There's been a fair bit of discussion of late regarding the omission of female assassins in Assassin's Creed: Unity, and it seems it isn't the only Triple-A game from Ubisoft to have made decision to focus solely on male characters.
Speaking to Polygon, Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson confirmed that they were "inches" away from adding a female co-op character, but ultimately decided not to, citing similar reasons.
"It's really depressing because we almost... we were inches away from having you be able to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy when you invite someone in," Hutchinson said. "And it was purely a workload issue because we don't have a female reading for the character, we don't have all the animations. And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude."
Given the size of the organisation, and the way Ubisoft splits focus with many studios working on different elements of different games, it is a concern to hear the same argument presented for both cases.
Perhaps it's now just a matter of time before the publisher has to start a department focused solely on making sure games allow for equal representation, because given the reaction to the news that Assassin's Creed: Unity would have no playable female characters, there's obviously plenty of gamers out there who'd like to have the choice.