God forbid a Ubisoft game actually says anything. There are quite a few irons in the Assassin's Creed fire at the moment, from the continued monetization of The Ninja One to the ongoing development of The Witch One to the remake of The Pirate One, but at least one has reportedly been doused. Sources inside Ubisoft have leaked the development, then cancellation, of an Assassin's Creed game set in the Civil War and Reconstruction.
From Game File:
In this Reconstruction-era Assassin's Creed, gamers would play as a Black man who had been formerly enslaved in the South and moved west to start a new life. Recruited by the series' Assassins, he would return to the South to fight for justice in a conflict that would, among other things, see him confront the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
That's according to interviews with five current and former Ubisoft employees who spoke to Game File on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the project. (Ubisoft did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
It may have been backlash to Yasuke, a Black slave-turned-samurai and one of the two playable protagonists of the last game in the series, that gave Ubisoft cold feet, to say nothing of America's mask-off turn toward overt racism under the current administration.
Three sources told Game File that word filtered through the company last July that management in Paris had stopped development of the game for two reasons: 1) online backlash that spring to the reveal of Yasuke, a historically-inspired Black samurai, as a protagonist in the company's then-upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows; and 2) concern that the political climate in the United States was becoming increasingly tense.
"Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short," one source familiar with the game and its cancellation told Game File.
Game cancellations are not unusual, sources said, but reasons such as those were.
When "slavery and the KKK are bad" is considered a take too spicy for the mainstream, it may be worth just writing off this whole American experiment thing.
