Ubisoft has been defending the notion that creating female protagonists takes a hefty amount of development time, claiming both Assassins Creed: Unity and Far Cry 4 teams just couldn’t spare the resources to develop playable female characters in time for release, missing out on the 48 percent of gamers in the world that are women.
This is not the first time development excuses have been brought to the table, while it would take Ubisoft a good chunk of time to get writers, voice actors and animators to create the female character, it’s not like the giant studio doesn’t have those resources readily available.
“It Takes a Long Time to Develop a Female Character”
There are plenty of female voice actors who would happily cover Assassins Creed: Unity or Far Cry 4, two big games sure to grab a lot of attention. Animation is another poor excuse, even if “8,000 new animations” needed to be added, this is not a large amount of work and could be done within a month at most, especially for a studio the size of Ubisoft Montreal.
Despite Far Cry and AC devs saying they started developing female characters but couldn’t finish the job, Jonathan Cooper, an animator over at Naughty Dog, called out Ubisoft’s PR for claiming animation on a character took a long time to complete. Cooper did say voice acting and writing would be the longest issue for Ubisoft, but not a hard one to overcome.
The main issue in our opinion is integrating a female character after the script and voice acting is finished. Ubisoft obviously did not go into development of AC: Unity or Far Cry 4 with the idea of adding a female main character, and now if Ubisoft were to add a female character they would need voice actors and writers to add new lines for the female character.
Even if just one piece of dialog from three characters involved the main player being a woman instead of a man, it could lead to three voice actors being brought back in to do more voice casting. Again, this does feel like a rather poor excuse and we wonder if Ubisoft simply wanted male characters who fit the scene better.
This is a Man’s World
There has always been more well known male main characters in video games and where females are added, they are usually not integrated well into the story. Watch Dogs didn’t offer a female main character, but one of the side characters who continues in Aiden’s story is a woman and isn’t just some lost girl in need of help, thankfully.
Some game studios have embraced unisex games, Fallout and Fable are the two that come to mind, allowing players to become the Queen of the Wasteland or Albion, respectively. This has opened those games up to more female adoption, whereas games with male only main characters tend to attract a higher male demographic.
As much as we hope games studios start working harder on making sure the game has more variety in character design, the design of female characters needs to be unique and smart. Designing some stereotypical woman is not what gamers want, we want someone powerful who can lead the charge, same as a male character.
