Cancelled because a black man killing the Klan, after all the morons complaining about Yasuke, was going to be too controversial of a video game in our (Americans’) “unstable” country.
“Okay team, we need to make this game about the American Civil war, but in a way that doesn’t touch on politics or race or offend anyone in any way, we have do whatever we can to make the Civil War seem like just some kind of completely neutral historical incident that couldn’t have been avoided, we can’t have modern slavery apologists or descendants of slaves feel ANYTHING about ANYTHING!”
Makes sense, they’re waiting to see how your civil war is going to turn out first.
Ubisoft will not tolerate anything but slop. The story needs to be about absolutely nothing.
I would so love to have an AC game where you play a black assassin taking out slave-owners and warmongering southern landowners, it’s a universally* acceptable premise that should be celebrated and enjoyed.
* the people this would offend should be ignored like we used to.
Isnt this basically the black flag DLC?
I don’t know but I’ll look into it, I haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed game in so long they will probably make an Assassin’s Creed game based on the time period in which I last played one.
More specifically, the story has to MEAN nothing. It has to curve REALLY CLOSE to interesting ideas and statements only to swerve away just before they actually make you think about a thing.
Fucking trash country full of trash people.
The shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree.
I assume the idea came from Red Dead Redemption, where it does done very well. Of course, you have to have the courage to make a game like that, and I doubt Ubisoft/new ownership will ever be on board with anything that takes courage. Better to make another bland boring empty world.
I’ll be honest, corps have owned art for far too fucking long. The people deserve this outcome. You can’t make good art by committee, and they’ve already fed everyone slop for years dressed in a shiny wrapper.
Support independent artists even if it isn’t polished.
It’s why Indie games are doing so well, people are obviously tired of bland corporate slop over and over again.
This is accurate. They don’t care about the political instability aspect, because they don’t care about making political commentary. They just don’t want to publish something that is guaranteed to get review bombed and not sell as much as it could.
I never made it too far into RDR2, but RDR1 is a VERY white game. Like, frigging Tom Jane’s Gun did a better job of acknowledging there was melanin in The Wild West and that game… does not age well. Was RDR2 significantly different?
Because, inherently, a LOT of wild west stories are set in or around The Reconstruction and have The Civil War as a major aspect. In large part because that is what contributed to so many guns (and people who knew how to use them) in an environment where there were a lot of scores to settle and an expectation that the government would actively hinder anything.
Whereas this sounds like a continuation of the AssFlag DLC where you straight up murder slavers in Haiti. Which, in turn, is a logical fallout of the origins of The Assassins mostly being about personal freedom and humanity and The Templar being a controlling fascist force that goes way back to Ass Creed 1.
You know… the game where the real bad guys were actually the brown people who were manipulating everyone and King Richard was actually a pretty good guy with a really hot right hand woman.
I’ll agree RDR1 didn’t do much (except the Mexico plight). RDR2 was much better. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt as much joy than punching klansman and just absolutely destroying racists
I literally got stuck in the first area of the new Indiana Jones game because I just couldn’t stop dropping my disguise so I could beat the shit out of Italian fascists.
Fair enough. I don’t recall people getting angry over the existence of black people in RDR2 but I also mostly just tune out the folk who can at all stand the controls of that game (one day I’ll try again).
Because I do think having actual people of color with even a modicum of agency makes a huge difference. Like, going back to RDR1, Bonnie is basically the epitome of “strong woman written by men”. There are so many hints that she is kind of a badass and she definitely has her moments, but basically anything of import is done by John and she increasingly is depicted as someone who needs her big strong outlaw to save her. Which is the same thing when you have Steve Rogers punch a klansman versus having Sam Wilson get his punch on.
Which, to get back to AssCreed, is funnily enough a recurring problem with the games from basically the end of Desmond up until Odyssey. AssFlag was a really fun game with really cool characters but it increasingly became obvious that Whitey McKenway (I am too lazy to look up his name) is almost a secondary character in the story about Mary Read and Anne Bonny and even Adewale (who did get a DLC that nobody played). Like, here are characters who have VERY personal stakes that can explore the societal problems inherent to the world and… we get snippets of their story while Whitey just works toward knocking someone up because he is Connor’s ancestor.
And that very much continued with the Egypt one where The Wife was a MUCH MUCH MUCH cooler character who actually drove the story while we played as The Husband whose claim to fame is he chopped off his finger to go back to something that had already been borderline retconned out of the series.
Fucking wild that this is the state of things. That you have to be courageous to make a game with a black person as the main character.
Ubisoft? The notorious video game publisher that had several high-up members of staff accused of sexual and psychological harassment?
Ubisoft? The company described in a lawsuit filed by employees in 2021 as ‘a legal entity for institutional sexual harassment for setting up, maintaining and reinforcing a system where sexual harassment is tolerated because it is more profitable for the company to keep harassers in place than to protect its employees’?
That Ubisoft? They cancelled a game? Oh no :(
Well racists ARE a protected class now and this would hurt their poor poor fee fees.
It would have been shit anyway like all their games of the past ~10 years
Fuck yes. A slave that takes on the slave owning Templar? Sign me up all day, I want to run into a confederate camp and crush them.
This would be quite the game and I can see the far right bitching about it for sure. But man, I want to see an Assassin Lincoln. Imagine that? Tall boy Lincoln dawning an Assassin’s hood? Would make me actually excited for a Ubisoft AC title again. After the let down that was shadows, I might explore the Witch AC coming up…but nothing else excites me from them.
Fuck yes. A slave that takes on the slave owning Templar? Sign me up all day, I want to run into a confederate camp and crush them.
Freedom Cry, the standalone expansion for Black Flag, was essentially this concept in the Carribean. You play as Adewale, a slave turned pirate turned Assassin, and liberate plantations.
They would complain, and it would be a self report… If you’re offended by a slave killing slaveowners, then you’re a piece of shit and nobody should fucking care what you think.
Lincoln would be cool to see in flashbacks, but I don’t think he’d have been a good assassin at the time of his death. It’d have been sick, shame that Ubisoft is full of pussies.
Just make him the wise old mentor, easy
AC is so moldy Ubisoft could only get me excited with a nice big Grow Home / Up sequel with no microtransactions, no ingame shop and everything unlockable through playing.
On one hand, it sucks that in the Trump era, maintaining shareholder value involves not offending Nazis. OTOH, though, given how tedious the American Revolution one was, essentially running on rails with your character inserted into key episodes, the Civil War episode would have sucked. Presumably you’d have been riding shotgun with Harriett Tubman and/or General Sherman in a succession of semi-interactive cut scenes, repeating until you shot/stabbed enough confederate NPCs to be rewarded with possibly a short break of open-world exploring as a treat.
True… I’m currently playing Ghost of Yotei, and I imagine Sucker Punch would knock a game like that out of the park
Assassin’s Creed: Django Unchained
Ghost of Abe Lincon vampire hunter available as guide via purchase
They didn’t want to alienate a good part of their market.
Slave holders or racists?
Yeah those guys
Racists, shareholders, or both?
I’d love to fight Cromwell!
