Honestly the weirdest thing about the gender thing is that we've had playable female characters in AC multiplayer in previous games. It's not like it would've been some new thing for the series and we're not getting it, it's that it's a feature that existed previously that now does not, I guess?
...granted, if every player is going to see themselves as the main protagonist anyway, I can't really see why anyone is too concerned.
Personally, I though it a weird choice, since the notable assassin of the era was female (Charlotte Corday), and militant female activist groups played a fairly important role in the counter revolutionary movement.
1. Watch Dogs is viewed as being sexist
2. Assassins Creed cuts female co-op character(s)
3. Farcry 4 cut playable female character(s)
4. Rainbow Six gameplay demo was a "save the damsel in distress" mission
1. Watch Dogs is viewed as being sexist
2. Assassins Creed cuts female co-op character(s)
3. Farcry 4 cut playable female character(s)
4. Rainbow Six gameplay demo was a "save the damsel in distress" mission
Polygon clickbait, they're just as bad as Kotaku now.
1.What is sexist about Watch Dogs, what part about Watch Dogs is actively sexist, that you play as a guy?
2. This is shitty but they gave their reason, hopefully they plan better next time.
3. This is also really shitty but again they gave their reason and said they would do better.
4. Fucking really? A hostage rescue is now a damsel in distress scenario?
1. A common complaint I've see about Watch Dogs, "Women Are Just Victims And Plot Points"
“Female characters in Watch Dogs are victims, to be kidnapped or murdered in the interest of plot or character motivation and are almost all overtly sexualized. Black characters fall into two camps – the aforementioned victims, or, just as maddeningly, criminals.
2-3. It's kinda interesting both happened at the same time and initially they wanted female playable characters, I'm curious how much it was the developers choice and how much was publisher pressure.
4. It was just a teaser, but if every hostage in the game was female, and there was no playable female characters, people would take offense.
On the other hand: let's give it to Ubi to be the only one avoiding the safe bet of using their CEO or someone else high up the ranks to do the press conference (usually white male) and instead go with Aisha "Lana" Tyler, who is as different for such an event as you can get without turning into Konami 2010.
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,"
I'm no animator but...
Motion capture, rigging, skinning, facial animation, etc etc... 2 days work?... hmm, at that rate Last of Us must of had a turnaround of about 3 months to complete the entire game... ;P
He's either lying or he's been misquoted. Nobody with any game development experience would ever say that.
I don't get why that guy would step forward and become the voice behind this particular crusade. I'm guessing he left on fairly bad terms and is lashing out.
He was responding to this line from a Polygon article:
Speaking with Polygon during a different interview, level designer Bruno St. Andre estimated more than 8,000 animations would have had to be recreated on a different skeleton.
Daniel Lim @asphaltOnline11. Juni@GameAnim Yeah, I was thinking about that. Does that androgyny apply to cutscenes as well? Don't know if they capped separate ones for ...
The discussion goes on but that was the jist of what he meant by that, he is not saying you can turn 8000 around, just that for the difference between male and female only a smaller amount are actually differeing in stance and motion, most are kept gender neutral.
yeah, essentially someone at Ubi tried to play firefighter and gave a response that i guess they thought the general gaming masses would accept, without realising that there are actual experienced developers out there to call them on it.
Motion capture, rigging, skinning, facial animation, etc etc... 2 days work?... hmm, at that rate Last of Us must of had a turnaround of about 3 months to complete the entire game... ;P
He isn't talking about making animations. He is talking about sharing the animations to a female rig which wouldn't take that long as they already have the tech for it. He also pointed out the female main character Avaline from assassin's creed liberation shared more animations with Conner from assassin's creed 3 than Edward Kenway from Black flag. Showing that the whole idea that you can't reuse male animations was bogus. Seeing as he was the director of animation from Assassin's Creed 3 I think he would know the ins and outs of their tech.
EDIT: I am wondering if they had a deeper multiplayer system at work before hand and then they had to cut it down to everyone is Arno. The real reason theY cut females as playable was because of the way the multiplayer works. Everyone appears as Arno to themselves. You will always be playing Arno. To allow female to be playable you would have to make a second main character.
