Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Was Meant To Star Kassandra, But Ubisoft Didn’t Believe It Would Sell With A Woman
According to a new report, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was meant to star Kassandra, but Ubisoft shot it down since it didn’t believe a woman would sell.
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The past few weeks haven’t been kind to Ubisoft. The French publisher/developer has seen a wave of accusations against a number of its top employees that range from disappointing to downright disgusting and that mentality has reportedly poured over into the development of its games. Case in point for today, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was supposedly going to star lady warrior Kassandra, but Ubisoft believed that “women don’t sell.”
The report comes from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, who went into detail about the sexist and misogynistic culture that the company has cultivated over the years. When developing Odyssey, the team wanted Kassandra to be the only option as a playable character. Ubisoft’s Chief Creative Officer Serge Hascoët then stepped in to drop his sexist beliefs.
The report also states that previous Assassin’s Creed titles suffered a similar fate. In Syndicate, deuteragonist Jacob Frye was given a more prominent role over his sister because of Hascoët’s beliefs. Origins also had its story changed from main character Bayek dying so that Aya wouldn’t be given the spotlight.
While these claims are legally defined as “allegations,” the sheer volume of them lends credibility to such statements. Industry pundit Jim Sterling recently released a video that covers the majority of these claims. There’s even the more public statement about how Assassin’s Creed Unity couldn’t feature women because “It was really a lot of extra production work.”
It may not be something you want to hear from a studio that has produced games you enjoy, but it is important to take companies to task for their deplorable mentalities. It doesn’t matter if Ubisoft is in the industry to make money, it needs to treat its employees better and stop stifling creativity because of sexist rhetoric.
It doesn’t help that Ubisoft is also one of the more money-hungry publishers out there. Single-player titles from the company are pumped full of microtransactions because why respect the player’s time? Just create padded, overly long games that force the player to drop extra cash just so they can have a reasonable progression method.
The silver lining here is that at least a ton of these monstrous executives have now left the company. Maybe they won’t be brought to justice, but they also won’t be doing any more harm to the developers trying to make enjoyable games.
Source: Bloomberg
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/assassins-creed-odyssey-kassandra-star-report/