Has anyone ever claimed they never made a female protagonist? If not, why would it be worth pointing it out?Gerishnakov said:
Ubisoft CEO Says Company Will Work to Extend Diversity
- Thread starter roseofbattle
- Start date
I'm really glad you mentioned this. I can't believe we have people in this thread complaining about the "impending doom" that soon games won't feature the same bland characters over and over again. One post even used the word "entitled" and said "your requests aren't reasonable." It is mindboggling that some people consider a demand for diversity - and to even include the other 50% of the population, for gods sake - a path towards somehow ruining games. I can't even fathom how that's possible. Perhaps one day we'll get past the "but I'm the bigger market so shut up and deal with it" response, but apparently that won't be any time soon!LazyAza said:
While Ubisoft isn't the worst example of the bunch, their response and our response will hopefully be a warning to other developers to stop lazy designs. There's a difference between ticking the diversity box and putting in the effort to make truly unique games and characters.
Agreed. I'd be more interested in the personality of the characters than their race/gender, that's if I cared about Assassin's Creed at all anymore.Erlend Sandholm said:
Also, considering this is set in 18th century France, I don't really understand why people are bringing up the fact that they're white.
Because it flopped like a soggy pancake, basically. Expanding diversity is all well and good, but it doesn't mean they should pursue things they think will be commercial failures.Imp Emissary said:Hey yeah. Didn't Ubi say they weren't making any games unless they could make them into franchises?Andy Shandy said:
Well why the hell aren't they making Beyond Good and Evil 2 yet?!
They're just dumb, aren't they?
Edit: Actually according to something I just read, they actually are making it - it just got pushed back so they could finish Rayman Origins. Although having now looked up Rayman Origins, it having been released in 2011 tells me that perhaps it was pushed back just in general.
Sorry to bug you for this, but do you have a source I could look at for Beyond's sales? I tried to find it myself, but all I could find was this.EvilRoy said:Because it flopped like a soggy pancake, basically. Expanding diversity is all well and good, but it doesn't mean they should pursue things they think will be commercial failures.Imp Emissary said:Hey yeah. Didn't Ubi say they weren't making any games unless they could make them into franchises?Andy Shandy said:
Well why the hell aren't they making Beyond Good and Evil 2 yet?!
They're just dumb, aren't they?
Edit: Actually according to something I just read, they actually are making it - it just got pushed back so they could finish Rayman Origins. Although having now looked up Rayman Origins, it having been released in 2011 tells me that perhaps it was pushed back just in general.
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/374242-Total-sales-figures-Forums
Says it made (I think, the text seems a bit messed up) $6,712,367 on GCN, and about $36 million on PS2.
Going with it being a sales failure though, why would they then start to develop it's sequel?
<.< And apparently are sill developing it.
If they really are. It kind of sounds like they aren't anymore.
Ubi could have gave an option to choose a female character for the COOP and not spend any time creating it besides mixing and matching assets used for female NPC's. Face/head from one and hair from another and you have a new female 3d model that can be used. Her combat animation might be more on the manly side but that's about it for what wouldn't need allot of development to make the character. it would be the outfit that would take the most time and that is just modifying the existing male outfits in 3ds Max and a couple days worth of work. I know modifying a male outfit into a female isn't some huge task and only takes a couple days because I did it with a Skyrim outfit myself and I am not professionally trained in working with 3DS Max and had user created tools to get it in the game unlike an employee at the studio who can export directly from Max and have it game ready in minutes. They could do that right now and have it ready for release and not come close to breaking the budget or pushing back any deadlines.
In the future they can have the female that did the mocap work for female NPC's animation do a few more for combat animations and specifically design a couple outfits for the character to have that is different than the males. It is not some huge amount of effort to create the assets and no more work than creating generic female NPC wandering about town #10. It is also no more effort than making generic male #2 through 4 for character selection in MP/COOP mode. Anyone saying it would break the bank or be too hard to do doesn't know a thing about making 3d models for games.
What Ubi is guilty of is not believing females play AC so created only male playable characters for the COOP mode and now maybe they know that females do infact play AC and that they are tired of being ignored. Maybe in the future they may add more female protagonists but at least they will know to add a female choice for any multiplayer in the future. Maybe just maybe give players the choice at the very beginning... Now wouldn't that be something.
In the future they can have the female that did the mocap work for female NPC's animation do a few more for combat animations and specifically design a couple outfits for the character to have that is different than the males. It is not some huge amount of effort to create the assets and no more work than creating generic female NPC wandering about town #10. It is also no more effort than making generic male #2 through 4 for character selection in MP/COOP mode. Anyone saying it would break the bank or be too hard to do doesn't know a thing about making 3d models for games.
