According to an industry report, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin’s Creed title set in the post-Civil War era last year, with company leadership deeming the project too controversial in today’s political climate.
This news comes from several interviews conducted by Game File with “five current and former Ubisoft employees”, who spoke on the ill-fated project. According to sources, the game would have been set amidst the American Civil War, and more specifically, the Reconstruction period that spanned the 1860s and 1870s.
The game would have featured a formerly enslaved Black man who would get recruited by the Assassins and return to the South to confront social injustice, and notably, clash against the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the infamous real-world extremist group, which would have marked a first for the franchise.
While a Reconstruction-era Assassin’s Creed game sounds intriguing, the game would unfortunately never see the light of day, as sources indicate that management in Paris had stopped development of the game for two reasons: The first being the backlash surrounding Yasuke, the historically-inspired Black samurai and one of the protagonists of the then-upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and the second being the concerns over the increasingly tense political climate in the United States.
According to a cited source, the cancelled Civil War-era Assassin’s Creed game was deemed “too political in a country too unstable, to make it short.”
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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