![]() The player took on the guise of a lady, a slave, or an Assassin depending on the situation or setting, emphasizing the fluid nature of being a mixed race woman in 18th century New Orleans. This system focused on how differently Aveline had to navigate her role as an assassin who was also a member of society living with a complex set of legalities outlined in the Code Noir that made her privileges as a noblewoman contingent on her father, a former slave owner. The Bulgarian developers of Ubisoft Sofia had envisioned Aveline with this background from the start and according to Jill Murray, one of the head writers of the game who spoke on writing diverse characters at GDC 2013, they were inspired to make the game’s Persona System because of that background. Aveline was not just the first playable female protagonist of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but also a New Orleans Creole of mixed Haitian and French heritage. I recount the above because a decade later Liberation remains a compass of sorts for how to approach diverse representation. In the years since, the franchise has seen at least three more female protagonists, with Evie, Kassandra, and Eivor, although all three of these protagonists are optional playable characters, instead of being the default playable character. Creative director Alex Amancio and level designer Bruno St-André would famously cite in interviews that it wasn’t worth doubling the production work and that it would take “more than 8,000 animations” to include a female protagonist alongside Arno Dorian ex-Ubisoft dev Jonathan Cooper would later call BS on that claim. Ubisoft didn’t so much have selective amnesia about Aveline’s existence as they wanted to reframe the reason for not including a playable female character as being too much trouble. ![]() The company would conveniently forget about this when developing Unity two years later and come under criticism for not including even one female protagonist in a year where the industry was seeing mostly forward strides in diverse representation.īut perhaps I should rephrase that. 10 years ago today Ubisoft surmounted one of their greatest challenges in game development by animating a woman, Aveline de Grandpré, for the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, a PS Vita spin-off of Assassin’s Creed III.
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