SoulUnison
Banned
I think you missed what was actually being said there, because you ran in pretty much the opposite intended direction.
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Developers call out Ubisoft on their stance regarding playable female characters
- Thread starter MagicWithEarvin
- Start date
I think you missed what was actually being said there, because you ran in pretty much the opposite intended direction.
Plenty of women walk that way. Not as exaggerated as you'd find in some games mind you but yeah that type of walk is not just found on the runway.
I think this is another case where less said the better. Developers or PR have the tendency to dig themselves bigger holes when trying to explain why they do or don't do things that they often invoke more criticism than they would have if they just removed the foot from their mouths.
It's a shame they didn't go with a female main character.
figadapaura
Member
They're ethnically white, dude. Having a tan doesn't change that.
What if it's a tan you're born with?
AcePartyN7
Member
Really…all of this for no woman playable in AC Unity?
Guys the game seems awesome to me. In a lot of games you play only male characters I do not see what is wrong here. Also in this way Ubisoft avoids the fight between players to be the one who will play the female character in coop not that bad, I saw often peoples in some games rage quit because they were not able to play a female…
People need really to stop to complain on Ubisoft recently; personally they do really great games, Unity really impressed me at E3, The Division and Far Cry 4 seems both awesome and Rainbow six is back finally, Ubisoft is probably the only one that is the most ready for next gen. I also loved Far Cry 3 and even more Blood Dragon, I did not play Watch Dogs yet but the game seem very good too.
So why all these complaints about a woman playable? Who cares really? It's a game, and not even a RPG!
And I am French too so I know good this period.
Guys the game seems awesome to me. In a lot of games you play only male characters I do not see what is wrong here. Also in this way Ubisoft avoids the fight between players to be the one who will play the female character in coop not that bad, I saw often peoples in some games rage quit because they were not able to play a female…
People need really to stop to complain on Ubisoft recently; personally they do really great games, Unity really impressed me at E3, The Division and Far Cry 4 seems both awesome and Rainbow six is back finally, Ubisoft is probably the only one that is the most ready for next gen. I also loved Far Cry 3 and even more Blood Dragon, I did not play Watch Dogs yet but the game seem very good too.
So why all these complaints about a woman playable? Who cares really? It's a game, and not even a RPG!
And I am French too so I know good this period.
Well, if Ezio, Connor and Edward are to be considered, being an Assassin doesn't necessarily imply that you went through rigorous training.
iNvid02
Member
It's not like they shy away from diversity with their characters; Altair was Syrian, Ezio Italian, Connor British/Native American, Aveline was a female of African and French heritage, Kenway was a white Welsh born Brit, Adewale was a black man from Trinidad, and more recently Far Cry 4s protagonist is a Nepalese or Indian guy from their fictional Kyrat
It's worth mentioning the series multiplayer has always had several female assassin characters too since it's debut in Brotherhood.
I'm pretty sure we will see a female lead in a future console AC game, not sure why there is so much outrage because they couldn't do it for Unity.
It's worth mentioning the series multiplayer has always had several female assassin characters too since it's debut in Brotherhood.
I'm pretty sure we will see a female lead in a future console AC game, not sure why there is so much outrage because they couldn't do it for Unity.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Ezio still doesn't look like a typical white male video game character. Italians may be ethnically white but they don't look exactly like every other caucasian.
Doesn't count because of reasons.So we're all just ignoring this then? Okay.
SketchTheArtist
Member
I'd be so curious to see the amount of girls in this thread who are actually bothered by this. Hope it's an actual issue they want to discuss and it's not just another discussion started by white knights of the internetz.
figadapaura
Member
So anyone who isn't pale as fuck isn't white to you?
ZehDon
Gold Member
If you're going to respond to me, please address what I've written, instead of posting baseless dismissals. Let me break it down for you:
In video game development, "expense" primarily exists in two forms of currency: time and money. For a flagship AAA game like Assassin's Creed, wherein a yearly release is mandated, time is the less frugal of the development currencies and thus the limiting factor.
