Ubisoft slammed for excluding playable females in 'Assassin's Creed Unity'

Ubisoft has come under fire for its decision to exclude playable female characters in two of its upcoming next-gen titles, the hotly-anticipated “Assassin’s Creed Unity” and “Far Cry 4”.

 

“Assassin’s Creed Unity” is the next major installment in their blockbuster franchise, coming right after last year’s “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag”. Set in the French Revolution, the title will follow lead character Arno Dorian and three other assassins – which means the game will support four-player co-op.

 

To the consternation of a number of fans, however, this small team of cold-blooded killers is apparently what could be inappropriately described as a French sausage fest.

 

 

Playable female assassins: Double the work?

 

In an interview with Polygon, Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio explained the lack of female representation in the game’s leads.

 

What it all boils down to is: including female assassins would have meant additional work, and consequently would have also been more expensive. And so the original plan to include them in the game was eventually dropped.

 

“It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets,” Amancio explained. “Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”

 

According to level designer Bruno St. Andre, this extra work would have entailed 8,000 additional animations, which would have also necessitated the rigging of a different skeleton for the female assassins’ more feminine shape and movements.

 

“We started, but we had to drop it,” St. Andre explained. He did, however offer a tantalizing possibility: “I cannot speak for the future of the brand, but it was dear to the production team, so you can expect that it will happen eventually in the brand.”

 

Also, because Arno Dorian, the star of “Unity”, will always be the players’ eyes as they explore the tumultuous world of the French Revolution, your co-op friends will appear as other assassins with customizable gear.

 

“Because of that, the common denominator was Arno,” said Amancio. “It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar.”

 

 

Simply put, the decision to drop female leads was “a question of focus and a question of production,” according to technical director James Therien.

 

Ubisoft also released a statement regarding the issue, which echoed the reasons provided by Amancio, St. Andre, and Therien.

 

“With regard to diversity in our playable Assassins, we’ve featured Aveline, Connor, Adewale and Altair in Assassin’s Creed games and we continue to look at showcasing diverse characters. We look forward to introducing you to some of the strong female characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity,” said the statement in closing, reminding fans of the diversity featured in the previous “Assassin’s Creed” games.

 

Aside from the “Assassins’ Creed” series, it cannot be ignored that two other Ubisoft games, “Beyond Good & Evil” and the beautiful, critically-acclaimed “Child of Light” both feature strong female leads, with the latter having a main character roster predominantly made up of women.

 

Industry professionals and gamers chime in

 

Neither Ubisoft’s statement nor the interviews seemed to appease everyone, however, with some – including industry professionals – questioning the claim that making female assassins would have complicated the game’s development.

 

Jonathan Cooper, an animator for Naughty Dog who also served as the animation director on “Assassin’s Creed III”, expressed his doubts on Twitter.

 

“In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations,” he said, adding, “I think what you want to do is just replace a handful of animations. Key animations. We target all the male animations onto the female character and just give her her own unique walks, runs, anything that can give character.”

 

“Another thing- go out and watch people. You’ll find that many women and men move EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Hips, arms, wrists and all,” tweeted 5th Cell animator, Tim Borrelli.

 

“You have to realize that at this point it’s getting tiring being a female and feeling alienated because you love a game but you feel your gender isn’t good enough to include in the game,” said Valkyrie in a comment. “It’s the fact that they could not be bothered to put a female character for multiplayer. We want to be able to play a female in multiplayer, at least… it f#@king sucks when you have to fight tooth and nail to feel included due to the fact that your gender is usually settled for the supporting character.”

 

 

Others came to Ubisoft’s defense.

 

“I’m all for choice and customization but if the team decided to not include female characters because it would save them time and money they could devote to making the game better, then people should cut them a break,” said commenter OldManLight.

 

“As an animator, women move differently,” said Spderweb, in clear opposition of Cooper’s statement. “It wouldn’t be two days work… there’d be a considerable amount of work. Then you have to do the entire game’s main character audio to be female too. Maybe doing such a huge thing wasn’t in their current budget?”

 

 

'Far Cry 4' – same problem, different game

 

The sequel to Ubisoft’s other popular franchise, “Far Cry 4”, will also not allow fans to play as women, either in single player or multiplayer. The reason, again, is traceable to increased workload pressures.

 

“It’s really depressing because we almost... we were inches away from having you be able to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy when you invite someone in,” explained director Alex Hutchinson. “And it was purely a workload issue because we don’t have a female reading for the character, we don’t have all the animations. And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude.”

 

 

Hutchinson did hint at the future of the franchise, if not Ubisoft itself.

 

“I can guarantee you that in the future, moving forward, this sort of stuff will go away,” he said. “As we get better technology and we plan for it in advance and we don’t have a history on one rig and all this sort of stuff. We had very strong voices on the team pushing for that and I really wanted to do it, we just couldn’t squeeze it in time. But on the other hand we managed to get more of the other story characters to be women.”

 

“Far Cry 4” was recently the subject of harsh criticism for its box art. Its depiction of a blond, fair-skinned man sitting on a throne and resting his hand on the head of a kneeling, darker-skinned man has been called racist in various circles.

 

“Assassin’s Creed Unity” and “Far Cry 4” will be released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC on October 28 and November 18 of this year respectively. — TJD, GMA News