Following reports last July that Ubisoft had canceled an upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, industry insider Stephen Totilo has revealed details of the shelved project.
According to his Game Files newsletter, the title was set in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. It was reportedly scrapped due to concerns over the political climate in the United States and online backlash to a Black samurai protagonist in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
The canceled project, which was in development at Ubisoft Quebec, would have reportedly featured a formerly enslaved Black man recruited by the Brotherhood of Assassins after moving West “to start a new life.” His return to the South would have involved a “fight for justice in a conflict that would, among other things, see him confront the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short,” one of Totilo’s sources said of the decision.
The timing of this cancellation was well before Donald Trump’s election to a second term, but it may have occurred around the time of the first assassination attempt against the sitting US president.
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For context, when Ubisoft released a trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows in May 2024, some fans, conservative critics, and Elon Musk himself unfairly labeled the game as “woke.” The criticism centered around the character Yasuke, who was based on a real-life African slave brought to Japan by Jesuit missionaries.
Thomas Lockley, a professor and author of African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, pushed back against the criticism. “There’s no piece of paper that says Yasuke was a samurai,” he told The Japan Times. “But then there’s no piece of paper that says anybody else was a samurai.”
Despite the backlash, Shadows surpassed five million players by July 2025 — just three months after its release.