I’ve been playing a lot of Apex Predator recently and was reminded of this. Having at least two woman agents amongst the 12 men would have been more realistic, or at the very least, refreshing. It could have been an opportunity to finally have armed female guards in WOA. There’s no reason not to do it. Voice lines? They already have some - or at least a set of one (there was a dialogue in Whittleton Creek of a jogger “reporting” a found body). It sticks out a lot to me the more I think about it. I believe there was a little bit of a discussion on this topic in 2021 actually, not sure. Point still stands though. They could have fit some ICA woman agents in. Easily.
First - Stop saying stuff like “there’s no reason not to do it” or “they could easily do it”. This is just flagrantly dismissive of real-word game development, not to mention not knowing how easy it is to do to begin with, and it’s certainly not non-zero effort as you seem to be implying here.
Second - This was discussed back in 2019 on one of the IOI Monthly’s (May 2019?); the short version is that they can’t for balance reasons. Guards can’t be female as players need to get disguises from them, and doing otherwise would make for a large difficulty spike. However, they did say they’d look into it.
Two years later, they added more female mid-tier-staff members to the H3 levels (by my count, it’s about 50/50 gender-wise, oftentimes more female than male), which makes for a much more gradual, and fairer, difficulty curve in my experience.
Third - You do have a point about the ICA agents in Berlin all being male, the thing you seem to have missed is that all the ICA agents are enforcers in all* disguises. This already makes them tricky, and plays into the cat-and-mouse aspect of the level. So, while your point is actually valid (and to be honest, something, you’ve opened my eyes to for Berlin), you kinda chose the wrong points to advocate for the inclusion of female ICA agents. Realism isn’t a reason to include it; building on the existing level setup as the agents are already aware of you is.
Fourth - The voice lines that do exist are so generic that they’d need to re-record them for the level, not to mention the ICA Agent chatter and such. Again, it’s not non-zero effort or “Easily” done. That’s nonsense.
Fifth - I’m aware I come off as a bit of a jackass due to the bulletpoints. It was just easier tackling this one at a time. It’s not an insult toward you, or anyone else for that matter.
Pretty weird for them to say things like that when there were already guards you couldn’t get disguises from in the game (soldiers and bodyguards in Warlord / Dictator for example, and a few unique NPCs). Besides it wouldn’t really be more of a difficulty spike to have a few more guards you can’t steal disguises from than those female civilian workers already are.
I don’t see how the gender of a character has anything to do with them being super enforcers. Allison Moretta already is one, for example (and, more recently, the showdown targets in Freelancer can also be super enforcers).
Honestly while the technical aspect is a pretty valid reason why there are currently no female guards (they have to make extra models and animations for them after all), game balance isn’t.
Those are exceptions that prove the rule, not the inverse.
Read the second part of the paragraph, it directly connects to the first. Them being super enforcers is a non-issue as the level already has male super enforcers. In any other level setup, that’d be annoying, but Berlin makes a point to do it, so them being female in Berlin isn’t an issue.
And Moretta has it as a part of her gimmick (and it’s done quite well too, might I add).
Erm…yes it is? 47 can only use male disguises; limiting that the further up you go on the disguise tier is going to make things harder to get around and /or isolate targets. Again, not an issue in Berlin, moreso in, say, Mendoza, which wasn’t made for that kind of gameplay.
On the off-chance that this might get a response:
Oh lord, I’m so tired of that phrase. Exceptions don’t prove rules; exceptions prove rules are only being enforced when it’s convenient and so should maybe be completely rethought to begin with.
47 usually can’t use the disguise of the targets except in very specific circumstances, like, say, The Author and Patient Zero. Swap out, say, three of the agents in Berlin with women, and I see no change to the mechanics of that map whatsoever.
… Then why did you bring up that point about ICA agents being super enforcers in the first place? 
If they had the character models available, they could easily have made a few of the agents women without altering the setup.
Guards in Mendoza are already mostly clustered in groups in the same areas, so making one guard here and there a woman wouldn’t really make it any more difficult to get a guard disguise (unless you were specifically going for that guy fixing his hair in the loo I guess). It wouldn’t really be much more difficult than getting an hotel staff disguise in Bangkok where most of the staff is female.
Especially considering some of the agents are in civilian clothes and you couldn’t get a disguise from them anyway.
Well, a lot of them are in biker and security disguises, and those can be found on the map in bags, so you don’t even need to take them anyway.
I’m aware that there’s never just doing something in game development, I’ve had a little experience in that arena to know the smallest things can cause headaches. Apologies if it appeared that I was dismissive of it. Game development is no joke. However, I thought that was implied, so there was no point in mentioning it. IOI is a successful developer with lots of employees though, so it doesn’t seem too much of a herculean task to ask for. Of course, budget was iffy with H3 allegedly, so that alone could be a valid reason? Maybe?
