Far Cry 4 passes on playable female character due to ‘workload issues’

Far Cry 4 won’t include a playable female character because of the high workload of creating it, the game’s director has claimed.

Speaking to Polygon, Alex Hutchinson said Ubisoft Montreal was “inches away” from having a selectable woman character in the game, but ultimately decided it was too much work to implement.

He said the developer didn’t have the animations available, and would have had to resort to a female model walking, talking and jumping “like a dude”.

"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,” he said.

"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.”

Hutchinson went on to “guarantee” that moving forward the developer would be able to implement female characters as it develops better technology.

The comments come after Ubisoft technical director James Therien sparked controversy by also suggesting it could not implement a female character into the co-op mode for Assassin’s Creed Unity, calling it a “reality of development”.

Former Assassin’s Creed animator Jonathan Cooper countered the claims however, claiming creating such a model would be “a day or two’s work”.

A number of animators have spoken to Develop on the issue, discussing the difficulties of creating a new rig when a female character is not chosen as the protagonist, with potential technical solutions offered if that is the case.