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Ubisoft may ditch Watch Dogs’ lead character Aiden Pearce for any future sequel in an effort to “extend diversity”, CEO Yves Guillemot has suggested.
“We knew it would be polarising,” Guillemot told CVG when quizzed over the game’s ‘fairly generic characters’. “Some people loved the characters and some didn’t. It was difficult to please everybody with that character. Now, having seen the reaction, we know what we will do next to improve that.”
“I can’t say [if Aiden will return as the lead character in Watch Dogs 2] because I don’t know actually,” Guillemot continued. “We’ll see.”
The CEO added that Ubisoft was “working on” diversifying away from ‘angry white man’ leads, stating that the firm wants to “spend more time on the worlds and characters in our games… you will see more and more of this at Ubisoft. We’ll try to be less like we have been in the past with some characters. We’ll try to extend more diversity.”
Ubisoft faced scrutiny last week over its reasons for failing to include female lead characters in upcoming co-op adventure Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
“[Female characters were] on our feature list until not too long ago, but it’s a question of focus and production,” technical director James Therien told VideoGamer.com. “So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character.
“A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes [inaudible]. It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it’s something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision… It’s unfortunate, but it’s a reality of game development.”
Watch Dogs launched last month and went on to become Ubisoft’s fastest-selling game of all time. A sequel has yet to be formally announced.
Source: computerandvideogames.com
