Jimquisition: Diversity? LIEversity!

[Ruisu]

I honestly don't care, since the game looks great anyway, and I loved most AC games before, and Ubisoft games in general tend to turn out good games.

So yeah. If we get more games with female player characthers? I'm okay. If not? I'm also okay.

I just care about the game being good. Too bad if people need so much more than that. Because when we DO get women, it won't be "it". People won't be happy, because they need black women, old women, strong women, weak women, and then still won't be happy, because the games these women are in are not making money enough.

There is one single constant here. If the game is good for "you", then it won't matter in the end if the protagonists are male or female, you'll like to play it. If not, you'll just use it as another reason to complain about it on-line.
Hell, people don't even give Aveline that much credit anyway because "it wasn't in the main series".

This is why I play Japanese Video games a lot more than Western ones. They solved the problem of the female protagonist a long time ago.

Dragon's Crown controversy. Japanese games have no problem putting female protagonists, because is all the same for them, but people still get extremely butthurt over them.

 

[Jupiter065]

Y'all do realize that "It was just too much work" is codespeak for "We're releasing this part of the game as paid DLC so we can sell you our game twice" in this cynical moneygrubbing industry.

You will be able to select your multiplayer character, including a woman character, but you'll have to pay for it.

(By the way, this is not an excuse for Ubisoft, it just makes it that much worse)

 

[LordMonty]

Ubi disapoint me so much, so many good games mired in BS like this.

 

[Zacharious-khan]

I don't think that's how laissez faire works, you can't just say that we don't know if games with female brotaganists would sell better than those without because they don't put them in AAA games. The fact that AssCreed sells well enough for ubisoft not to care enough to put female brotagonists means that women in games is not important enough to the consumer. Now if Farcry 4 only sold a few thousand copies until women were patched in that would be a different story.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

I did find it strange that female animations apparently took so much work and money. Granted I guess a woman walking is not exactly identical to a man's walk but it hardly seems like something that can't be easily tweaked. Unless Ubisoft animate all there female models with massive swaying hips Jessica Rabbit style that is... which come to think of it might revive my interest in Assassin Creed if just briefly for the amusing spectacle that would make.

 

[Lunar Templar]

I've been going with 'they are liers' on this one and they just don't want to make a playable female assassin, but are to spineless to just come out and say it.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

People will buy the excuse, even defend it. That's why.

Well I didn't say it was a valid excuse, I just said it was more valid than saying it was too expensive.

Well, no. The historicity argument is utter crap. Not only do we have evidence of female assassins, not only did Ubisoft add them into other games, but Ubisoft chucked historicity out the window with the very first game and got worse with time. That excuse doesn't fly at all. But the excuse that maybe Ubisoft so poorly manages things that their games with huge Hollywood budgets and three-year dev cycles still can't manage to make a woman possible?

I'd say that's a more valid argument. You still have to ignore them animating women before, even women with voices, even women with voices doing assassiny things. But it's still the more likely reason.

I already conceded my ignorance. You people don't have to keep reminding me how stupid I am.

 

[Frozengale]

Speaking as a modder/game dev wanna be I was kinda floored by the excuse that it would be "to hard" to animate/model female characters. One of the simplest things you learn when modding is scaling models and transferring animations between models. Heck give me access to Ubisoft's Engine and assets and I bet I could get you a Female Assassin up and running by the end of the week. Voice Acting might take a bit more money... but it will take you DAYS at the most if you already have all the dialogue planned out. Just hire a decent VA and I'm sure they could bust out all the dialogue over the course of a few days.

 

[Baresark]

AC Unity: I think it was literally dumb of them to not have a female playable character in the MP like that. It was short sighted and stupid and compounded by the fact that they gave some complete bullshit reason for not doing it. Also, they have female basic character models and animations already, they have women walking around the world.

FC4: I don't care about the sex of the protagonist at all. People get bent out of shape on this particular issue, but I just want to play a good game. I enjoyed the last Tomb Raider game independent of the fact that the main character was a woman. I enjoyed Far Cry 3 independent of the fact that the main character was a white guy. These things are just inconsequential so long that the game is good.

