Ubisoft Allegedly Cancelled A Reconstruction-Era Assassins Creed Game Because Of The Political Climate
In July of last year, word began to trickle through Ubisoft that an ambitious new installment of the company’s top franchise, Assassin’s Creed, had been cancelled.
The new game would have brought the history-spanning series to one of its most modern settings: The American Civil War and, moreso, the Reconstruction period that followed in the 1860s and 1870s.
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.
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.
Ubisoft is a really weird company in their ability to screw things up sometimes. These are the guys that, in addition to Assassin's Creed, brought us Watch Dogs, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, the Division, Far Cry and more. Good games! But they also manage to screw up a ton, especially with these later sequels.
To give this a little background, lets go back to their last game, 'Assassins Creed: Shadows'. If you never played it, I can tell you that it's totally fine. Boiler-plate task slop like the rest of them and the worst I can say about this one is that it felt particularly repetitive. Although, that might be a general fatigue that'd carrying over from the previous games. Also, something that probably hurt my evaluation is that going from Ghost of Tsushima to this game was like going from a wagyu steak to a microwaved hot dog. I'm still eating that hot dog in a pinch, sure, but it pales in comparison. But the quality of Shadows isn't what made headlines.
AC Shadows is set in feudal Japan and you split time playing as a Japanese ninja, who is an original character, and an African samurai, who is based on the real life African samurai named Yasuke. The latter decision got a lot of online hatred. There are obviously the chuds who will shit their pants about having to play as any non-white or female character. They are a loud minority, but a minority nonetheless. And anyone that criticized the choice to include Yasuke was lumped in with that minority because of the black-or-white society we find ourselves in culturally. However, grey does exist. And think there is a reasonable question to be asked which is who is the Yasuke decision for?
Yasuke is a historical figure and his story is a very interesting read. However, I don't get using him for a game like this because, to me, part of the fun of AC is getting to immerse yourself into a peoples, culture etc. In AC Origins, you play as an African assassin in Egypt. In AC Mirage, you play as a middle eastern man in Iraq. In AC Odyssey, you play as a Greek etc etc etc. And the reasoning by Ubisoft for the decision was:
"What's great about this character is that we can discover Japan through his eyes, the eyes of a foreigner, and most of the players are kind of discovering Japan at the same time."
To me, you can read that as a defense for a white savior movie like 'The Last Samurai'.
So now, we get to this news drop. Ubisoft allegedly cancelled a series where you would play as a former slave that is fighting the rise of the KKK in the reconstruction south. Basically Django Unchained, which sounds like an incredible game. However, Ubisoft canned it because of the backlash to Yasuke and the "political climate".
The hell does that even mean? The Yasuke part is like throwing out the square peg when it doesn't fit in the round hole. The square hole is right there! As for the political climate thing, I don't know, man. Nobody cares about that shit as long as the game is good. And bending this sort of creative call for "political climate" to me is really whack. AAA studios seem to be in a perpetual headlock where they invest too much into every single game to ever be able to risk one failing. Here is an interesting commentary on the AAA system from a video game creative director back in 2012.
"I see two kind of dystopian futures at hand.
One is where the only games that sell are leaning on analytics. Where we’re basically putting up red buttons and blue buttons, watching what people press and changing all the buttons in the worlds to follow that. And that’s just the pursuit of money. The last time we chased money was the Atari 2600. For those of you that remember, the industry almost died overnight.
At the other end of the scale, I see a massive arms race. Where we’re basically pushing graphical fidelity and working on the sheer scale of games which we think about as kind of cancerous growth. And I think that will leave the real AAA blockbusters as nothing more than the last of the dinosaurs.
In my mind, video games have to have either the goal of educating people, entertaining people or at least being artistic. If you’re not pushing for any of these things, you’re not taking responsibility for the sales of your game and trying to make sure that the games we love are getting the real peoples hands then I think we’re in for a rough patch."
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What I didn't mention is that this quote was by UBISOFT's creative director back in 2012. He almost perfectly predicted the exact state his own(now former) company would be in 10 years down the line. Because so much money goes into these games, everything bows to the analytics which sucks ass.
The formula for these should be so easy. Just find an interesting period of history and insert the protagonist there. They still haven't gone to Rome, China, India, Korea, Africa or really anywhere outside of a few European spots. Pick a location/time period, do the research and give a cool story that shows it all off.
P.S. A little Ubisoft aside. Back in the barstool gametime days, Smitty let me to an early demo session of AC Odyssey. They brought us into this little room in an office building that almost looked like a computer lab from back in the day. Then a bunch of French-Canadian guys oversaw us playing the first few missions of the game. Early on, there was a player choice where you could let a bunch of civilians go, or kill them and get a big reward. I chose the latter. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and, with that french accent, told me "You are the first person in all our testing to make that choice" as if I actually killed these people! Really made me feel like an asshole about it.
