Why I personally am upset with Ubisoft about AC: Unity

[Casual Shinji]

Resident Evil pulled it off, and that was ten years ago. I refuse to believe that this billion-dollar corporation can't shill out enough for a female character. When Mitt Romney walks down the street and a hobo asks him for change, does he try to convince the hobo that he doesn't have anything on him?

That was a small cast of characters in a mansion. And I doubt the length of that game was as long as an Assassin's Creed game can usually be. And again, Resident Evil is not too famous for it's terrific storytelling and well-written characters.

I recognize that "gamers" who want a "cinematic experience" are simply fedora tipping, pretentious clowns who will be satisfied with anything that bangs the Dear Esther/Gone Home/Heavy Rain drum.

Wow, way to show you're judgemental side there, my friend. After all, people who like a cinematic experience in their games want only that and nothing else, right? God forbid people can like story-first games and gameplay focused ones.

 

[Gankytim]

I recognize that "gamers" who want a "cinematic experience" are simply fedora tipping, pretentious clowns who will be satisfied with anything that bangs the Dear Esther/Gone Home/Heavy Rain drum.

Wow, way to show you're judgemental side there, my friend. After all, people who like a cinematic experience in their games want only that and nothing else, right? God forbid people can like story-first games and gameplay focused ones.

Oh no, don't be mistaken. It was merely to prove a point.

He can be smug? So can I.

Just throw the shoe onto the other foot, it's the only way some people learn.

 

[CrazyBlaze]

Also a crouch button.

hold it... the 7th main entry into the series, and they're finally adding in my biggest gripe with the franchise?

if you're not shitting me, you are the first person to make me even remotely interested in AC:U!

Shortly after the three minute mark.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

What happened to people who wanted to play fun games?

I don't care who the character is, could be Bayonetta, could be Spyro, could be Dante, doesn't fucking matter as long as the game is fucking good. Fuck narrative, fuck story, fuck that cancerous "cinematic experience" attitude. GAMEPLAY should be the top priority, shit like avatars and characters should take a back seat.

And I already know what's gonna follow, that tired and smug "Oh so you don't want games to grow and mature?" or "Games aren't your cis, het, white, ablest, gender binary, restroom inequality, [insert every other SJW "I WIN THIS ARGUMENT" buzzword here] toys anymore" argument.

Setting and narrative can really affect your fun. Shooting demons is fun, but shooting gray cubes is less fun. Context, setting and narrative really do matter. This goes x2 for AC. The series is more or less an game that lets you play historical tourist well stabbing people.

Wow, you're the first person to actually throw a good, non-fallacy ridden argument at me in this debate. Seriously, good show.

I'll agree that context is important, but no matter how good and well made the setting and story is, it doesn't change the fact that a unfun game won't make a lasting impact.

Example 1: The story of Metal Gear Rising takes an obvious back seat, but the game is so fun you're distracted from the glaring plothole that is Raiden's mere presence, the game stands on its own two feet and its noticably weak narrative is rarely adressed.

Example 2: Heavy Rain has VERY little focus on gameplay, it's at least 85% story. What's left? There's nothing really challenging or fun for the player to come back to. No matter how good Heavy Rains narrative is, it still isn't a good game.

Assassins Creed has very big presence of setting and atmosphere, I wont deny that. When a new Assassins Creed is announced the big question is "What historical period?" and yes, I will even agree that maybe in a setting like the french revoloution, females might need a large role even if just for the sake of historical accuracy. But the bottom line is, no matter how good and immersive the setting it, if the stabbing of historical figures isn't fun I'll probably end up shelving it and never coming back to it.

I hope they do the gameplay good, but I only hope. The gameplay in AC has been rather stagnate and i think that is why people aren't really talking about it. We kind of know what it will be. The gameplay demo didn't even have any real surprises except for lockpicking and environmental interiors. (I am mildly excited about the second one.)

