Oh, thank shit this whole debacle is finally over. Now that Ubisoft has admitted it clearly hasn't done enough to promote diversity by letting you play as pretty much every race of man (and as an afterthought, tested the waters by even making a mobile-game featuring a black woman), they're going to work harder to pander to your extremist 'political-correctness' by... half-assing everything because they know you psychopaths can't ever possibly be satisfied.
Why is it that every smart-ass who comes in here saying 'they have HOW MUCH MONEY? They can't afford to make women' has absolutely no fucking idea how the game development process works? Yeah. They really CAN'T afford to invest time and manpower into designing female characters for a -secondary feature- of a TACKED-ON game mode, in a game being shoveled out the door LITERALLY as fast as Ubisoft can force the team to shovel it that doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the game beyond failing to appease the squealing throngs of 'sexist bastard Ubisoft' naysayers.
You folks don't even bother paying attention to REASON anymore. You latch onto the 'media nipple' and suck all the bullshit stories like this dry, coming away with froth spewing out of your mouths and impotent rage built up in your minds over shadows of doubt and stolen snippets of conversation twisted and cut to suit your message.
Sexism and unrepresentative characters are alive and well in the video-game industry, but instead of taking it to task with well-formed opinions and knowledgeable critiques of those who perpetuate the cycle... instead of having the meaningful conversations we OUGHT to be having with developers and artists and publishers... the idiot masses always come out in full force to rabidly rally against anyone and anything that dares to have a different viewpoint than their own. Of course, if you -do- have the audacity to challenge them with reasonable arguments like:
'It's not a game with multiple customizable characters, every player is the MAIN guy but you get to slightly modify and edit the appearance of that guy for the benefit of your co-op partner not seeing a thousand copies of the main character running around'
or
'Creating a female character is more than slapping a female body onto the new rig. It requires concept art to be drawn up, followed by preliminary modeling, followed by hours upon hours of testing to make sure that the model works with the animations, followed by arguing with artists and programmers who are being called in at all hours of the day and the weekends they're supposed to have off as 'crunch time', followed by the realization that this is a third-person action game and now the female model clips with all of the NPCs during execution moves, followed by another month of building up new animations (possibly with motion-capture, which is expensive and takes quite a bit of time), all of which has to be done in a very specific order because you can't move on to the next stage of progress before the previous is completed. All for what? So that a character YOU will personally never see can look like a woman to some OTHER PERSON playing the game? Not at all worth the effort.'
It gets immediately overlooked or ignored, or dismissed off-hand by some jackass who thinks he knows everything about everything because he played around in photoshop once and now he's a big badass artist or something? If you don't work in the industry, or aren't willing to listen to anyone who DOES when they give you a lesson in how unreasonable an expectation it is for them to even attempt a female character at this point... just shut the hell up and vote with your money.
As it stands, this isn't a war for freedom to play as who you want to play in video games, and the people RESPONSIBLE for this movement know it. This whole controversy... and the hundreds of others like it popping up across the industry... are calculated attempts to generate controversy where there is none for the sake of manufacturing a discussion about sexism. But that manufactured discussion is meaningless, because it's based on bullshit and lies. It's based on fear and manipulation, a blatant attempt to EXTORT game developers into a 'do what I want or I declare you sexist/racist/homophobic and destroy you on Facebook and Twitter' situation.
That's not freedom. That's fascism, that's dictating what a developer can and cannot say or do or believe, and it's the exact OPPOSITE of what we want.
The people continuing this sexism/discrimination witch-hunt by mindlessly attacking anyone and everyone without consideration of the situation and motivation behind any given action are directly -UNDERMINING- the cause of fair representation of the genders in gaming. They drown out the perfectly reasonable folks just looking for a fair shake (or looking to support friends and family who want to play as girls, or hell... maybe even a gay girl, if you know any) in a sea of insatiable bloodlust. They stop listening, because the frothing-at-the-mouth psychos obviously AREN'T the majority. If they were, these companies would be losing a LOT more money.
So what do they do? They make a token effort, roll their eyes when the internet says 'not good enough', and kindly stop giving a damn. That's what this is accomplishing. That's what the fear-mongering rabid movement against all things sexist is leading towards. Not better, more inclusive games... but more half-assed pandering followed by dismissal.
Have fun with that. I don't have a dog in this fight, since I'm a straight 30-something white guy with brown hair and a glorious braided beard. I'm represented quite well. Mostly by Nords in 'The Elder Scrolls' games, though.
I just like the idea of better written, higher-quality characters with more varied physical attributes is all. I believe that diversity will make gaming better... and that all of you here screaming and raging over nothing are killing that vision.
