Ubisoft has had quite a bit of the gaming industry’s collective attention directed at them the past few weeks, for better or worse, especially after their recent Ubisoft Forward digital event that previewed many of their new game projects. However, this event had a big shadow looming over it, as several instances of severe allegations made towards figures of leadership in the company that supposedly engaged in inappropriate behavior came to light. While it seems that Ubisoft has stated their efforts to restructure their editorial department to correct these issues, it seems these toxic attitudes hurt not just their female employees, but their Assassin’s Creed female lead characters as well.

As reported by Bloomberg News (via Prima Games), new reports have released information about not only the sexual misconduct scandals that have taken place at Ubisoft, but also the echoes of sexist behavior that transferred over to Ubisoft’s games themselves. It seems that multiple times in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the prominence of its female lead characters in the games have been minimized by those in creative leadership. For instance, playable characters Jacob and Evie in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate were supposed to have the equal amount of time being playable in the game’s story, but executives demanded that Jacob be more playable than sister Evie.

A similar situation happened afterwards with Assassin’s Creed Origins, as there were plans early on to have male playable character Bayek killed off early in the game, putting players in control of his wife Aya for the rest of the vengeful story. However, the final version of the game did not kill off Bayek, and Aya’s screen time ended up greatly cut back. The pattern repeated yet again in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, as Chief Creative Officer Serge Hascoët reportedly shut down the developer’s plans to make Kassandra the only playable character, claiming that “women don’t sell.”

It should be noted that Hascoët was one of the recent Ubisoft executives to have sexual harassment accusations directed at him, leading him to resign from the company. Hopefully, the departure of Hascoët and the other toxic executives like him will give greater representation to female characters and other underrepresented groups as well. Let us hope these are the Origins of a new and better chapter in Ubisoft’s story.

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