Assassin's Creed: female lead "wouldn't be surprising"

Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag's director has said he won't be shocked if a future flagship game features a female protagonist.

"I would say it wouldn't be surprising to see a female assassin coming up in a mainline Assassin's Creed," Black Flag director Ashraf Ismail told IGN.

Assassin's Creed 4 was not the right place, though, because of its historic setting.

"From the pirate perspective, there were a few famous women pirates. But it wasn't common. So we didn't want that element to be a detail people got stuck on," he said.

It's amazing how comfortably people accept Ubisoft's fiddling with history as long as it doesn't cross gender lines, but okay - let's accept it. It's this next bit that really bothers me:

"Really early on, we decided to tell the story of the Kenways. So we already had in place the idea to tell Edward, Haytham, and Connor. This was actually years ago, we had this. We actually never thought, 'could this be a woman?'" Ismail added.

Never actually thought. No, no, why would you? It's hard.

Well anyway, enough editorialising; Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is about a dude and that's that. Go see the first and second trailers; read Stace's impressions and Sam's video from the London preview event; and check out Dave's thoughts on the series' annual iterations.