Though I am currently up to date with everything going on it would be quite a stretch to call myself an 'Assassin's Creed fan'. More like am 'Assassin's Creed curios' bystander. Heck, I may have played every game up until now until completion but never year one and never even close to at full price. I'm just dipping my toes back into the pool every now and then to see if the waters are warm enough to stir something in the dead vessel I call a soul. And, uhh... that's been a 'no' so far. Mirage was fine, but reeked of a non-committal to it's own supposed core design principals that it overall undermined itself in the most ridiculous ways. Trying to finagle a core-gameplay-style stealth system out of the rough confines of the Valhalla iteration game engine was a trying experience to witness- but I guess it got the company their biggest comparative financial success of the past few years and that's all this industry is to Ubisoft- a financial endeavour. (No 'art/commercialism' balance here!)
But that doesn't mean I don't keep up to date with the franchise and watch what's coming on the horizon. Because otherwise how else would I be able to see their newest attempt at doing a dual protagonist story when they still struggle to make a single protagonist with a personality deeper than a mid-day puddle. (I genuinely think that Assassin's Creed writers are hard-line limited to developing a single new character trait each game. Maybe by Assassin's Creed 2040 we can have an actual complex character to play around?) I see with the utmost chagrin that they're still trying to make their milquetoast third person action combat thing work- really hope they learned moderation this time around, and seem to be making a Stealth system that at least looks fleshed out and fun- we'll see when the thing drops soon. But what I want to talk about has nothing to do with that.
I want to talk about the absolute war that Ubisoft seems to have unintentionally sparked within their Asian community. Of course it started when chuds saw now white or male characters in the reveal trailer and suffered mild strokes- I can only imagine the recent 'Ghost of Yotei' trailer has them all in the emergency room- but since then the Japanese audience and just general Ubisoft sceptics have really picked on the depiction of Yasuke the black Samurai. Now first I really need to recover from the absolute flashbang of people rushing around declaring the Assassin's Creed franchise as pure historical fiction wherein accuracy to the time period was never an important part of the franchise... umm, yes it was. It always was. Yes, the games are historical fiction but they were intentionally tied to worlds close enough to the history books that they could survive the integrity of a thirty second Wikipedia search- and that isn't just me speaking my feelings, that is literally the guidelines they themselves exposited about the series back in the Ezio days. You don't spend hours of development time tirelessly writing codex entries describing the historical importance of local impeccably modelled architecture if history is just a wet rag you wipe your narrative inconsistencies with. With that in mind- let's talk Yosuke.
I'm going to go ahead and call this horrendous bad luck on Ubisoft's side because as an artistical void pure corporate business hell hole- they have absolutely political bias or leaning they try to put out into the world. If it makes money, it's their new mantra- that is as far as any of that flies around a Ubisoft office. And Yasuke very much survived the 'thirty second google search' rule when the game was first conceived. But since then, and independent of this title- the validity of the historical sources detailing him have come into question and suddenly I'm betting Ubisoft deeply wished they stuck to the 'invented protagonists' rule they developed ever since the days following Ezio- who himself was actually tied to a real family of small historical note. (I'm not sure they ever had a son called Ezio, though.)
Now Yasuke has been said to perhaps not even be a Samurai, let alone be of foundation importance to Japanese History- but none of that should even matter because the way Assassin's Creed uses it's protagonists shouldn't reflect in history anyway- right? It seems Ubisoft has allowed itself to be dragged into the mud and now have squashed themselves into a state where they're not even welcome at Tokyo Games show anymore! That's right, they finally make a Japanese based game and they can't even show it off in Japan! All because Ubisoft latched onto a protagonist based on a real person and were foolish enough to assume that being dead for several hundred years makes one safe from fresh controversy. I'm sure Yasuke thought the same, Ubisoft- doesn't make that belief any less right.
Assassin's Creed is of eminent importance this year too, given the shakey grounds that Ubisoft has been on in recent years- with even their Star Wars game not hitting it out the park like they promised it would. Some would say that the general mediocrity of Ubisoft has snuck up on them- and there might be some truth to that. As the rest of the industry shores up it's talents and becomes more refined, maybe the middle of the road 'everything game' that Assassin's Creed regularly trips itself up trying to be is finally putting people off. Maybe that's why people are freaking out over every little thing, like horses not perfectly syncing in their walking animations or sword strikes not always hitting their target. And in kind maybe that's why Ubisoft are getting spooked and dodging conferences? I doubt it though. I just the reality is dawning on Ubisoft that this controversy might actually affect sales in the one year that Ubisoft can't afford to lose out on sales.
The most recent information is that Assassin's Creed Shadows is going to be delayed even further into 2025, which could be seen as a strategic move to get them away from the packed holiday season- or perhaps a sign of weakness because, you know- Assassin's Creed used to own the holiday season! They used to be the big boy that others were afraid to go up against but this year- they need to make sure they get as many game copies out there as possible. Of course, now they're sharing their window with Monster Hunter and Like a Dragon- so maybe it's an 'out of the pot into the fire' situation for Ubisoft right now.
I truly think it hasn't dawned quite how screwed Ubisoft is if Shadows is a bomb. Which it won't be... but it might be? I cannot overstate how utterly inconceivable it is that even with the uncommon levels of vitriol around this game's community that any of it will translate to sales in a meaningful manner... but what if it's just enough to make this game short of it's sale goals? In a perfect world that would mean next to nothing, but when Yves Guillemot is currently having his competency heavily questioned by internal forces looking to seize control out from under him in order to gut Ubisoft for spear parts? We may be looking at a very precarious Jenga block to an empire wobbling under the weight of responsibility. And in that light- yeah, I'd probably delay the game too.
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