With the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows supposedly coming up in mid-March, I think we can all agree that this game’s rollout has been very strange, and the response to it even stranger. The game, set in 16th century Japan and depicting the eternal struggle between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templar Order, has been set alight with several controversies, received widespread rejection, and has been apocalyptically predicted by many as the end of the Assassin‘s Creed series.
I say that the game’s release is ‘supposedly’ in mid-March due to the fact that the game’s been delayed numerous times, having its initial release date of 15 November 2024 pushed back until 14 February 2025, and then pushed back again until 20 March. These delays have themselves become a feature of this bizarre unveiling. For months at a time, I’ve been under the impression that the game had already been released, only to discover that we’re still waiting on it. With all this, this game barely feels real at all.
A number of reasons have been given for these delays; the original delay saw Ubisoft cite feedback from the then-recent Star Wars: Outlaws, which didn’t reach the financial heights it was expected to. This itself is an interesting thing to acknowledge; for the first time in a while it feels as though Ubisoft have to prove itself as a competent video game developer and publisher, particularly after the failure of Skull and Bones in early 2024.
Alternatively in an interview with IGN, the game’s director, Charles Benoit, stated that the delay was due to polishing the final product’s parkour. Of course, I and several others don’t necessarily think this is the case; the comments on that same IGN interview are sceptical, although many seem to use this information to predict that the game is already dead upon arrival. Gone, seemingly, are the days of citing that apocryphal comment of Shigeru Miyamoto’s, stating that ‘a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever’ – but, why?
I do think that these comments, while misguided, do manage to pick up upon what I believe is the actual reason this game has been delayed, that being an odd attempt to avoid the several controversies it’s picked up, one of which ironically has itself been that the new release date, 20 March, is the anniversary of the Tokyo subway sarin attack.
Chief among these controversies is that Shadows features a Black protagonist named Yasuke, an interpretation of a real historical figure who has already been publicised by many modern interpretations of the character, including most recently in a 2021 Netflix series.
Ubisoft have stated that Yasuke takes the place of one of the two playable characters within the game is so that the player can take control of a character who is similarly less familiar with Sengoku-period Japan, discovering the landscape together. The backlash to his inclusion has been fierce, and I’m sure we’re all sick of reading comments and articles about the game’s supposed wokeness and forced inclusivity.
Yasuke’s inclusion is hardly out of the ordinary for Assassin’s Creed, a series that has always featured historical figures in larger-than-life roles, many of which are downright ridiculous. In Assassin’s Creed II, Pope Alexander VI is a fightable villain, working for the evil templars and plotting to obtain a piece of technology created by an ancient race of beings who predate humans. The series has never truly been about historical accuracy, opting instead for a light-hearted, ‘what-if’ perspective of the past.
Even so, Yasuke is hardly ahistorical as a character; Thomas Lockley, a British professor with Nihon university who has released several research papers and a book on Yasuke, has stated that the backlash to the game has arisen from “people who know nothing about Japanese history”.
All of this to say that the game’s most major controversy is largely over very little. Yet, to me, this controversy almost feels deliberately engineered. By picking a real-life historical figure, Ubisoft has pre-emptively provided itself with a shield against the criticism of ahistorical inclusivity, but have still allowed themselves to feature a Black protagonist, a move sure to attract attention.
A similar case is true for the second playable protagonist, a female shinobi named Fujibayashi Naoe, who is Japanese. This move renders potential criticism about not featuring a Japanese protagonist useless, but, like Yasuke, still dips into diversity through making her female. While backlash against female protagonists is reducing, it does still occur and Naoe’s inclusion only threw more fuel on the already-blazing fire.
There has been an extra controversy over the series not having featured an Asian male protagonist, but Ubisoft even have a shield against this: the game prior to Shadows, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, did feature an Asian male protagonist.
Much of this feels engineered to drum up attention and get people talking about the game – whether positively or negatively – in the same vein as the Gillette ‘The Best a Man Can Be’ advert. However, it also feels as though the backlash has entirely gotten out of hand; the outrage machine seems to have really fixated on this one particular thing, and has determined to drive itself into the ground.
It’s difficult, at this point, to go through the comments of any press release surrounding this game without seeing any comments being deeply critical. Any new mechanic or graphic being shown off will inevitably be torn to shreds by people slamming it as unoriginal or outdated. These comments mark a shift in the discourse, which is no longer concerned merely with the game’s protagonists, but also its gameplay and graphical quality.
This itself is deeply interesting; I and many others have been very critical of the Assassin’s Creed series – and, indeed, of Ubisoft – for years at this point over copy-and-paste mechanics and ideas. While the series originally might have felt fresh and interesting, after years of Ubisoft slop Assassin’s Creed has degraded into dullness, particularly with the saturation of the open world genre in the late 2010s.
And it looks as though Shadows may be following suit; I can hardly say there’s been anything in any of the showcases that has caught my eye. Yet, for years, the series has been unwittingly lapped up by the majority of players as the gaming landscape has grown less discerning of quality than even the late 2000s.
Recently, however, on a surface level it’s finally felt as though things are starting to change, people are starting to recognise how shallow these games really are after; it’s just come at a very steep cost, and as a critic of the upcoming release, I really don’t like my allies. While there is, of course, a difference between those who are critical because of the actual quality, and those who are critical because they were predisposed to dislike it because of some culture war nonsense, it can be difficult to discern between them at times, and it’s made the game’s unveiling all the more strange.
The backlash has descended so far that Ubisoft’s head of the Assassin’s Creed franchise gave a speech at the BAFTAs defending the company’s handling of the game, an unusual occasion for Ubisoft, which rarely gives its stance on anything. And, of course, if you look at the comments on any video on social media documenting this very speech, the outrage continues.
Part of the outrage against Shadows has resulted in a boost in support for Ghost of Yōtei, an upcoming game that also set itself in historical Japan (although Yōtei is set in the 17th century). Pitting the two games against one another does very little with regard to actual criticism, and yet any publicity that Shadows receives also, through their new association, provides publicity for Yōtei additionally, making this strange non-rivalry another bizarre feature of Shadows‘ rollout.
This isn’t even the first time that the Ghost series has been caught up in a rivalry intended to destroy a ‘woke’ game; after The Last of Us Part II proved to be controversial for similar reasons, Ghost of Tsushima, Yōtei‘s predecessor, was touted by the online anti-woke crowd as a superior rival to The Last of Us.
With all of this having been said, presales for Shadows are reportedly looking good, so it’s possible that these tactics have been working. This rollout has made me more curious about the Assassin’s Creed series than I ever thought possible; the flames are being put to Ubisoft’s feet right about now, and there’s been no speculation over any possibilities of the game being pushed back even further as the company will likely need to hit sales targets and soon. With this, perhaps we’ll finally see a game worth playing.
