Female Assassins Would “Double the Work”

While the lack of female representation in the gaming world has been a popular and important issue, Ubisoft’s recent comments about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed title has me questioning more than a simple lack of representation. It has me questioning why companies think they can give such a poor answer to such an important question.

After a great showing of Assassin’s Creed Unity, Videogamer.com decided to ask Ubisoft why there was a lack of female assassins. Considering the fact that one of the best pieces of news was that the game would feature four-player co-op, it seemed odd that there wouldn’t be an option to play as a woman. Ubisoft’s technical director, James Therien, cleared up all confusion for us by letting us know that “it would have doubled the work” because they would have had to do things like redo animations and costumes and they ultimately decided to cut it due to limited resources.

A game with the limited resources of being made in 2004

Now, I know I can’t be the only one scratching my head at this. Female assassins and playable female characters are not new to the franchise by any means. Besides the excellent Aveline from Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, we had quite a few female characters to choose from in multiplayer in the last few titles. Obviously they had the resources to once record female animations, and considering there’s a large amount of different Ubisoft studios working on this title, a lack of resources seems unlikely. Unless Ubisoft is entirely redoing all animations (which is highly unlikely), they studio could just as easily reuse old animations. Besides, other major companies have had no problem integrating female characters into games where male was not just the default, but the only option. Call of Duty: Ghosts was the first entry in the Call of Duty franchise to allow players to pick and customize a female soldier. The Rainbow Six: Vegas series also allowed players to be female and that came out years ago. And that’s not even mentioning titles like Dark Souls, Skyrim, and Dragon’s Dogma that all allowed female characters. Hell, even Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain allowed us to be women and that came out on the PS2 in 2004. And Mass Effect? That title has had criticisms of failure to use separate female animations for female characters but you’d be hard pressed to find gamers who would tell you that the incredible trilogy just shouldn’t have even bothered with female characters because the animations were too “dude-like”. In fact, I think I’m more upset that they clearly had no idea how to dance when they animated Commander Shepard.

But perhaps the reason this is most offensive is that by Ubisoft is once again ignoring history with this idea that revolution is a some bizarre “history of men”. The French Revolution is noted as being one of the largest pushes by feminist groups and women in general to obtain more rights for women and level the playing field in things like the workforce and education. And what important event happened early on in the French Revolution? Why, the March on Versailles! To those unfamiliar with the event, basically a group of French citizens decided that they had had enough with bread shortages and high food prices and that royalty feasting at fancy banquets while the common person starved was a complete load of nonsense. So a group made up mostly of women decided that the best way to get that across (because months of being civil and listening to rich people talk about how to not fix their problem didn’t get them anywhere) was to march on up on these rich folk eating, destroy their stuff, and demand to be taken seriously. After raiding city hall for weapons and food. And the king more or less actually stepped down.

Pictured: A female assassin

In case you didn’t catch that, I’ll repeat. A group of women got tired of not being able to feed their families, raided city hall for weapons, marched right on up to the royal palace, and basically demanded that the king come back with them because 60,000 people would destroy him if he didn’t comply.

Refusing to acknowledge this major moment in history would be absolutely ludicrous. Robespierre, a person who’s almost certain to have a role in AC: Unity, got a large amount of promotion and a rise to prominence at this event. And if they do include it (which they almost certainly have to), do they just plan on not recording female animations? Or do they just not plan on including women? When history books cite the March on Versailles as one of the most important acts of radical militant feminist action, it would be a complete rewrite of history. Which isn’t to say that the series is 100% accurate or doesn’t take liberty with history. But when Liberation takes place within decades of Unity‘s events, Ubisoft would also be backtracking on their own established franchise timeline that would allow Aveline to be an assassin and an important woman in that historic timeframe but ignore a whole mob of angry ladies who helped usher in a revolution.

I’m sorry Ubisoft, but I just don’t buy it. If you just flat out wanted to ignore the fact that female gamers make up about half of the overall player-base, you could’ve just said so. At least Epic Games told us that they don’t want female characters front and center because they won’t sell games. They’re at least being honest with their ignorance.