*This is pure speculation* I think they had a multiplayer system before where you customized an avatar that you would play as in the multiplayer. That would explain why they were going to have females playable in the first place.
Most surprising thing to me is that the character had 8000 animations....
Is that an exaggeration is is that normal?
That was my first thought also. The project I'm currently working on involves the main character only having around 50 animations...am I doing this wrong? How does one even organize that many animations?
It also makes me wonder how many animations were in previous AC games because it seems like a lot of these animations would have to be very tiny or duplicates such as having a character start a movement in different directions.
no I am pretty sure they meant 8000 animations. I remember hearing devs on AC3 saying they had around 3k animations for conner, espeically with all the organic "tree running".
There was also a rediculous article on how women are objects in rainbow 6 where the writer even says: I havent seen the rest of the game but this could be a problem. who in their right mind would think that all hostages in a game would be women?! having played all the last few rainbow games, it was always fairly even. He also completley ignored the fact there was a female rainbow teammeate on that squad kicking ass. pure clickbate white knight sensationalism.
Its also funny that when rockstar was asked why there wasnt a female lead in gta 5 they flat out responded "thats not the game we wanna make" and there was zero blowback.
Its also funny that when rockstar was asked why there wasnt a female lead in gta 5 they flat out responded "thats not the game we wanna make" and there was zero blowback.
I think that the Rockstar answer is very fair and appropriate - it shows the difference between a product with a strong vision behind it, like GTAV, and a yearly franchise like AC with so-called PR people trying to find excuses in front of journalists.
And meanwhile, the irony is that Rockstar still managed to make a fantastic multiplayer mode for GTAV, complete with gender options ! (even tho there's been some complaints recently about the DLC items being unbalanced, with male avatars getting a wider offering of clothing items recently. Not sure if this has been sorted out ?)
Anyways - not buying the 8000 animations thing either.
He's either lying or he's been misquoted. Nobody with any game development experience would ever say that.
I don't get why that guy would step forward and become the voice behind this particular crusade. I'm guessing he left on fairly bad terms and is lashing out.
Motion capture, rigging, skinning, facial animation, etc etc... 2 days work?... hmm, at that rate Last of Us must of had a turnaround of about 3 months to complete the entire game... ;P
He was refering to the last Assasins Creed games which re-used a lot of mocap data from the previous games and he also talked about their animation re-targeting system they used in the AC-titles he himself worked on. (He also tweeted that a lot of his friends at Ubisoft have thanked him for speaking up about this.)
EDIT: Basically what he meant was that the retargeting would take two days, but voice-acting and facial animation would require additional work.
I think that the Rockstar answer is very fair and appropriate - it shows the difference between a product with a strong vision behind it, like GTAV, and a yearly franchise like AC with so-called PR people trying to find excuses in front of journalists.
And meanwhile, the irony is that Rockstar still managed to make a fantastic multiplayer mode for GTAV, complete with gender options ! (even tho there's been some complaints recently about the DLC items being unbalanced, with male avatars getting a wider offering of clothing items recently. Not sure if this has been sorted out ?)
Also, GTA has a very diverse cast that respects those groups, Russian imagrant, Dominican, Jewish, Arab, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, black, gay, Irish, etc.
My god, they released two awesome looking gameplay videos and the last page is filled with some not really interesting polemics, at least not for me.
Props to the team, the evolution from the latest AC is huge in pretty much everything. I was very impressed when i saw it live from E3 and i already was expecting a lot.
even tho there's been some complaints recently about the DLC items being unbalanced, with male avatars getting a wider offering of clothing items recently. Not sure if this has been sorted out ?
It's not surprising that they'd offer more for male characters, there's probably more of them. Take Mass Effect and FemShep, from the way the internet acts you'd think FemShep was played by 90% of players, according to Bioware, it's only 18%.
damn yea, ubisoft is so sexist :P I think people are completely forgetting about child of light, the last assassins game on vita where the main character was female, and ol' beyond good and evil to name a few.
uh-oh.....Nintendo just confirmed that link in the new zelda is still a male.....BURN THEM!BURN THEM AT THE STAKE!
I don't think they confirmed Link was male though. they just confirmed that the character in the trailer was indeed Link. They did hint that him looking more feminine may have been intentional though, so it's all pretty much up in the air. Not like it matters too much I think anyways, Link has always been so androgynous that they could call Link male or female and they wouldn't really have to change anything about him.
I think the big backlash for Assassin's Creed Unity though was that the interviewed guy said that they would have to double their efforts to add the female characters in game. I feel like if there was a different reason, like saying that the game was almost complete already and the characters have already been entirely developed but that they would strongly consider it for the next game there wouldn't have been such a big uproar.
Glad to see a logical response to all of this unnecessary controversy. I'm sure people will stick to their stupid ideas of "WELL YOU DIDN'T MAKE THE MAIN CHARACTER FEMALE IN THE FIRST PLACE SO YOU HAVE TO BE SEXIST!" but there's not much you can do about that I guess.
I hope the team working on this game isn't suffering any negative consequences because of this bullshit.
Game News sites are aware of this forum, we'll probably be mature enough to discuss this topic in 5-10 years but I don't think mocking it as a "false controversy" makes us look that good.
I don't like the Dogpile that's happening on Assassin's Creed right now
I think a major part of it is that they've chosen to set a game in a period of history synonymous with militant feminist activism (and one of the most famous assassins in history, who was a woman), but appear to have completely neglected this important context.
No no! the issue is real. It's just stupid that other devs are dogpiling on them.
Does Call of Duty have a playable Female lead? Why aren't they called out for it? GTA still has no female lead. Neither does God of War.
I think it's silly that this is coming from a developer who have NEVER released a game with a leading female character.
(Ubisoft already has a few).
As the guys from Telltale will say, you write the stories and characters. You assign them their gender and race afterwards.
It's a drop in the sea of issues, but eventually the world has to vent it out, critical mass so to say.
Personally for me it is the fact that we see women and minorities as the "cuttable extra" every time, It's a bit thoughtprovoking to have female characters be this unexpected happy bonus.
The Naughty Dog animator should be ashamed of saying that.
Joel could have been a female in Last of Us. Especially considering it was nearly the exact same story arch and character development as Ripley in Aliens.
Nathan Drake could just as easily be a swappable female character in Uncharted.
Jack and Daxter weren't female, neither was Crash Bandicoot.
This brings Naughty Dogs playable female count to ZERO.
I don't like the Dogpile that's happening on Assassin's Creed right now
What are you talking about? How did you come to this conclusion?
I read the interview with Cooper and I follow him on twitter. As I see it Jonthan Cooper isn't trying to be a white knight. He never even mentioned the sexism debate that is going on right now. He just wanted to make it clear that Ubisoft is talking "bullshit" (his words, not mine) when they blame the lack of female characters on the animation tech. As a passionate and experienced animator (the guy even worked as animation director on AC3) Cooper probably just felt obligated to call Ubisofts bluff regarding the animation aspect.
If his goal was to divert the discussion from being about a social issue, towards being a technical issue, then yes, he has succeeded.
Do you realise there is no right answer to this?
Last of Us was one of the best games I have ever played. The writing was the best I've ever seen in any game. In fact the characters were SO well written, that I am certain Joel and Tess could have been swapped and nothing in that game would have changed. THAT'S how good the writing was.
Now lets imagine a hypothetical scenario, where the media started dogpiling on Naughty Dog for asking 'WHY wasn't Tess made the lead"?
DO you realise there is absolutely NO right answer that Naughty Dog can give?
And if suppose they gave a talk about the writing (lets be honest, EVERY answer given is an excuse), and a former Writer employed by them went to the media and said 'NOPE! IT WOULD BE EASY TO MAKE TESS THE MAIN CHARACTER". And then the entire discussion became less about lack of females in games, and about the integrity of the developer.
What I find just stupid, is Ubisoft never proclaimed to be the moral Arbiters of social injustice. But they've handled it a LOT better than most developers (Bioware is pretty much the only ones that I can think of that have them beat).
I think a major part of it is that they've chosen to set a game in a period of history synonymous with militant feminist activism (and one of the most famous assassins in history, who was a woman), but appear to have completely neglected this important context.
15% of the US infantry are women.
I'm willing to wager that's a higher percentage than historical female blade wielding assassins. Yet we don't see any playable female infantry in Call of Duty or Battlefield.
The most ruthless cocaine druglord in Florida in the 80's was a female, yet there was no playable female in GTA.
Look I'm not saying Assassin's Creed should exclude playable females. But the same can be said for pretty much every game.
I'm willing to wager that's a higher percentage than historical female blade wielding assassins.
There are no references to a male assassin anywhere in the history books concerning the French Revolution. There was however a very large movement concerning human rights, much of which focused on the rights of women, and there were a great many women who turned to violence and militant action as they had no political power. It's an extremely important aspect of that period of history.
I'm not sure if anything has been said about available multiplayer modes but it'd be awesome if people could join your game and try to assassinate you like in Watch Dogs. Of course I also haven't played AC since AC1 so I'm not sure if that would fit in the story.
Either way, Ubisoft can do what they like with the game (it makes no difference to me, I never had any interest in the game, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate) - but if enough people have sufficient disincentive to prevent them from buying the game, then the argument becomes relevant whether they like it or not. The petition against only including male characters that's floating around out there somewhere has gained nearly 5000 signatories in only a couple of days
They should just go with 'We apologize we anger our fans. We will implement female character immediately. We hope that our action will set an example for Gears of War, CoD, GTA, and many more games to have female lead too'
this is the easiest way they could have explained it away:
the animus user (note, the CHARACTER in the animus, not the player) synchronises best with their ancestors who have the closest genetic alignment. since our animus user is male, his historical counterpart needs to be too, otherwise synchronisation isn't close enough.
I have a feeling the problem isn't making a female mesh or animations but more likely the fact that the entire game is based on precise movements and parkour. I'd imagine changing the rig and hitboxes would have an effect on implementation. They'd probably also need a new script and new voice overs/performances for a female character. Only the developers really know, and perhaps they really do simply hate women. Maybe the armchair, click-bait blogger-gamer on some random corner of the internet is on to something.
In the next Assassins Creed they should just take the safer, saner route of making everyone an androgynous snake-person from the start.
Django unchained was fictious history.
So was Inglorious Basterds.
So was X-men - First Class
If you're telling me an ancestor of an Assassin sent back through genetic memory to locate biblical artifacts that will lead to places like Eden isn't fictitious, then please elaborate.
I hate to say strawman like some sort of 1st year debate class dropout but please stop constructing the idea that people are upset that the lead character isn't a woman. The AC series had playable women in MP in the past and now they don't.
I'm sorry I didn't heed my own advice not to continue the debate, I guess I should just accept that people would come in and start declaring victory over a "pointless controversy".
Replies
...granted, if every player is going to see themselves as the main protagonist anyway, I can't really see why anyone is too concerned.
1. Watch Dogs is viewed as being sexist
2. Assassins Creed cuts female co-op character(s)
3. Farcry 4 cut playable female character(s)
4. Rainbow Six gameplay demo was a "save the damsel in distress" mission
Polygon clickbait, they're just as bad as Kotaku now.
1.What is sexist about Watch Dogs, what part about Watch Dogs is actively sexist, that you play as a guy?
2. This is shitty but they gave their reason, hopefully they plan better next time.
3. This is also really shitty but again they gave their reason and said they would do better.
4. Fucking really? A hostage rescue is now a damsel in distress scenario?
2-3. It's kinda interesting both happened at the same time and initially they wanted female playable characters, I'm curious how much it was the developers choice and how much was publisher pressure.
4. It was just a teaser, but if every hostage in the game was female, and there was no playable female characters, people would take offense.
I'm no animator but...
Motion capture, rigging, skinning, facial animation, etc etc... 2 days work?... hmm, at that rate Last of Us must of had a turnaround of about 3 months to complete the entire game... ;P
I don't get why that guy would step forward and become the voice behind this particular crusade. I'm guessing he left on fairly bad terms and is lashing out.
His exact response from twitter:
The discussion goes on but that was the jist of what he meant by that, he is not saying you can turn 8000 around, just that for the difference between male and female only a smaller amount are actually differeing in stance and motion, most are kept gender neutral.
He isn't talking about making animations. He is talking about sharing the animations to a female rig which wouldn't take that long as they already have the tech for it. He also pointed out the female main character Avaline from assassin's creed liberation shared more animations with Conner from assassin's creed 3 than Edward Kenway from Black flag. Showing that the whole idea that you can't reuse male animations was bogus. Seeing as he was the director of animation from Assassin's Creed 3 I think he would know the ins and outs of their tech.
EDIT: I am wondering if they had a deeper multiplayer system at work before hand and then they had to cut it down to everyone is Arno. The real reason theY cut females as playable was because of the way the multiplayer works. Everyone appears as Arno to themselves. You will always be playing Arno. To allow female to be playable you would have to make a second main character.
*This is pure speculation* I think they had a multiplayer system before where you customized an avatar that you would play as in the multiplayer. That would explain why they were going to have females playable in the first place.
Is that an exaggeration is is that normal?
It also makes me wonder how many animations were in previous AC games because it seems like a lot of these animations would have to be very tiny or duplicates such as having a character start a movement in different directions.
8000/30 = ~267 animations. which sounds like a far more reasonable number.
There was also a rediculous article on how women are objects in rainbow 6 where the writer even says: I havent seen the rest of the game but this could be a problem. who in their right mind would think that all hostages in a game would be women?! having played all the last few rainbow games, it was always fairly even. He also completley ignored the fact there was a female rainbow teammeate on that squad kicking ass. pure clickbate white knight sensationalism.
Its also funny that when rockstar was asked why there wasnt a female lead in gta 5 they flat out responded "thats not the game we wanna make" and there was zero blowback.
I think that the Rockstar answer is very fair and appropriate - it shows the difference between a product with a strong vision behind it, like GTAV, and a yearly franchise like AC with so-called PR people trying to find excuses in front of journalists.
And meanwhile, the irony is that Rockstar still managed to make a fantastic multiplayer mode for GTAV, complete with gender options ! (even tho there's been some complaints recently about the DLC items being unbalanced, with male avatars getting a wider offering of clothing items recently. Not sure if this has been sorted out ?)
Anyways - not buying the 8000 animations thing either.
He was refering to the last Assasins Creed games which re-used a lot of mocap data from the previous games and he also talked about their animation re-targeting system they used in the AC-titles he himself worked on. (He also tweeted that a lot of his friends at Ubisoft have thanked him for speaking up about this.)
EDIT: Basically what he meant was that the retargeting would take two days, but voice-acting and facial animation would require additional work.
Also, GTA has a very diverse cast that respects those groups, Russian imagrant, Dominican, Jewish, Arab, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, black, gay, Irish, etc.
Props to the team, the evolution from the latest AC is huge in pretty much everything. I was very impressed when i saw it live from E3 and i already was expecting a lot.
It's not surprising that they'd offer more for male characters, there's probably more of them. Take Mass Effect and FemShep, from the way the internet acts you'd think FemShep was played by 90% of players, according to Bioware, it's only 18%.
I think the dogpiling is a result of a hot issue.
Women face absurdly high discrimination in the game industry so it's no surprise when news like this comes out, people feel sensitive to it.
I don't know what the appropriate response is. Maybe Ubisoft is right, maybe they're wrong. I want to see what makes the most sense.
Does Call of Duty have a playable Female lead? Why aren't they called out for it? GTA still has no female lead. Neither does God of War.
I think it's silly that this is coming from a developer who have NEVER released a game with a leading female character.
(Ubisoft already has a few).
As the guys from Telltale will say, you write the stories and characters. You assign them their gender and race afterwards.
uh-oh.....Nintendo just confirmed that link in the new zelda is still a male.....BURN THEM!BURN THEM AT THE STAKE!
I think the big backlash for Assassin's Creed Unity though was that the interviewed guy said that they would have to double their efforts to add the female characters in game. I feel like if there was a different reason, like saying that the game was almost complete already and the characters have already been entirely developed but that they would strongly consider it for the next game there wouldn't have been such a big uproar.
http://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/27ut97/distinct_lack_of_female_characters_due_to/ci5z8i7
I hope the team working on this game isn't suffering any negative consequences because of this bullshit.
I think a major part of it is that they've chosen to set a game in a period of history synonymous with militant feminist activism (and one of the most famous assassins in history, who was a woman), but appear to have completely neglected this important context.
It's a drop in the sea of issues, but eventually the world has to vent it out, critical mass so to say.
Personally for me it is the fact that we see women and minorities as the "cuttable extra" every time, It's a bit thoughtprovoking to have female characters be this unexpected happy bonus.
What are you talking about? How did you come to this conclusion?
I read the interview with Cooper and I follow him on twitter. As I see it Jonthan Cooper isn't trying to be a white knight. He never even mentioned the sexism debate that is going on right now. He just wanted to make it clear that Ubisoft is talking "bullshit" (his words, not mine) when they blame the lack of female characters on the animation tech. As a passionate and experienced animator (the guy even worked as animation director on AC3) Cooper probably just felt obligated to call Ubisofts bluff regarding the animation aspect.
Do you realise there is no right answer to this?
Last of Us was one of the best games I have ever played. The writing was the best I've ever seen in any game. In fact the characters were SO well written, that I am certain Joel and Tess could have been swapped and nothing in that game would have changed. THAT'S how good the writing was.
Now lets imagine a hypothetical scenario, where the media started dogpiling on Naughty Dog for asking 'WHY wasn't Tess made the lead"?
DO you realise there is absolutely NO right answer that Naughty Dog can give?
And if suppose they gave a talk about the writing (lets be honest, EVERY answer given is an excuse), and a former Writer employed by them went to the media and said 'NOPE! IT WOULD BE EASY TO MAKE TESS THE MAIN CHARACTER". And then the entire discussion became less about lack of females in games, and about the integrity of the developer.
What I find just stupid, is Ubisoft never proclaimed to be the moral Arbiters of social injustice. But they've handled it a LOT better than most developers (Bioware is pretty much the only ones that I can think of that have them beat).
15% of the US infantry are women.
I'm willing to wager that's a higher percentage than historical female blade wielding assassins. Yet we don't see any playable female infantry in Call of Duty or Battlefield.
The most ruthless cocaine druglord in Florida in the 80's was a female, yet there was no playable female in GTA.
Look I'm not saying Assassin's Creed should exclude playable females. But the same can be said for pretty much every game.
At present, 0% of them serve on the front line.
There are no references to a male assassin anywhere in the history books concerning the French Revolution. There was however a very large movement concerning human rights, much of which focused on the rights of women, and there were a great many women who turned to violence and militant action as they had no political power. It's an extremely important aspect of that period of history.
The historical setting isn't fictitious....
Either way, Ubisoft can do what they like with the game (it makes no difference to me, I never had any interest in the game, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate) - but if enough people have sufficient disincentive to prevent them from buying the game, then the argument becomes relevant whether they like it or not. The petition against only including male characters that's floating around out there somewhere has gained nearly 5000 signatories in only a couple of days
the animus user (note, the CHARACTER in the animus, not the player) synchronises best with their ancestors who have the closest genetic alignment. since our animus user is male, his historical counterpart needs to be too, otherwise synchronisation isn't close enough.
LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWL
http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/behind-the-scenes-of-assassins-creed-unity/
any wild Polycounters appearing in this video??
In the next Assassins Creed they should just take the safer, saner route of making everyone an androgynous snake-person from the start.
Django unchained was fictious history.
So was Inglorious Basterds.
So was X-men - First Class
If you're telling me an ancestor of an Assassin sent back through genetic memory to locate biblical artifacts that will lead to places like Eden isn't fictitious, then please elaborate.
I'm sorry I didn't heed my own advice not to continue the debate, I guess I should just accept that people would come in and start declaring victory over a "pointless controversy".