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Assassin's Creed canceled: Ubisoft reportedly shelved Civil War-era game over political concerns
A report claims Ubisoft canceled a 2024 Assassin’s Creed game set in the US Civil War over fears of political backlash due to its race and KKK-related themes.
An explosive recent report has put Ubisoft's flagship series, Assassin's Creed, under the scanner.
On Wednesday, Game File, a gaming news portal, exclusively reported that an installation in the Assassin's Creed series was canceled over fears of political backlash. According to the report, an Assassin's Creed installation set in the US Civil War era was canceled in 2024 over fears of political backlash in the current political climate in the US.
The report claims that the game, set in the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction era, planned to feature Yashuke, the assassin, as a black man who confronts members of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious white supremacist group founded in 1865.
The report, done by Stephen Totilo of Game File, interviewed five Ubisoft employees anonymously to make the claims. They said that the game was initially approved by the Ubisoft leadership, but was later canceled because of the touchy subject matter, given the Trump administration's crackdown on DEI and Civil Rights era legislation.
The game was reportedly in the concept stage but was canceled before developers could get to work with it.
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What Was The Game About? Details Revealed
The report states that the game's plot featured a formerly enslaved Black man as the hero who moves to the West from the South to escape the perils of racial violence and start a new life. He gets recruited by the Assassins' Brotherhood in the west and returns to the south to confront his old ghosts.
In the south, he would face the Ku Klux Klan, the then newly-founded far-right group which sought to bring back the days of white glory of the pre-Civil War era in the south. It reportedly touched on key political issues of that era, such as citizenship rights of former slaves, the unification of the Confederate and the southern states, among others.