What Ubi is guilty of is not believing females play AC so created only male playable characters for the COOP mode and now maybe they know that females do infact play AC and that they are tired of being ignored. Maybe in the future they may add more female protagonists but at least they will know to add a female choice for any multiplayer in the future. Maybe just maybe give players the choice at the very beginning... Now wouldn't that be something.
Got my stuff off of "Ubi Uncensored: The History of Ubisoft" which I had read many a moon ago, and wikipedia. No precise sales numbers, but the dudes who made it, and apparently many retailers viewed it as a flop.Imp Emissary said:Sorry to bug you for this, but do you have a source I could look at for Beyond's sales? I tried to find it myself, but all I could find was this.EvilRoy said:Because it flopped like a soggy pancake, basically. Expanding diversity is all well and good, but it doesn't mean they should pursue things they think will be commercial failures.Imp Emissary said:Hey yeah. Didn't Ubi say they weren't making any games unless they could make them into franchises?Andy Shandy said:
Well why the hell aren't they making Beyond Good and Evil 2 yet?!
They're just dumb, aren't they?
Edit: Actually according to something I just read, they actually are making it - it just got pushed back so they could finish Rayman Origins. Although having now looked up Rayman Origins, it having been released in 2011 tells me that perhaps it was pushed back just in general.
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/374242-Total-sales-figures-Forums
Says it made (I think, the text seems a bit messed up) $6,712,367 on GCN, and about $36 million on PS2.
Going with it being a sales failure though, why would they then start to develop it's sequel?
<.< And apparently are sill developing it.
If they really are. It kind of sounds like they aren't anymore.
Re-reading Uncensored I have a feeling that they really didn't blame the quality of the game for the poor sales and weak interest, so they were ready to give it a second shot to one extent or another - but for whatever reason it ended up getting pushed aside.
Announcing a desire to please everybody is nothing to celebrate. That's creative death.roseofbattle said:
I haven't played to the conclusion of Watch Dogs, yet, but I also have to take a bit of issue with "fridging". Yes, female characters shouldn't be routinely killed off just to give male characters motivation towards action. But it very much feels like there's a pool of commentators who simply aren't comfortable with violence being directed at female characters at all- in games where violence is a primary or major source of action, conflict, and tension. That's not okay; it pushes game creators into a corner where "Make your own games, then!" becomes a perfectly legitimate response, not because the game makers don't want to use their own resources, but because they're not at all certain that the game the critics are describing is possible.
You don't give someone directions by telling them where not to go, and by saying "don't do this, this, or this, and we're certain to have some more 'constructive' criticism when we see your next effort" critics all but insure that safe male characters remain the status quo.
Shifting to a more diverse cast of characters in video games is going to require more than a change of thinking in game studios. It's going to require a more constructive and less antagonistic mindset from critics. And if they're not willing to make that shift, they're going to need to get used to either a much more glacial shift or a simple maintenance of the status quo- the price of refusing to believe they have any part in it.
I suppose it would be considering one of the most famous assassinations during the French Revolution was done by a woman.spartandude said:
I'll believe it when I see it, Ubisoft.
If they wanted to, they frikking well would have with AC Unity, and Far Cry 4. This is just like Nintendo saying they'll try to be more accommodating of LGBT in the next Tomodachi Life. I guess the difference here is Ubisoft's next game in general is gunna be expected to not be a frikking sausage fest as opposed to some sequel.
If they wanted to, they frikking well would have with AC Unity, and Far Cry 4. This is just like Nintendo saying they'll try to be more accommodating of LGBT in the next Tomodachi Life. I guess the difference here is Ubisoft's next game in general is gunna be expected to not be a frikking sausage fest as opposed to some sequel.
Now by saying they'll try to do it, does that mean they'll actually make playable female characters, then decide to disable the option to play them? Then someone else will have to go into the files and find where Ubi buried the option to play the female characters and switch the ability to play them back on?
Well, at least they... sorta... admitted they messed up. Not many companies... sorta... do that.
Y'know, I wonder if the userbase of this message board was significantly less than 70% male [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.852520-Poll-Gender-Identity], there'd be significantly less claims and patting each other's backs about their views that every person that asks for diversity is some caricature of a coffee shop blogger halfway between a martyr and a tyrant.
Well, we can play it that way. Here's a list of summarized beliefs I've seen actually typed by people over the course of this discussion across the internet, with the spots filled in as to simulate the types of things that could possibly serve as proof:
"Hey, they made this one game character on the Vita a girl and you can pick them in some multiplayer modes in a few other games! Sexism is over!"