 

[Casual Shinji]

Wow, way to show you're judgemental side there, my friend. After all, people who like a cinematic experience in their games want only that and nothing else, right? God forbid people can like story-first games and gameplay focused ones.

Oh no, don't be mistaken. It was merely to prove a point.

He can be smug and make generaliztions? So can I.

Just throw the shoe onto the other foot, it's the only way some people learn.

How was he generalizing? He simply stated that there's more than enough people who do like story, narrative, cinematic experience, character designs etc. And that different people have different preferences. That's not generalizing or in any way an insult.

 

[suitepee7]

Also a crouch button.

hold it... the 7th main entry into the series, and they're finally adding in my biggest gripe with the franchise?

if you're not shitting me, you are the first person to make me even remotely interested in AC:U!

Shortly after the three minute mark.

wow, hadn't seen that video, the stealth in an assassins creed game actually looks decent for once! thanks for enlightening me and finding the vid ^^

 

[T_ConX]

The whole 'No female PCs thing in ACV' thing just seems so petty to me. It just seems like there's so much reactionary misinformation getting thrown around.

The best part of the controversy was finding out that every game critic and journalist knows much more about both game design AND the French Revolution than the BILLION DOLLARS IN YEARLY REVENUE VIDEO GAME PUBLISHER that is BASED IN FRANCE. Sorry guys, but that's kind of a tough sell. The Ubisoft corporate HQ is a half hour drive from the public square where King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were executed. The Bastille is 15 minutes away.

Game design is a complicated process. They probably made some estimations about how much work it would take to make a fully playable female character for the co-op, and decided that there wasn't any way to pull it off without cutting other features. It's a lot more than just animating; they would have to rework every customization item, rewrite and re-record dialog, and then run all this through quality assurance. It's a sizable workload.

"But... Ubisoft has 73 different studios working on this game! They could have done something!"

I know a lot of folks have made the argument that Ubisoft seems to have nearly unlimited resources, but that's just not true. It is true that a number of studios are working on AC5, but many of those studios are relatively small compared to the Montreal studio, and all of them have also been invested on other projects, from AAA titles like FarCry 4 and the new Rainbow Six. Hell, some are probably working on AC6 already, if not AC7. Ubisoft is dedicated to putting out a new Assassins Creed game every year, so there's not a lot of breathing room in their development cycles.

"But... Charlotte Corday!"

Killed a unarmed and naked man who was suffering from Duhring's disease in his bathtub, and executed four days later. Not much of a game there.

If the lack of playable females is enough to keep you from buying AC5, then that's your right. It's your responsibility as a consumer to vote with your dollars. That said, while I'd love to see a female lead in a major AC title, I'm just not put off enough by this fiasco to sit ACV. I did enjoy Liberation a whole bunch, (it's a little on the short side, but it's free of much of the bloat that I thought ruined III) despite the main character not having the same genitals (or skin color) as me, so I'd like to believe I'm more open to playing as a character that looks different from me than the 'FUCK YOU UBISOFT FOR THINK THAT ANIMATING WOMYN IS HARD!' crowd... Which is a nice warm feeling...

Anyway, time to actually play video games. I'm just starting to get the hang of Lightning Returns...

 

[Depulcator]

The gender/ skin color means NOTHING, as long as the game is fun to play, but this seems to be a thread that's gonna pop up for every AAA game until it screams itself silent.

 

[Rebel_Raven]

I'm mad because Ubisoft dangled some hope in front of me, then said it was too hard, and threw their plans out the window, and ABANDONED THEIR VISION, like all the people complaining bitterly that adding women in would make people do.
It reeks of hypocrisy, by the way, that the people supporting artistic vision for not including women as playable characters don't seem to think there's anything wrong when it's women being excluded despite artistic vision. Especially when they only defend the exclusion of women.

If they'd have kept their yaps shut about AC Unity, and Farcry 4, (both falling in the same category of "it's too hard!") I probably would've quietly just ignored those games, and been a bit grateful for AC Liberation, and Child of Light.

