Ubisoft is undergoing a “major reset,” cancelling six video games and closing two studios in a desperate bid to return to growth.
The French publisher, known for Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, has scrapped its long-awaited Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. Fans have waited since 2020 for the title, which has suffered from multiple delays and a complete development reboot.
Alongside the high-profile Prince of Persia cancellation, Ubisoft binned four unannounced titles and one mobile game. The company stated these projects “did not meet the new enhanced quality” standards required for its refined portfolio.
Seven other games have been delayed into 2027 to ensure they meet strict quality benchmarks.
The restructuring has a high human cost. Ubisoft confirmed the closure of its studios in Stockholm, Sweden, and Halifax, Canada. The Halifax closure is particularly controversial, occurring just days after the studio voted to form a union.
Additional “restructuring” is also hitting offices in Abu Dhabi and the UK, as well as The Division developer, Massive Entertainment.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot described the moves as a “decisive turning point” for the company. He noted that the “triple-A” gaming industry has become increasingly competitive, with soaring development costs making new brands harder to launch.
To stabilize, Ubisoft is splitting into five independent “Creative Houses.” Each house will focus on a specific genre, such as open-world adventures or tactical shooters. This decentralized model is designed to speed up decision-making and restore creative agility.
The market reacted sharply to the news. Ubisoft’s shares plunged by 33% on Thursday, hitting their lowest level in more than a decade. The company now expects a massive operating loss of around €1 billion for the 2026 financial year.
Despite the cuts, Ubisoft is doubling down on its biggest franchises. Its “Vantage Studios” division will focus on turning Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six into annual “billionaire brands” through a mix of open-world sequels and live-service updates.
In 2025 Marc-Alexis Côté, the head of the Assassin’s Creed franchise and a 20 year veteran of Ubisoft, abruptly left the publisher following the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Three months ago he broke his silence to claim that he didn’t leave voluntarily but was pushed out of the company. Now he’s suing Ubisoft for nearly $1 million over what he alleges was a “constructive dismissal” after being demoted from leading the publisher’s biggest franchise.
Radio-Canada reports that the lawsuit was recently filed in the Superior Court of Quebec and claims $1.3 million Canadian dollars in damages, or roughly $935,000. In it, Côté details the events leading up to his departure from the company, including a meeting in the summer of 2025 when it apparently became clear that he would no longer remain in charge of Assassin’s Creed, the franchise he had led sine a 2022 strategy reboot outlined its ambitious future.
Last year, Ubisoft launched a subsidiary called Vantage Studios backed by $1.25 billion in funding from Tencent that would house the publisher’s most profitable franchises: Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry, and Assassin’s Creed. It’s led by North American studios head Christophe Derennes and CEO Yves Guillemot’s son, Charlie Guillemot. Prior to the move, Côté reported directly to Yves Guillemot.
An Assassin’s Creed veteran allegedly demoted
But under this new model, Ubisoft was looking to hire a Head of Franchise that would oversee all of its major IP, including Assassin’s Creed, effectively demoting Côté, according to his lawsuit. The new position would also only be located in France, meaning Côté wouldn’t be eligible unless he was willing to relocate his life across the Atlantic.
The veteran developer was reportedly offered a new position of franchise production head or an ambiguous role leading a “Creative House” overseeing a separate, lesser franchise within the company’s portfolio. When he declined and requested his severance for effectively losing his position in October, he alleges that Ubisoft took the surprise step of both internallyand publicly announcing his “voluntary” departure the next day.
“The past 24 hours have been deeply emotional,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “Many of you have expressed surprise that I would choose to leave Assassin’s Creed after so many years, especially given the passion I still hold for it. The truth is simple: I did not make that choice.” Côté is now asking the Quebec court not only for damages and his severance, but to be released from a non-compete clause that limits the roles he can take elsewhere in the video game industry.
Longer dev cycles, fewer games
The lawsuit comes on the eve of Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ one-year anniversary, the last game in the franchise to ship with Côté, who has been working on the historical action series since 2010’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, at the helm. That game was originally supposed to come out in 2024 but was delayed to provide additional development time after already marking the longest lull ever between new releases in the series.
“We’re also shifting our development model to make it more sustainable for our teams, as previously we used to average about three years for each development cycle on Assassin’s Creed,” Côté announced back in 2022. “So we’re moving to longer dev cycles to make them more sustainable from a human and technological point of view, so that we can truly build on the shoulders of one another and then support our games for a longer period of time.”
He said the franchise would evolve along two separate tracks, with Shadows representing the continued evolution of the open-world RPG formula that began with Assassin’s Creed Origins and the next entry, Assassin’s Creed Hexe directed by Clint Hocking, taking an approach that would feel “fresh and different.” Years later, however, some projects like the multiplayer spin-off Invictus and the mobile “AAA” game Jade remain MIA. A remake of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, meanwhile, is rumored to be launching in the next few months.
Ubisoft and Côté did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There are a lot of Assassin’s Creed games, but only a handful are really important to understanding the series’ evolution. Among those is Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which was released on October 23, 2015 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Beyond righting the ship after 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity stumbled out of the gate—something Ubisoft developers openly wrestled with in a video revealing Syndicate to the world—this entry began what’s become a staple of the franchise and action-adventure games more broadly: the ability to play as two fully formed protagonists.
Across various genres, games have let players inhabit multiple characters. But not all implementations are equal, and for franchises, this application has grown over time. A shooter like Halo has evolved from making Player Two a second Master Chief to making them the Arbiter or a fellow Spartan from the series’ canon, depending on the game; Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V (and its incoming sequel) has playable leads introduced over time, whereas its Red Dead Redemption games introduce a second character late into the story and preceded by the explicit death of the nominal lead.
When a game shifts to another point of view, it can introduce new mechanics (see Ratchet & Clank), create new feelings of vulnerability or power (The Last of Us), or just simply offer another perspective on its story (Metal Gear Solid 2).
In the examples above and plenty of others not mentioned, the developers treat having another protagonist like a big deal. When it comes to Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, that status was outside its control. Co-protagonist Evie Frye is the series’ third overall female lead, preceded by Aveline de Grandpré of Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China’s Shao Jun. But when it comes to mainline games, Evie was the first woman, which was quite important back then: Unity noticeably lacked playable women, because, according to creative director Alex Amancio, it would’ve been extra work to make them playable.
