The game would have featured a Black man formerly enslaved in the South and trying to start afresh in the West and being recruited by the Order of Assassins and sent back south to face a swelling Templar threat, with the character set to “confront the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Stephen Totilo’s paywalled Game File report cites five current and former Ubisoft staffers under anonymity who say leadership pulled the plug for two main reasons.

The publisher did not want a repeat of the online pile-on around Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows [pictured]. For those who came in late, that featured a black samurai in feudal Japan, which got a lot of good white folks on the blower to issue death threats to Ubisoft staff because of their "political correctness."

Bosses judged the United States setting to be an untouchable political third rail. The US government is removing texts from schools and museum displays which talk about slavery, the KKK and racial prejudice claiming that it is all a leftie plot.

Crucially, the sources did not say the game was scrapped because it would “offend white people.” They framed the concern as a US political firestorm risk, which would naturally include backlash from some white audiences given Reconstruction and KKK themes.

“Too political in a country too unstable, to make it short,” a source reportedly told Game File. “I was terribly disappointed by not surprised by leadership. They are making more and more decisions to maintain the political ‘status quo’ and take no stand, no risk, even creative,” another source added.

Ubisoft has handled slavery before. Freedom Cry, the Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag spin-off, put players in the boots of Adéwalé, a Black man from Trinidad who had been enslaved, with missions focused on freeing people held by Templars.

For all the noise around Yasuke’s inclusion, Assassin’s Creed Shadows launched strongly with critics and sales in 2025, which dents the fear that audiences would not show up.