Earlier today, we let you know that Assassin’s Creed: Unity wouldn’t include any playable female assassins because, as Ubisoft put it, adding them would have “doubled the work” when it comes to animation and costumes.
Well, it turns out Far Cry 4 was close to having a playable female character in co-op, but as Director Alex Hutchinson told Polygon (via GI.Biz), it didn’t happen due to a workload issue:
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.
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.
So unfortunately for this one, no, but I can guarantee you that in the future, moving forward, this sort of stuff will go away. As we get better technology and we plan for it in advance and we don’t have a history on one rig and all this sort of stuff. We had very strong voices on the team pushing for that and I really wanted to do it, we just couldn’t squeeze it in in time. But on the other hand, we managed to get more of the other story characters to be women.
Hutchinson finished by saying, “We did our best. It’s frustrating for us as it is for everybody else, so it’s not a big switch that you can just pull and get it done.”
Far Cry 4 will be released for the PS4 and PS3 on November 18th in North America and November 20th in Europe.