That controversy hung over Evie alongside concerns of how she’d be handled in Syndicate. Most of the marketing and the game’s own box art may have downplayed her in favor of her twin brother Jacob, but of the two’s overall positive reception, she came out on top, and her performance was even nominated for a DICE award in 2016.
From that popularity, Ubisoft began to embrace diversity, letting players customize their gender, ethnicity, or both in titles like Far Cry 5 and 6 and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, with the protagonist going by a gender-neutral name or title like “Deputy.” When it comes to Assassin’s Creed, 2018’s Odyssey lets players choose between the named Alexios and Kassandra, while 2020’s Valhalla has a male or female version of Viking-turned-Assassin Eivor Varinsdottir they can switch between at any moment or let the game dictate at specific moments.
While Eivor’s gender-switching is complicated by Valhalla’s approach to Norse mythology, both it and Odyssey consider their respective women the canonical leads across the franchise. It’s not entirely coincidental; a 2020 report revealed Kassandra was originally Odyssey’s sole lead before Alexios was also made playable, a decision made based off the incorrect assumption that a game solely starring a woman wouldn’t sell. In that same report, we learned that Syndicate originally had a more even split between Evie and Jacob, and 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins would’ve killed its main character, Bayek, and shifted perspective over to his estranged wife, Aya.
In working against the constraints of Ubisoft’s toxic management at the time, the Creed developers created a trend that’s helped define present titles. If they hadn’t, 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows might not have its dual leads, Naoe and Yasuke—or at least, not as they are now. That game offered a notable shakeup to this approach in basing Yasuke off a real-world figure, and now that we know a future game is based in 16th-century Europe and a now-canceled title would’ve been during the Civil War, it’s possible either project, or future ones, would’ve further experimented with this.
Alongside Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, more AAA games began to become two-handers, and several have made that a specific selling point. Like the aforementioned Far Cry games, titles like Mass Effect Andromeda and Fallout 4 treated their dual mains as basically interchangeable, made distinct primarily by their gender and voice actor.
But there’s been a growing emphasis on narratively justifying having multiple protagonists around. Sometimes, the justification is just right there on its face, like how the Spider-Man games naturally built up Miles Morales in early installments so he arrived fully formed in Marvel’sSpider-Man 2 as a co-lead for potential future installments. Other times, the second character’s importance is gradually revealed, as The Last of Us Part II does with Abby, or the way Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cycles through three specific perspectives—Gustave, Verso, and both men’s sister Maelle—as the Expeditioners discover their place in the world.
In these instances, what the second (or third) protagonist contributes to the narrative matters as much or more as their playtime compared to who’s been positioned as the “main” up to that point, something developers are aware of and know how to leverage. Expedition did such a good job of characterizing Gustave, his death at the end of Act I has brought players to tears. (Being voiced by Daredevil actor Charlie Cox also doesn’t hurt.) Narratively and to the player, his absence hovers over the rest of the game, despite his playtime being so minimal in the grand scheme. So often, a character like him functions as an appetizer before the full meal of seeing them interact with a contemporary and potentially step aside for that second character to step up, maybe even take the reins going forward. Even in the games where the second character ends up significantly underserved, like the Arbiter across the Halo games, they’re still likely to end up with fans when all is said and done.
Unlike other well-worn tropes over the past decade, like rhythm games or battle royales, there’s not a real risk of two-hander games wearing out their welcome anytime soon. It’s a good mechanic that’s not obtrusive or a betrayal of the premise like co-op can be, and players seem to generally like the idea of trading off between multiple characters. Some games wouldn’t be what they are without it, and as Assassin’s Creed has shown us, it can help keep a series going just a little longer.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows expansion Claws of Awaji launches September 16.
The expansion follows on from the story of Naoe and Yasuke, and introduces over 10 hours of brand-new content.
Here’s what players need to do to prepare themselves to explore the mysterious region of Awaji.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ expansion, Claws of Awaji, is launching on September 16, bringing over 10 hours of new content to the game, furthering the story of Naoe and Yasuke. Set after the main events of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Claws of Awaji will introduce a mysterious new region, Awaji Island.
Awaji is an isolated island, separate from the main game map, full of different biomes such as beaches, swamps and jungles. The island is filled with deadly ambushes, dangerous traps, and Naoe and Yasuke become the target of a powerful and terrifying faction. Enemies on Awaji Island can ambush you when you least expect it; some are even disguised as citizens, so stay on your toes. The expansion will also bring new, unique bosses…but no spoilers here!
At the expansion’s release, all Shadows players will be able to get a new weapon for Naoe – the Bo staff. This weapon can be elevated through multiple legendary Bo Staves, only available in the expansion, that can be found across the island of Awaji. The Bo is a very agile weapon, designed to execute spectacular combos. It can help Naoe attack different enemies in quick sequence or even throw one enemy into another. Players who dive into the expansion will also uncover brand new armor and gear, each featuring fresh designs and abilities.
To prepare for Claws of Awaji, you must finish Shadows’ main story, as the expansion will pick up right where things leave off after completing each of Naoe and Yasuke’s full personal quests.
If you haven’t finished Shadows’ main story – here’s your warning to look away now, as we’re going to spoil the end of it to tease Claws of Awaji’s story.
Still with us? Good. At the end of Shadows, Naoe hears rumors about a mysterious shinobi who is facing a dangerous faction on the island. As Naoe thinks it’s her mother – Tsuyu – she goes there with Yasuke to find out and soon encounter the nefarious faction for themselves.
Claws of Awaji will also incorporate the upcoming level cap increase for its progression, so we recommend hitting at least level 60 before September 16 so you can dive into the action fully prepared and ready to take advantage of the extra levels.
For those who haven’t played since launch, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has since implemented a number of robust updates, including New Game+, a level cap increase (80, up from 60), Knowledge Rank 9 and 10, Forge Level 4 and 5, a new Animus Hub project, new achievements a new Critical Role-inspired ally, bonus free missions, and the Nightmare Difficulty mode. Multiple community-suggested features have also been added, including new parkour mechanics, greater HUD customization, Photomode improvements, and more.
