Assassin’s Creed Unity: Adding Female Assassins Would Only Take ‘A Day or Two’

A former Assassin’s Creed designer, Jonathan Cooper, has addressed recent claims by an Ubisoft developer that adding female characters into Assassin’s Creed Unity would be prohibitively expensive for the developers to do, due to the animations and artwork required for such a feat. Cooper, who now works at Naughty Dog, states that it would have only taken a “day or two” to add a female assassin into the game, based on the amount of animation work required to do so.

“In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two's work,” wrote Cooper. “Not a replacement of 8000 animations.”

Cooper noted that in a prototype of an Assassin’s Creed game, entering your name as Aleissia (an Ubisoft developer) allowed you to play as a female character. It is unclear whether he was referring to AC: Unity or another Assassin’s Creed game currently in the works at the publisher.

He also added that Aveline de Grandpré, the female protagonist of Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation, shares more of Connor Kenway’s (Assassin’s Creed 3) animations than Edward Kenway (Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag) does. 

“Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone at Ubisoft tried to bullshit me on animation tech,” quipped Cooper. 

Ubisoft Technical Director James Therien was quoted by VideoGamer as saying that the decision to omit female playable characters from Assassin’s Creed Unity was due to the amount of work that would have been required to “redo a lot of the animation, a lot of the costumes” and that it would have effectively doubled the workload of the developers. 

Update: Ubisoft has since issued an official response to Kotaku regarding the matter.

We recognize the valid concern around diversity in video game narrative. Assassin’s Creed is developed by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs and we hope this attention to diversity is reflected in the settings of our games and our characters.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is focused on the story of the lead character, Arno. Whether playing by yourself or with the co-op Shared Experiences, you the gamer will always be playing as Arno, complete with his broad range of gear and skill sets that will make you feel unique.

With regard to diversity in our playable Assassins, we’ve featured Aveline, Connor, Adewale and Altair in Assassin’s Creed games and we continue to look at showcasing diverse characters. We look forward to introducing you to some of the strong female characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity.