14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has continued talking about the chances of seeing women as protagonists or characters in its games, this time saying that it was close to having a female cooperative hero but, due to the workload on the team, it wasn't able to introduce it into the game.
Ubisoft got some negative attention yesterday when it revealed that, due to the lack of time, it wasn't able to introduce female characters into the upcoming Assassin's Creed Unity, which allows for up to four male heroes to go on adventures in Paris.
Now, Far Cry 4 Director Alex Hutchinson has revealed to Polygon that a similar issue also affected the upcoming first-person shooter, as the studio was close to implementing a female cooperative character in the game, alongside the existing male one.
"It's really depressing because we almost... we were inches away from having you be able to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy when you invite someone in. And it was purely a workload issue because we don't have a female reading for the character, we don't have all the animations," he explained.
"And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude."
However, Hutchinson emphasizes that, in the future, these problems will go away, apparently, as the team will start coming to grips with the technologies and mechanics it uses, in order to easily produce and animate male and female characters.
"So unfortunately for this one, no, but I can guarantee you that in the future, moving forward, this sort of stuff will go away. As we get better technology and we plan for it in advance and we don't have a history on one rig and all this sort of stuff. We had very strong voices on the team pushing for that and I really wanted to do it, we just couldn't squeeze it in in time."
"But on the other hand we managed to get more of the other story characters to be women. We did our best. It's frustrating for us as it is for everybody else, so it's not a big switch that you can just pull and get it done."
Once again, the workload excuse might draw in criticism, especially since Ubisoft's current practice of pooling together the resources of studios from around the world ensures that games and their features get produced as fast as possible.
Far Cry 4 launches this November for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.