The expansion will be available for purchase or playable with a Ubisoft+ subscription. We hope you enjoy your time exploring Awaji Island on Xbox Series X|S, September 16!
I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past.
Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
I’m struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it’s even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all.
To be excited about a beautifully crafted wall is to set yourself up for an aneurysm when you start to notice the tiny, inflecting details on characters’ faces, or the scrupulous idle animations of a bored guard. Then as I tried to conceive that this same level of care was taking place across thousands of locations in multiple cities over a handful of planets, my genuine thought was: “It’s ridiculous that we mark these games on the same criteria as others.” How can someone look at this, this majesty, and say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then a guard sees me through a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of painstaking stealth, and I wonder how it can be on sale at all.
In 2024, we have reached the most deeply peculiar place, where AAA games are feats that humanity would once have recognized as literal wonders, and yet play with the same irritating issues and tedious repetition as we saw in the 90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
Ubisoft strikes me as the leader in this bizarre space. I have, for years, been delighted and bemused by what that company is capable of creating, albeit often not in positive ways. The Assassin’s Creed series routinely builds entire cities, even countries, in authentic detail, to the point where we almost take it for granted. It has always struck me as the most horrendous waste that a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can recreate ancient Greece in such wonderful detail, and then gets thrown away, that entire digital space never used again for anything else. It could be given to the world, offered as a setting for a thousand indie games, reused and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it’s there for that single game, where we reasonably kvetch about the frustrating details of a broken quest, or at how crowd AI bugs out at crucial moments.
And this is only to touch on the art and architecture. We’re not even mentioning the fantastic writing, the exquisite voice acting, the sound effects, the musical score, the lighting, the concept art that makes such designs possible, and the direction and leadership that can bring all these disparate parts together. All as a backdrop to my repeating the run across the gantry because a distant AI decided to be triggered by a Nix it couldn’t possibly see, or because that time when I pressed Square it decided to throw a punch instead of trigger a takedown.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
I’m old enough to remember a time when we’d lament that a beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure was no fun to play, and be so disappointed that such lovely artistic skill had been the backdrop for illogical puzzles and bad writing. Imagine the camera shot pulling out from that adventure game and revealing the room it’s in, the house that contains that room, the town that house is in, the city that town forms part of, and the country in which that city exists—that gets you close to the scale at which the same issue plagues us 40 years later.
Just that opening city in Outlaws, Mirogana, is more than gaming was capable of ten years ago, let alone 40. It, alone, would be enough for an entire game, with plots and missions and characters. And it’s a blip in this game’s mindblowing breadth. I cannot over-express the scale of what’s offered here, and how incongruous it feels that it can all feel so easily dismissed given such fundamental errors. Errors that mean the game attracts headlines like, “Star Wars Outlaws Is Too Simplistic For Its Own Good.” And I get it! I know what the article means! It’s right that its stealth is banal and badly implemented, and yet such a core element of the game. But God damn, why are we able to reasonably call this creation “simplistic”?
I’ve no idea what the solution can possibly be, but I feel it sits somewhere in a new order of priority. One that involves scaling back the ambition of everything that a large-scale developer knows it can achieve, and re-focuses resources on fixing the absolute basics that it so often cannot. Because the tragedy of a piece of art like Outlaws—or any number of other architectural masterpieces that we see come and go in this industry every month—being able to be sniffed at with a (deserved) 7/10, is too awful.
At Gamescom this year, I saw a talk (currently embargoed) about how wind will cause a game’s world to behave differently, and on one level it was incredible stuff, a technological marvel. But on another, it’s going to offer absolutely nothing if that game’s basic loops are dreary, or if the enemy AI is going to endlessly run into beautifully rendered walls. It could end up being a 7/10 game with technologically astounding wind.
And so I come back to that wall. And I thank everyone involved in making it so special, the artists who spent so long ensuring it felt authentic, and the level designers who placed it, and the people responsible for collision detection who ensured I couldn’t walk through it, and the people who coded the Snowdrop engine so it could exist at all, and the producers who encouraged the developers who implemented it, and every single person who was in some way responsible for making me that wall to momentarily stare at. And I wish I hadn’t had to sneak past it quite so many times.
On May 16, the gaming and entertainment news site Dexerto tweeted an image from the forthcoming game Assassin’s Creed Shadows featuring one of its protagonists, the Black samurai Yasuke, in a fighting pose. Across scores of replies, some voiced optimism, others fatigue with Assassin’s Creed’s now 14-game-long run, and a very vocal few expressed frustration and anger that a Black person was at the center of the narrative.
“Gonna pass on the DEI games,” wrote one blue-check X user, referencing the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Why Wokeism?” asked another. Comments full of racist and sexist language filled the thread.
A more articulate undercurrent of these reactionaries, across many online forums, had a more specific set of complaints. Some alleged the race of the real Yasuke was never known, others that he wasn’t a samurai but a retainer, and another claimed he was never in combat.
These were all fairly elaborate conclusions to draw about a guy from 1581 who’s been depicted as a samurai in Japanese media many times, including in the 2017 video game Nioh and Samurai Warriors 5 in 2021, as well as his own animated series on Netflix.
They also may have been the last bit of armchair history we got on Yasuke if the conversation hadn’t been sustained by a set of accounts looking to build yet another front in the online culture war, fueling what some have been calling Gamergate 2.0. Whereas the Gamergate of 2014 focused on trying to drown out feminist voices, and the voices of women of color, in gaming culture, this second incarnation seems focused on pushing back against diversity in games of all kinds. Yasuke just stepped in their path.
The resurgence of the Gamergate moniker came earlier this year in reaction to the work of Sweet Baby. Staff at the small consultancy received a wave of harassment this spring stemming from misinformation and conspiracy theories claiming the company was a BlackRock-backed outfit trying to force diversity into games. (It’s not affiliated with BlackRock and merely advises on characters and storylines.) As the controversy around Assassin’s Creed Shadows intensified, severalposts mentioned Sweet Baby, even though company CEO Kim Belair says the firm didn’t work on the game.
