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.
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.)
The people were enthusiastic about the game but were also frustrated by its cancellation, which they perceived as Ubisoft bowing to controversy.
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.
This would-be Assassin’s Creed game was early.