After Assassin's Creed Shadows delay, Ubisoft acknowledges Outlaws issues and anti-woke backlash

Ubisoft is currently in an extremely difficult situation: its stock is at a ten-year low, the company is conducting a self-examination to resolve its problems, and it has been announced that the upcoming large-scale Assassin's Creed game Shadows is now being delayed by three months from 2024 to February 14, 2025.

Ubisoft was … unusually open about the reasons for this and even admitted that there were problems in the last game that they had to learn from:

“While [Assassin’s Creed Shadows] is fully functional, the lessons learned from the release of Star Wars Outlaws have prompted us to schedule additional time to further refine the title.”

Outlaws came out to fairly mediocre reviews, putting it in the bottom half of all of Ubisoft's major releases of the last 10-15 years. The idea was that an open world Star Wars game was almost a must-have, but due to bugs and criticism of its heavy focus on stealth, it just didn't perform as well as hoped, including in terms of sales. Now Massive is patching the game not only to fix technical issues, but also to make some of the stealth sections more player-friendly, as well as making additional improvements to combat in general.

Then, surprisingly, Ubisoft quietly acknowledged the claim that its games had become too “woke” or interest-driven, as shown in a section on the Internet:

“I want to reiterate that we are a company that puts entertainment first. We develop games for the widest possible audience. Our goal is not to push a particular agenda. We remain committed to developing games that everyone can enjoy.”

While Ubisoft has already apologized to its Japanese audience for some questionable promotional materials for Shadows, the pushback also focused on the inclusion of Yasuke as one of the two main characters, a legendary black samurai, which sparked a subsequent debate about whether he Strictly speaking a samurai and the stated idea that he should not play the main role at all.

There was similar pushback against Kay Vess leading Star Wars Outlaws as a woman, and not attractive enough at that. No, er, there were complaints about historical accuracy, as these were pretty obvious “woke/DEI” talking points. But it's surprising that Ubisoft would even consider this.

I've heard that they're using the time after Shadows is delayed to patch Yasuke or reduce his role in the game. That's… basically impossible right now. That's a three month delay for a game that's feature complete, and you're not going to rip out the whole heart of the story and replace it in that time. It just doesn't work that way. It's actually just going to be polishing to make sure the game comes out with the best performance in that regard and has fewer bugs than Outlaws.

It's clear that Ubisoft is in a tough spot right now and has its hands full. Whether they can recover from their recent missteps and launch Shadows as a hit remains to be seen.

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