A new report has stated that Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin’s Creed game set in the American Civil War. Players would face and likely try to stop the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. The reason behind its cancellation? The recent Assassin’s Creed Shadows controversies, particularly involving the inclusion of Yasuke, and the current political climate in the United States.
The report, shared by Stephen Totilo, explained that Ubisoft axed the project in 2024, deeming it “too controversial,” according to anonymous sources. Players would take control of a Black protagonist who travels to the West from the South to start a new life following enslavement. After being recruited by the Assassins, he’d travel back to the South to try and put an end to the suffering he had gone through.
Three of the sources spoke to Totilo about the game’s cancellation, stating that just this past July, several developers finally got confirmation as to why Ubisoft Paris stopped developing the game in 2024: online reaction to Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, paired with a turbulent and confrontational political climate in the United States.
The buildup to the launch of AC Shadows was very rocky for the studio from an online perspective. The game was heavily criticized due to Yasuke’s inclusion, with detractors stating that the developers were overwriting history, as there was no clear-cut evidence (according to them) that he was a samurai, which is how he is portrayed in Shadows.
All that noise ended up being for naught, as Shadows ended up performing relatively well for Ubisoft, becoming the second-best-performing game in the franchise sales-wise during its first few weeks. Rumors of an impending Switch 2 release have picked up steam recently, and with how well Ubisoft managed to port Star Wars Outlaws, they could come true sooner rather than later.
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