In case you haven't heard about the recent kerfuffle surrounding the upcoming Assissin's Creed: Unity- in a polygon interview with Alex Amancio, the Creative Director for Unity, it was brought to light that having the players choose the gender of their assassin was once in the development plan, but it was eventually scrapped. According to Amancio, "It's double the animations, double the voices, double the visual assets... it was really a lot of extra production work." Which, sadly, I can understand. I can just see the budget meeting with the white board divided into two sections: "What makes us money vs. what's nice to have." What makes you money? Having six different collector editions. What's nice to have? Gender-inclusive design. That on top of the fact that Ubisoft has nine or ten studios all over the world working on this game, any of which could have easily shared the load on the art assets, makes it seem like an increasingly shallow decision to cut out the female assassin.
On the other hand, throughout the interview, Amancio let details slip that Unity's story heavily revolves around Arno and his redemption. "It's a redemption quest- Arno's redemption quest. If you dig one layer under that, there's what we call a Cornelian Dilemma- it's love versus duty." At first I thought Why can't a woman have the same redemption? Hell, if it's a love story you want, you don't even have to change anything. Make it a lesbian love story! What's the big deal? But after I cooled down a bit, I realized that at this point, the story has molded itself around Arno. He's become a fully-realized character with his own struggles and motivations. We need more women protagonists in games- there's no denying that. But we need women who are their own fully-realized characters with their own struggles and motivations- not just gender-swapped versions of currently existing men. We can do better than adding to the roster of Ms. Male characters.
I have this fantasy that there's an alternate reality where Ubisoft never scrapped the female assassin. Let's call her Charlotte. And just after the reviews for Assassin's Creed: Unity come pouring out, so does word of a New Game+ mode. On a lark, the people who did their first playthrough as Arno do their NG+ as Charlotte, and all the people who played as Charlotte play as Arno. Everyone is delighted to find that not only is there a host of content they either missed or didn't have access to during their first playthrough- but they are playing the same story with a completely different character that has different motivations and thought processes. Maybe Charlotte has an easier time keeping her calm while interrogating people; but Arno likes to leave them with a little reminder to never cross the assassins. It would kind of be like reading Marv's story in Sin City, The Hard Goodbye, and then reading it again but with Brienne of Tarth as the protagonist (or better yet, replace Brienne's character in Game of Thrones with Marv. But maybe that's just because I like the thought of Mickey Rourke beating the crap out of Jaime Lannister on a bridge). Granted, this would take a lot more than double the time and effort to do. But in this fantasy world of mine, it's a worthwhile investment because it gives the players more content and more reason to keep playing the game. But, you know. That's just a fantasy.
