Mainstream entertainment is becoming more diverse. Gaming lags behind film and television, but we are starting to see concentrated efforts from developers and publishers to create more female, people of color and queer characters. While a large bulk of that has been on indie and mid-range developers, one examples of a major publisher trying is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. But sometimes something that starts with good intentions can fall apart.
Odyssey is a reinvention of the long-running Assassin’s Creed series. While the previous game, Origins, took several steps in a new direction, Odyssey takes the series from an action adventure game with free flowing combat and stealth to a full-on Action RPG filled with levels, loot and dialogue options. Player choice is a big part of this new direction. For the first time the series had an option to choose between a male or female lead. Ubisoft made a big deal that not only was your avatar’s gender a choice, but so was their sexual orientation.
The game features a good deal of romance options (though they are more one night stand options) of men and women. Regardless of the sibling you chose you can romance whoever you want. While there’s no real in-depth romantic plotlines that develop from those choices it still allowed the player to roleplay their sexuality in a way the series never had before and very games do in general.
But Ubisoft dropped the ball.
There came instant backlash to the DLC episodes that released, Legacy of the First Blade. In the second of the three episode story the choice of sexuality is stripped away from your avatar and they are forced into a heterosexual relationship to have a child.
Obviously this disappointed people playing their character as gay or bisexual. It also felt like a strange direction considering Ubisoft seemed to make the player choice such a key competent of their marketing.
If you examine the storyline there’s some degree of logic there. A lot of Assassin’s Creed’s story and themes revolve around bloodlines and legacies. So a character being forced into a relationship they don’t want to further their unique lineage fits in its own way.
Still, it lacks any kind of gravity to accommodate the situation of a homosexual person being forced to conform to a heterosexual norm. The original, unaltered version of the story made the whole thing seem like a natural romance between your avatar and the new character. On top of that the achievement that accompanied finishing the episode was titled, “Growing Up.” If you chose to play as and identify as homosexual that’s a connotation that’s awfully painful to think about.
It’s something that you can’t help but look at and wonder just how in the world anyone couldn’t see the problem with this.
To be fair to Ubisoft, they have tried to resolve some of this by redoing a few things post-release. They renamed the achievement to reflect continuing a bloodline over ‘growing up,’ and altered the scenes and choices in the game slightly to give players the ability to be less than enthused about their situation and be clear they are in this relationship just to continue their bloodline and not for love or romance.
Still, the bad taste lingers.
So what happened here? It’s hard to say unless you’re on the inside, of course. It’s also easy to be cynical and say it was little more than Ubisoft wanting to get the credit with a ‘representation’ checkmark without really putting the thought into what they were going to do with it.
I like to think it’s equally possible it was something done with the best of intentions that fell short. It’s hard to give any benefit of the doubt nowadays I know, but as a creator myself I understand the potential of a work of art/entertainment trying to open a window but to end up catching a cold.
Not that I’m arguing against so-called “forced representation” just to clear. Most arguments there are little more than thinly-veiled sexism, racism and xenophobia.
What I am saying is that well intentioned diversity is great, but often without some degree of thoughtfulness or input from those you’re trying to represent, we can end up in problematic positions. There’s a lot of ways that Ubisoft could have handled this situation better. They could’ve just said your avatar was a young, free-spirited bisexual or pansexual individual that was up for anything (playing the game it feels like this is what they wanted the character to be anyway) which would make the original unaltered plot less biting and offensive. Or, as alluded to above, they could have given gravity to the situation. It’s still a real struggle throughout the world to be anything other than homosexual. In many countries homosexuality is still illegal and people are basically forced to breed out of their natural lives or face dire consequences. Having a grim and disappointing situation that strips away your choice could be a way for even heterosexual players to relate to what queer people across the world are subject to.
It doesn’t mean a lot coming from a straight guy I know, but I tend to give Ubisoft props. They tried, even if it was a flop, which is more than you can say for most of the big publishers at current. And they took measure to minimize the damage afterwards, which tells me they are open to listening and improving. So I hope they continue trying, but just you know, better. That’s what Odysseys are all about, too, right? You know where you want to go, but you never know what pitfalls you may find. It’s all about what you do once you get past them. This isn’t giving Ubisoft an A for effort. More like a B for be better next time. And let’s all cross our fingers and hope the next time is better, so the time after that is better and so on and so forth with the hope history doesn’t repeat itself in another disappointing way.