The new Assassin's Creed game – Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag – looks like it could be pretty awesome. Who doesn't love pirates, right? But for some players the roguish Edward Kenway, while clearly far more interesting than his grandson Connor, represents something of a disappointment. Here we are with our fourth protagonist for the core series (fifth if you include the few hours in which you get to play as Haytham, sixth if you include Desmond), and they've all been male.
Of course, Aveline was not a man, but she also didn't get to make an appearance on any of the home consoles, relegated instead to the poorly performing Vita. But relative to the limited reach of that console, her game actually sold very well. So why has Ubisoft not yet taken the risk and brought a female protagonist to one of the main games in the series? The director of Black Flag, Ashraf Ismail, told IGN the answer:
“Really early on, we decided to tell the story of the Kenways. So we already had in place the idea to tell Edward, Haytham, and Connor. This was actually years ago, we had this.”
Apparently, since Black Flag is so close to the previous game, it wasn't the brand-new opportunity for a female protagonist some of us hoped. These two games were always going to be all about the men. “We actually never thought, 'Could this be a woman?'” Ismail says.
Additionally, the team seems to have thought a female protagonist would have seemed forced given the piratical setting; while there were female pirates (some of whom pretended to be men), they were certainly the minority.
The silver lining is that for any future games, i.e. those that will presumably move away from the Kenways, Ismail says the idea of having a female assassin for a protagonist “wouldn't be surprising”, and is “not a no-no”.
Where would you like to see the series go after this? Would a female assassin be a better fit there?
