Patrice Desilets, former Assassin’s Creed game designer quite firmly believes that Ubisoft should have invested the time and effort to give players the choice to play as a woman in Assassin’s Creed Unity, an aspect that Ubisoft opted out of due to “the reality of production.”
At E3 this week, Unity creative director Alex Amancio told why the cooperative multiplayer game features four versions of protagonist Arno and why the developer excluded the option to play as a female assassin.
“It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets,” Amancio said. “Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”
Desilets in an interview told Polygon that Amancio’s reason was only valid to some extent, agreeing that it would create extra work he felt that Ubisoft should put in the effort to let players have gender options.
“It’s true. If you do a big giant character and a small character, or a woman and a guy, it’s different,” Desilets said. “But that shouldn’t stop you. With all the time, money and people on that project, you could’ve done it.”
“You know what would have been really awesome? Four women,” he continued. “Then people would be like, ‘Wow, they’ve got big balls.’ Imagine four girls. It would have been really a strong message of what Assassin’s Creed Unity is about.”
Desilets, feels that Ubisoft is only offering their games to a certain audience by keeping the gender option closed. He informs decisions like the choice to prioritize male avatars over offering gender options.
“They always try to sell the same thing,” he said, referencing the commercial underperformance of female-led games like Remember Me as cited evidence for why certain games don’t sell well. “So it’s easy to win the argument: ‘See, that’s the only thing that sells’ — because that’s the only thing to buy.
“That’s why the game that I’m designing, I’m giving control back to the player,” he said. “Which gender do you want to play? Let’s start there.”
