Is Animating Different Genders All That Complicated? Part 2

Assassins Creed is another example recently that has hand some controversy when it comes to animating their female characters. AC: Unity has a multiplayer mode, letting you choose and customise your own character - the catch being that they are all male. Due to time, resources and priorities, they did not add in a female character even if that was claimed to be the intention, and this statement received a lot of backlash.

In earlier AC games, the female character Aveline got a lot of her movements straight from the character Connor, who was being made in a parallel AC same around the same time. A few walks and runs were changed, but especially with fighting techniques, she used the exact same animations, so the designers made sure that her weapon as close enough to Connor's to replicate.

Connor Parkour/Fighting animations

This shows that everything to create just one more playable female character would not have to be made from scratch - especially considering there is a female character involved in the main game who's model and skeleton could most likely have been used as a base for another generic female character, if the multiplayer male character used everything from the lead male character.

Jonathan Cooper, Animation Director for Assassins Creed III featuring Connor Kenway talked about his experiences animating both genders to Polygon.

"I think what you want to do is just replace a handful of animations. Key animations. We target all the male animations onto the female character and just give her her own unique walks, runs, anything that can give character." The facial expressions would be harder, but temporary solutions could be used.
"You can quite easily put male animations onto the female character, and it can still be good."

Cooper also worked on the Mass Effect series, which gave players the option of a male or female character.
"We made sure that their skeleton was identical so it could be shared across everything. I think maybe the female had shorter arms or something. We might have also replaced some animations like holding a gun or stuff, but otherwise they're just shared across all the characters, all the different races."

This shows that, especially where multiplayer generic characters are concerned, it is not all that hard to add in a female option. They already have a female model within the story line if they needed it, but a lot of things could be reused. This would be more of a challenge if it was more main female characters they were talking about, as the animations would be a lot different, to show the personality and possibly different strengths of the character, but for one that you are not required to think of in regards to any sort of personality? Not as hard as they implied.