A little defense for Ubisoft for the female assassin discussion.

[sXeth]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this debate isn't about the main character, per see.
The story is set for a male and that is fine.
The problem is that when going multiplayer, the additional options for player two three and four are pallet swaps of the main character, but there is no option to switch to a female model.
This player Two character has no unique personality they have to come up with. It's just a avatar for player Two.

People want to be able to pick a female when they play multiplayer, the option should be there, it's not that hard.
(again, please correct me if I am wrong)

Personally, I always found it odd that Call of Duty and Battlefield didn't let me pick a female either.

Those aren't palette swaps of the main character, they are the main character.

Essentially, when you play co-op, everyone is the main character, with whichever robes/sword/etc they happen to have selected from clothing/gear options. So everyone is playing Arno, and sees their own Arno when they hit cutscenes and so on. Rather then Player 1 plays the hero, and players 2-4 play other characters. Its kind of an odd system, with some retro-logic (back when their was a premium on modelling, co-op player being a clone was basically the go-to).

Whoever made the statement fumbled it hardcore style, but there's some merit to what they said when you put it in context of how the MP works and the story integration as the OP here mentions. Essentially, there's no co-op characters of any sex/race/hair color/orientation/religion at all. The complaint that one of these non-existant characters isn't female (or whatever) is largely manufactured unless you place it alongside a complaint that there aren't multiple characters in the story to serve as avatars. When whichever Dev was asked, he apparently just translated a misunderstanding of the co-op's working into thinking they wanted an extra main character option. Which in context is, yes, a lot of work to make a second version of the story that considers the protagonist a female, not just in creating models/animation, but adjusting things like a potential family, and redoing dialogue to reflect the fact.

Yes, you can put a ponytail on the character, leave their backstory largely irrelevant, and let the player choose everything ingame, but that works much more poorly in writing a story-based "cinematic" game, then in an RPG like Mass effect or crazy sandbox like Saints Row.

 

[DoubleU12]

This is isn't about diverse characters. This is about you making it complicated to gender swap a character because "Women have very different priorities, wants, needs, concerns and means of dealing with problems than male characters." The reasons you have difficultly swapping character gender is because you needlessly gender traits and as per usual the examples in how men women are different involves women getting pathetic traits with their character development centred around showing weakness where guys have character development about proving themselves.

Fair enough, I also said that the tough girl crying was only 1 example and there is nothing wrong with a strong girl that has weak moments every now and then, there is nothing wrong with a strong male character having weak moments and crying. I'm not saying that makes her a weak character and I never mentioned traits that demonstrated weakness or traits that strengthen a male characters and if I did then I suppose we have a different ideas of what makes a character strong and another weak. I don't see a girl who likes flowers weak and a boy who likes cars strong. Likewise I said several times it is effortless to swap gender roles, and that works but if that is just as much an arch-type as anything else we've talked about.

I also gave an example of a girl who wants to be a pokemon master vs her wanting to be a pokemon coordinator but you didn't comment on that.

All I'm saying is plainly this. I agree, Gender Neutral is totally fine, nothing wrong with that at all. It works in several situations but there are qualities more real women relate with than real men and in those situations yes I'd call them feminine qualities and portraying a female characters with feminine qualities and male characters with masculine qualities is fine and can strengthen a character just as much as giving a female character masculine qualities or a male feminine qualities.

But if we can't agree on that then there is not much to both our points of view is there? ^_^

 

[Angelblaze]

Basically, op, you aren't one of the world's richest gaming developers with a studio of trained professionals, handling one of the best selling series of all time.

So no, that is not a defense.

And I'd like to note that the real controversy wasn't 'we have no female character', it was 'blah blah blah costs too much' and then the *model developers themselves* said that was stupid.

 

[Dragonbums]

Basically, op, you aren't one of the world's richest gaming developers with a studio of trained professionals, handling one of the best selling series of all time.

So no, that is not a defense.

And I'd like to note that the real controversy wasn't 'we have no female character', it was 'blah blah blah costs too much' and then the *model developers themselves* said that was stupid.

I would even like to add to that that apparently there were even staff within Ubisoft themselves that said it was full of shit.

Honestly, the very moment other game developers of pretty high status called Ubisoft out on their shit ass excuse there should be very few people even defending Ubisoft anymore.

Even Sunset Overdrive dev teams recently smacked them around by adding a playable female assasin in their game.