Jimquisition: Diversity? LIEversity!

[Frozengale]

I remember when Nintendo said Peach couldnt be playable in the New Super Mario Bros. series because "It would take to much time and money to properly code her hair and dress physics"......then they go and put her in Super Mario 3D world...

Back peddling at its finest.

The difference here is that there is no model or animations comparative to Peach in the Super Mario games. This actually would take quite a bit of time and money on Nintendo's part and extra coding for the dress/hair physics. I mean it wouldn't be that long but something like that would actually take quite a bit.

In Assassin's Creed they would literally just have to go in and tinker with the model a bit and then apply the same exact animations. I mean you'd have to write in some extra code as well to deal with online viewing and other such things, but all in all they could have a female Assassin in the game in a couple of days. If they want to spend the time to update a few of the animations so they are more feminine then yeah that may take a few weeks depending how how many animations they change.

My point being that these are two completely different situations.

 

[Callate]

Snip

What really confuses me about it, is that they have a Woman Protagonist in an Assassin Creed game, in Liberation. So they have the animations in the code of their Assassin's engine, and a voice actress's phone number. This also doesn't explain why they couldn't get a playable character with a different color of skin.

It's worth remembering that Liberation was a Vita game. Even its HD remake, by most accounts, was a fairly shallow port. It's far from impossible that simply porting over the female skeleton from the portable game and trying to make it mesh with a current-gen model with far more polygons, more points of articulation, and high-resolution textures, would create a character that didn't match the standard they felt they had achieved with the male character.

I don't think it's ever really been a question that they could hire a female voice actor (there's probably a few thousand to be found places like this), or even that they could create a female character. The question is whether they could do it and remain on-time, at current staff levels and budget, without dropping features that are currently on their milestone chart- and that's where the skepticism comes in. I do feel the amount of aggressive certainty the skeptics show in their skepticism isn't warranted, though.

 

[Donnicton]

Everyone is missing the point.

What we really need are more dogtagonists. Give me Okami 2.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

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

No offense. Just pointing out why I think I prefer the resource argument.

Sorry, it's just you were like the 5th or 6th person to point out how mistaken I was.

 

[gargantual]

Ubisoft's admitting their own incompetence with the excuses as to why they cut women from AC:U, and FC4. They didn't budget properly to say the least.

And it occurs to me that they cut women, out of everything. Kinda screams where female characters lay in terms of priority, doesn't it?

If it weren't for Liberation, and Child of Light, I'd be far more cheesed off at them than I am.

Guess we'll have to put the dunce cap on their heads and send Ubisoft into the basement without supper. And they can't come out until all of their studioes have finished making Beyond Good and Evil 2 as repayment.

Sounds like a just punishment eh?

 

[Strazdas]

The market can device. you pointed yourself many female protagonist games that the market can buy. it doesnt. because the market, gasp, actually likes male protagonist.

And creating multiple protagonist, regardless of sex, does cost a lot of money. and yes, it will cost more the more complex your grpahic and cutscene engine is, unless you like bodyparts clipping through objects.

and no, a reskin or "similar model with same animations" does not a female character make.

what Ubisoft shoud have said: "We create the game we want. you buy the game you want. we are not sacrificing our creative freedom because of few loudmouths". and that would have went well even if it had provided far less information. because people dont want information. people want pandering.

 

[MaximumTheHormone]

People do realize that its not just the model that needs to be redone?
Cutscenes may have needed to be altered to altered (depending on how they handled things, but if they wanted to give the concept a serious go they would've had to redo the cut scenes to center the female player).
Voices would be doubled, the assassin of course would have to be redone, but also all NPCs who address the character. Pronouns matter.

Pointing and yelling that other games could do it isn't a very valid call either.
Other games may have been able to manage it, but other games don't feature parkour mechanics and fluid movement.
If they didn't want this to be clunky as fuck they would've had to play test this aspect a LOT.
But no.
Its easy to design a female model.
Just ask these devs who have never worked on an ass creed game, or any sort of game that attempt the fluid movement of ass creed!

