We tried it at GamesRadar and, once we’d weeded out all the immortals, elves, witches, aliens and people that simply don’t age (Chun Li’s looking good for nearly 50), we were left with… Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat X and Evie.

Admittedly on the male side of things the list is still slim: MGS4’s Old Snake, Assassin’s Creed’s Old Ezio and The Last Of Us’ Joel are the most notable. But Evie’s significant because video games are still struggling with the idea of women being any more than set dressing and plot motivation. It’s getting there, but you only have to look at the Syndicate box, focusing on Evie’s brother Jacob, or to hear Naughty Dog talk repeatedly of the pressure to downplay Ellie’s role in promotional art, to realise that representation of women still has a way to go.

When it does come to representation in games (and media in general) women have two roles: sexy reward or expositional crone. You’re either Scarlett Johansson or Maggie Smith. There’s little middle ground because the message for years has been that, for women, ‘young and hot’ is all that matters. Got a few crow’s feet showing? Could you possibly go away until every hint of remaining sexiness has been aged out of you? There’ll be some character parts then. Men, on the other hand, are regularly portrayed as powerful and potent well into their 60s.

A middle (ish) aged woman having the gall to look it and still be the hero? Big deal. Huge.

Check out this graph from an old Vulture article.

There’s one for most of the big actors, all aging but dating a steady pool of largely steadfastly 30-something actresses. So yeah, a middle aged woman starring in a game as a playable character, and not second to a guy? Quite the thing. A one-off right now but a step ahead of Hollywood all the same. When our current curmudgeonly Bond, Daniel Craig, was questioned about starring against ‘an older women’ as apparently something unusual, he rightly pointed out – corrected even – that she was a woman “his own age”. (And, grumpy all the same, he’s doing a way better job than Sean ‘hitting women is okay’ Connery.)

Now, usually at this point, there will be someone reading this arguing that an older woman as a hero is a rarity because it’s mainly men buying games (literally not true) or that woman are represented just fine and stop making a fuss – cue the usual list of Samus, Lara, Chell, Faith, Bayonetta et al from 20-odd years of history as proof that everything is okay right now.

If you are one of those people then try to understand that this isn’t about anyone trying to mess with your toys, it’s about letting everyone have equal access to the same toys. Women are still woefully underrepresented as playable characters, full stop, let alone being allowed to noticeably age. The message apparently being that girls aren’t hero material and that slightly older women shouldn’t be anything. All mainly because of some differences in bits on the outside. You might as well judge people by the hats they’re wearing – people in red hats can’t be the hero. Makes about as much sense.

Ubi might have put its foot in it a few years back with the whole ‘woman are hard to animate’ balls-up, but this is a step towards making up for all that. And it’s definitely something worthy of praise – up there with Freedom’s Cry’s Adéwalé and Far Cry 4’s Ajay Ghale for showing well represented gaming heroes that aren’t 20-something white dudes. You know, like a lot of real people aren’t. So well done to the studio and here’s hoping it opens the way to more characters as interesting as Evie.

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“Ubisoft’s intention for this park is to immerse people in reactive worlds where they can interact with each other and become the heroes of their own life-sized game,” says Jean de Rivières in the announcement on the Ubi Blog (opens in new tab). He’s the senior vice president of Ubisoft Motion Pictures which is in charge of the project alongside Malaysian theme-park developer RSG.

The park will be an indoor complex of 10,000 square meters featuring “rides, shows and other attractions, all built around Ubisoft’s games and characters.” RSG, who will be responsible for the running of the park, is currently working on a park called Movie Animation Park Studios (MAPS) for a 2016 opening. It’s based around Dreamworks characters such as Mr Peabody, The Croods and Casper and will have Malaysia’s tallest drop tower.

And why Malaysia, you scream? Rivières has an answer for that. “Malaysia is the second-most-visited country in Asia. There is room for multiple projects to take root in the region and a growing middle class with an increasing income and appetite for entertainment.”

I’m not exactly sure where ‘next-generation’ comes into things but I’d imagine plenty of attractions with Spider-Man Ride style CGI simulations if it’s all going to be indoors. However, I’m already calling an Oblivion-style diving coaster called Leap of Faith. All it needs is a haystack and the bottom and an eagle cry in your ears as you plummet. There’s no list of attractions for the park yet but it doesn’t take much to imagine that a stack of Rabbids will be making an appearance. Just keep telling yourself that and it might make you feel better about the cost of flights.