 

[Necromancer1991]

I do not support the weak excuse they undoubtedly made in a futile attempt to stem backlash. It is my position that no excuse is necessary in the first place.

While I do agree that ultimately Ubisoft isn't required to give us playable female protagonists, but the excuses they give as to why they don't are just flimsy in light of all the evidence against their claim that making a female character would be too time-consuming and expensive. Again I don't really care one way or the other if we do get a female player character for the co-op modes of either game, I just don't like publishers making flimsy excuses.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

I'm a bit sick of devs/publishers being so fucking stupid when handling such matters. Responding at ALL is always their first mistake, and then they respond in a stupid manner that's guaranteed to piss people off. Why would a publisher/dev shoot themselves in the foot like this when it can EASILY be avoided by simply not responding, or at least being careful with words?

Instead of standing by their product and their decision to stick with male characters, they are coming off as apologetic and making excuses which OF COURSE people are going to call "bullshit and weak". Because they already placed themselves on the back foot. Showing any signs of weakness in this industry results in people tearing you apart and that's exactly what happened here.

Developers and publishers need to seriously grow some balls (no pun intended, I swear) when it comes to handling accusations of sexism, racisim, homosexuality, etc anything that's the "controversy hot topic" these days.
This is not the first time something like this has happened, IO Interactive also did a similar mistake with their handling of Hitman trailer controversy and came off as sounding apologetic and making weak excuses. If Ubisoft HAD to open their mouths on the matter, they could've easily said something generic like:

> "We may add it as DLC" (with no plans of ever doing that, but this is about avoiding controversy)
> "We'll see if we can get the art/design team to look into it" (see above)
> "It didn't fit with our vision for the game" (a bit more risky to say this)
> "You'll have to ask the XYZ person/team that one, that wasn't up to me" (knowing that XYZ person/team is not contactable)
But nope, lets start nervously stammering out excuses and revealing details how the company had a female character in the works but ran out of money/time/etc! Oh and lets give a healthy sprinkling of words like "unfortunately" and "sadly" to make people sympathize with us, that's bound to go down well!
I don't even fucking work in that area and yet I can think of so many non-stupid replies to easily squash any chance of controversy.

I thought companies hired PR experts for the express purpose of stopping this shit from happening. Do they not have the slightest clue about how to handle consumers? Are the PR guys even doing their jobs, are companies letting them?

A developer should be able to say "I created my game this way. Buy it or fuck off." (politely of course). It's heartbreaking to see them resorting to excuses as if they need to defend their decisions with characters or story.

 

[disgruntledgamer]

Oh God........... Jim I know it's your life long ambition to become a women, but every time you approach the topic of sexism I want to damage my ear drums with a Q-Tip!

Is it a lame excuse Yes, but at the same time who cares? Ubisofts is Probably running under the philosophy of if it ain't broke don't fix it. Also if you recall they did make Assassin Creed games with a Black, Native American and Woman protagonist. They probably just didn't want to this time, thought it wasn't worth it or simply did it for historical accuracy. Ok that last ones a bit of a stretch, but in the end if sales start hurting because of the lack of diversity than they'll be forced to change it or die so the problem will eventually be solved by itself.

 

[Zontar]

This is more or less the first time I'm seeing the issue with the new Assassins Creed brought up, and it seems pretty obvious to me. It was a board room/marketing research decision that white male characters sold best, and they left it up to some middle man to find an excuse to appease the 'social justice warriors' on the internet. The first group doesn't seem to take the SJW's that seriously obviously, and I don't know they may be right not to be worried.

If the numbers are anything to go buy, it's probably the case. Say what you will about the movement (whose history is actually quite fascinating in that it may be the most extreme case of a political shift, in this case from far right to far left) but it's a vocal one which happens to be a lot smaller then people think.

