South Park: The Stick of Truth was great, but only ever let you play as a boy. The upcoming sequel – The Fractured But Whole – will allow us to play as a girl.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed this new feature in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Stone first revealed why gender choice wasn’t in the first game:
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 can the whole game. So we just left it the way it was. This time, we obviously wanted to add that.
While the ability to choose your gender is nothing new in videogames, you can be sure to expect a classic South Park twist. As you might expect of the South Park kids, playing as a girl will affect how certain characters react to you.
Stone explained:
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.
Stone also joked that gamers (himself included) always seem to pick the option to play as a girl if it’s there, so they assume everyone’s gonna go for it.
The brilliantly named South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be out December 6, 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.