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You have characters, and also two play styles. What’s the reasoning behind this split?
I remember two years ago we started to think about how we could tell a modern story in a modern era, and we decided at that point to tell the story of a pair of twins with very different personalities. Jacob is an extremely charismatic, very confident personality. He’s a leader. On the other side, you have Evie who tends to be more cautious, she’s more on the strategic side, she has stealth-specific skills that are specific to her. It’s that duality between the two within the story that really makes those characters stand out. I guess that it was a creative direction, it was a story and narrative direction right from the start.

Can you jump on trains in free-roam, if you time it right?
Oh yeah, absolutely. At Victoria station, for example, you can climb on top of a train. You can unhinge wagons, you can stay on the main carriage, and you can go all across the city, you know, by staying on there. It’s a cool fast travel tool if you want to explore the city.

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In the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine, creative director at Ubisoft Quebec Marc-Alexis Côté reveals that side-missions have been designed to reflect the fight for power in each of Victorian London’s seven districts. “In Assassin’s Creed we tend to be very generous with the activities that players can engage in, but one of the things that we need to do to modernise the experience is to make sure that those activities make sense for the players – and this is something that we are working on this year,” he says.

Côté is also adamant a sense of cohesive narrative is key to crafting a special brand of additional tasks (much in the same way the inclusion of new drivable carriages will add a unique flavour to Syndicate’s navigation). “Every activity that the player will do will make sense in the narrative quest of the protagonist,” he says. “The goal is to take back London, so all the activities that you will do in the open world will serve that as well as the main storyline.”

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The sword unsheathes from the cane at a press of a button and also features ‘a spring loaded, button-triggered scythe blade’ so even this Assassin’s cane has dual blades. Find out more about how Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is changing everything you know about the series (opens in new tab).

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The twin sister of Jacob Frye, Evie has her own story missions and skill tree and can be switched to at any time in London’s open world. She favours stealth over the instant violence of her brother and while we don’t know much about her weaponry, like Jacob she’s is a relentless Assassin and armed with the new rope launcher for hurtling up the sides of buildings like a Victorian Batgirl.

The idea of twins is a new kind of narrative for the franchise as the two criminal assassins take over London with their gang, the Rooks. “One of the things that we wanted to do from the beginning [was have two protagonists]. We were thinking ‘how can we tell the story differently?’,” says creative director Marc-Alexis Cote. “I absolutely wanted to bring a new perspective, and I think having a female protagonist is great for that. Because the minute we start [asking] ‘how would Evie react to that?’ it brings us in a different mindset than we traditionally are in.”

Ubi isn’t revealing much of Evie’s story but we do know that she and her brother both arrive in London in 1868 at the end of the Industrial Revolution to take back the city from the Templars. “I think we have something different to tell if we tell the story of a brother and sister and their relationship,” explains Cote. “I think there was a fresh story to tell there….I did not want the story to be about romance.”

Last year’s Unity was famously overshadowed by the ‘woman are too hard to animate’ scandal when creative director Alex Amancio explained the lack of a female character by saying, “It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices and double the visual assets […] It was really a lot of extra production work,”. Understandably, it didn’t go down well.

This year the team are studiously avoiding the issue, deflecting questions with the kind of diplomacy that could end war forever if used in the right places. Asking about what it was like to be working on a female assassin during last year’s headlines we got this response from Cote: “Since the inception of this game we’ve had Jacob and Evie as those twin characters. Assassins have many thousands of animations so we’ve been focussing on building a credible Evie and female protagonist for our players to enjoy. So I have to say I was more focussing on delivering this experience for our players.”

Pelland, on the other hand, says that the twin angle was always there: “Right from the start. Two and a half years ago we said ‘let’s talk about the story of Jacob and Evie Fry.’ For us, this is the best way to tell our story. It starts with the twins and within that mindset this is how we build a game. This is how we build the world of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.”

We’re promised much more info on Evie later in the year with the current screens showing her frustratingly absent from the Victorian London skyline. Her positioning on the boxart also sees her standing behind her brother Jacob, who takes centre stage. It’ll be interesting to know how the story will be split between the pair and the different gameplay styles of each Assassin.

For more Creed info take a look at the ways that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is changing everything we know about the series (opens in new tab).

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