14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed Unity, the next iteration in its hugely successful series, won't have female assassins in its new four-player cooperative mode because it would've required extra work in terms of animations, costumes, and more.
Assassin's Creed Unity is the first next-gen-only installment in Ubisoft's action adventure series and it's going to debut this October for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Quite a lot of new details have appeared at E3 2014 from Ubisoft about the game, including the confirmation that the story mode supports up to four players, thanks to the new cooperative mechanic. As we saw in the live gameplay demonstration and the cinematic video, all four characters are male assassins.
Over the years, Ubisoft added plenty of female characters to the multiplayer mode and even had one female protagonist for Assassin's Creed Liberation.
However, in Unity, there will be no female playable characters, as, according to Technical Director James Therien, it would have meant lots of extra work.
"It was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it's a question of focus and production," Therien told Videogamer. "So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes."
"It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it's something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision... It's unfortunate, but it's a reality of game development."
The explanation provided by Therein is a bit awkward, considering Assassin's Creed Unity has been in development for some time now and Ubisoft has a whopping nine studios working together on different parts of the game.
The representative clarified this join effort as well, saying that all the studios are busy with important aspects of the game and couldn't have focused on building female characters.
"Again, it's not a question of philosophy or choice in this case at all. I don't really [think] it was a question of focus and a question of production. Yes, we have tons of resources, but we're putting them into this game, and we have huge teams, nine studios working on this game and we need all of these people to make what we are doing here."
Assassin's Creed Unity is set to debut on October 27 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.