Far Cry 4 to also skip playable female character due to workload

While many in the industry continue to discuss the unfortunate exclusion of a playable female character in Assassin's Creed Unity, it's now been revealed that another hotly anticipated Ubisoft game will also miss out on having a playable female character. Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson told Polygon that his team was only "inches away" from being able to include a selectable co-op female character.

"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," he explained. "And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude."

It's a similar explanation to the one given by Ubisoft technical director James Therien, who said that adding a female character to the new Assassin's Creed would "double the work" and that "it was a question of focus and a question of production."

For its part, Ubisoft did comment that "We look forward to introducing you to some of the strong female characters in Assassin's Creed Unity," even though they won't be playable, and Hutchinson, too, promised, "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."

Far Cry 4 is shipping on November 18 for current-gen and next-gen consoles and PC.