Assassin's Creed V: Unity

[Team Andromeda]

Bloody hell, that trailer looks immense

[Neon Ignition]

The E3 Gameplay trailers:

[Guts]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-12-assassins-creed-unity-is-a-step-backward-for-progressive-games

AC V is the latest target of the vocal internet "moralists". The reason? No playable female characters in multiplayer! Those misogynistic Ubisoft *****!

Also, there are apparently not enough racial minorities in AC V! A game that takes place during the French Revolution in the 18th century. Doesn't matter, they're racists too!

I just hope Ubi doesn't bend under this ****.

[Neon Ignition]

Yeah, its been a very sensasionalist story, I also hope Ubi doesn't bow to them. Considering the wider franchise it's a pretty dumb argument that lies on focusing purely on a single entry. Hell, Ubi should kindly remind them of Freedom Cry and Liberation HDs recent releases just to shut the morons up

[Asura]

Going to go against the grain, and say that I think Ubi have dropped the ball here. They should have included female characters in their multiplayer, and if that wasn't on the cards, they definitely shouldn't have said it was for "technical reasons". If they didn't want to, then that's one thing, but trying to "explain it away" like that is in very poor taste.

Motion rigs and such be damned; a female soldier or fighter moves in the same way as a man, if she's of similar proportions and relatively flat-chested. The AC games feature many different NPCs of different race and gender; it's baffling that they didn't make at least one of the 4-player team female.

The whole thing about "it's during the French revolution" doesn't hold water either. Women are half the population (naturally) and their involvement in history is often overlooked in favour of a history which gives the impression most things have been achieved by men - male soldiers, kings, emperors and scientists. Some of the highest profile assassins in history (including that period) have been women.

Not every game needs to have female main characters, or even female characters at all. Not every game needs to be a shining beacon of tolerance. Maybe people have been a bit reactionary (considering Liberation having a female PoC as its main figure).

However, the core of the issue is this approach, that in gaming, male is "normal" and female is "different". It riles people up and when you think about it, it's easy to see why.

I don't think they're reacting to the game, specifically. They're reacting to that specific argument - "it's too difficult to do both" or "it'll take too long" when the Assassin's Creed games are extremely content heavy and really could feature both. I think if the Ubi PR message had been "we wanted to focus on a male character", people might make snide comments but ultimately it wouldn't be such a big deal. It's that particular comment that has ignited the whole thing.

[Dogg Thang]

It has only really blown up because someone from Ubisoft has been saying very silly things about it that anyone would pick up on. Had they said - everyone is the main protagonist of the series and he happens to be male, this would not have exploded the way it has. Instead they said along the lines of - females are hard and double our budget. So it's not a creative choice, it's that the default human is male and we didn't build in a budget to allow for that 51% minority who don't happen to be exactly the same as a default human. That mindset is a real problem.

As Asura says, male is "normal" and female is "different" and that thinking is everywhere and I think people can and should kick up a fuss when it happens.

[Guts]

The whole thing about "it's during the French revolution" doesn't hold water either. Women are half the population (naturally) and their involvement in history is often overlooked in favour of a history which gives the impression most things have been achieved by men - male soldiers, kings, emperors and scientists. Some of the highest profile assassins in history (including that period) have been women.

I wasn't talking about women - I was talking about these same people demanding more "ethnical diversity" in a game set in 18th century France, a country, where, you know - 99.99% of the population back then was white. That's just dumb.

Also, why male is the default gender in a lot of games - well, again many games involve soldiers, combat, and military life and since 99% of that has been done by males through human history, so it's kinda logical that most soldiers in film and video games are male by "default" in my opinion. Females have always been (and still are) a small minority in any sort of military. If anything, in most fiction there's a much larger amount of females acting as soldiers and warriors than in real life.

Edit: I think Ubisoft's excuse for not including females is pretty lame and stinks of lazyness, being cheap and cutting corners, but it also irritates the **** out of me, when this "moral mob" bitches about everything. It's the artist's right to portray what they want, and if someone wants to make a male-only or a female-only work of art or whatever, then that's their right as the creator. If it's such a big deal, then the best solution is to boycott the product, not demand the artist to change it so it pleases everybody.

