Is this true? Does Assassin's Creed: Unity really feature a cast of 4 protagonists who all look the same? You white men with stubbly beards and a cape?
Poll: Jim Sterling Calls Out New Assassin's Creed (for racism/sexism?)
- Thread starter Thunderous Cacophony
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Perhaps they've learned from Assassin's Creed Liberation that 20 hours of horrible french accents become grating after a while, just as much as the faux Italian accent in Assassin's Creed 2 made me want to put the game away after two hours playing the gameFloppertje said:
If they want French then have them speak French, but I don't want dramatic cutscenes where everyone sounds like the taunting Frenchmen from monty python
I don't think Jim was calling it racist, and I don't think it's meant o be racist. I think Jim was joking about the generic "white male square jawed heroic stubble action hero" look of the characters. And those are some pretty dull designs. They all look pretty much the same apart from hood colour. People might say that's justified because they're all part of the Assassins, but that excuse doesn't fly with me. Groups like the Lantern Corps show how one can have distinct individuals in larger groups, and even the other Assassin protagonists have been different takes on the same theme. This just screams of lazy artists.
Hopefully, they'll all have extremely comical, yet very distinctive, French accents.
Maybe one of them can be from Quebec.
Maybe one of them can be from Quebec.
Ah yes, because Jim was super serious throughout everything else yesterday.
He was making a joke about how lazily designed the characters seem to be based on what Ubisoft themselves decided to show us.
He was making a joke about how lazily designed the characters seem to be based on what Ubisoft themselves decided to show us.
Well so far you are the only one that doesn't think they look the same. Because frankly they look like the same guy with a different beard. Secondly, I guarentee most of the people here are white, these dudes are white, and we're saying these four specific dudes look the same, that is not racism, that is describing what you see in front of you. Because unless they're a set of quadruplets there's no good reason for them to look so damn similar.Rozalia1 said:
Despite what /you're/ saying, people aren't expecting them to add in a black character, because that would be very, very, very unlikely given the setting, they'd just like the four characters they do play as to not look so similar as to only be distinguished with their facial hair, assemble 4 white dudes, any 4 white dudes and they will look vastly different.
Super serious or not, he's making a valid point here. Very valid indeed. Now it isn't outright sexist or bigoted, but it is lazy design, especially in this day and age. Diversity is a good and interesting thing, it'd be nice to have different perspective from different characters with different backgrounds. But they haven't given us any indication that that will happen.
Worst thing is that we do know that they're capable of it:
Why the regression all of a sudden, I wonder.
Also, one of the first things that popped in my head when I saw these blokes:
Worst thing is that we do know that they're capable of it:
Why the regression all of a sudden, I wonder.
Also, one of the first things that popped in my head when I saw these blokes:
I am gonna jump in and be a second who says they don't look alike. However, I am not countering the lazy design argument. But they don't look alike. First off, a cloak hood is often usually used to obscure identity, especially so in Assassin's Creed. So for someone to say they all look alike could be because they are all have cloaked faces. However use the above image in conjunction with this image:
The axe wielder has a broader jawline that the two beside him, unless they have jawline beards casting an illusion. or his is. The man in green looks like he has a tall and slender face compared to the axe wielder. I can see this in both images. IN the top image look at the one giving a profile shot. His chin appears to poke out from the jaw more.However, this could all be concept art. Until we can get a 3D look at the models in the game, it could be hard to see it.
I think the axe guy should be beefier, but whatever. I don't even like Assassin's Creed.
EDIT: It is a shame not one of them is a woman though.
...
I wonder if they are all brothers?
Nevermind, I said nothing. But I can't get into the whole "lazy character design" or "why not have one of them be a mexican or an inuit" band wagons. They are assassins, I assume, and they need to blend in to a particular melieux, at least to some extent, maybe?
I mean, I'd like to hear the rationale behind the story, or the story itself, before I decide that the game didn't need all of them to be white or men.
I wonder if they are all brothers?
Nevermind, I said nothing. But I can't get into the whole "lazy character design" or "why not have one of them be a mexican or an inuit" band wagons. They are assassins, I assume, and they need to blend in to a particular melieux, at least to some extent, maybe?