I'm in a "what have you done for me lately" kind of mind set with the industry, (You can thank the people expecting games from the 80's, and 90's to remain relevant.) and Ubisoft, for all their might, and power, and talk, screwed up.

It's not even like they hadn't pulled this before. I.E. Farcry 2.

And, yes, I give a damn about the gender of my played character. I used to not, but you can thank the crap the industry started doing for changing that in creating a void of playable women, and trying to bandage it with useless bs excuses that just stopped sticking.

If it weren't for other parts of the industry getting their heads out of their asses, I'd be a lot angrier than I am now. Gaming is how I release stress, and this gender politics getting in the way of me playing a female characters just really interferes with it, nevermind the artistic freedom of developers.

 

[Lilani]

Huh?

Wouldn't that be like me getting upset with Bethesda because they keep making open world games, but I prefer more linear games with better pacing?

Damn it Bethesda, I'm a customer expressing a desire for a product and you're failing to provide!

Are you saying that the most vital core element of Ubisoft games is their specialization in male player-characters? That THAT is the one thing that makes Ubisoft, Ubisoft?

 

[Dalisclock]

Huh?

Wouldn't that be like me getting upset with Bethesda because they keep making open world games, but I prefer more linear games with better pacing?

Damn it Bethesda, I'm a customer expressing a desire for a product and you're failing to provide!

Are you saying that the most vital core element of Ubisoft games is their specialization in male player-characters? That THAT is the one thing that makes Ubisoft, Ubisoft?

Not that I don't care about the Female representation issue, but right now my biggest gripe with ubisoft with the perpetual forced POS that is Uplay.

Once they scrap that particular piece of dead weight, I'll worry more about not being able to play a female in single-player(I personally don't give a shit about co-op or mutiplayer. Never have and probably never will).

Captcha, uplay needs to die in a fire, not Fade Away. Thanks for the solidarity, though.

 

[Eddie the head]

Huh?

Wouldn't that be like me getting upset with Bethesda because they keep making open world games, but I prefer more linear games with better pacing?

Damn it Bethesda, I'm a customer expressing a desire for a product and you're failing to provide!

Are you saying that the most vital core element of Ubisoft games is their specialization in male player-characters? That THAT is the one thing that makes Ubisoft, Ubisoft?

Nope. So? It's still the game Ubisoft wanted to make. Whether it's a big aspect of the game or not isn't the issue. It's still an aspect of the game.

 

[Evil mr dave]

Snippity snap

While I think your raising a good point about the number of hansom white dudes that have been the protagonists of the AC games I take issue with it for two reasons:

1. This is there story. Ubisoft is making the game, they are writing the story, and if the story that they want to tell means that some Italian douche is the protagonist then that's all she wrote. Trying to shoehorn in changes after the fact would just be awkward and unnecessary and I would probably call them a bunch of of panderers. If when they decide to jump the Shark story forward to modern times and do the inevitable story about Hitler being a Templar and Churchill being the Assassins secret leader, then it would make sense to have a female protagonist. Or better yet they could actually make Stalin and the Communists the Templar's and have a story that revolves around an assassins controlled OSS/SOG during the Cold War although I think this is a discussion for another thread, more bitchin thread.

2. Good intentions balanced by wrong reasoning. I'm going to need an analogy for this. So in Winnipeg, Canada, there's this woman who wants to raise awareness about the health of lake Winnipeg by walking all around it (its about 25% bigger then Israel) because the lake has a spirit that needs defending. Now, making sure that our water is safe and pollution free is a huge deal, especially in Canada because we have such a huge amount of the worlds non-Glacial fresh water, but doing it to defend spirits is wrong when there are so many real reasons to defend it. You see, good intentions for the wrong reasons. In your case, you shouldn't be asking "why come we don't have any Female protagonists?" when you should be asking "Why come we don't have any Female Antagonists?". Seriously, there have been an embarrassing number of these games and a cursory examination of the AC wiki shows me that you only stab, like, five chicks in all of them. Combined.

