Men can be hostages too, OK?

Ubisoft's recent confirmation that Assassin's Creed: Unity won't feature playable female avatars caused quite a stir in the gaming press, and the company appears to have stumbled headlong into another gender controversy, this time relating to FPS title Rainbow Six: Siege.

The recent demo of the game at E3 was populated entirely by female hostages, which led PC site Rock, Paper, Shotgun to question if any males would find themselves in need of aid. While technical artist Oliver Couture confirmed that hostages of both sexes would be in the final game, his explanation regarding the E3 demo has raised a few eyebrows:

I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage. We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that's the design we chose.

Ubisoft has stated that it has nothing to add to Couture's comments.

[source rockpapershotgun.com]