes out, it’s gone through about three different levels. I would say that the first person who was interested in creating that character – not always, but in my experience usually – has some kind of connection to that identity. It’s something that they’re interested in and that they want to explore. Then we have the internal level and then we have the external level.
EG: The newest Legend is Alter who is asexual. Why was that specific representation important for this character?
Jaclyn Seto: The truth is, I’ve wanted to write a top character for a while, but you have to go into it with an open mind when it comes to creating a Legend, so that the character can become who they need to be without the pressure of fitting into preconceived ideas. As Alter’s personality and backstory came together, I started thinking about her relationships and desires. Was there a type of love or intimacy that she wanted? And if so, what kind was it? Ultimately, in answering those 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 can find something in our characters that makes them feel seen. If Alter’s addition to the cast reaches more people in that way, then we’re very happy! Our Legends can be a little eccentric, but at their core, we strive for them to be a reflection of the world we live in.
EG: Do you think that diverse representation has had a positive impact and led to the success of the game? Do you think there is a direct correlation?
AR: I hope so. It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty. But anecdotally, from what I’ve seen from the community, we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from people like, “This is the first time I’ve seen a character like this, I feel really valued by the Apex team, I feel like I can be here because they’re here.” And that’s exactly what we’re striving for. That’s what we want. We want people to feel like they’re not the first in the room, the character is the first in the room.
EG: How does it feel for you as writers to get such positive feedback from players?
AR: Happy but relieved! A Legend is probably one of our heaviest lifts in terms of features, it takes about a year to create from start to finish. When you’re stuck in a project that only people internally and a few select external people can see, you get to a point where you just keep repeating and repeating and repeating. And it’s like if you say a word too many times, it doesn’t sound like a word anymore. So then you launch it and people love it. It’s really amazing when those reactions come in. I was in Japan recently for Asia Fest and there were some amazing cosplayers there. 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 the pure emotion, the genuine love for this character, it was like she hit me. So for a character that I didn’t even create, but knowing that this game made that available for this person to connect with this character, it was just so meaningful to me.
EG: Do you think having such diverse characters has contributed to less harassment in the game for LGBTQIA+ players?
AR: I hope so. I think the reality is that it makes Apex at least a little bit better than it would be otherwise. There are still a lot of measures that need to be taken, it can’t be that we have some diverse characters and our job here is done. But if for whatever reason it’s completely unbearable to be around people who are different from you, then you’re not going to like it here and you need to go somewhere else. This is not the place for you. And if you want to be in a place with a lot of different types of people and feel represented by someone in this large diverse cast, then you are welcome here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise because they’re wrong.
“If you want to be in a place with a lot of different types of people and you want to feel represented by someone in this big, diverse cast, then you are welcome here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise because they’re wrong.”
EG: There’s a much broader discussion about forced diversity in games and “wokeness” at the moment, particularly through diversity consultants. What would you say to someone who accuses Apex of being “woke”?
AR: Where have you been? We’ve been doing this since the beginning. It’s been five years! But this is interesting too! Why do we want our games to be duller, less colorful, less meaningful, less useful to fewer people? I don’t get it. The alternative is just everyone being the same? That doesn’t seem interesting to me. I’d be bored to death playing the same character over and over again.
EG: Are there any other areas of representation you’d like to see in the game? Have you considered including more disabled people?
AR: Yeah, that’s something we’ve thought about a few times. We looked briefly at what would happen if a Legend was blind? But we found that there were barriers in the game that made it difficult to represent that effectively. But it’s something we think about, we’re always thinking about what’s the next thing we can do? What’s interesting to us? We’ve also thought about a deaf Legend, we’re still playing around with some of those ideas.
There’s a huge world with lots of different countries, and we’ve only scratched the surface of including people from all of those countries. There are character prototypes with certain nationalities that we’ve wanted to make since launch. We just need to find the resources. If we could just spit all of those characters into the game, like say, “Go!”, then we would. But it takes time, and resources are finite. But there are more and more characters from more and more parts of the world that we want to include. That’s the dream.
This interview has been edited for clarity.