“I think it just comes with the post-Gamergate (late-Gamergate?) territory,” Belair wrote in an email to WIRED. “To a certain kind of person, largely trolls, we’re synonymous with their idea of ‘wokeness in games’ or a vague idea of ‘DEI,’ but it’s ultimately reflective of the overall misinformation that fuels this campaign.”
Gamergate was not the first harassment campaign conceived in the bowels of 4chan and its affiliate websites, but it was perhaps their crowning achievement. The attacks against developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, among others, ranged from doxing to rape and death threats. Its tenets and tactics eventually proved valuable in bringing people into the burgeoning alt-right movement. Even Pizzagate and QAnon can, in some ways, be traced back to what was happening with gamers online in 2014.
“Gamergate was a recruiting ground, a pipeline to leverage the loneliness, discontentment, and alienation of young men—often white young men—into alt-right politics, extremist misogyny, and outright white supremacy and Nazism,” Thirsty Suitors narrative lead Meghna Jayanth told WIRED.
Image: Kotaku / Ubisoft / Sony / Rocksteady / Nosyrevy (Getty Images), Digital Sun, Vicky Leta / Blizzard, Nintendo, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios / Sega, Cyan Worlds Inc
This week, Ubisoft released a statement addressing what might generously be called a “controversy” about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, Shadows. Let’s be real, though. It’s just the latest salvo from a reactionary hate movement. You can read our thoughts on that, the terrific texture of Yakuza 0, the missteps of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, the amazing sound design of the Riven remake, and more, in the pages ahead.
With an entire franchise leading into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, features have come and gone over the years. All good things learn from their predecessors, so it’s important to highlight some of what should and shouldn’t be included, so here are 5 features we hope to see in AC Shadows and 5 we don’t.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Features We Want to See
It’s easy to look at any feature in the franchise now and say it’s good or bad in retrospect. Some things made sense for the games and their titles, while others improved their games from the ground up.
1. Stealth-Focused Combat
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
I can’t lie, when I play Assassin’s Creed 3, it’s loads of fun to run up to a group of Redcoats and start a fight I know I can win. However, something about that doesn’t feel like Assassin’s Creed at its best. Assassin’s Creed Mirage brought back the combat mechanics from the days of old where stealth is more your ally than the sword at your hip. Hopefully, Yasuke can satisfy the large-scale combat, while letting Naoe remain stealthy.
While losing any fight with more than five enemies gets disheartening, it drives players to play the game using stealth, the way it should be. It makes you think about your environment and use it to your advantage, rather than brute force. When I want to tear through enemies, I’ll hop into AC3 or Black Flag, but I’d rather be sneaky.
2. Those Who Came Before – Isu
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
One of the common threads throughout the Assassin’s Creed games is the precursor race often referred to as Those Who Came Before. They’re the basis for why the Templars and Assassins have anything to fight over. Different games have touched on them to varying degrees, but the earlier games dove deeper than the new ones.
Some titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 would have the historical protagonist and Desmond interacting with characters like Juno to give backstory to the Isu. Games like Syndicate and Mirage didn’t take any time to go forward to the present day, so the period characters had all of the interaction with them. While I don’t want Assassin’s Creed Shadows to feature the Isu too heavily, I’ll miss them if they’re gone.
3. Playable Side Games
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
One of the smaller Assassin’s Creed features playing games in a bar or saloon is a nice touch that brings the world together. Certain in-game locations have people playing games either for money or pleasure. The franchise has seen games like Checkers, Men’s Morris and Hazard, so Japan opens the door for Shogi, Go or Sugoroku.
These games add to the world-building, as much as having a codex with paragraphs of information. The codex is great, but having interactive games incentivises players to dive deeper into the history. You’re immersing yourself deeper into the world, which connects you more with the characters. Plus it’s a great way to make a little money.
4. Eagle-Based Scouting
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has introduced plenty of mechanics that make the overall game easier or more connected. One such feature is the eagles used for scouting the environment. AC Origins employed Senu and Origins employed Enkidu as their scouts, and it feels right at home in the franchise. Sure, it’s not using the Assassin’s skills per se, but I can suspend my disbelief if it means flying around the map.
The marksmen that shoot at your bird are a brilliant counter to the ability, not making it feel too overpowered. If you try to use your bird and they get shot at, you’ll have to manage on foot until you eliminate those enemies. Then, you’ll be able to use the feature to its fullest, which adds an extra layer to the gameplay. If you want to use your eagle’s vision, you’ll have to use your Eagle Vision.
5. Efficient Sprint Feature
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
As a self-proclaimed completionist, I do my best not to fast-travel very much. I love running around the map to find the collectibles and side missions scattered throughout. That said, my patience thins quickly when a game doesn’t have a sprint button like Assassin’s Creed Origins. Games with oversized maps like some of the AC franchise can’t get away with not letting me run fast enough to explore the map efficiently.
I say “efficient” sprint mechanic as a direct callout to AC Mirage. It’s a great time to explore Baghdad, but the sprint feature didn’t make me feel like I was running much faster. Most of the other Assassins (who weren’t hulking warriors) had the advantage of being fast and deadly. Basim felt a bit slow after playing the whole game, but he’s a very different character.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Features We Don’t Want
There’s no inherent issue with Ubisoft giving Assassin’s Creed Shadows features that can keep things fresh. However, sometimes features are added to the franchise that it could do without, or that are only appropriate for the title they’re originally featured in.
1. Grappling Hook
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
One of the most game-changing mechanics introduced to Assassin’s Creed would have to be the grappling hook from AC Syndicate. Don’t get me wrong, there was something satisfying about being able to grapple up the face of most buildings. However, it does go against what makes Assassin’s Creed feel the way it does. Fearlessly scaling buildings by hand makes the Assassins feel capable and threatening. Having a grappling hook do all the work feels like taking a shortcut.
The grappling hook being a feature in AC Syndicate does fit that time nicely, but it’d feel out of place as a feature in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The Industrial Revolution was a boom in technological advancement, so it only makes sense that the Assassins might get some new kit. However, having a grappling hook in feudal Japan might pull players out of the story, so it’d be best to omit one this time.