In terms of raw asset creation, throwing man-hours at the problem has diminishing returns due to the nature of artistic design and quality standards. Concept work and design, construction, iteration, implementation, testing, quality control; every step takes time to make sure the overall quality bar is being hit. To add a female player character, Ubisoft's team would aim for the highest level of quality, and thus spend the maximum amount of time on the feature. Their pipeline would most likely create an agile construction process, but at the end of the day, it just takes a long time to make AAA quality assets.
For a female character, every wearable piece of clothing would need to be hand created, textured and animated from scratch to look and feel correct, and to hit the quality bar set by previous games. Assassin's Creed employs a combination of key frame, mo-cap and procedural animation. This allows for the smooth animations we've come to expect from the series. There would of course be some degree of overlap, especially within the procedural animation area, but the mo-cap wouldn't work at all, meaning every mo-capped cutscene needs two versions, and a lot of the key-frame would need to have gender specific variations. And then it all needs testing.
This would get the female character into the game world, however specific interactions with the NPCs would require another layer of customisation. Unless procedural animation is employed for all of the NPCs - which it isn't - their animations for interaction with the player characters would need to take the gender - due to the different models - into account when animating. Again, there is of course overlap, but a good portion would need to be redone.
On top of this, script and voice acting needs redoing from the ground up. All game events and NPC dialogue needs to be gender neutral, to minimise the amount of variation. And then the entire dialogue for the player needs to be re-recorded by a female voice actor.
All of this additional work results in a potential - and even then a small - increase in sales, assuming they push the character customisation heavily in their marketing, to combat the perception that Assassin's Creed is a "boys" game. So, hopefully you can appreciate the amount of work that would go into it.
Comparing Assassin's Creed to Mass Effect is also kind of dishonest: the animations in Mass Effect were serviceable but not in the same ball park as Assassin's Creed, and even then they still had a number of gender specific animations.
Exactly! That's why Mass Effect crashed and burned, all Bioware RPGs failed, Tomb Raider isn't a series, character-driven MMOs aren't made, an- oh wait. The opposite of that is true.
Now, you certainly have a point about gay characters. I entirely agree with you - they're scared of the potential sales ramifications. And that's pretty shit, frankly. But you've lumped women into that argument egregiously. As I explained above, return of investment is a massive factor. It's simply very expensive to add female characters at this level of production, and unattractive to large companies because it doesn't increase the sales in proportion to the cost.
Yes but this character appears to be a fully trained assassin unlike them.
As far as gay main characters go most companies are probably more afraid of the idiots who would protest their game non-stop and how that would effect sales more than you generic 20 some dude bro's opinion. The religious protestors can be toxic as hell.
Ascenion
Member
Altair: Syrian so yes.
Ezio: Catacombs say he isn't really an Auditore....so Italian yes, pure? Hell no. Also Italian is basically white but he isn't completely Italian.
Connor: yes.
Aveline: Wrong. Half French, Half African/African descent so creole.
Adewale: Wrong. Slave from Trinidad, so while not certain more than likely African.
Arno: French/Austrian.
RockTurtle
Member
So we're all just ignoring this then? Okay.
it doesn't count because UBISOFT didn't make it a AAA entry in a major console or shout it out from the rooftops and dedicate massive funds for advertising it.
or something like that.
Just "because its video-games" doesn't mean that a multi-billion dollar franchise exists in a cultural bubble. As Prax says below this post they're contributing a small amount to a wider trapestry, probably unintentionally. Normally that's not notable because it's a big fucking tapestry but in this case they've been really boneheaded about it and it's insulted a lot of people.
Prax
Member
I'm a girl who is kind of bothered by this.
But I have no investment in the AC series so... Meh.
And I probably will continue not to at this rate as it seems like the series is getting more and more whitewashed somehow? Haha.
It's just a poor excuse and is again another reminder of the industry's male-centric and sexist leanings. I don't think they are doing this purposefully maliciously or anything, but it's a result of passively absorbing and regurgitating sexism in the wider culture and overall not cool. The really bad excuses on top of that is extra insult.
And Liberation counts, but it's like they deliberately went backwards on the matter and then used the "women too hard to animate so time intensive so many resources" excuse when uh.. they didn't manage to bankrupt themselves THAT time, did they?
But I have no investment in the AC series so... Meh.
And I probably will continue not to at this rate as it seems like the series is getting more and more whitewashed somehow? Haha.