"If they make one female character, the workload on the entire game would be doubled, because they would have to create an entire female population next to the already existing male population! And if their workload was doubled, they couldn't afford to make this game that they are producing across more than three studios and will do so up to twice a year while selling enough copies to continue doing this."
"All these not bystander NPCs in various Assassin's Creed games are female. That makes what, like eight of them out of the rest of the characters? That should be enough right? They don't need lines or anything, just being there assures me that they exist."
"Most of history's greatest figures were men anyway, so trying to include women would be shoehorning in unimportant people. It's not like women made up a significant portion of the population back then. Who's even heard of important women? Certainly not the important men who wrote all the history books, and I trust their judgment."
"Making female characters would automatically ruin the game or character because most of the good games have male leads, and it'd be forcing the game to be worse because games with female leads have been pretty mixed results. This has nothing to do with the game industry employees being mostly comprised of men, and even more of the majority taking key spots in leadership."
"Playing as a female would ruin my immersion, because I'm not female, or having a female character exist in any context other than shopping for shoes or cooking would shatter my suspension of disbelief."
"Including a female character, even as a faceless co-op skin that doesn't talk and is never seen as the main character from any of the player's viewpoints, would force them to have to rewrite the entire game because the lead is a male and they didn't account for things like malls and tampons."
"Game development is hard, so we should take everything they say at face value, regardless of how many times that company has lied before, and is even lying now, in an article next to the one we are commenting on, as long as we adamantly agree with this viewpoint without any actual evidence."
"Look, the guy says he works with lots of women. Binders of them, even. They must agree with him."
"Anybody that claims that we need more diversity in games is not actually a real person. We will prove that all their complaints are just loud shouting and gain undue representation in the media, by filling message boards with disagreement and creating entire websites, videos, and even flash games just to demonstrate how underrepresented our viewpoint is. We have a third of our task force targeting one Youtube channel."
"They're just making the games that the majority of their players who just happen to be male want to play, so they make games that happen to have mostly male leads. Why should they listen to people we believe are fake?"
"They shouldn't have to pander to the mass market (and by that I mean people who aren't me or agree with me, which are certainly the persecuted minority) just because they think something's wrong with their games. If they did that, their games would surely be lowered in quality as a result. Why should they have to change? They're perfect as they are now!"
"Women animations work differently from men animations. Think of how they would have to make their legs bend in the opposite direction, or how many rigs they'd have to build of stripper pole interactions alone. That would also decrease the frame rate. I can tell the difference right off the bat while viewing the character from behind in all of the games made recently that have women, which are enough to make this distinction."
"All of the women hitboxes would have to be smaller, and that would give them an unfair advantage compared to the heavily built men featured regularly in Assassin's Creed. Maybe we can just make their hips and chest larger to compensate."
"If the main character was a woman, the entire game would have to be different because women don't start out with their own self agency like men do. We would have to spend the entire game pointing out all the differences between this character and our male characters, and nobody likes to play through the parts where we explicitly show past discrimination, which doesn't happen today, because it's boring. Guys like Master Chief are automatically awesome and capable of doing anything and nobody questions his ability, unlike women, who can still be rendered helpless regardless of where they are in their personal development, if that happens at all before somebody beats them up and/or removes their clothes and they need to get revenge to regain their innocence. Also, they have feelings and squishy parts and that makes everything weird. Nobody likes female characters."
"Most women play games in the segments that we don't consider to actually be games, so therefore no women will ever play the games we do consider to be games and their opinions will not matter."
"Making a character a woman more than once in ten years would cheapen everything else that was ever made, like when an artist decides to use a different color one day and art instantly becomes trite and useless simply because that color would be the only color in the painting and we would be forced to look at every one of them for hours. Soon all art would be this new color and we would never have art done with the old color ever again."
"Just because most of their characters are men doesn't mean that all of them are really similar to each other, because underneath the nearly identical outfits and animations, some of them are different colors, if you squint hard at the face concealed by a hood. This also isn't extremely boring and repetitive. Which putting women in games would be, because we can tell underneath that outfit."
"Realistically, not many women have been assassins, or could be assassins, because they're women, and I think the really large breasts that most women have would just get in the way. Oh, that one lady who was a famous assassin during the French Revolution? She just stabbed some guy in a bathtub and the rest of it was played up by the newspapers. That would be boring if they actually put that in the game. It's not like Ubisoft could spice it up because that would be lying or something. Just look at the previous Assassin's Creed, that was pretty realistic (like the entire series) and they didn't need women to do that."