2. Glider/Flying Machine
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
Speaking of faster methods of transportation, Ezio‘s glider in Assassin’s Creed 2 is another thing that should be left out of AC Shadows. Depending on the size of the map, my opinion on this might shift because sometimes you need to cover large distances quickly. Traversal shouldn’t feel like a cop out, and luckily the glider wasn’t a main feature, so it didn’t become distracting.
Rise of the Ronin was a recent game set in Japan with the protagonist using a glider, so it’s safe to say that AC Shadows won’t want to mimic it. Depending on the map size, it might be worthwhile to have some method for speedy travel, but I’m a fan of the classic horse. As long as you can make the horse sprint, I’ll be happy.
3. Naval Combat
Image Source: Ubisoft
Naval combat was introduced to the Assassin’s Creed franchise in Black Flag. It consists of captaining a ship and its crew to board and destroy enemy ships while traveling on the seas. While the mechanic is interesting and done uniquely, it can tend to slow some of the gameplay. There’s a learning curve, with patience being key to success.
There is plenty to appreciate about the naval combat in the AC games that have it. Listening to your crew singing sea shanties was a great touch in Black Flag, and boarding a ship is always satisfying. It just feels like using large-scale transportation like ships isn’t as discreet as the Assassins aim to be. Assassin’s Creed Shadows could feature some boats, but I can’t see Naoe captaining a vessel to the cheers of her crew.
4. Modern-Day Cutaways
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
This one is a struggle even for me to choose, but I’ve got to go with my gut. I understand the parts of the game that cut back to Desmond or an Abstergo employee are the way to tie everything together. When I first started playing AC games, I became more compelled by the historical settings than the meta-story. Even though I like the precursor details, after Desmond’s story I haven’t been impressed by anything in the modern day.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy a new modern storyline if it were done well. I only feel that Ubisoft should focus its resources more on the part of the game that people are buying it for. Blag Flag’s Abstergo cutaways were my least favorite part of the game, but not playing them at all felt like skipping out on the full experience. As much as I loved Nolan North’s performance, I found myself racing to get back in the animus whenever I could.
5. Freerun Up/Down
Image Source: Ubisoft via Twinfinite
Assassin’s Creed Unity revamped the freerunning mechanics for the franchise to allow for more precise traversal. This continued into Syndicate, although later games abandoned it to pursue a different style. The introduction was much needed in the franchise to smooth out some of the traversal mechanics, and it succeeded.
That said, at this point in the franchise, the mechanic is dated. While it did solve some of the former issues regarding traversing the map, it’s since been modernized in a way that makes sense for the franchise. The newer games have implemented a smoother, implicitly directional system allowing for a more natural experience. Freerunning up or down is a feature Assassin’s Creed Shadows won’t be needing.
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Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s long-running open-world RPG series, and Vanderpump Rules, Bravo’s long-running reality TV series, are connected—kind of. It’s rare that two of my biggest, most disparate interests collide so spectacularly as this, but here we are, and it’s all thanks to a man named Jax Taylor.
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Taylor, one of the former stars of VPR (he left/was fired after season eight, depending upon who you ask) has been claiming for nearly 15 years that the face on the Assassin’s Creed I box art(or II, depending upon who and when you ask) is based on his visage. Taylor, who was previously a model, even lists it as one of his (unverified) credits on his old Model Mayhem page.
Before we go any further, it’s important to note that Taylor has, historically, been considered to be, well, um, a liar. As any VPR fan knows, and as a 2019 Vulture article pointed out, Taylor was accused of infidelity in back-to-back seasons and “both times [he] convinced both the show’s behind-the-camera staff and his friends that he was wrongfully accused; both times, he was caught red-handed as the season ended.” Taylor was also tied up in a lie in season six, after he was caught cheating on his future wife (then-girlfriend) with another co-star. There are other lies you’ll find deep in the Bravo subreddits: that he was roommates with Channing Tatum, that he almost got a job working for the NHL, that he loved the tea set Lisa Vanderpump gave him as a wedding gift.
But the reality TV star doggedly insists that he is, indeed, the face on the cover art of an Assassin’s Creed game. He recently doubled down on this claim at Lexington Comic Con, which took place in the Kentucky city over the March 7-10 weekend. Taylor and several of his former and current castmates (he’s starring in a new Vanderpump Rules spinoff called The Valley alongside his maybe-future-ex-wife, Brittany Cartwright) had their own tables at the convention, which were decorated with images of their professional appearances. On Taylor’s table: A picture of the Assassin’s Creed I cover art.
Is Jax Taylor the face of the Assassin’s Creed box cover art?
Screenshot: Jax Taylor on X / Ubisoft
Now, here’s where things get confusing. Taylor first claimed this video game connection back in 2012, when he posted “Me on the cover of assassins [sic] creed II” on X (formerly Twitter). The picture accompanying the text certainly looks like cover art for an Xbox 360 game, but there are some notable discrepancies. First, the image depicts Assassin’s Creed I, not II, and second, that picture doesn’t appear to have ever been used for a physical release of the Ubisoft game. An intrepid reporter asked about this alleged cover art back in 2022, and the replies only unearthed more questions: It appears that the image Taylor posted is from a website called Customaniacs, which, back in the Xbox 360 era, would share hi-res, downloadable, custom pieces of box cover art for people to print out and slip into the plastic shells.
On March 12, I reached out to Taylor’s PR via email, who initially confirmed that Taylor was “on the first season” of Assassin’s Creed. When pressed for clarification, the representative confirmed that he was the model for “the very first game” and “just the box art.” I thanked them for the clarification.
An hour later, unprompted, Taylor’s representative emailed me an image that only made things more baffling: a picture of the cover of PlayStation: The Official Magazine’s Holiday 2009 issue, which featured the publication’s review of Assassin’s Creed II. Yes, a review of the sequel, not the first game like his representative initially confirmed. To add more layers to this confusion cake, the PlayStation mag cover does not depict the box art for any Assassin’s Creed game, but bespoke art. (Unrelated, but hilarious: the image is clearly just the cover torn off the magazine, the rest of which Taylor ostensibly threw out.)
