Assassin’s Creed 5: Female Assassin Like Charlotte Corday Would Make The French Revolution Real For AC5

For Assassin’s Creed 5, a female assassin like Charlotte Corday would have made perfect sense from a historical plot perspective, and would have made the French Revolution seem more real. So why did Ubisoft choose to stick with all male assassins?

In a related report by The Inquisitr, the reason Ubisoft claims that female assassins were left out of Assassin’s Creed: Unity was because it supposedly would have been too much work. The new game Sunset Overdrive by Insomniac even made fun of Ubisoft by putting a female assassin into the game that heavily resembles the hooded figures of the other franchise.

Now, way before we knew for certain the French Revolution would be the Assassin’s Creed 5 location, I wrote that a strong female lead could help combat the perception of sexism in games. But the other reason I made the suggestion is because the previous plot points have hinted that a female character may be pivotal to the story:

“The story Ubisoft has been telling also has strongly hinted that a female lead character may play an important role. An “Eve” character has been mentioned since the games featuring Ezio, although the hidden video from AC 1 showed Adam and Eve racing to grab hold of the apple. Clay Kaczmarek, or Subject 16, originally told Desmond to ‘Find Eve… In Eden… The key… her DNA.’ The Eve character was mentioned in Liberation again when Aveline played a recording which mentioned that ‘Eve will lead us through the war of generations.'”

Escapist magazine has already done an excellent job of listing the historical reason for why the French Revolution should have women be prominent in Assassin’s Creed: Unity. The most obvious fact is that a bread price riot caused thousands of women to march upon Louis XVI’s palace and led to the King’s capture and the signing of several important documents. Worse, when it comes to actual history, the most prominent real assassin during the French Revolution was a woman:

“Charlotte Corday was the daughter of a minor noble and allied with the moderate Girondist faction. Alarmed by increasing Jacobin radicalism and support for massacres, Corday resolved to murder the man she deemed responsible: the journalist Jean-Paul Marat. More than a mere writer, Marat’s paper The Voice of the People served as a mouthpiece for the most extreme Jacobin faction, and advocated violence against ‘enemies of republicanism’ like the moderate Girondists. On 13th July, 1793 Charlotte Corday went to Marat’s home claiming that she wanted to expose a Girondist plot. Marat met her in his usual workspace – taking notes while soaking in a bathtub to alleviate a painful skin disease. The position made him especially vulnerable, and Corday stabbed him thrice in the heart.”

No hidden blade necessary. Of course, Corday ended up dying by the guillotine, so perhaps Ubisoft legitimately wanted to avoid focusing on a main character that then is killed in real life. The plot also depends on which historical figures they intend on transforming into Templars, and which group in the French Revolution they decide to call the “good guys.”

Regardless, Patrice Desilets, the game designer for the first Assassin’s Creed, told Polygon that Ubisoft should have taken the effort to make female assassins a centerpiece of Assassins’s Creed 5:

“It’s true. If you do a big giant character and a small character, or a woman and a guy, it’s different. But that shouldn’t stop you. With all the time, money and people on that project, you could’ve done it. You know what would have been really awesome? Four women. Then people would be like, ‘Wow, they’ve got big balls.’ Imagine four girls. It would have been really a strong message of what Assassin’s Creed Unity is about.”

Do you think the main character in Assassin’s Creed: Unity should have been a woman?