Ubisoft and Women

I’ve played the Assassin’s Creed series since the beginning. Ezio is my favourite, but Ezio is everyone’s favourite of course because he’s awesome. The Kenway/Connor period was interesting and a learning curve (damn wolves) but the Unity saga was the most interesting outside of game play. The story is now more interesting as years later we’re seeing some of the male management of Ubisoft having a real problem with women.

Unity was a buggy piece of junk when it launched, and the tacked on awful multiplayer was terrible. Worse still was the refusal on Ubisofts part to launch it with a playable female character in multi – and then their heel digging approach to people requesting one. Firstly, the French revolution famously had women involved at all levels of the resistance – facts shown in the game itself by Ubisoft in some of Unitys quests and backstories. Secondly, if fans really really want something in your game then your best interest is to try to put it in. Especially if it’s widely requested, not story breaking, and not difficult. Ubisoft is trying to make money, they’re not art or history purists by any stretch.

Fans weren’t asking for unity to be rewritten – they were asking for a character model of a woman to be added to the multiplayer options. There were several well animated female models in the game, because naturally France famously has women in it, they generally make up around half the population. Surely adding some climb animations, stab animations and an assassin’s hat to a random woman from the street wouldn’t have taken more than a month?

With revelations (see what I did there) now of Ubisoft having senior execs standing down over sexual harassment claims, I do wonder if the response to Unity’s sausage fest was more of a link to an internalised silent culture of undervaluing women. Either way, Ubisofts saving grace post-Unity came in Evie Frye although reports have come out that her strengths and screen time were both intentionally downplayed due to senior managements views of women. With later AC games having had playable leads of both genders (which I haven’t played yet) I’m interested to see just how they are portrayed against their ‘better halves’.

Carla “Ubisoft? more like Abstergo” Cravaliat.