Screenshot: Jax Taylor Instagram / PlayStation: The Official Magazine
Not long after my conversation with his PR person, Taylor posted a picture of the PlayStation: The Official Magazine cover that had been emailed to me to his Instagram story, with the caption “Flashback to when I did the cover art/box art for #assassinscreed 2009.” He tagged the Instagram accounts for Lexington Comic Con and PlayStation.
The thing is, a French-Canadian model named Francisco Randez has been widely credited as the face of series protagonists Desmond, Altair, and Ezio. Randez has done interviews about his role in the series and has an IMDb credit for it. In a 2011 interview, Assassin’s Creed devs discuss creating the digital likenesses of the character, referring to the “handsome model” as a “neighbor” of the game’s producer in Montréal…though they have trouble remembering his name and call him “Rafael.” (It’s around the 8:50 mark.) Is there more than one “Assassin’s Creed guy”? Is Jax Taylor one of them? Is he none of them?
I reached out to both Ubisoft and Francisco Randez. Ubisoft declined to comment, and Randez has yet to respond.
So, it’s still unclear if Jax Taylor is, indeed, the face on the cover for either Assassin’s Creed I or Assassin’s Creed II. As a VPR fan, I’m inclined to believe he’s not, but what do you think?
With the pre-release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown started, Ubisoft has chosen this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services, and introduce a PC version of the “Classics” tier at a lower price. And a big part of this, says the publisher’s director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, is getting players “comfortable” with not owning their games.
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It’s hard to keep up with how often Ubisoft has rebranded its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club, and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics, all names used over the last decade or so. It’s also seemed faintly bewildering why there’s a demand for any of them, given Ubisoft released only five non-mobile games last year.
However, a demand there apparently is, says Tremblay in an interview with GI.biz. He claims the company’s subscription service had its biggest ever month October 2023, and that the service has had “millions” of subscribers, and “over half a billion hours” played. Of course, a lot of this could be a result of Ubisoft’s various moments of refusing to release games to Steam, forcing PC players to use its services, and likely opting for a month’s subscription rather than the full price of the game they were looking to buy. But still, clearly people are opting to use it.
But it remains strange why enough people would want to subscribe—and at $17.99 a month it’s not cheap—to a single publisher’s output. That’s not a diss of Ubisoft’s games—although you might want to apply your own—but something that would be as true were it Activision Blizzard or EA.
You can subscribe to Game Pass, or PlayStation Plus, and get a broad range of hundreds of games from dozens of publishers, or you can pay significantly more to only get the games made by one single publisher, and indeed a publisher with a very distinct style of game. TV networks and movie companies tried this, and those numbers are thinning out fast, with many already compromising by returning their shows to the larger streamers.
What’s more chilling about all this, however, is when Tremblay moves on to how Ubisoft wishes to see a “consumer shift,” similar to that of the market for CDs and DVDs, where people have moved over to Spotify and Netflix, instead of buying physical media to keep on their own shelves. Given that most people, while being a part of the problem (hello), also think of this as a problem, it’s so weird to see it phrased as if some faulty thinking in the company’s audience.
One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That’s not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
Tremblay goes on to say to GI.biz, “But as people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you’ll be able to access them when you feel like.” But…we know that isn’t true! We know how often services don’t continue, how many games are no longer available.
One of my all-time favorite games was published by Ubisoft in 2003, called In Memorium (Missing: Since January in the U.S.), and that’s certainly not on its Classics range, I’m sure because the company long ago lost any rights to it. Luckily for me, I own a physical copy of it. But any number of other Ubisoft games from the early ‘00s I stick in its Classics site have no results. There’s no reason on Earth to think the same won’t be true of Ubisoft’s current games in 20 years.
There are still plans for Ubisoft to add streaming access to Activision Blizzard’s games to Ubisoft+, as bizarre as that may seem given the publisher’s recent acquisition by Microsoft. It’ll also seem fairly redundant, given all the games will come to the far more ubiquitous Game Pass, where they won’t be behind the technical hurdle of streaming. And indeed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is already available to play via the Epic Games Store if you pre-ordered it there.
If, for whatever reason, you just adore Ubisoft’s output, then yes—for $17.99 a month you can play Skull & Bones, Avatar, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Anno 1800, and The Crew: Motorfest right now, which is a lot cheaper than buying them all individually. But you won’t own any of them, and you’ll need to keep paying that 18 bucks a month in perpetuity if you want to keep them, right up until you can’t any more.
Video games make the world a better place. We’ve got honkin’ deals on Xbox Series X, a new genocide-free romance option in Baldur’s Gate 3, and wicked-strong Marvel Snap decks for your perusing pleasure.
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Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the Ubisoft stealth adventure series’ 2015 entry featuring dual protagonists that’s set in 19th century London, is currently free on PC until December 6. There’s just one twist: You’ll need to get it from Ubisoft Connect launcher (insert horror emoji). Don’t hate the messenger. Read More
Minthara is one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s most interesting companions, but only a select few people tend to see much of the Drow Paladin in their playthrough because recruiting her typically requires you to help her slaughter Tiefling refugees. Despite this, fans have found creative workarounds to recruit her without having to engage in genocide, but in Baldur’s Gate 3’s fifth patch, Larian has implemented a streamlined way to add her to your team. Read More
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Image: Arika / Bandai Namco Online / Digerati / EA / Gameloft / Secret Location / Ratloop Games / Square Enix / Hi-Rez / Good Luck Games LLC / Gun Media / Polyphony Digital / Warlogics / Sharkmob / Yager Development / Kotaku
We’re still making it through 2023 and a surprising number of games have already been killed off, as devs have announced their impending deaths. Normally, we’d reserve this list for the end-of-the-year round-up, but we’re ringing the death knell early because, with 15 games already lined up for public execution, we need to start paying our respects now. So, let’s get right into it. Read More
Gif: Square Enix / Vertigo Games / Warner Bros. / Ubisoft / Cygames / Nintendo
Well folks, the final 31 days of 2023 are upon us. While I expect you’ll likely have picked out your personal game of the year already, there’s still time for some more games to hit physical and virtual shelves, and maybe one of them will be a nice send-off to a wild year of killer games. Read More
It’s no secret that the Xbox Series X hasn’t been selling great, and this holiday season Microsoft’s “next-gen” console is getting some huge discounts. For a brief period today, Amazon was selling the Starfield machine for as little as $350. Read More
Oh, hi again! We’re in the final month of what is arguably one of the most impressive years in gamingin recent memory. So when you find yourself at the end of the week looking to get some gaming in, how can you possibly choose among the embarrassment of riches that’s been released this year alone? Read More
Happy Halloween! Ubisoft Netherlands invites you to celebrate the spooky festivities with AI-generated Assassin’s Creed art. Terrifying indeed!
