Hmm. Not entirely convinced that claiming a lack of resources as the reason for poor female representation is that valid an excuse when your company could genuinely buy the moon and paint a massive picture of Yves Guillemot’s face on it.
Speaking to Polygon, Assassin’s Creed Unity’s creative director Alex Amancio said the game’s confirmed lack of female playable assassins was unfortunate, but ”the reality of production.”
“It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets,” Amancio said. ”Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”
As in Watch Dogs, players will see themselves as a customised lead character, in this case the assassin Arno. Multiplayer allies will be seen as different characters. Amancio claims this is the main reason for the lack of women.
”Because of that, the common denominator was Arno. 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.”
And that seems to be the party line. When VideoGamer expressed doubt as to whether the community would believe Ubisoft don’t have the resources to add in female characters, company technical director James Therien repied, ”Yes, we have tonnes of resources, but we’re putting them into this game, and we have huge teams, nine studios working on this game and we need all of these people to make what we are doing here.”
Expect more on this story as the great Ubi PR machine rumbles into action.
