This is a long one, so bear with me here. The shit is very well hidden but it's sitting in there. Basically, an experienced project manager in the gaming industry tried to explain the lack of women in "Assassin's Creed: Unity's" co-op mode. The issue is still pretty big right now, both among gaming feminists, and regressive dudebros who fail to see the problem. So, needless to say, a producer in the industry decided to sweep in and "explain" the situation.

But his explanation obviously excuses the devs, instead of identifying how important women are in the series, being critical of the team's decisions, and/or being critical of the game's lack of women.

In other words, all this comes down to "personal opinion" for this guy:

Something "costly" could mean it takes up a lot of bandwidth cycles within a game engine. Something "expensive" could mean that the project manager feels it's going to take a lot of work/effort/complexity during a particular release cycle. Something that's a feature could simply be a particular requested item from a designer (could also be called a story, an epic, an ask, an item, or whatever terminology that team is using at the time, often depending on the methodology the team is using for production).

Okay, so far so good, thanks for the production info. Sometimes words have double-meanings and one statement is intended for several people, let's work from there-

On my current team, EVERYTHING that is requested by the EP, CD, or designers is a "feature" - regardless of what it is. Want a new animation? That's a feature. Want a new weapon type? Feature. New character archetype? Feature. Anything new that does not already exist within the game is a feature. Anything that is involved in the work necessary to create the feature is a task or subtask. A collection of features is either a theme or an epic (depending on the flavor of the collection).

This shorthand exists for teams of developers to work efficiently together. My production staff does all the wrangling so that the designers, engineers, artists, animators, and QA can do more work and still get home to their families while their kids are still awake.

Yes, I see. Developing must be a stressful and difficult job; but, that still doesn't excuse-

Features all have costs. To the project. To the company. To my team members. If I have to make a call as to whether or not this product of entertainment includes a feature that leaves someone somewhere feeling a bit left out OR whether or not my development staff has to put in some weekends (a staff that includes significant numbers of women - many of whom are mothers or even grandmothers, mind you), then I'm going to want to weigh those costs against their work/life balance...and your personal feelings on the subject aren't nearly as important to me as the well-being of my team. Sorry if that offends. Actually, no I'm not.

Oh wait. I see where this is going. My "personal feelings" don't trump your work week, since apparently my concern for representation is keeping you from your family. Oh, okay. I'm sorry, it's obviously my fault that the Ubisoft dev teams are willing to sacrifice women playable characters for some other "features." I see-

Building out a new female character is just as difficult as creating a new <insert ANY adjective here> character. It means new concepts, models, rigging, storyline changes/additions, script changes, VO, and cut scene changes/additions. All of these additions now live in the game code alongside everything else, which might already be getting pretty crowded depending on what platforms you're delivering to. All of these additions make the code base larger and even more complex. All of these additions create bugs and technical debt that needs to first be found through additional QA (sorry guys, you're in this weekend because of the new character cut scenes) which then result in more work from the engineers (sorry guys, you're in next week till 10 PM mandatory because of the expected bugs from the new cut scene that QA will find over the weekend).

Wow, those poor feminists are really going hard on those engineers! We must be asking for so much, it would simply derail the game if they put in ONE woman!

Best estimates I've heard from people I know at Ubi are that the additional female character was prototyped out very early but sidelined as the game itself is massive and requires an inordinate amount of work just to get the co-op working in the first place. They wanted to get back to the female character, but after costing her out, discovered it would take between 25-50 days of work to get her added in properly (that's the important word, by the way - will get back to it in a bit).

Wait. So are you telling me that the game had female characters, but the team decided to remove them for another one of your "features" in game design? What kind of feature trumps women characters - more bloom on the face of a French aristocrat? Are you kidding me? Don't you realize that the fact that they developed these women in prototype also means there's still some assets the team can work with? Seriously, what?

That 25-50 days isn't something you can just throw money and people at by the way. Character pipelines don't work that way. You can't start rescripting or animating new cut-scenes before you have the new rigged model. You can't rig the model till have the model. You can't build the model till have the concept art. You can't record the VO for the cut scenes and in-game play till have the script written. You have to then find the actress who will record the voice, and another actress to record the mocap.

All of this takes time. Time from someone already working late into the day/night and possibly on weekends. Because they're working on OTHER parts of the game. Because the game isn't done just because you saw a trailer at E3. Chances are the trailer wasn't done by ANYONE on the team and likely was outsourced out to a cinematics house

You're keeping us on weekends guys! Ubisoft can't handle that! We have more important things to do than making women in our game!

The next two are the real kick in the teeth though, and show how much this producer sees women as a niche feature, instead of a requirement:

However, most teams on AAA don't want to give up quality for anything. Why? Because that means lower Metacritic scores for one thing...a thing that most studio bonuses are inextricably intertwined with. Busted your ass for 2 years on a project and it's expected to bring in a 90 Metacritic so you can get your 20% IC bonus? Wait, you only got an 88% because some jackass kid who gets paid in pagecounts and free games decided you did a half-assed job on the animations for the female character compared to the male and the side-quests weren't involved enough (because your team threw those out to work on the female characters)...no bonus for you, sucker!

I get it. Women are simply a little niche interest that keep you from the bonuses that the AAA publishers can give. That's right, devs are willing to sacrifice adding in women just to appease reviewers and get paid. Yet, instead of questioning the bullshit system, it's obviously feminists who are to blame! It's all our fault!!

And followed by:

This whole subject makes my stomach turn to shit. I know a LOT of people on those teams. Good people. They WANT to bring in more features - female characters definitely is part of that. They hate being called sexist. They hate upper management telling them estimates for their work that they KNOW is wrong ("only a couple of days worth of animations" might as well read "fuck you every other animator who can't do as well as I think I can as fast as I can on new tech").

The best part being the ending statement:

It's personal when I see people I know and respect called liars or sexist.

It's like these producers and developers really don't get it. They try to send you on a guilt trip about "how bad it is to work to a 10pm shift" instead of identifying the fact that maybe, just maybe, this is about the shitty decisions the team made in identifying certain "features" as more important than women playable characters. That maybe this is a core failing in Ubisoft's development team and that they should be changing their priorities in game development.

Instead, we just have another dude in the industry defending sacrificing women, since apparently there are more important things than women (like money or your work shift - which, might I add, would probably be just as long anyway if they're "swapping" features for the women characters).

I know this shit is wrapped up with a bow on top, but I still smell some crap underneath.