No female characters for four-player Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Assassin’s Creed: Unity will for the first time allow four players to work together – but not, it seems, for them to play as a female character.

That’s the claim of Ubisoft technical director James Therien, who has argued that while the ten separate studios working on Unity have the collated resources to create the series’ biggest ever game world and evolve the netcode to support an unprecedented number of co-op players, they were unable to rise to the mammoth task of including any women.

"It was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it’s a question of focus and production," he told Videogamer. "So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character.

A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes. It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it’s something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision… It’s unfortunate, but it’s a reality of game development.

"It’s not a question of philosophy or choice in this case at all. It was a question of focus and a question of production. Yes, we have tonnes of resources, but we’re putting them into this game, and we have huge teams, nine studios working on this game and we need all of these people to make what we are doing here."