After ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Delay, Ubisoft Acknowledges ‘Outlaws’ Issues, Anti-Woke Pushback

Ubisoft is in an extremely rough spot right now with its stock at a ten year low, a self-investigation into the company beginning to sort out its issues and the announcement that its imminent large-scale Assassin’s Creed game, Shadows, will now be delayed three months, out of 2024 to February 14, 2025.

Ubisoft was…unusually candid about the reasons for this, even to the point of admitting its last game had issues they needed to learn from:

“While [Assassin’s Creed Shadows] is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title.”

Outlaws arrived with somewhat middling scores, which put it in the bottom half of all Ubisoft’s major releases over the last 10-15 years. The idea was that an open world Star Wars game was almost a can’t-miss, but between bugs and criticism of its heavy stealth focus, it just didn’t do as well as they wanted, and that includes sales-wise. Now, Massive is patching the game not just to fix technical issues but even to modify some of its stealth sections to be more player friendly, plus additional improvements to combat more generally.

Then, Ubisoft surprisingly, tacitly acknowledged a narrative that its games have become too “woke” or agenda-driven, according to a segment of the internet:

“I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda. We remain committed to creating games…that everyone can enjoy.”

While Ubisoft already apologized to its Japanese audiences over some questionable promotional materials for Shadows, the pushback was also about the inclusion of Yasuke as one of the two leads, a legendary black samurai where there was an ensuing debate of whether he was actually a samurai, and a stated idea that it shouldn’t be starring him at all.

There was similar pushback to Kay Vess leading Star Wars Outlaws as a woman, and a not-attractive-enough woman at that. No uh, historical accuracy complaints there, as it was pretty straightforward “woke/DEI” talking points there. But it is surprising to see Ubisoft entertain this at all.

With the Shadows delay, I have seen some talk about how they’re using this time to patch out Yasuke or reduce his role in the game as a result of all this. That’s…essentially impossible at this point. This is a three month delay for a “feature complete” game and you are not going to tear out the entire meat of the story and replace it during that time. That’s just not how it works. It will indeed simply be polish, ensuring the game launches with its best foot forward in that department and has fewer bugs that Outlaws did.

It’s clear Ubisoft is in a tough spot right now and all-hands-on-deck at this point. Whether they can recover from recent missteps and launch Shadows as a hit remains to be seen.

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