Bear in mind the Murderer’s Creed: Shadows controversy? I barely do. If you happen to listened to a really specific crowd again when it was revealed the sport would characteristic Yasuke, an actual historic determine who’s been referenced an entire bunch in Japanese media anyway, you’d have thought it was the top of days. Initially, Ubisoft tried to mollify stated crowd, calm them down which… Nicely, it went about in addition to you’d count on.
The sky did not fall. What really occurred was that the sport bought fairly nicely as an entertaining open world romp, and all of us moved on with our lives. In different phrases, Ubisoft made an Ubisoft sport. Nothing exploded as a result of a Black samurai was in it. Gaming survived.
Coté did, nonetheless, lately get slowly inspired to depart the corporate, which can go some methods to elucidate the extent of cynicism I am about to use to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot incoming phrases right here—which do not essentially match as much as actions taken by Ubisoft within the ensuing months. Extra on that later.
That is to not say Guillemot is sort of as impassioned as Coté was, although he stabs at roughly the identical jist: “In September 2024, we had our backs towards the wall, and that is when it clicked. To get out of the nook, we needed to cease specializing in those that hated us. We needed to begin firing up our allies. So we stopped making an attempt to win the argument, and leaned on what had carried us for 18 years: The Murderer’s Creed model.”
“It additionally gave us time to rebuild the Murderer’s Creed model pact, placing the markers of the franchise again on the middle.” Guillemot, considerably hilariously, classifies this as “extra hood, extra stealth, extra leap of religion, extra lore.” I, too, like it when issues from a videogame like hood and leap of religion are in a videogame. A lot lore, large stabs. Yum yum.
Actually I am glad the plan labored, although I am a smidge cynical of Guillemot, right here. Not as a result of he instantly begins speaking about how cool the model is, or how everybody needs extra hood and stealth and lore of their Murderer’s Creed video games, however as a result of Ubisoft additionally reportedly cancelled a complete deliberate Civil Battle-era sport the place you went up towards the Ku Klux Klan as a result of US political local weather. After which there’s the Coté factor.
There are actions Ubisoft additionally would possibly’ve simply completed so for monetary causes—but it surely’s most likely reminder that Ubisoft’s ‘Operation: Cease listening to the racists’ wasn’t completed totally out of the goodness of its coronary heart: It simply occurs that not feeding the trolls is the simplest strategy to, nicely, starve them.
