‘Far Cry 4’ Females Missing … Is Ubisoft Showing A Trend, Or Are We Reading Too Much Into It?
Far Cry 4 females are proving to be just as absent as women in Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and it’s leading some to speculate disturbing things about Ubisoft. Accusations are flooding in that Ubisoft’s latest wave of new and upcoming releases are showing signs of sexism and racism.
Are they intentionally keeping white male characters as heroes and main villains, or are we reading too much into the whole matter? Some might even wonder why Ubisoft is being targeted in this latest public attack.
It may just be that Ubisoft has a lot of new games being developed and they simply didn’t think about diversity in their games’ cast. These kinds of things could happen when companies like Ubisoft spread themselves too thin. Is it going to take a new all-female title with nothing but African American, Hispanic, and Asian supporting characters in the protagonist’s corner to get Ubisoft out of this proverbial hot water?
The lack of Far Cry 4 females, mirroring their other big announcements and releases lately, spawned yet another response from Ubisoft director Alex Hutchinson:
“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. And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude.
“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.”
The lack of females in Far Cry 4 apparently came down to time restraints.
AC:Unity isn’t the only Ubisoft game w/o women b/c “too much work”, they’re trying that excuse re: Far Cry 4, too! http://t.co/mbtl82RxfH
— Michi Trota (@GeekMelange) June 12, 2014
It is true that switching a male out for a female requires more than just one of the classic Mortal Kombat style palette swaps. Women move differently, usually wear different clothing, and definitely sound different. It’s basic biology. Ubisoft really wanted to put women into their latest games, but as they claimed, there simply wasn’t enough time without a serious delay like the one that almost killed Watch Dogs.
Could Ubisoft be planning their next wave to include more women and diversity in response to the lack of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Far Cry 4 females? Perhaps the public just needs to calm down and realize that not every big game is going to have a diverse cast?
[image via vg247]
