Liberation’s Aveline showed how a woman could integrate into the game world

Mar 5, 2013 10:45 GMT  ·  By

The director working on the recently announced Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag believes that, in the coming years, a female character might be the protagonist of one of the core titles in the long-running Ubisoft series.

Ashraf Ismail tells IGN that “I would say it wouldn’t be surprising to see a female assassin coming up in a mainline Assassin’s Creed. From the pirate perspective, there were a few famous women pirates. But it wasn’t common. So we didn’t want that element to be a detail people got stuck on.”

He adds, “Really early on, we decided to tell the story of the Kenways. So we already had in place the idea to tell Edward, Haytham, and Connor. This was actually years ago, we had this. We actually never thought, ‘could this be a woman?’”

Traditionally, major video game series, from Halo to Gears of War to Call of Duty, have used males as protagonists because most of the audience can related to them and their heroics.

The comments coming from Ashraf Ismail are interesting because, recently, Ubisoft took a chance on a female character in the PlayStation Vita-bound Assassin’s Creed: Liberation.

Aveline is a black woman and the game was well written enough to get the team at Ubisoft an award from the Writers Guild of America.

The mechanics of the game were also solid and it managed to create an interesting self-contained experience that had little to do with the wider Assassin’s Creed universe.

Unfortunately, the relative limited popularity of the PlayStation Vita means that only a small number of players were exposed to Aveline and her adventures.

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag will be launched later during 2013 and will allow players to inhabit the body of Edward, the grandfather of Connor.

The entire experience is based around piracy and naval battles.