Sitting, as they do, at the intersection between “actual human history” and “stabbing the shit out of a ton of powerful dickheads,” Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games have always been inherently political, pretty much by default. It’s built right there into the concept, after all, even before you get into games that specifically deal with topics like slavery, political revolutions, or racially motivated villains: These are games about assassins, who tend, as a rule, to target people insulated and protected by the societal structures they exist within. Hard to make that entirely apolitical.
But dang if folks won’t try, as a new report from former Kotaku editor in chief Stephen Totilo suggests today. Totilo was writing for his newsletter Game File, reporting that Ubisoft actually canceled an Assassin’s Creed game last year, owing in large part to the current political climate in its target markets. For some reason, the company apparently thought it might have trouble selling an Assassin’s Creed game about a freed slave sticking knives in the neck of members of the Ku Klux Klan in the midst of the Reconstruction South to Americans living in the middle of the 2020s. Weird, right?
According to anonymous sources who worked on the project, the untitled Assassin’s Creed game would have taken place in America in the 1860s, touching briefly on the Civil War before mostly focusing on the post-war period, with its hero returning to the South to covertly battle forces of oppression and division. (Among other things, the game apparently intended to demonstrate how “racial tensions can be manipulated as a means to control a society.”) Although the Klan—founded in 1865 as a racist backlash against the end of slavery and the granting of the vote to Black men—wouldn’t have been the game’s only villain, it certainly sounds like our hero would have had to contend with its rise, presumably in knife-neck fashion.
The game was apparently in early development, having passed early stages of approval from higher-ups at the France-based company. (Developers were apparently excited, both by the unique setting, and the chance to say something meaningful with the game.) But then, in July of 2024, the verdict was handed down: The game was being canceled, reportedly over worries about political tensions in America, which eats a lot of Assassin’s Creed games. To quote one unnamed developer, the game would have been “Too political in a country too unstable.”
There probably were other factors at play: Around this same time, Ubisoft was getting backlash from Online Gamer Types over announcing that its Japan-set Assassin’s Creed: Shadows would feature a Black man, Yasuke, as one of its protagonists. Still, the insiders quoted in Totilo’s newsletter emphasize that “anxiety over the political climate in the United States” was the major factor in not releasing the Reconstruction-focused game. Instead, Assassin’s Creed—which previously covered the U.S. in two different games from 2012, and targeted the slave trade with 2013’s Freedom Cry—is ditching North America entirely. The franchise’s next game, codenamed Hexe, will reportedly focus on witch trials in the 16th century Holy Roman Empire.