 

[The_Darkness]

I also like playing as a female character. Heck, the new Tomb Raider was probably my favourite game of 2013 (for a variety of reasons, but a well done female protagonist was one of them). So you're not alone OP.

As for AC: Unity - Ubisoft has justified it by saying that it's the same drop-in multiplayer that Watch_Dogs employs - all players see themselves as the main character (Arno, I think his name is). This is done for the sake of immersion. The thing is... I'd prefer 3 new co-op characters to the "everyone is the same person" thing that they have going, even if it does break the immersion slightly when you transition from SP to MP. And if they went that route, they'd really have no excuse for one or two of those co-op characters being female.

So... yeah. I personally dislike a few of the decisions that Ubisoft has made about their multiplayer, with the resultant "no female characters" thing being one of them.

Then again, I'm probably not going to pick up AC:U anyway. I've yet to see anything about it that really grabs me.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I also like playing as a female character. Heck, the new Tomb Raider was probably my favourite game of 2013 (for a variety of reasons, but a well done female protagonist was one of them). So you're not alone OP.

As for AC: Unity - Ubisoft has justified it by saying that it's the same drop-in multiplayer that Watch_Dogs employs - all players see themselves as the main character (Arno, I think his name is). This is done for the sake of immersion. The thing is... I'd prefer 3 new co-op characters to the "everyone is the same person" thing that they have going, even if it does break the immersion slightly when you transition from SP to MP. And if they went that route, they'd really have no excuse for one or two of those co-op characters being female.

So... yeah. I personally dislike a few of the decisions that Ubisoft has made about their multiplayer, with the resultant "no female characters" thing being one of them.

Then again, I'm probably not going to pick up AC:U anyway. I've yet to see anything about it that really grabs me.

Wouldn't the immersion be hurt by seeing 4 of the same person?

 

[The_Darkness]

I also like playing as a female character. Heck, the new Tomb Raider was probably my favourite game of 2013 (for a variety of reasons, but a well done female protagonist was one of them). So you're not alone OP.

As for AC: Unity - Ubisoft has justified it by saying that it's the same drop-in multiplayer that Watch_Dogs employs - all players see themselves as the main character (Arno, I think his name is). This is done for the sake of immersion. The thing is... I'd prefer 3 new co-op characters to the "everyone is the same person" thing that they have going, even if it does break the immersion slightly when you transition from SP to MP. And if they went that route, they'd really have no excuse for one or two of those co-op characters being female.

So... yeah. I personally dislike a few of the decisions that Ubisoft has made about their multiplayer, with the resultant "no female characters" thing being one of them.

Then again, I'm probably not going to pick up AC:U anyway. I've yet to see anything about it that really grabs me.

Wouldn't the immersion be hurt by seeing 4 of the same person?

They have slightly different coloured robes and facial hair as far as other players are concerned. But... well, to an extent, yeah. That's another reason I dislike it.

 

[Zhukov]

Huh?

Wouldn't that be like me getting upset with Bethesda because they keep making open world games, but I prefer more linear games with better pacing?

Damn it Bethesda, I'm a customer expressing a desire for a product and you're failing to provide!

Are you saying that the most vital core element of Ubisoft games is their specialization in male player-characters? That THAT is the one thing that makes Ubisoft, Ubisoft?

Something can be an aspect of a thing without being the defining aspect of the thing.

Apparently an aspect of AC:U is that it stars a white dude named Arno.

Actually expecting or demanding that to change at this late stage of development for no other reason than "I want it to" is, to my eyes, a bit silly.

Like I said in another post, saying that you'd like to see a chick at the helm of the next AC game, or the one after that depending on how their development cycles work, would be a much more reasonable and practical request.