"Also, there weren't that many women in the French Revolution in general."
"I am threatened by the suggestion that anything I think could ever be wrong, and my friends agree so it must be true that I am not wrong."
"Most of the people who disagree with us are just white knight social justice brony bloggers who are doing this in the hopes that they will have the moral high ground by saying these things, which totally doesn't work compared to when I speak the whole truth that everything is fine concerning equality, which makes me much better than you. I didn't even think this was worth discussing, but since you're so wrong, I decided to post on this thread for an entire day just to prove how pointless this is."
"When I ask my many, many female friends about the situation, they didn't care when I positioned the question out of context and downplayed anything that might make me look wrong."
"Why do these people keep attacking me and my friends, and I do mean specifically me and my friends because that is what the conversation is clearly about, when I, and by extension everybody I agree with, have never done anything to them based on my total world experience which must match everybody elses? They are just blaming all of us for the actions of a very small few number of people in the history of humanity, and most of those were probably women lying about it."
"Everybody that disagrees with us must hate us as far as we can tell, which also makes them wrong. That is why we hate them."
Well, we can play it that way. Here's a list of summarized beliefs I've seen actually typed by people over the course of this discussion across the internet, with the spots filled in as to simulate the types of things that could possibly serve as proof:
"Hey, they made this one game character on the Vita a girl and you can pick them in some multiplayer modes in a few other games! Sexism is over!"
"If they make one female character, the workload on the entire game would be doubled, because they would have to create an entire female population next to the already existing male population! And if their workload was doubled, they couldn't afford to make this game that they are producing across more than three studios and will do so up to twice a year while selling enough copies to continue doing this."
"All these not bystander NPCs in various Assassin's Creed games are female. That makes what, like eight of them out of the rest of the characters? That should be enough right? They don't need lines or anything, just being there assures me that they exist."
"Most of history's greatest figures were men anyway, so trying to include women would be shoehorning in unimportant people. It's not like women made up a significant portion of the population back then. Who's even heard of important women? Certainly not the important men who wrote all the history books, and I trust their judgment."
"Making female characters would automatically ruin the game or character because most of the good games have male leads, and it'd be forcing the game to be worse because games with female leads have been pretty mixed results. This has nothing to do with the game industry employees being mostly comprised of men, and even more of the majority taking key spots in leadership."
"Playing as a female would ruin my immersion, because I'm not female, or having a female character exist in any context other than shopping for shoes or cooking would shatter my suspension of disbelief."
"Including a female character, even as a faceless co-op skin that doesn't talk and is never seen as the main character from any of the player's viewpoints, would force them to have to rewrite the entire game because the lead is a male and they didn't account for things like malls and tampons."
"Game development is hard, so we should take everything they say at face value, regardless of how many times that company has lied before, and is even lying now, in an article next to the one we are commenting on, as long as we adamantly agree with this viewpoint without any actual evidence."
"Look, the guy says he works with lots of women. Binders of them, even. They must agree with him."
"Anybody that claims that we need more diversity in games is not actually a real person. We will prove that all their complaints are just loud shouting and gain undue representation in the media, by filling message boards with disagreement and creating entire websites, videos, and even flash games just to demonstrate how underrepresented our viewpoint is. We have a third of our task force targeting one Youtube channel."
"They're just making the games that the majority of their players who just happen to be male want to play, so they make games that happen to have mostly male leads. Why should they listen to people we believe are fake?"
"They shouldn't have to pander to the mass market (and by that I mean people who aren't me or agree with me, which are certainly the persecuted minority) just because they think something's wrong with their games. If they did that, their games would surely be lowered in quality as a result. Why should they have to change? They're perfect as they are now!"
"Women animations work differently from men animations. Think of how they would have to make their legs bend in the opposite direction, or how many rigs they'd have to build of stripper pole interactions alone. That would also decrease the frame rate. I can tell the difference right off the bat while viewing the character from behind in all of the games made recently that have women, which are enough to make this distinction."
"All of the women hitboxes would have to be smaller, and that would give them an unfair advantage compared to the heavily built men featured regularly in Assassin's Creed. Maybe we can just make their hips and chest larger to compensate."
"If the main character was a woman, the entire game would have to be different because women don't start out with their own self agency like men do. We would have to spend the entire game pointing out all the differences between this character and our male characters, and nobody likes to play through the parts where we explicitly show past discrimination, which doesn't happen today, because it's boring. Guys like Master Chief are automatically awesome and capable of doing anything and nobody questions his ability, unlike women, who can still be rendered helpless regardless of where they are in their personal development, if that happens at all before somebody beats them up and/or removes their clothes and they need to get revenge to regain their innocence. Also, they have feelings and squishy parts and that makes everything weird. Nobody likes female characters."