It's just a poor excuse and is again another reminder of the industry's male-centric and sexist leanings. I don't think they are doing this purposefully maliciously or anything, but it's a result of passively absorbing and regurgitating sexism in the wider culture and overall not cool. The really bad excuses on top of that is extra insult.
And Liberation counts, but it's like they deliberately went backwards on the matter and then used the "women too hard to animate so time intensive so many resources" excuse when uh.. they didn't manage to bankrupt themselves THAT time, did they?
So we're all just ignoring this then? Okay.
Considering they've completely revamped the parkour system with a lot of new animations just citing Liberation isn't good enough. (Not that I have any reason to think men and women would parkour differently)
Another fuckin' cis?So we're all just ignoring this then? Okay.
figadapaura
Member
Edward Kenway doesn't look like your typical video game character either, but he's still white.
captainnapalm
Member
Because game "journalists" are framing it as controversy/outrage, despite Ubisoft's better than average track record and despite not having any proof that their reasons given are not in fact accurate.
I see something toxic here in the water for sure, but it's not Ubisoft.
As to why some ex-Ubisoft guy on Twitter is piling on, I'm guessing he has his own reasons that probably have very little to do with diversity.
No I understand you couldn't pull the animations out. That would be ridiculous.
Why are people criticising the publisher with probably the most expansive racial lead characters and a female lead in one of their major franchises of being suddenly gender and race exclusive is utter crap.
It's a crap argument. It screams of lets get everyone riled up around E3 for clicks.
No, I'm just saying there's a fucking arbitrary line there somewhere particularly when you start talking about mixed races. If saying someone with a "tan" makes them white you're ignoring a whole lot of peoples true heritage.
Zen_Arcade
Banned
The problem here is that people are picking about the worst franchise to make their point about.
Gold_Loot
Member
Ascenion
Member
I've said it before in this thread. Aveline's animations appear to be 90% Connor possibly just 80%. This is a new engine yes, but so was that at the time. If they just ripped Connor making adjustments as needed why not rip Arno too?
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Completely forgot that Adewale isn't African American. He would destroy me for that. And never knew that Ezio isn't completely Italian or not really an Auditore.
It seems like people want forced diversity for the sake of forced diversity and thinking that it somehow means "equality." It's ridiculous.
Studios can make the characters they want to make. Focus on making fleshed-out, believable characters, not crafting them around the ability to fill out a few diversity checkboxes.
Studios can make the characters they want to make. Focus on making fleshed-out, believable characters, not crafting them around the ability to fill out a few diversity checkboxes.
ExFalsoQuodlibet
Member
Why should these matters not be important in videogames? What are exactly videogames to you? Another way of wasting time, equivalent to any other?
Edit: I will further explain myself.
I grew an adversion to these kind of subjects. They annoy me. Why do people get so up in arms if a developer makes a choice?
If no woman lead is present. If homosexuality is not possible. Why is this important to anyone!? We are talking video games here
Let the developer decide what they want to do please.
If someone wants a female character they will chose that. Its not worth anyones breath to make a fuss about that.
Italians are white.
Also, about the french revolution, are you implying that no women had a role in the french revolution on the revolutionists side? http://french.lovetoknow.com/Women_in_the_French_Revolution
This thread is delivering
figadapaura
Member
I wasn't saying they needed to have two different main characters, obviously not. They've had no problem in the past making female animations purely for multiplayer purposes, so I don't see why it's such a huge problem now. Instead they wanted to make everyone play the same assassin in 4 player co-op, which seems kind of absurd to me, but whatever it's their game.
Anyway, it's their explanation for the lack of inclusion that really pissed me off. Maybe their next game will include a playable female character, but I won't hold my breath.
I'm not saying that though. I'm saying that having a tan doesn't mean you're not white.
double jump
you haven't lived until a random little kid ask you "how do you make love".
I've been skimming threw thread and I need something clarified. Are we talking about sp, mp or in general ?
So we're all just ignoring this then? Okay.
How about you try harder to downplay the issue which is a wide range of bullshit excuses made by Ubisoft employees? And how about you do a bit of research of generally the sameAss excuses they always bring on the table regarding excluding women?
What? Why does Ubisoft, of all companies, have to be singled out here?
