My latest for The Daily Beast is on Ubisoft’s (lack of) prioritising women in their upcoming games and the response, in general, from those wanting diversity in media. Specifically in the case of Assassin’s Creed: Unity I found this really disappointing, since this is a talented bunch of people – who not only themselves wanted women, but are great at encouraging diversity.
I’ve been sick and busy with work, so apologies for empty blog for awhile. I should be returning to at least my infrequent levels of blogging – I definitely have an upcoming fisk.
It seems particularly deplorable in a game based on the French Revolution in which many of the actual protagonists (assassins included) were women.
Tauriq, are you aware of Ophelia’s post on this?
I am not.
Ubisoft decided to cut out 50+% of the world’s population because it would have taken too many resources to do their animations. Their words, not mine.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/ubisoft-is-excluding-women-from-the-new-assassins-creed-and
It’s rather more telling that the “Etsio” character is always male as well. I mean this is supposed to be some past lives random magic shit. Why not ever a woman (in the “pirate” version of the game this would’ve been great).
What they did in this incarnation of the series was just use the basic model for all multiplayer characters, instead of having 8 or however many models, they just have one with customizations (“boobs” is not an available customization). It wouldn’t have been that difficult to rework one of the game’s other female models or just add a “feminised” version of the main character, but they figured they would just save time and money on that because “oops we forgot that was important”.