"Most women play games in the segments that we don't consider to actually be games, so therefore no women will ever play the games we do consider to be games and their opinions will not matter."
"Making a character a woman more than once in ten years would cheapen everything else that was ever made, like when an artist decides to use a different color one day and art instantly becomes trite and useless simply because that color would be the only color in the painting and we would be forced to look at every one of them for hours. Soon all art would be this new color and we would never have art done with the old color ever again."
"Just because most of their characters are men doesn't mean that all of them are really similar to each other, because underneath the nearly identical outfits and animations, some of them are different colors, if you squint hard at the face concealed by a hood. This also isn't extremely boring and repetitive. Which putting women in games would be, because we can tell underneath that outfit."
"Realistically, not many women have been assassins, or could be assassins, because they're women, and I think the really large breasts that most women have would just get in the way. Oh, that one lady who was a famous assassin during the French Revolution? She just stabbed some guy in a bathtub and the rest of it was played up by the newspapers. That would be boring if they actually put that in the game. It's not like Ubisoft could spice it up because that would be lying or something. Just look at the previous Assassin's Creed, that was pretty realistic (like the entire series) and they didn't need women to do that."
"Also, there weren't that many women in the French Revolution in general."
"I am threatened by the suggestion that anything I think could ever be wrong, and my friends agree so it must be true that I am not wrong."
"Most of the people who disagree with us are just white knight social justice brony bloggers who are doing this in the hopes that they will have the moral high ground by saying these things, which totally doesn't work compared to when I speak the whole truth that everything is fine concerning equality, which makes me much better than you. I didn't even think this was worth discussing, but since you're so wrong, I decided to post on this thread for an entire day just to prove how pointless this is."
"When I ask my many, many female friends about the situation, they didn't care when I positioned the question out of context and downplayed anything that might make me look wrong."
"Why do these people keep attacking me and my friends, and I do mean specifically me and my friends because that is what the conversation is clearly about, when I, and by extension everybody I agree with, have never done anything to them based on my total world experience which must match everybody elses? They are just blaming all of us for the actions of a very small few number of people in the history of humanity, and most of those were probably women lying about it."
"Everybody that disagrees with us must hate us as far as we can tell, which also makes them wrong. That is why we hate them."
Frankly I just have a hard time swallowing that creativity was ever alive at Ubisoft. When they flat out say that they only want to make games that they can make franchises out of (You know, instead of just making a game that's good and then making a franchise out of it if there proves to be a viable market) then it's pretty clear that creativity took a far distant backseat to making money.Callate said:
Don't know why so many people protect creativity in the AAA industry when it's not really there.
Increasing diversity in games is great and i'd be glad to see it happen but im really not that worked up about it.
I just want to play as someone other than the same grizzled white dude in every single AAA game released. The French revolution is the perfect time for a female main character, I was excited to see who we might play as but who do we get?
Connor/Edward/Henry/James/Generic white male name 0432 who is fighting for freedom/motivated by revenge.
I've played the same character too much, he was never that interesting or good to begin with. I want to try play as an interesting character for once.
If a game isn't going to offer me anything interesting then im not going to pay £40-50 for their game. That isn't an act of protest against the patriarchy or anything. That's just me not spending money on something that won't interest me as much as other games.
I just want to play as someone other than the same grizzled white dude in every single AAA game released. The French revolution is the perfect time for a female main character, I was excited to see who we might play as but who do we get?
Connor/Edward/Henry/James/Generic white male name 0432 who is fighting for freedom/motivated by revenge.
I've played the same character too much, he was never that interesting or good to begin with. I want to try play as an interesting character for once.
If a game isn't going to offer me anything interesting then im not going to pay £40-50 for their game. That isn't an act of protest against the patriarchy or anything. That's just me not spending money on something that won't interest me as much as other games.
More divinity in characters is good, more diversity in the world of a game the story and the game play is also good. LEts hope this happens as at the moment the AAA industry is getting more and more homogenized to the point where you cannot tell the protagonists apart, or the world , or the mechanics.
Lets hope you stay true to your word ubisoft for our sake and for yours.
Lets hope you stay true to your word ubisoft for our sake and for yours.
I didn't know that. Considering the hype machine they had for 2, 3 and 4, I still say they weren't giving Liberation nearly as much attention.RicoADF said: