'Again, it's not a question of philosophy or choice in this case at all I don't really it was a question of focus and a question of production,' he said. Therien's response to this perfectly reasonable query was slightly garbled by the incessant roaring assault of noise that is the setting for nearly any E3 interview, and this is probably the only reason why I'm calmly typing away at my keyboard and not actually snapping it over my knee. Assassin's Creed: Unity, let me remind you, is being worked on by nine development teams and has been in the works for a couple of years. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality of game development.'Īt this point VideoGamer quite rightly pressed the issue, mentioning the resources at Ubisoft's disposal. 'And I mean it's something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision.

It would have doubled the work on those things,' he said, and I hope he was wiping sweat off his brow as he did it. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes. So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. 'It was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it's a question of focus and production. Speaking to VideoGamer, technical director James Therien said making female characters is just too much work. Yes, that's right: despite putting out a great game with a female assassin protagonist (Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation) and stuffing the multiplayer component of last few core releases with playable females, Ubisoft has now somehow forgotten how to do that and elected not to try to remember. One caveat though: all those buddies have to be represented by male avatars. Get together with a handful of your buddies and solve the French Revolution, or whatever.

Putting in just one playable female character would 'double the work' on Assassin's Creed: Unity, says Ubisoft, apparently believing this is a genuine excuse a rational human being would accept in the face of its stubborn lack of representation of almost half the world's population.Īssassin's Creed: Unity has a new thing, and that thing is co-operative play.

Assassins creed unity coop