I mean, I'd like to hear the rationale behind the story, or the story itself, before I decide that the game didn't need all of them to be white or men.
Hang on a second, where's that picture... Ahh, here it is!
Come on, they look the same. And it's not just that they look the same as each other, they look the same as dozens of other video game characers, as shown above! I mean, I appreciate that literally speaking I will probably be able to tell them apart, and that in real life I'd know the difference, but come on! If you have to get down to the nitty-gritty details of jawlines and facial structure to point out the differences, that's bad design for what are supposed to be iconic looking characters. Or at least, I assume they're meant to be iconic, given that they've been slapped all over the promotional material. They're even all brunettes, apart from a little bit of grey here and there. How statistically likely is that, really?
Now, I've heard that the game will actually feature character customisation to the player, so that's fine, but why they then chose to just show off these four guys when there are a huge number of possibilities is beyond me. Oh well, since I don't like incredibly bland character design, I guess I must be racist. Against white people. Damn, I thought I thought it was supposed to be SJWs who have really itchy trigger fingers for calling people racist, not their opponents...
Come on, they look the same. And it's not just that they look the same as each other, they look the same as dozens of other video game characers, as shown above! I mean, I appreciate that literally speaking I will probably be able to tell them apart, and that in real life I'd know the difference, but come on! If you have to get down to the nitty-gritty details of jawlines and facial structure to point out the differences, that's bad design for what are supposed to be iconic looking characters. Or at least, I assume they're meant to be iconic, given that they've been slapped all over the promotional material. They're even all brunettes, apart from a little bit of grey here and there. How statistically likely is that, really?
Now, I've heard that the game will actually feature character customisation to the player, so that's fine, but why they then chose to just show off these four guys when there are a huge number of possibilities is beyond me. Oh well, since I don't like incredibly bland character design, I guess I must be racist. Against white people. Damn, I thought I thought it was supposed to be SJWs who have really itchy trigger fingers for calling people racist, not their opponents...
Well statistically, considering the time period, there is no excuse not to add at least one women on the team.This wasn't a "normal" war. Everyday people took to the streets in order to fight and it is well documented that women did so as well. But yes. It should be exactly like Mario 2. The four of them looking radically different would do just what you say. But even if they didn't add any diversity they could have at least made the men different heights. Or had one broader or skinnier than the others. They could all be white men and look different. So its just lazy. Really, really lazy.Not G. Ivingname said:Even is statistically, it wasn't as likely as a group of four being all white, having diversity of gender and race makes sense for a design perspective. At a glance, with multiple characters, one should be able to instantly tell the difference between who I am playing. Since they all need to be wearing hoods, differences in body shape and coloring means that, just at a glance, I can tell "I'm playing the one better at jumping," or "this one is better with guns." Having different colored coats doesn't really give us enough instant visual difference, particularly since three of them have a fairly similar color.mecegirl said:One of his old Destructoid buddies, Anthony Burch, made a similar tweet.
But really, as Zak757 said. They do look really similar. The easiest addition would have been a woman. And women did fight during the revolution. The most notable action taken by women during the revolution was when thousands of them marched to Versailles with cannons in tow. Their actions forced the King to surrender Versailles.
But as Commissar Sae said Hatians (either full or half) weren't uncommon in France. And within metropolitan areas slavery wasn't allowed so they would have been free men. Alexander Dumas, the man who wrote the Three Musketeers, his father was biracial(half Haitian) and was a general during the Revolutionary wars.
If anything the lack of diversity is a signal of laziness instead of bigotry. It is a lot easier to just render four identical dudes and just change the cloak color. But it is always a shame when a game could easily have diversity but fails to be inclusive.
Think back to Mario 2. Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad. All had different heights, all looked radically different, all were colored radically different.