Ascenion
Member
There was this whole story in the catacombs about the codex and Marco Polo and Ezio's I guess Grandpa coming from Syria or somewhere with the codex. Then he met people and took the name Auditore. I can't remember completely but it was shocking that it was something you had to look for.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
so what?
As consumers and game players its not our job to think about some companies ROI in terms of deciding what we want. Nobody goes "well I wish there were more space shooters but I guess they just have to keep making COD clones, oh well", they well fucking complain "no stop making so many goddamn COD clones". People feel entitled to talk about all other kinds of creative decisions and bitch and moan at how developers aren't catering to them, but all of the sudden when something like female characters gets involved all the "why are we talking about this", "its not a big deal to meeee" bullshit gets trotted out
flatearthpandas
Member
There was another tweet, I don't remember from whom, that also pointed out that the most famous assassin of the French revolution was a woman.
In this respect and many others, UbiSoft has really wasted a huge opportunity with this setting.
In this respect and many others, UbiSoft has really wasted a huge opportunity with this setting.
ZehDon
Gold Member
Well, being as we've had game titles such as "The Ballard of Gay Tony" for one of the largest franchises in the history of the industry that didn't receive global religious protests, and massive "family friendly" games like The Sims which feature almost entirely bisexual player characters, including same-sex families with children, that also didn't receive global religious protests, I think its safe to say "religious protestors" probably isn't the main reason publishers shy away from it.
We've had the discussion about homosexual lead characters and their consumer appeal extensively before, so I'd recommend doing a search for those threads, to save this thread getting seriously off topic.
You've answered your own question here, I think.
Ubisoft rebuilt their animation stuff for this release, meaning it all of it gets re-done. They can't leverage their previous works to a high enough degree to rely on it. Ignoring that, they have made co-op a huge focus of this game, meaning all of the assets for all of the characters need to be the same quality for such a major feature. As you actually play as the primary character in multiplayer this time around, the female character would therefore need to have assets and animations equal to that of the main character... so its still the same amount of work, even if she isn't replacing the main character for the story. In previous games, the multiplayer characters were single model, single skin entities that could share basic animations, with a small degree of specalised animations. Because there was just one variation for each character, creating them wasn't as time consuming.
This time around, they can't just animate one model and create one skin. It wouldn't hit the bar they've set.
I think you've misunderstood my position, or I haven't explained myself as well as I could have. Apologies. Let me clarify: I 100% agree that female characters should be more represented in the video game industry. No arguments of any kind. After my wife and I first started dating, she opened my eyes to just how god damn limiting it is for a woman to get into video games, due to the ever-present male protagonist. She loves games as much as I do, but the immersion factor is gone when she's forced to play "John McGruff". For example, she opted to not play Watch_Dogs because she couldn't play as a woman. However, she's on her 6th (!!!) Mass Effect playthrough.
My position isn't that we should just sit down and take what we're given. My position is that this "Unity/Ubisoft Witch Hunt" is utterly bullshit. Unity has done nothing that 1,000 other games at E3 didn't do. Why is it being singled out? Unlike a lot of the games, it actually has an excuse for not including female characters - the extensive character customisation options make it prohibitally expensive. In contrast to Assassin's Creed 1, wherein the cost of adding a female character would have been significantly less expensive. Why is Unity being singled out to such a fucking horrendous degree? GTAV had 3 playable, customisable central characters, not one of which were women. Rockstar too had story/cost justifcations, and yet no one started screaming "boycott". They also had a US$260+ million dollar budget - the largest budget for any video game in the history of the planet Earth.
My position is simple: why is Unity getting this kind of hate, when there are larger offenders with less justification?
I say get in line, a Black Assassin is long overdue
Edit: And not as a DLC , Side Character or hell Side Game for that matter lol
Hey you guys got a president first
To all of those males here who are not able or interested to understand.
Imagine you are not the centre of the world and worlds, may they be Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Uncharted, God of War etc etc. are not build around you. You are an afterthought, at best.
You would want representation. Representation of the players, to use a marketing term, #4theplayers. Not more, not less.
Now imagine other gamers would tell you to shut up. To stop complaining for whatever strawman reasons. That they don't understand.