[Profit]

I still cannot find any rationale as to why this game is singled out for not having female character options.

[Asura]

I still cannot find any rationale as to why this game is singled out for not having female character options.

If you read what I said above, you'd know. It's not that the game has been singled out; it's that someone asked the question (ditto for Far Cry 4) and the response they gave was something that has annoyed people.

I wasn't talking about women - I was talking about these same people demanding more "ethnical diversity" in a game set in 18th century France, a country, where, you know - 99.99% of the population back then was white. That's just dumb.

That's apparently not true, though. We all think that because movies, documentaries etc. have given that impression, whereas in reality (even going so far back as the Roman Empire) the racial make-up of places like France has been quite mixed. "White" was still the majority, but it's apparently a myth that european nations were like this. For starters, today, France has the largest (relative) population of black people of western European countries; that didn't just happen since World War 2. It's part of their colonial and Roman legacy and stretches back centuries.

This, ironically, is why this concept of "representation" is so important; you suggest a figure of 99.99% whites because it seems perfectly reasonable given the image we all have of circa-1800 England/France/Germany. Now we're starting to see that this kind of thing simply isn't true, and it's important that art helps us dispel these myths so that they don't continue.

[Profit]

I think it`s more to to with people having an unreasonable response to a reasonable answer given by Ubisoft. People demand a lot nowadays from an AAA game. Realistically, Ubisoft could not have provided an answer that would satisfy everyone due to the inherent branching implications of the question. Games have already decided to include more and more generic characters to appeal to the masses and hopefully developers will not be coerced into including character creation options at the expense of storytelling and character development.

One of the best things about Uncharted and The Last of Us was the fixed character choices (which include having ethnic minorities (British!) as villans) which led to relatively good (for videogame standards) characters.

[Guts]

The vast majority of immigration to Europe has happened since the Industrial Revolution and most of that after WW2. Most of the black population for example in modern France has also arrived there after WW2, since there wasn't mass immigration in the millions before the 20th century. Slavery was also illegal, unlike in America.

Apparently, it's illegal in France for goverment to gather data on ethnicity since the late 18th century which makes finding any numbers problematic. Still, I'd be willing to bet that during the French Revolution, the number of non-whites in the population was tiny in France and Europe in general.

[Profit]

To be fair, Ubisoft could make a game set in modern day Nigeria and have all the characters as White, speak American English... and they still should not have to explain their creative decision.

It`s one of the privileges for indie developers not to have to explain their creative decisions that leads to more diverse games, which is something often missing from AAA games - where developers are under scrutiny to be compliant with accepted trends.

[Dogg Thang]

Don't buy that for a second. Almost every decision could be deemed creative and that does not mean it is beyond scrutiny.

[Asura]

To be fair, Ubisoft could make a game set in modern day Nigeria and have all the characters as White, speak American English... and they still should not have to explain their creative decision.

Absolutely, and you're right; no law or rule requires that they explain that hypothetical situation. You can bet, though, that if that happened, people would comment/criticise that decision, and they'd have a point in doing so. So often with this debate, commenters say things like "I wish people would shut up about this", which is the other side of the coin. If they're allowed to make those creative decisions, people are allowed to criticise.

(not saying you're doing this; no-one here has said anything like that yet)

Apparently, it's illegal in France for goverment to gather data on ethnicity since the late 18th century which makes finding any numbers problematic. Still, I'd be willing to bet that during the French Revolution, the number of non-whites in the population was tiny in France and Europe in general.

You're right in that figures aren't easy to come across, so fair enough. We'll park this though, as we've went off on a bit of a tangent about race when this is about gender, and we do know that split.

Games have already decided to include more and more generic characters to appeal to the masses...

That's part of the point though - you consider "average build, male, stubble" as generic when it's actually a very specific kind of person. It's no less generic in the UK than "female, average build, brunette".

[Dogg Thang]

Technical Director James Therien said: "A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes [inaudible]. It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it's something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision."

Not seeing creative here. Not seeing artistic vision here. I'm seeing "girls are different and hard".