Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Ubisoft
The Assassin’s Creed series recently produced a rather great installment with Assassin’s Creed Shadows this year, but it turns out another great concept was in the works. A game that would have been cool had leadership not scrapped it for reasons that are rather stunning.
Game File’s exceptionally reliable Stephen Totilo conducted interviews with five current and former Ubisoft employees about a game that was cancelled in July 2025. It would have been an Assassin’s Creed game set in the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period. You would play as a formerly enslaved Black man who heads back south to fight enemies including the Ku Klux Klan.
Sounds awesome. The problem? Ubisoft watched both the reaction to a character in Shadows and what was going on with the US more generally, and canceled the project.
The lead-up to the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows was overwhelmed by a culture war controversy that the game was using legendary, historical, Black samurai, Yasuke. That sparked both endless debates about whether he was “really” a samurai in history, and general disdain for the idea that AC finally had a game set in Japan, but was using a Black man instead of a Japanese male lead (there was a second lead, a Japanese woman, who was largely ignored).
Past that, Ubisoft reportedly also looked at what was happening in the US and decided not to risk it. “Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short,” one source told Totilo.
While the US is not in a literal Civil War, the country is more divided than at any point since the Civil War, some might argue, and that has been dramatically escalated by the second term of Donald Trump and the myriad policies he’s implemented since then. Though in July of 2024, the election hadn’t even happened yet.,
Ubisoft has previously reported how the Yasuke controversy had affected individual employees who were targeted for harassment during that period. The “woke” debate even made its way up to Elon Musk, who began to talk about how too many video games were too infected by DEI now.
With this news coming out, I’m not sure anyone is celebrating the decision to cancel the game. Supporters eager to play such a cool concept would accuse Ubisoft of bending to online trolls. And the online trolls, though they might enjoy the “victory,” no doubt would have had a great time launching yet another large-scale campaign against a new game.
I do wonder if Ubisoft will ever revive the concept, but it’s more than likely that it’s moving on, which is a shame. Read the story by subscribing to Game File here.
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