Ubisoft Executives Sabotaged Efforts for a Female-Lead Assassin's Creed

Recently, Ubisoft was raked over the coals when it was discovered they spent years protecting and defending executives who made the internal culture toxic, misogynistic, and filled to the brim with “machismo.” Now that they’ve been called out in public, they’re begrudgingly making changes, but that hasn’t stopped new, horrifying details from emerging about the company in the weeks to follow the initial accusations.

For example, we’ve recently learned thanks to a new report by Bloomberg that a number of Ubisoft executives, including the now-resigned Serge Hascoët, were responsible for ensuring that Assassin’s Creed never got a proper female protagonist.

Of course, those familiar with the series probably aren’t surprised by this: ever since Unity, folks have been asking why there haven’t been any female protagonists, and their excuse of “no time to animate” always reeked of an excuse pulled out of their behinds. This new report certainly paints a more honest picture, where a number of executives in marketing – most of whom remain unnamed – actively suppressed efforts by the developers to give us a proper female assassin.

For example, in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, dual protagonists Jacob and Evie were supposed to have a proper 50/50 split in gameplay. However, meddling from the executives forced designers to switch it up to a 40/60 split, in Jacob’s favor. In Assassin’s Creed Origins, the male protagonist Bayek was supposed to get killed off and replaced by his wife, Aya, but those plans were scrapped and she was only playable for a few ship combat sections. And in Odyssey, the devs wanted Kassandra to be a female, straight-up, but the marketing department claimed that female-led games don’t sell as well so they were forced to give players the option to play a dude, even if “canonically” Kassandra is the lead.

It’s not detailed if the dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is also the product of this meddling, but it’s hard to imagine it didn’t play a hand.