When Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at its E3 conference earlier this month, one of the game’s key features was the ability to choose your gender. As well as including dialogue options for the first time in an Assassin’s Creed series, Odyssey allows players to choose between a male and female protagonist.
The female character, Kassandra, is the canonical lead (according to the game’s official novel). Despite that, her male counterpart, Alexios, featured in all of the screenshots on the Odyssey Steam page at the point at which we sought comment from Ubisoft (new screenshots, featuring Kassandra, have since appeared). Alexios is also the only character featured in the game’s trailer. On Uplay, only Alexios shows up in the header image for the game, and he is the only one featured on the box art.
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Alexios is also the only character to appear in any of the game’s three pre-order statues too, despite Ubisoft saying that canonically Kassandra will be treated as the lead character. While you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find a separate statue of Kassandra that’s available for purchase, to get there, you’ll have to go past a £659.99 special edition Alexios figurine.
We asked Ubisoft why Kassandra is absent from the game’s marketing, despite featuring prominently in the gameplay demo shown at E3. In response, a spokesperson told us:
“As metadata had to be sent some time before the official reveal, some retail pages will not showcase the full selection of assets. Store pages will, however, be updated throughout the course of the campaign to include new assets that reflect both our leading characters, as featured at the announce of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey across all our asset packs.”
This does little to explain why Kassandra assets were not created initially.
You can check out the game’s Steam and Uplay pages for yourself here, and watch our gameplay footage from E3 above. Given that the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey release date isn’t all that far away – October 5, for those of you looking to mark your calendars at home – I wouldn’t hold out hope for an enormous Kassandra statue any time soon, but perhaps she’ll be the focus of the game’s next trailer.