Ubisoft says no girls.

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frigidmagi
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#1 Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by frigidmagi »

Let's start with the annoucement that having a female character in Farcry 4 is just to hard.
Far Cry 4 was "inches away" from having the option for players to select either a man or a woman as a playable co-op character, director Alex Hutchinson told Polygon.

The Far Cry series has never had a playable woman lead. When asked if he thought a woman protagonist would work in Ubisoft's brazen and oftentimes violent open-world shooter series, Hutchinson said that yes, it could work - and it should already be working.

Ubisoft Montreal had come very close to making it so players could select the game's co-op character as man or woman.

"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.


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Far Cry 4 was "inches away" from having the option for players to select either a man or a woman as a playable co-op character, director Alex Hutchinson told Polygon.

The Far Cry series has never had a playable woman lead. When asked if he thought a woman protagonist would work in Ubisoft's brazen and oftentimes violent open-world shooter series, Hutchinson said that yes, it could work - and it should already be working.

Ubisoft Montreal had come very close to making it so players could select the game's co-op character as man or woman.

"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.



"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."

Yesterday, Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio that Ubisoft dropped women characters for Assassins' Creed Unity's four-player co-op because of workload pressures during production.

"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."

"We started, but we had to drop it," said level designer Bruno St. Andre in a separete interview. "I cannot speak for the future of the brand, but it was dear to the production team, so you can expect that it will happen eventually in the brand."

Earlier today, Naughty Dog animator and former Assasin's Creed 3 animation director Jonathan Cooper told us that animating a woman character should take "a day or two's work," instead of what St. Andre said required the replacement of more than 8,000 animations to do so. Cooper said that male animations could still work on a female form.

"I think what you want to do is just replace a handful of animations," Cooper said. "Key animations. We target all the male animations onto the female character and just give her her own unique walks, runs, anything that can give character."
Rebuttal.

I'd like to point out Nintendo is basically throwing female characters into every title they'll think the ladies will fit into. We got smaller companies pulling it off without any problems and bluntly, recent demographic data on video game play suggests that girls are now 48% of the market. 48%. That's worth a day or two or extra work isn't it?

But hey, in Watch Dogs you get an iconic baseball cap. Nothing wrong with Watch Dogs right?
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#2 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Hotfoot »

Technically, Far Cry 2 let you play as a woman, it just had so little to do with the actual plot that it didn't really matter.
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#3 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Lys »

It's kind of sad that the only female first person shooter protagonist I can name off the top of my head is Joanna Dark, from Perfect Dark, a 14 year old game. This isn't even some obscure game, it was the best FPS of its generation (and I would argue the next), and remains one of the best of all time, and yet it remains an exception.
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#4 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Hotfoot »

As far as Shooter Protagonists, yeah, the list is absurdly small relative to the number of game produced.

You've got, off the top of my head:

Alice from American McGee
Joanna Dark from Perfect Dark
Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever
Samus Aran from Metroid Prime
Some character options from Far Cry 2
Mara Jade from Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight Mysteries of the Sith Expansion Campaign
Character options from Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Character options from Mass Effect
Chelle from Portal
Faith from Mirror's Edge
Character options from Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines
Bloodrayne from...well...Bloodrayne
Lara Croft from Tomb Raider (I'm counting the most recent one because there was more shooting in this one than most. I think. Whatever, we're about to hit the bottom of the barrel here).
Character options from Fallout 3/New Vegas
Rainbow Six series (multiple characters)

Now, that almost extends my limits of off the cuff knowledge of female protagonists in shooter games, beyond here I would have to go and actually do research, but there is one more that it shames me to admit I know. Fuck I wish I could forget this game existed.

Julie from Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2

This one shouldn't even fucking count, but if we let in Bloodrayne, I guess this one has to come along for the ride.

Meanwhile, many of those games give you the option of playing as a woman, but for many it doesn't matter, it just doesn't. Far Cry 2, for instance, it doesn't really matter WHO you pick. Same with Rainbow Six. Hell, in that game you're not really "playing" as anyone, so fuck it.

Expand things out to other types of games, like platformers, action, adventure, RPG, and so forth, and the numbers improve a little, but not by much. So there are games that allow for it, but they're not many in comparison to the glut of other games in the same genres.
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#5 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Lys »

I could have named more off the top of my head (by which I meant without thinking about it) if I had included non-first person shooters. Jennifer Mui, one of the three playable characters from the two Mercenaries games, stands out in particular. Mostly because I'm actually playing as her in the second game right now. World in Flames is in general pretty good about female characters. Half the merc's support staff are women, as are both of your primary employers in the first half of the game: the oil company executive and the guerrilla leader. Additionally, a noticeable portion of the guerrillas are female, which is actually realistic. Not bad for a silly game about running around blowing things up.

One notable example within the FPS genre that I forgot and shouldn't have, given how much I played the damn game, is Dead Island. In the original game two of the four playable characters are female. It was actually a pretty good example of having decent female character options, in that all characters have their own unique play style. Also, the team leader is a woman, which I thought was neat. It made sense too, because she's an experienced police officer, whereas the others are an inexperienced police officer, a football player, and a rapper.

But yeah, overall, the list is damn small. Which is a pity because a fair number of the examples available are actually pretty well done.
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#6 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by frigidmagi »

Has a side note, I find the amount of demographic data completely awful. No one seems to be wanting to track amount of time spent, or types of game played by age, race, economic status, or gender and what data I can find is gathered in a completely unprofessional way. One was a series of questions asked to attenders at E3!
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#7 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Hotfoot »

Huh, I was wrong about Far Cry 2, never mind.
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#8 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by General Havoc »

I can see why they didn't add a female protagonist into Farcry 4 at the last minute. Adding things at the last minute is difficult. Perhaps then the answer is to make the game with the female protagonist BEFORE the last minute, and not leave female characters as an afterthought.

I'm the guy least likely to white knight in the world, but this trend is even starting to piss me off. I played a hundred and eighty hours of Mass Effect with a female Shepard without hesitation because I liked the voice actor better, and cannot now envision Shepard as anything but female, to the point where I have to remember to leave her out of lists of female game protagonists, as most people played Male Shepard. Does Ubisoft really think that the prospect of playing a woman who guns down hundreds of whatevers with rocket launchers and machine guns is going to drive me off the game? Have any of you honestly ever met someone who wouldn't play a game because the character was female?

The end-stage of the development process is far too late to add anything, let alone another protagonist. Don't tell me that an afterthought was the best you could do here, Ubisoft. Even if you had managed to add a female co-op character in, the fact that it came last on your nice-to-have list speaks volumes enough.
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#9 Re: Ubisoft says no girls.

Post by Steve »

Ah, another who considered Jen Hale better than Mark Meer.

Though to be fair to Meer, by ME3 he was damn good and holds his own as MaleShep.

As for the OP... I have nothing to add but to agree that it's stupid they couldn't.
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