Ubisoft has reportedly canceled the next mainline Assassin’s Creed game (codenamed “Project Scarlet”) for fears of political backlash in the United States.
According to Game File, the company canceled the game in July 2024, one month after CEO Yves Guillemot denounced the racist backlash to the casting of historical figure Yasuke as one of the dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. In September, he adopted a more conciliatory tone where he stated the company’s goal isn’t to “push any specific agenda.” Then in October 2024, he said the company would be “tackling the dynamics” behind what he called “polarized comments” in order to protect the company’s reputation and sales potential.
Insider Gaming corroborated Game File’s report, adding that the game was codenamed “Project Scarlet” and Ubisoft Quebec was leading development. It would have been “the next mainline RPG for the franchise” and was scheduled to launch in October 2027.
Current and former Ubisoft employees explained to Game File that the game would have been set in the mid-19th century American South, specifically during a period known as “Reconstruction” that followed the American Civil War. The protagonist would have been a formerly enslaved Black man recruited by the titular Assassins to battle the Ku Klux Klan and other oppressive forces.
These sources claimed that despite internal enthusiasm for the game, it was rumored to be canceled due to the backlash over Yasuke’s lead role in Shadows and fear that United States’ political climate was becoming increasingly tense. “Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short,” said one source.
Why would a Reconstruction era Assassin’s Creed game risk backlash?
America’s Reconstruction Era was the time period after the Civil War where the political and social ramifications of the end of slavery and the defeat of the Confederate States rippled across the American South. It is largely defined by state-sanctioned efforts to delegitimize the rights of newly-freed Black Americans through laws referred to as “Black Codes” and state-sanctioned terrorism by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
These efforts were enabled by a federal government that proved conciliatory to former Confederates under presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. The assassination of president Abraham Lincoln by the pro-Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth hung over these events, as Lincoln believed in a different post-war strategy that would have extracted more concessions from the South and denied former Confederates political power.
Many historians posit the failures to defend Black Americans’ civil liberties cemented over a century of racist inequality only partially alleviated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The 2020 George Floyd protests spotlighted the fact that this inequality persists, leading many companies—including game developers—to pledge support for improved diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI).
Those programs became the target of conservative and far-right groups over the last five years, and their obliteration was promised in the infamous Project 2025 policy document produced for an anticipated Trump administration. The proposed policies within carried dire portents for what could turn into censorship of the game development community, warnings that now seem prudent given the administration’s continued vilification of DEI initiatives.
As President Trump’s campaign gained momentum, far-right agitators attacked Ubisoft for making Yasuke one of the main protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Despite his real-world role in Japanese history, supporters of this campaign accused Ubisoft of forcing diversity by making a Black man a co-protagonist in a game set in Japan’s Sengoku period.
This campaign did little to dent the game’s financial success with over 5 million “unique players”, but apparently shaped the thinking of Ubisoft leadership. One could argue that given the long arc of history, “Project Scarlet” was undone by the injustices of the era it hoped to portray.