The Developer Points to Metadata as An Explanation
Though Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has been praised for its inclusion of LGBT romance options and letting players choose between playing as a male or female protagonist, some have pointed out that the optional female protagonist, Kassandra, currently doesn’t seem to be featured all that much in the game’s marketing.
A Ubisoft spokesperson told PCGamesN that due to metadata that was sent out before the game was officially revealed “some retail pages will not showcase the full selection of assets.”
“Store pages will, however, be updated throughout the course of the campaign to include new assets that reflect both our leading characters, as featured at the announce of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey across all our asset packs,” the spokesperson said.
Despite Kassandra having already been declared to be the canon protagonist in the upcoming novelization of the game, there doesn’t appear to be a canon protagonist for the game itself.
Additionally, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will have reversible covers that’ll feature both Kassandra and the male protagonist, Alexios, each on different sides.
This isn’t the first time that Ubisoft has dealt with controversy regarding playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed. In June 2014, two Ubisoft developers told Polygon that the reason why were no female assassins in the co-op mode of Assassin’s Creed Unity was because of the additional workload creating an assassin of a different gender would bring. These comments (among others) caused a lot of backlash and there was much debate about whether or not Ubisoft was being sexist.
Ubisoft eventually released a statement to Kotaku that stated that they recognized “the valid concern around diversity in video game narrative” and pointed to how diverse the series’ playable characters were.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is releasing on October 5th for the PC, PS4 & Xbox One.