According to a new report from Stephen Totilo at Game File (paywalled), Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game in 2024 that would have been set in the 19th century, specifically in a post-American Civil War era setting. Players would have taken on the role of a Black man who had been enslaved in the American South before the war, now living in the western regions of the country, looking to start a new life.
That is, until you would have been recruited by the Order of Assassins and sent back to the American South to face a growing Templar threat, which would have, according to Totilo's report, seen your character "confront the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan."
Totilo's report comes from a mix of five current and former Ubisoft employees who all spoke under anonymity, who claim that the game was cancelled for two main reasons.
The first was Ubisoft deciding it didn't want to go through the same online turmoil it went through over the inclusion of Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows. The second reason was that Ubisoft management ultimately seemed to believe that releasing an Assassin's Creed game with this setting would have been like stepping on the third rail in the United States with regards to the game's political setting.
"Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short," a source reportedly told Game File. Another source added, "I was terribly disappointed by not surprised by leadership. They are making more and more decisions to maintain the political 'status quo' and take no stand, no risk, even creative."
This wouldn't have been the first time Ubisoft has broached atrocities like slavery in its historical settings. Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry was a spin-off to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, where you play as Adéwalé, a Black man from Trinidad who was a slave before his time on Edward Kenway's ship in the Black Flag campaign. Beyond your regular Assassin's Creed stealth and action gameplay, a core element of the story was freeing other Black people who had been enslaved by the Templars.
In fact, you could argue that making the kind of game described by the report here would be the next logical step if you wanted to continue exploring the idea of a character fighting back against those who enslaved him and those like him.
It's also worth pointing out that for all the 'backlash' Ubisoft received online for having Yasuke as one of two protagonists, Assassin's Creed Shadows had a stellar launch from a critical and commercial perspective, and even now is still one of the best-selling games of 2025.
Whether Ubisoft would have been able to execute on this story is another matter, but the fact that Ubisoft management allegedly deemed a story that would have, among other things, pointed out the very obvious fact that slavery is an awful, terrible, and disgusting stain on human history, "too political," is telling in its own way.
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