Assassin’s Creed has taken in a few historical periods over its life as a franchise, from Medieval to World War I. The through-line follows a fictional millennia-old struggle between the Order of Assassins, who fight for peace and free will, and the Knights Templar, who desire peace through order and control.
It turns out that there is one period in history that they simply can’t touch right now, the Reconstruction era, directly after the American Civil War.
A new report at Game File has given details on the scrapping of a planned instalment set during this era. The new game was to be set in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s. Gamers would play as an African-American man who had been formerly enslaved in the South and moved west to start a new life. Recruited by the Assassins, he returns to the South to fight for justice, along with confronting the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
The report spoke to current and former Ubisoft employees under condition of anonymity who say management in Paris halted the title due to the tense political climate in the US, describing it as “…too political in a country too unstable…” They also cited the “backlash” surrounding the Black samurai character Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
This feels disengenuous, as most of the complaints about that were around historical “blackwashing” in the game, a charge that simply cannot be levelled at a game set against the backdrop of freed slaves and the reintergation of the South into the United States.
More likely is that it posed awkward questions and even more awkward answers when they were grappling with how to deal with the historical roots of the politics behind the Klu Klux Klan, and Westward expansion, an approach that would eventually, many years later, inspire a certain Austrian painter.
Assassin’s Creed III was set during the Revolutionary War.