Numbers don't lie, and given sales numbers, they most likely believed it to be something with too much diminished returns (lets face it, no one who wasn't going to buy this game without a female playable character would have done so if it had one, that's just not how people shop). Is a 5% increase in production costs going to net a 5% increase in revenue? For this, not likely.

People like to say more women are playing video games, but the problem is women have always been playing video games. That 43% statistic has remained consistent sine 2000, so how it is interpreted as some sort of shift each year is odd to say the least.

 

[CrazyBlaze]

Except there is not four main characters. There is one. The rest are other people's variations of that character. Think GTA where everyone can choose their clothes to wear or their hair or tattoos. Its the same with ACU just also with weapons. Hence why everyone looks similar. It is because they are the same. You aren't going to a screen to pick a new avatar. You are using the same one you have in SP in CooP

True, true ... it is mainly about that one assassin during the French Revolution.

If they added co-op with 4 people however, I do wish that they made the assassins different instead of having just a color to tell them apart. Despite that i'm a white male, I would of preferred a character to play as that stood out. Otherwise, it's not... thrilling to say the least. Imagine if Borderlands 2 had focused on making the characters look the same but having different colors.

Say you picked the Siren. Instead of having the option to change her hairstyle, style of the suit, the weapons... all that, she looked the same except you could change her color only. Now if someone else picked a siren and had everything but the same color... it'd be boring to look at. This is how I feel about the new Assassins Creed co-op. Least give us options to change the clothing, the colors, and whatever. Least make them somewhat different. But Ubisoft didn't so it's a real shame in the end.

Except that they do. Those clothes are each person's outfits that they are wearing in SP. Yes the clothes are similar but we don't know the full list of wearable items yet. I would think that if they were going to add a high level of customization in than they would at least give a decent amount of options.

 

[Delance]

"GUYS, we need 4 exactly same looking dudes who are as interesting as sliced bread! THE SCRIPT DEMANDS IT!"

It's not four guys. There's only one guy. The game doesn't have four identical player characters, but just a single player character.

 

[KDR_11k]

I like the VA excuse. Because a second set of voices would be absolutely prohibitive to record. Meanwhile Saints Row 2-4 had 6-7 voice packs for the main character, a character who spoke a lot in every cutscene, scripted sequence and just general gameplay. I kinda doubt that SR is so much more expensive than Assassin's Creed.

 

[Lightknight]

Usually if the protagonist speaks in games you only have one type of character. Games like Borderlands don't really have interactive dialogue that requires all the things that go along with it even if they add a female character model in game. Additionally, there can be anything from a writing perspective to the desire to have a strong stable character for marketing. For example, what does Mass Effects Shepard look like? Don't know and without the N7 armor I would never be able to pick him/her out of a lineup.

For games with strong writing and stable characters, it should be enough that the writers wrote the character as male.

What's more is that a growing female target market doesn't necessarily translate into a growing AC market. We've already pointed out multiple times that ESA's numbers are for iOS now and for anyone who's ever accidentally opened up solitaire or watched someone play it. But in 2010 we know that 80% of the females who owned consoles owned a Wii, not the consoles that AAA games were typically released on. So we see Nintendo being very girl friendly but the other consoles are sticking to their main demographic.

At which point I'd say this. They probably don't think it's worth the effort and unless you're standing around with a God's eye view of a developer's target market then who are you to say whether it is or isn't?

 

[Karadalis]

This should be the perfect oportunity for some modders to show what they are capable of.

Also the tripple A industry will change its attitude as soon as females become a major demographic in the tripple A industry. Shouting for diversety at a company when there are no numbers suggesting that diversety would make them more money is a futile undertaking.

Fact is that there allready is a multi million dollar industry with the casual gaming/hidden object/ facebook gaming industries that almost exclusively cater to female gamers.

Yet for the sake of political correctness everything nowadays needs to be diversified.

However i do agree its nigh time for a female assasin protagonist, however not for the sake of diversety but for the sake of story and gameplay.. especialy since females have allways been the more capable and more importantly more interesting assasins throughout history.