I sure hope you'd want new voice acting for them too...
And of course a new subset of voice acting/subtitles from all NPCs anytime someone addresses the protagonist by a male pronoun...

So those things at the bare minimum. But I don't think it really matters to appease one journalist. Ubisoft picked a protagonist and it wasn't female. They have also picked a female protagonist in the past.

While I don't think devs should be forced to shoehorn in female or specific minority characters for the sake of some sort of diversity rainbow, I do find ubisoft' s explanation odd and disingenuous.

To be a feminist is a subset of those things you just mentioned. The term exist and is relevant when topic of discussion is specifically gender. 

Furthermore someone can believe in the equality of men and women but then hold descrimitive believes pertaining to some religions or of people from a certain background. There is valid reasons for subsets like feminism, no need to try and toxify the term.

Honestly, if they would just not have said anything about this then maybe it would just go unnoticed. I say "maybe" because the industry is now plagued with websites like this that want to click bait with scandalous articles in order to get a few more hits.

I laughed at the "cancelling my preorder" part as well. Give me a break.

In a show of solidarity, however, I will now boycott Metroid games until we get to play as man Samus.

 I mean I just can’t enjoy a story unless the characters are exactly like me with the same: gender, sexual orientation, hair color, shoe size, favorite color …. it’s just not possible.

the term is toxic, and it's toxified exactly by the most vocal of the people who declare themselves feminist. feminism was a term that made sense in a world where one group of people were actually discriminated (voting rights, admission to higher education, etc)

in this day and age there is no one sided bias in favor of men/deteriment of women (speaking of western world obviously). this does not mean that there is no more discrimination against women by certain individuals in society, but for each of those examples you can find plenty of situations where the discrimination is going exactly against men.

furthermore, the shift in society and pushback in favor of women's rights was so strong that I could argue there's an increased favoritism towards the females in several aspects (lower retirement age for women despite longer life expectancy, parental custody rights, rate of incarceration, lower sentences for the same type of crimes, persumed innocence in domestic disputes vs the male counterpart, etc)

finally, from a perception standpoint you can't appear to defend gender equality when you decide to use the word FEMINism. the word itself has in its conception a clear bias towards the female gender (which again made total sense a few dozen years ago) but no one would accept MALEism as a word to convey equality in gender treatment.

anyways, sorry for the longer rant, but in a nutshell, better call yourself gender equalitarian if you really want to make your point across. i'll be right there with you

You are a guy who knows nothing about programing, like myself, and is criticizing a company for being mysoginist for not having a playable female character despite them already displaying their willingness to do so in other games.

More female characters in video games would be good, attacking video games that do not push this agenda is negative bullshit and thats how I treat it.

I actually do know about programming...and can assure you that except for the voice recording (which there doesn't seem to be much even for the male characters), it's a few days of work at the maximum.

But then I agree, not everybody has to conform to the feminist agenda. But one of the needed actions that isn't just agenda, seeing how there's still lots of sexism or racism, is indeed to put more women has playable characters, if they're going to be part of your audience.

So what? There are starving children in Africa and Ubisoft hasn't fed them..

This thread still open?

There is explanation I came across, and is pretty simple one.

Everyone is playing like Arno, main character, but when in co-op you see different random faces on other players (who also play as Arno).

So basically, they would need to offer choice of female character as a lead too, and Unity is story about Arno and not "pick your own gender/skin-color/sexual orientation" kind of adventure.