Ubisoft Wants to Fix its Diversity Problem

So if you've been keeping up with the news lately, then you’ve probably heard there’s been quite a hubbub of controversy surrounding Ubisoft and the latest reveal of Assassin’s Creed: Unity.  It was annoying for some players, you see, when they found out Ubisoft had no plans to have any female assassin’s in the largely multiplayer-focused Unity.  Annoying but not unusual, this year’s E3 was chalk-full of generic white male protagonists.   No, what sparked the controversy was when Ubisoft, a multi-billion dollar company with over 9,000 employees, claimed female assassins were excluded because they didn’t have time or resources to make new models, animations, and procure a voice actor—calling it an ‘unfortunate reality’ of game development.

That did not sit well with people when they were told the amount of effort (which other developers have confirmed would be ‘minimal’) it would take to cater to half their potential audience wouldn’t be worth it.

Since then Ubisoft has been trying to explain and elaborate on its position without really ‘backtracking’.  The most recent attempt at damage control comes to us from Yves Guillemot, co-founder of Ubisoft.

"We want to work on [diversity].  We want to spend more time on the worlds and characters in our games... you will see more and more of this at Ubisoft. We'll try to be less like we have been in the past with some characters. We'll try to extend more diversity."

Now, this is frustrating for a few reasons.  First of all, when they say they don’t have the time to add Female characters to the Assassin’s Creed roster, I almost believe them: largely because they’ve made it their self-imposed mission to release a new Assassin’s Creed game every year and adhering to that strict timetable, they might not have much time left to add new assets without leaving some things out.   Of course, if they were willing to delay the game a little bit (which can be done, astonishingly) they could probably fix the problem without much issue on their end.   Secondly, it’s frustrating to hear “we’ll work on making our games more diverse” when they’re already sitting on the Beyond Good and Evil IP, which was praised as having one of the best female leads in all of gaming. 

But I’m not going to do anyone any favors by complaining about it, I suppose.  It is what it is, and if we can believe Guillemont than maybe better news is incoming.