“Assassin’s Creed: Unity” might be featuring a female assassin in the latest Ubisoft title.
During a new making-of video posted by IGN, Ubisoft’s developers spoke about the next-gen technology used to animate AC: Unity. Around the 7:40 mark, the above image of an alleged female assassin was showcased.
The significance of adding a female character comes from the backlash Ubisoft faced after an executive claimed it was too much extra work to animate female assassins for their four-player co-op experience.
Polygon interviewed Ubisoft Creative Director Alex Amancio during the studio’s E3 2014 appearance back in June. Amancio claimed the studio would need to use additional resources to create the customizable female characters. There are reportedly more than 8,000 animations used to create a male assassin.
"It's double the animations, it's double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets," Amancio said. "Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work."
"Because of that, the common denominator was Arno," Amancio added. "It's not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar."
Amancio’s comments were questions by fans and former Ubisoft employees. Former "Assassin's Creed" Animation Designer Jonathan Cooper took to his Twitter account to call out Amancio’s claims.
"In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two's work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations," Cooper said on Twitter. "…Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone at Ubisoft tried to bullsh** me on animation tech.”
Ubisoft released the following statement regarding the backlash from Amancio’s comments about female assassins:
We recognize the valid concern around diversity in video game narrative. Assassin's Creed is developed by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs and we hope this attention to diversity is reflected in the settings of our games and our characters.
Assassin's Creed Unity is focused on the story of the lead character, Arno. Whether playing by yourself or with the co-op Shared Experiences, you the gamer will always be playing as Arno, complete with his broad range of gear and skill sets that will make you feel unique.
With regard to diversity in our playable Assassins, we've featured Aveline, Connor, Adewale and Altair in Assassin's Creed games and we continue to look at showcasing diverse characters. We look forward to introducing you to some of the strong female characters in Assassin's Creed Unity.
"Assassin's Creed: Unity" will be released to the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on Oct. 28.