Those guys sounds like sexist assholes, don't they? Don't even try to be those guys.
Imagine you are not the centre of the world and worlds, may they be Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Uncharted, God of War etc etc. are not build around you. You are an afterthought, at best.
You would want representation. Representation of the players, to use a marketing term, #4theplayers. Not more, not less.
Now imagine other gamers would tell you to shut up. To stop complaining for whatever strawman reasons. That they don't understand.
Those guys sounds like sexist assholes, don't they? Don't even try to be those guys.
Lalalandia
Member
Am I really having to read posts pointing to AC:Liberation as some sort of blanket defence to accusations of sexism? Is AC:Liberation the new 'my best friend is _____'? Let's be clear AC:Liberation is a spin off title for the Vita that got tarted up for a full price release when the Vita didn't do the numbers. Such spin offs are where the writers are allowed to deviate from the norm, the mainline characters have been all mid 30s white guys since AC1 (a bold choice at the time when the only other middle eastern characters in games were seen down iron sights).
As the Eurogamer article said if the dev had just said 'we designed this game where you play as a dude who has other dudes come in to help him' there wouldn't have been as much outrage, instead he said 'Oh there would have been chicks but they're just sooo expensive'. That sets up a handy go to lazy justification of the 'everybody is a mid 30s white guy' theme that games have going on, the pillorying is entirely justified. Especially as the whole issue seems to have never even occured to the mid 30s white guy in charge of the damn game. At least the Far Cry 4 team admit they wanted to spend the resources for female mo-cap and voicing on another two dozen pre-release game trailers.
As the Eurogamer article said if the dev had just said 'we designed this game where you play as a dude who has other dudes come in to help him' there wouldn't have been as much outrage, instead he said 'Oh there would have been chicks but they're just sooo expensive'. That sets up a handy go to lazy justification of the 'everybody is a mid 30s white guy' theme that games have going on, the pillorying is entirely justified. Especially as the whole issue seems to have never even occured to the mid 30s white guy in charge of the damn game. At least the Far Cry 4 team admit they wanted to spend the resources for female mo-cap and voicing on another two dozen pre-release game trailers.
More often? People complain about Ubisoft every time.
Because yearly development cycle, new engine, new animations = resources that could be devoted to making more animations are devoted to other things so that thr game can come out in time, I'd presume. It's not a great excuse, but you can blame the vicious AAA cycle for that.
Why weren't people upset at AC for not having a female protagonist before? Is it because we can customize the clothing of the protagonist now? Or is it because people misunderstood the nature of the coop and thought we had 4 separate playable characters?
In AC games you never play as famous real people. You always play the person behind the curtain as all the famous historical figures do their thing around you.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
1.In the past the multiplayer animations were completely different from the SP and made by a small team working with much simpler rigs than the single player character which in turn was a much simpler rig than the ones in this game which includes new tech that was never used in the original games.
2.It's just like Watch Dogs, in the sense that the multiplayer is completely seamless and you see yourself as Aiden. This is not an rpg nor did they ever imply in any interview that it was an rpg with a highly customizable character that doesn't have a set plot. So no it's not absurd in anyway shape or form unless you misinterpreted what they were saying during interviews about wanting seamless multiplayer.
RodrigoDorta
Member
We can see that this game in particular dont have an female lead for story/dev choice sake, not because the team is racist or gender issues.
If the "Games Journalism" keep on this way, we soon will see all the "AAA" games taking the safe and incridibly stupid way; fill the game with token characters, wich is ridiculous, the last thing i want personaly is that AAA games having more badly writen and dull characters due the need to represent every gender/ethnicity, sexual orientations etc....
What we should call out is the bullshit response, if they said: a woman playable character do not fit the story/ we´ve made a choice do not incluido female characters in co-op because reasons, it all would be better. We need to wise up people, the same way the top dogs evade questions about downgrades and cut content in the final version of the AAA games, of course they will say everything to make the dev look good, even when the PR fuck it up with ufortunate wording and blatant lies.
I've seen people say Gay Tony doesn't count because he's not the lead. Sure he's the reason the entire plot even happens and he's one of my favourite characters in a GTA game ever but it doesn't count. Because he's a stereotype or something and couldn't possibly be a real live gay person. Get with the program.