Now, before you all recite it, yes, I am well aware of the in-game explanation of why we see neither women nor children in the game. In fact, I remember the conversation that explained their absence despite not having played Outcast for quite a number of years by now (Cutter's reactions are - as usual - hillarious).

Also, this is not a politically/agenda-driven question, so you can relax if you suspected so.

What brings that question up is that I just recently downloaded the artwork-pack for outcast and actually discovered that there were artworks for female Talans. You can see both a sketch- and colored bust as well as a full-body pictury of a clothed and armed female Talan. So given that they clearly went beyond anatomical sketches, I have to believe that they at one point intended to implement female Talans in the game, so the "Island of Woman" wasn't plan A.

My question: What happened? Why did they go that far in designing female Talans only to say "Nah, let's just mention them in a conversation and forego the issue."?

If I were to guess, maybe they felt like putting in Talan children into the game and finding a way to address the potential death of kids in the game would be too much of a hassle, but creating a world with only children missing would be kinda weird so they packaged the women away with the children for consistency's sake? Honestly I'm just spitballin' here.

So if anyone knows any facts about this, I'm very curious to learn about that fact.

I played this game so long ago, and never got too far in my replays, that I had forgotten there was an explanation for this issue.

So I came up with the 100% non-canon explanation of this world being similar to The Left Had of Darknes. I guess that's mostly because I played the game not too long after I read the novel, so both universes became a little too close in my memories.

In order to get a more official answer, why not ask the team working on Second Contact? There are quite a few mambers of the original team there, so a twitter or mail might get some info.

As a game dev myself, I can think of several reasons for the omission: female Talan would require extra animations and voice acting, which would be expensive work back then, for little gain. And Outcast was a game already pushing too many fronts. Adding anything else would have probably delayed development quite some time or stolen even more hours sleep than it probably did.