If you were excited for Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s co-op option in normal gameplay, there may be something missing: A playable female avatar. Unity’s co-op gameplay features four customizable versions of Arno, the main character of Unity, but wil sadly lack a female option.
With a recent interview with the Polygon, Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio said that “though female assassins were planned for the game, Ubisoft ran into the reality of production.” and that “It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets, especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”
The level designer of Assassin’s Creed: Unity predicted that creating a playable female assassin would require over 8,000 animations to be redone.
As a whole, social networking sites and fans of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise has responded negatively to the announcement and even inspired former Ubisoft workers to chime in.
Jonathan Cooper, former animation director of Assassin’s Creed III wrote on Twitter in response to Ubisoft’s announcement that “In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations” and that “Aveline de Grandpré shares more of Connor Kenway’s animations than Edward Kenway does.”
With the addition of co-op gameplay, Ubisoft decided to do away with competitive multiplayer mode. This will be the first time not having competitive multiplayer since Assassin’s Creed II. Multiplayer mode allowed players the option to play as a female, but now it seems that everyone is out of luck in that department.
Now, this won’t stop myself and others from buying, arguably, the biggest game of this year but this whole debacle does seem to have a lot of people fired up, sparking the creation of a trending hash tag on twitter: #WomenAreTooHardToAnimate.
All of this is not to say that there won’t be any female characters in the new Assassin’s Creed game, just no playable ones.
You make some good points. I know that I, as a female gamer, would love to see more strong (and playable) female characters but it doesn’t bother me much to play as a male character. In this year’s Entertainment Software Association factbook (http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf), studies showed that 48% of gamers are female but yet the industry is dominated by male characters and companies often directly target the male demographic between the ages 0f 18-35 (which in comparison to the entire gaming community is a pretty niche group). The Entertainment Software Association also found that “women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game playing population (36%) than boys 18 years or younger (17%)”. The female gamer population is growing every year and I believe that the industry needs to reflect this growing demographic starting with creating strong AND playable female characters. From what I am taking from this whole conflict is that people feel misrepresented by Ubisoft’s choices in characters.
This is rather sad. Ubisoft really missed the mark on this. Judging from all the responses, it seems to me like they just missed it in the early game design. Worse is (as you’d mentioned) there is a treasure trove of female animations that they could have adapted. 5 games had direct playable female character models/animations, and the majority of them had MULTIPLE female characters.
It’s really sad that Ubisoft mucked this one up. There are many women who like to play as male characters, but I would say there are a lot more men who like to play as female characters. Hence the birth of the Internet Rule 29: “29. In the internet all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents”