Assassin’s Creed: Unity [No Girls or Characters Allowed]
-By Alex Shaw
Firstly there’s the whole debacle over four male characters and no females. Then their fairly pathetic excuses as to why not. Too many new frames of animation and wotnot. Never mind the playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed III, Black Flag and the aptly titled Liberation.
Then if you dig deeper you’ll find that with four players in the team each of you will be under the impression that YOU are the game’s special male hero; Arno. They just swap out the faces of your companions to make you feel like the star.
So imagine playing a co-op Mass Effect game, four player co-op story where everybody thinks they’re Shepard. It doesn’t take long to realise how little true characterization and as a result what little character that allows for.
* So, 51% of the species: Dismissed
* Playing an important part of a team: Dropped
* Characterization: Minimal
* Being a special chosen one: Present and correct.
I’m not even going to go into the fact that a ton of ladies like playing Assassin’s Creed and why that’s good, and why that should be encouraged and how the choice to play as someone of your own gender or not is a key element of engagement. Also why the constant positioning of the player into the shoes of special Mr Johnny Template (Johnny Templar?) all chiseled jaw, determined eyes and a bit of stubble is both tediously repetitive and holds back the very idea of both teamwork and unity. If we’re ALL special by default then nobody is, really. Teamwork means you aren’t the most important person in the world and that you play your part.
Hang on, I said I wouldn’t go into this. Back up.
We are now at a stage in video games where these tropes need to be challenged and subverted if the medium is to move forwards, and not just by indie developers if that sea change is to have a significant effect. Ubisoft, if Nintendo and Koei are more progressive than you (Hyrule Warriors so far has three female protagonists to one chap: Zelda, Impa, Midna and Link), and Media Molecule introduce dedicated, specialized teamwork in a cute platformer (LittleBigPlanet 3), consider just going back to the word “UNITY”, having a big, long meeting about what the word really means and go from there. We will be happy to wait an extra year while you produce an aristocrat-stabbing simulator that we can get on board with together.
June 12, 2014
This is next-gen, alright. Massive crowds and photo-realistic graphics, no problem. Female character models and mocap, not so much.