Assassin's Creed Unity's four-player co-op will not offer female assassins due to the pressures of production work, Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio told Polygon during a recent interview.

Amancio said that though female assassins were planned for the game, Ubisoft ran into "the reality of production."

"It's double the animations, it's double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets," Amancio said. "Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work."

In the game's co-op mode, players will have custom gear but always view themselves as Arno, Unity's star. Friends are displayed as different characters with the faces of other assassins.

"Because of that, the common denominator was Arno," Amancio said. "It's not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar."

Speaking with Polygon during a different interview, level designer Bruno St-André estimated more than 8,000 animations would have had to be recreated on a different skeleton.

"We started, but we had to drop it," St-André said. "I cannot speak for the future of the brand, but it was dear to the production team, so you can expect that it will happen eventually in the brand."

Assassin's Creed Unity launches for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC Oct. 28.

Chris Plante and Ben Kuchera contributed to this report.