Seriously....People would only care if they didn't know their history. It's not just "historical" France. It's revolutionary France. It shouldn't be a secret that women participated in the revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women's_March_on_VersaillesSmiley Face said:
This was not a war in the traditional sense. This did not pit two armies against each other. Regular people took to the streets to fight against soldiers. And yes that included white women and Haitians. But what is less known is that there was a lot of back in fourth about the legality of slaves within Paris. And no Alexander Dumas wouldn't be running around. He wasn't born yet. But his father, a biracial man(who was also named Alexander Dumas so it makes things confusing), was, and was a general. When he was brought to Paris from Haiti slaves were not allowed within the city. Since then stricter laws were put in place because whenever slaves were brought to Paris they could be freed if they escaped, or be freed at the will of their owners. The problem for France as it concerns slavery is that like Alexander Dumas(the father), there were other wealthy biracial men moving in and out of Paris during the revolution. Once the revolution was over, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was published in 1789. Appeals were made to the Declaration of the Rights of man and of the Citizen for both White women and Black people. They were of course turned down. But it only reinforced the ideas already swimming around Black and Biracial individuals heads, both in Paris and in Haiti. In 1791 the Haitian Revolution began.
So have the characters react in sexist and racist ways if necessary. They may be too busy overthrowing their government to give a shit. Not every individual would feel as strongly about such issues. Especially along racial lines. The French weren't like the British. There wasn't always a clear line between slave and master. The same dynamic seen in Aveline De Grampre's game existed within Paris and Haiti. The timeline in Avelene's game would have been a just a couple of decades before the Revolutionary war in France. But even if some of the characters did its not like a group of protagonists have to completely get along for a story to work. A little drama is always necessary.
Nonsense they all have different facial hair styles and one is even clean shaven. How's that for diversity?Zak757 said:To be fair, they really ARE identical.
They are all a bunch of white dudes with stubble and trimmed mustaches making the same facial expression. The only significant difference is the hood color (well 2 of them are the same), which doesn't really earn you any originality points. You don't get much less creative or diverse with your character design than that. I don't know if this is an issue of race or sex, but it certainly is creatively bankrupt for a game with "unity" right in the title.
On topic.
Yeah Jim has been tweeting many tongue and cheek jokes about E3. Nothing to get fired up about.
Yea... but why is none of them a woman then? Roughly half of all Parisiens were and are women, I presume?the December King said:
The following is not directed at you, so please don't take it the wrong way, but, thinking of the Sexy Female Armor thread, I just love it how people invoke realism as reason for why we can't have women or minority characters in this or that setting in one instance, yet couldn't care less about realism when it comes to them getting their skimpy female armors.
You'd think by now people throughout history would've gotten wise to the Assassin's cloak look. It's supposed to make them blend in, but after so many entries it's just making them stick out like a sore thumb.
But yeah, four ordinary looking dudes with ordinary facial hair and ordinary shade covered faces. Just giving one of them a smirk or something would've gone a long way.
But yeah, four ordinary looking dudes with ordinary facial hair and ordinary shade covered faces. Just giving one of them a smirk or something would've gone a long way.
To assume that every Frenchman in France during the 18-century was a brown-haired "English" looking white guy is representative of not looking at the issue very closely. What of the diversity of people native to France--they don't all look alike. Some areas of France can't even speak what is now the "native" French tongue. What of those native French who have Spanish blood in their families? Roman? "Viking"? What of the African people who would have been considered free people in France after Louis X's 1315 proclamation? Surely those individuals would have intermarried with the "French" population (not to mention that if the French treated their female slaves the way that some slave owners in the South did, there would have been plenty of children born of white fathers/black mothers.
So, even from an ethnic diversity point-of-view, those four assassins could all be dissimilar to one another. They could also have made at least one of them a female assassin. It would be nice if game developers at least tried to mix up the player-characters a bit.
So, even from an ethnic diversity point-of-view, those four assassins could all be dissimilar to one another. They could also have made at least one of them a female assassin. It would be nice if game developers at least tried to mix up the player-characters a bit.
Right, because non-white people blended in SOOooo well in historical settings [/derision]
But dang, they look really similar. The "they all look the same" is entirely justified. The specification that they're white and male is a racist/sexist thing in a way. But I'm sure that we can't be racist or sexist against white guys... [/sarcasm]
But dang, they look really similar. The "they all look the same" is entirely justified. The specification that they're white and male is a racist/sexist thing in a way. But I'm sure that we can't be racist or sexist against white guys... [/sarcasm]