ac unity was originally going to be a much more ambitious game that had you play as multiple characters throughout france's history, male and female.
that was cut for budget reasons, and all that remains of the different eras is the time travelling animus mini games.
the controversy came from the idea that you would be able to select your character in multiplayer, when in reality the different "characters" were just a face swap put on the main character to make sure it didnt feel like there were clones of you in each mission.
this multiplayer had horrible performance, compounding the already horrible performance of the actual game.
clearly there actually WERE much bigger problems to focus on than implementing character select, something that would have had obvious narrative implications. the fault lies mostly with the creative director for phrasing his response in a way that obscured the effort that HAD gone on behind the scenes to make a more diverse multi-protagonist narrative, versus simply swapping character models in a specific mode and calling it a day. however i also think people's refusal to listen to new information and re-evaluate that statement was also a big part of why it got out of hand.
AC has gone from being a focused singleplayer story to a messy choose your own adventure due to pressure from this controversy, and has unfortunately never gotten to do anything as interesting as the original premise for Unity, which would have diversified the playable characters in a narratively controlled and coherent way. Origins (while being my favorite entry in the series and benefiting very much from Aya's presence as a character) bears the ghost of an attempt to do the same character choice as Odyssey, which imo fully jumped the shark with contrived dialogue options that don't matter and a shallower rendering of each character due to the need for them to be interchangable.
AC should have focused on building each game's story around specific types of people from both genders versus going down the path of thinking they can cater to everyone at once without quality dropping.
Here, however:
escape from tarkov is basically a multiplayer roguelite. fuck em. just say adding women to the game is a low priority for you and go.