That is another good reason that’s been stated here already on the forum elsewhere, but yes agreed.
…you sure? Haven’t heard anything of the sort.
That’s my point.
“It was crazy (laughs). I mean…We had hard and fast commitments. I had mentally prepared myself and I was trying to mentally prepare everyone else for shipping the game with robot voices because of all the logistics [of voice acting]: getting the actors in the studio, getting voice directors in the studio, engineers, mocap. Yeah…
“I was like, ‘guys…Google Translate!’ (laughs). It was a terrible idea, and I was shut down, thankfully…But what are you gonna do? I mean we were independently producing and publishing this and there was a fixed amount of money." - Forest Swartout Large, executive producer at IOI (source)
Covid lockdowns were what they struggled with more than money it seems so I misspoke. Despite this, I still think they could have switched some of the Berlin agents’ genders to make it more interesting
Oh definitely. It’s not something I thought about until now, but yeah, they definitely could’ve done a few agents in Berlin as female.
That could be it (edit: you actually mention this down below, ok cool)
This wouldn’t be totally related, but it could also be due to storage space, or keeping the file size low? (Especially at this stage of the game, 3 entries in with loads of locations and guard types)
I know that the first Last Of Us only has male enemies, and that was because they didn’t have enough space on the bluray disc to include female models and voices.
Really would have been nice at least, just to make the world a little more immersive.
But I totally get the main disguise balance issue that it would probably present.
I also believe that animations would have been a part of it.
The key to Berlin is that the targets are, in essence, guards. I would even say that it’s essential to the level. So they have access to all the behaviours, And I think that some animations are exclusive to the male NPC skeletons.
Dragging body bags is one of them, If you look at some of Mooney’s video where he has a “all NPC have weapons” mod, then all dragging bodies bugs out : women just walk, with the body bag magically following them.
It’s certainly not the only one.
Might have been part of it.
Yeah we forget about all the unique behaviors that guards have that an armed female NPC would have to get uniquely designed for, meaning many more voice lines, animations, and adjustments to the code. The whole thing was probably far too big of a headache to design for this late into the trilogy.
I’m sure that when we get a new Hitman game or entry in the series from the ground up it will have female guards, the series has had female combatants in most entries (I think the only other game in the series that doesn’t have female enemies is Contracts, although I could be wrong about that).
Overall, although the trilogy had some issues, it’s made me very excited for the the future and what IO will do with the series and it’s mechanics in newer entries.
Let’s also not forget the unprecedented number of female targets in this trilogy, with only a handful of missions, including bonus material, that did not include a woman as a target. Considering the types of targets and their roles in this world the games take place in, that’s a step forward in and of itself.
Unpopular opinion dump 
I like hitman 2/3’s lighting in Marrakesh and bangkok which some people complain about. Bangkok’s old lighting was too much and Marrakesh’s lighting was too little. I can totally see why people hate the new lighting in Sapienza tho.
I like Haven Island and Colorado. Haven being one of my top missions. (Colorado being in the alright range)
I hate the knock back some sniper rifles have, looks goofy making someone backflip while shooting them. it’s good for hiding bodies, but might as well add a cartoon whistle sound effect to it at that point.
A lot of people loved 47’s HITMAN 2’s face model. I hated it. it looked ugly imo.
Sister Yulduz isn’t a hard target nor a pain in the ass as people say she is. It might be because of that one challenge that’s removed now, but all you really needed to do was throw an explosive baseball at her face and boom, done. (Unless you didn’t buy hitman 2 at the time). And for regular strats she isolates herself in a room that’s not hard to get to, can be killed in that area where Oybek puts the thingy for the ceremony.
I like Marrakesh (like B-tier), but due to the two fortresses thingy and the empty space between them, I can see why people hate it.
Hokkaido isn’t an S-tier to me, only because I dislike Soders as a target. I liked that they tried something new, but when I compare him to sierra who was basically him but executed way better, there was definitely some improvement that could be made. If he moved around for the first part of the mission, gets prepped, and then the surgery starts like how sierra starts in the car and then eventually finishes the race and has a new path and routine, I’d like him more. I do still like Hokkaido, but it’s at a low A tier.
Knock back with any firearm in any media annoys me. I know that cinematically it’s almost required for someone who gets hit with a bullet, shotgun shell, or whatever to fly through the air in response but physics is a thing and in order for any bullet to cause that sort of response, an equal knock-back would be required on the part of the shooter.
Unless 47 is flying through the air backwards, the target should barely be moving at all.