Three years ago, Ubisoft announced a bunch of Assassin's Creed games and their plans for the franchise's future. The game code-named Project Red released earlier this year as Assassin's Creed Shadows, and Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe is expected to launch in 2026. But what about 2027? Well, seems like we might not get a big mainline entry then, and it sounds like the reasons for it are rather unusual and controversial.
Stephen Totilo and Tom Henderson, both very reliable journalists, have spoken with sources at Ubisoft that claim the Assassin's Creed game meant to launch in 2027 has been cancelled. "Fair enough. Maybe Ubisoft just didn't think it seemed fun or good enough", you say? Not exactly.
Because Assassin's Creed 2027 was supposed to be set after the American Civil War. Around the 1860s and 1870s to be exact, and have a black, former slave, protagonist that would - among other things - go up against the Ku Klux Klan in the South.
To quote one of Totilo's sources:
"Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short."
The longer version: Three sources told Totilo that they heard Ubisoft had two main reasons to cancel Assassin's Creed 2027:
1) The online backlash that rose around having Yasuke, a historically-inspired black samurai, as one of the protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
2) Concerns that the political climate in the United States was becoming increasingly tense.
Not exactly common reasons for cancelling a game, but certain parts of the internet's reactions to games like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and The Last of Us: Part II does to some extent make it understandable that a gaming company under increasingly tougher pressure decided to play it safe.
What do you think about cancelling games for reasons like these, and would you like to see an Assassin's Creed set in the mid-1800s?