 

[uchytjes]

If I was in charge of a game I would purposefully mislead and trap people into thinking all player characters were male through the use of clothing and, if and when they take the bait, I'd spring the trap by posting screen after screen of this female protagonist posing in her masculine clothing, all the while calling the people who thought the character was male "scared of transvestites and transgender people" as well as saying they were "not even looking skin deep, but at their clothing. How shallow and petty."

Ubisoft, get on that shit. Take the idea and run.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Or it could be option 3: Ubi is afraid of getting burned. They took a bath on Beyond good and Evil, and want more hard signs that the online frevor isn't just online frevor.

I mean, I've seen this in comics for 20 years: endless complaints about too many events, too much Batman and Wolverine, too many superheroes, too few women. But if companies break the mold, the books they make don't sell in favor of the things everyone complains about. When confronted, it's the same thing: everyone has the internet but only knows about things marketed to the nth degree. Given that gaming buying habits haven't exactly proven the old bullshit wrong, companies are jockying for position to not be first lest all the internet anger is once again from a bunch of people that won't show up at the gamestop and they'll have to face downsizing.

Yes, the excuse was stupid, and maybe they're just perfectionists about such things while others cut cornors, but I said it a few times already this weekend: Ubi isn't exactly wrong to stop to ask if the extra effort would produce the cash results.

At the very least, maybe they should provide whatever sales data they're using to justify their decisions.

 

[Shjade]

There are times I wish I could feel like these kinds of videos will make a difference.

This is one of those times.

Sadly, I can't muster the kind of optimism required to believe that. :|

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

I'm pretty much on the "Ubisoft is allowed to do whatever the hell they want, though they still shouldn't insult us with their pathetic excuses" boat.

If they want to make a game with four protagonists who are such laughably cliche white male protagonists that they're practically identical, that's fine. However, making up blatant lies as to why you've made your decisions is not.

 

[Something Amyss]

Okay, you didn't like Desmond's design. Then what if I changed "The art team needs to design an interesting character" to "The art team needs to design a character" because that work still needs to be done.

Of course it does. So what?

And Jim referenced an artist tweeting "The character would take a few days to animate" then construed that to mean it would be a few days to just make a character.

You're putting words in Jim's mouth now.

Jim references ease of inclusion in both this and the earlier episode. When Jim talks about scalability, that's also relevant here. What he doesn't do is say construe the "the character would take a few days to animate" as anything: in fact, it plays over a completely different statement. One where he says gamers have addressed a desire for playable female characters. I just rewatched the episode to verify this.

Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.

And yes, they've been able to create female characters before because they had time. This is simply an unfortunate case where they're too close to the deadline and had too many resources working on getting the new co-op system to work properly in time that they ran out of time to implement an feature in the icebox.

And I still consider this absurd, given the reuse of assets within gaming, given the time they've probably spent on NPCs, and given the limited resources required for what is effectively a MP-only character.

I also don't buy that Co-op took more time and effort than the prior multiplayer.

As for the bit about them losing their bonuses and whatnot, well, yes. I agree it's a shitty system beholden to a need for annual releases and high metacritic scores. But if, and let's just assume it could happen for the sake of argument, if the game does significantly worse now, how do you suppose that's going to affect them?

That's a huge problem with the flowchart approach to game production. Pass/fail systems are great on some level, but not always.

I grant you, this probably never occurred as a possibility to anyone at Ubisoft. But that's not anything positive, either.

 

[Nion]

Stopped watching after 1:30 because Jim thinks that there are multiple co-op protagonists.

 

[Something Amyss]

well... thats like... your opinion man

Whose opinion would it be other than mine?

for me "not to offend" and "to appeal" seem interchangeable 90% of the time, maybe because people defending these kind of movements often act extremely offended

Considering how much time you spend knocking down straw men, posting false or misattributed statements, lying about Anita Sarkeesian and so on, pardon me if I don't actually agree.

for me, an uninteresting black character is no different from an uninteresting white character, i dont want uninteresting characters, and i feel inclusion for the sake of inclusion can give birth to some very uninteresting characters

And yet you only seem to show up to gripe in topics about minorities and take jabs at "feminism."

Like the absence of women in games, it's more the overall pattern than any given statement.

Sorry, it's just you were like the 5th or 6th person to point out how mistaken I was.

Yeah, I only saw one or two before I hit send. My intention wasn't so much to kick you when you were down as it was to use it as a jumping off point because these are issues being brought up in general. Like I said, no offense, and sorry if it came off that way.