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People first began to notice some of Ubisoft’s social media channels posting what appeared to be AI-generated versions of Assassin’s Creed art last night. A smoothed over, off-brand Ezio emerged on the French publisher’s X (formerly known as Twitter) account for Latin America. “In other amazing industry news here’s an official Ubisoft account with 300K followers posting AI art,” tweeted Forbes contributor Paul Tassi. The publisher’s post was mocked for making Ezio look like a Fortnite character and for one character in the background wielding gun grips like knives. The tweet was deleted soon after.
Not to be outdone, however, the Ubisoft Netherlands account followed up with its own AI-looking Ezio art complete with Jack-o’-lanterns. “Which Ubisoft game is perfect for this horrible evening?” the account asked in Dutch. Clearly the one the Assassin’s Creed maker was playing with fans’ hearts.
Ubisoft recently revealed that over 1,000 people have left the company in the last year as part of its “cost reduction” program. Some of those departures were voluntary, but others included layoffs across customer support, marketing, and other departments in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere. “Ubisoft literally conducting layoffs this year and last month, and they’re posting AI art,” tweeted film concept artist Reid Southen. “Unbelievable. What the hell is the game industry doing right now.”
Still, over 19,000 people continue to work at Ubisoft, including many devoted just to the Assassin’s Creed franchise and all of its sequels, spin-offs, and other incarnations currently in the pipeline. Surely one of them could have made some art for the social media accounts. Or the company could have just used one of its many existing Ezio images. Anything would have been preferable to posting ugly AI-generated crap as thousands are laid off across the video game industry this year.
Fans have had to become increasingly vigilant in 2023 about companies trying to pass off AI-generated images in their marketing, as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and other AI text-to-image models make it easier than ever to cobble together fake art. Amazon did it to promote its upcoming Fallout TV show. It sure seemed like Niantic did it to promote upcoming content in Pokémon Go. Legendary Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki calling AI art tools “an insult to life itself” back in 2016 has never felt so prophetic.
Ubisoft has announced plans to shut down online services for nearly a dozen video games, including Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction. The games will lose online functionally on January 25, 2024.
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As we’ve seen over the last year, plenty of video game publishers and developers have already pulled online services and shutdown servers for a plethora of games across all platforms. The reasons vary, from low player counts to expiring licenses, but the reality is the same: More games become harder or impossible to play once the plug has been pulled. Now we can add even more titles to the growing list of “Dead Games.” This time around it’s Ubisoft announcing more shutdowns.
In a new post on Ubisoft’s support site, the publisher confirmed plans for “decommissioning” online services for 10 “older” games. Ubisoft further added that shutting down servers for old games is a choice it doesn’t make “lightly,” however it also added that it is “a necessity as the technology behind these services becomes outdated.”
Kotaku has contacted Ubisoft about the shutdowns.
Here is the full list of games losing online service on January 25, 2024, as well as which platforms are affected:
Assassin’s Creed II — Xbox 360
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood — Mac
Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD — PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Assassin’s Creed Revelations— PC
Ghost Recon Future Soldier— PC
Heroes of Might and Magic VI — PC
NCIS — PC
Splinter Cell: Conviction — Xbox 360
R.U.S.E. — PC
Trials Evolution— PC
According to a chart from Ubisoft, once online features are shut off for these 10 games, users will no longer be able to play online multiplier, link accounts, or collect Ubisoft Connect rewards for the affected titles.
The sequel to Immortals: Fenyx Rising (2020’s open-world, Greek-inspired adventure game) was cancelled in July 2023, and we’re just now learning exactly what that game was meant to entail—and how much of a break from tradition it was planned to be for Ubisoft.
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According to Axios’ Stephen Totilo, who broke the news on August 21, the sequel (codenamed Oxygen) was an ambitious one that would combine features of two distinct, beloved games: FromSoftware’s action RPG Elden Ring andNintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Anonymous sources familiar with the game’s development spoke to Totilo, painting a detailed picture of a “vast game set across a fictionalized version of the Polynesian archipelago, made primarily by Ubisoft’s Quebec studio but developed alongside Polynesian consultants.”
“The goal was also to make a game very different from the rest of the Ubisoft portfolio,” a source told Axios. Instead of the typical Ubisoft map overwhelmingly dotted with icons, Immortals 2 would have far less map markers, and require players “to search harder to figure out where to go, by tracking animals, following the wind, or navigating via the position of stars in the in-game sky,” alleged a source. The core inspiration for this change? Elden Ring.
The sequel would reportedly also be very different from the original Immortals, with more realistic graphics, the abandonment of the first game’s narrator, fewer puzzles, and a “more malleable story in which player choice is significant.” According to Axios’ sources, the player’s character would try and “curry favor with various Polynesian gods” that would give them special elemental powers and the ability to shape-shift. They’d gain new tattoos on their body based on the narrative choices they’d make in game, all of which is rooted deeply in Polynesian cultural traditions and the notion of mana, or the belief that there’s a supernatural force flowing through humans, animals, plants, and more. A player’s decisions would affect the various islands on which Immortals 2 would have been set.
According to Axios, part of the reason Immortals 2 was canned was so that Ubisoft could focus on established IP like Assassin’s Creed Red. The first Immortals game was reportedly developed in just over a year, but the sequel was taking longer because of its ambitious scope and its comparatively small dev team. Apparently, however, “several playable hours were available in an internal demo” by spring 2023, and Ubisoft was “at a juncture about whether to fund full development or nix the project.”
