Far Cry 4 playable female character dropped due to workload

Another Ubisoft game has found itself embroiled in a gender equality debate.

Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson has said that the shooter was inches away” from offering a playable female co-op character – although the feature was ultimately dropped because of workload pressures.

It all harks back to the debate surrounding the omission of playable women in fellow Ubisoft title Assassin’s Creed: Unity, with workload being one of the reasons also blamed for that decision.

"It’s really depressing because… 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,” he told Polygon.

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

"So unfortunately for this one, no, but 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. We did our best. It’s frustrating for us as it is for everybody else, so it’s not a big switch that you can just pull and get it done."