What? Being given care as a reward for the fact that one risks their life, their mental health and everything else isn't good enough to deserve a little something in return? What sort of insane reasoning is -that-? And how is the right to vote being protected even a point of discussion? It should go without saying in a modern western country that the right to vote is a given...

I don't know how it got to this, considering US soldiers used to be the only group that were considered completely sacrosanct, but now we've got politicians lumping them in with the other "takers."

I'm not even pro-military or pro-war, but it seems reasonable to me that if you're going to put someone in harm's way, the least you can do is cover the damage done. Especially if you guarantee it before hand. But lying to our troops is something the government's been very good at for a long time.

And as for voting, it's only certain types we don't want voting. Some places have made it so difficult to vote Arthur Dent's local planning office called for tips.

Where you up in arms about the last 6 or so Assassin's Creed games too because there are female assassins throughout the time periods where those games took place in?

Honestly? I doubt people cared that much before Ubisoft said something stupid. Or before people started making false claims about the historicity of female assassins. Not to mention every game since Brotherhood has had multiplayer with female avatars, which is all most people are looking for in this game. So really, there was no "need" for those previous games. If you're looking for a double standard, this ain't it.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Sorry, it's just you were like the 5th or 6th person to point out how mistaken I was.

Yeah, I only saw one or two before I hit send. My intention wasn't so much to kick you when you were down as it was to use it as a jumping off point because these are issues being brought up in general. Like I said, no offense, and sorry if it came off that way.

No no, of course not. Like I said, it wasn't you. You were just like the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

 

[I.Muir]

I just don't want to play the same bloody American from every other game in every game.

 

[Fireaxe]

Let's ask the question: is having female protagonists bad for sales?

Lets ask the more commercially significant question: does having a female protagonist (instead of OR in addition to a male protagonist) increase sales by a significant enough number that the extra time modelling and animating the character can be considered well spent.

 

[CloudAtlas]

snip

How is Ubisoft going to prove this? Release detailed information showing how much it cost each department to make the make protagonist? Given the difficult in collecting this data it's entirely reasonable of Ubisoft not comply with your unseasonable request.

You honestly think they can't do an estimate of how much hours it costs to animate a character? how many hours of work it takes to record more lines for voice actors? It's their JOB to know. they keep records of these things, it's how you keep your finances in order.
Besides, according to them they DO know how expensive it is because they claim to know it costs too much.
How is it unreasonable for me to ask them to explain an answer that cites a reason that a lot of their customers and pretty much all gaming press have called unacceptable?

Kind of weird seeing people jump so readily to the defense of UbiSoft while at the same time believing UbiSoft to be so utterly incompetently managed that they wouldn't even be able to give an estimate on the cost of one of their core activities.

And yea as you said that's even disregarding that in order for UbiSoft to know that implementing female characters is too expensive they need to have an idea in the first place how expensive it would be...

 

[Iceklimber]

Instantly remembered the World of Darkness excuse from TheGuardian Interview: "?He had members of our storyline team ? a group responsible for writing in-game content and fiction ? put it together?

Probably something similar happened when the two Ubisoft games had their press statements excuses for no females assembled.

I totally get it when developers want to focus on male protagonists if that is what they are used to, and sometimes female characters feel awkward and forced such as the new WoW Expansion which explores the Stories of Warcraft 1-2 (1993-1995) where no female Characters existed yet desperately wants to add some *important* female Princess or something to the game.

But not including females while simultaneously patting themselves Shoulder for how much you *want* female Characters is evil hypocricy.

 

[croc3629]

Really though, its the excuse that's unfortunate more than anything.

Its one thing to have just not thought about putting playable female characters in your game, and leaving them out by design, but to say that they were deemed too expensive to put in, but that they would have if it weren't for the untenable costs, that is a bit irksome.

Either way, I hope it at least lets the developers consider their next project plan carefully, or at least just be honest and tell us that they just didn't design it that way and you can take it or leave it.

Its not like I was expecting the protagonist of Unity to be anything but male anyway, and the franchise is free to do whatever it wants, but please have better reasons to give us. Or stay quiet, you don't have to answer us if you can't think of anything good to say.