We know Ubisoft ultimately decided to can it, but as Kotaku’s Ethan Gach pointed out in July 2023, Immortals: Fenyx Rising was “pretty good,” and the idea of a more expansive sequel that abandoned some of the tired markers of a Ubisoft game sounds exciting. Oh well, guess we’ll just get more Assassin’s Creed games instead.
In recent years, Ubisoft has struggled to release games on schedule, with some titles like Skull & Bones being delayed over and over. But now, the company has announced something different. Instead of being delayed, it turns out Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch a week earlier than previously planned.
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Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the next entry in the long-running open-world stealth franchise. This time around players will take on the role of Basim Ibn Ishaq, an assassin first seen in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. In Mirage, players will get a chance to see how a younger Basim evolves from a street thief to a fully-fledged assassin. Ubisoft is promising that, unlike recent AC games, Mirage will be a smaller, more stealth-focused action game and less of a super large open-world RPG. That sounds great to me, someone who misses those sleeker, sneakier entries. And what also sounds good to me is that we won’t have to wait as long to get our hands on this Assassin’s Creed prequel.
On August 14, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on October 5. The game was initially planned—after a delay in 2022—to be released on October 12. Ubisoft says that the game has now gone gold and will be ready for players a full week earlier than expected.
In an era where big, complicated video games are taking longer and longer to make and delays are becoming more and more common, this is a nice bit of news. Not just for Assassin’s Creed fans, who now get to play the upcoming game a week earlier than planned, but for anyone looking for a sign that perhaps not every big game that is completed and successfully ships has to do so on fire.
Of course that’s assuming Mirage launches in a respectable state and not filled with bizarre glitches, like the originally released version of Assassin’s Creed: Unity back in 2014. Either way, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is now set to launch on October 5 across Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Perhaps one day Skull & Bones will release, too.
I know this isn’t the most pressing issue facing the video game community, but I just think it’s funny: someone at Ubisoft has finally got around to fixing a bug that has impacted one particular version of Assassin’s Creed on one specific platform that has been bugging people (or maybe just one person?) for years.
You might experience unexpected game behavior while playing this PS4 game on your PS5 console.
Still, like I said, not a huge issue. But still an issue, one that would have been logged somewhere at Ubisoft, far enough down the list of priorities that it didn’t get fixed at the time, but on the list nonetheless, waiting to be tackled by somebody, anybody, whenever they had the time.
That time is this week. The series’ Twitter account posted this earlier today, saying that an update be released tomorrow specifically targeting this very bug:
We’re happy to announce that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate will receive an update tomorrow, February 23, on PlayStation 4. This update will provide a fix for flickering issues when playing on PlayStation 5.
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Thank you for reminding me to dig this out and replay it. Not because I want to enjoy it flicker-free—I never had it on PS4, I have it on PC!—but because this is a deeply underappreciated entry in the series, and one I’d love to revisit in the wake of the more recent games being just a bit too much.
For the first time ever, tonight’s Grammy awards featured a category just for video game soundtracks. And the first ever winner in this new category was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. Congratulations! A momentous occasion for everyone involved, but for the rest of us, also a very funny moment of live television.
The nominees were veteran games composer Austin Wintory (hilariously given his previous body of work, for Aliens: Fireteam Elite), Bear McCreary (Call of Duty: Vanguard), Richard Jacques (Guardians of the Galaxy), Christopher Tin again (for the Civ-like Old World) and Stephanie Economou for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s expansion Dawn of Ragnarok.
Composer and violinist Economou—who at time of publishing had a Twitter bio simply saying “Non-award-winning composer”—is now an award-winning composer. Congratulations Stephanie! Making the occasion even more memorable for everyone watching at home, though, was presenter and comedian Randy Rainbow (also nominated tonight, for best comedy album) being given an envelope that had “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” written inside it then reading it like this:
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It must be nerve-wracking at the best of times being up there and announcing awards knowing that so many people (even if this was the earlier “premiere” ceremony) are watching you. Then imagine being asked to read, not “Beyonce”, but “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok” when you’re not someone who has been exposed to those words non-stop for three years, and has somehow internalised them and made them seem even remotely normal. It is not a normal collection of words. It would be hard!
You can watch Economou’s full acceptance speech, in which she thanks everyone who “fought tirelessly” for this category to be included in the awards, here.
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – The ConvertsImage: Ubisoft / Kotaku
This year the Assassin’s Creed franchise turns 15 years old. In that time, the franchise has expanded into multiple games, mobile spin-offs, books, movies, shorts, and more. It’s a big, complicated universe that involves historical conspiracies, shadowy cults, and ancient aliens. And those ancient aliens, the Isu, have a complex language, and it’s that language that seems to have frustrated an artist working on a newly released Assassin’s Creed comic.
Since 2007’s original Assassin’s Creed adventure, each installment in the franchise has added more and more lore. At this point, it’s a batshit-wild universe and one key part of the madness are ancient beings, later named the Isu, who were technologically advanced, lived on Earth like gods long ago, and were wiped out 77,000 years ago following a war with ancient humans who they’d enslaved. Anyway, the Isu created all sorts of gizmos and trinkets that, thousands of years later, are still being sought after by humans obsessed with power. And many of these items are covered in the Isu language, which was largely untranslated until 2021, when fans finally cracked it.
But apparently working with this language is a pain in the ass, as seemingly revealed by a bit of text in the recently released comic book, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – The Converts. At one point, we see a close-up of an ancient Isu tablet of some kind which is covered in the ancient aliens’ language. And translated, part of the text reads says:
“If somese as esplasi how to write this shit it would be muc appreiated”
It’s pretty easy to see what this person was likely trying to say using the Isu language, even if it has a few mistakes. The message was likely meant to say:
“If someone can explain how to write this shit it would be much appreciated.”
This funny little message was first spotted by the Assassin’s Creed super fans over at Access The Animus—the same people who first cracked the Isu language a few years back. They also spotted “multiple bits of incorrect Isu language” in the comic, suggesting the artists or writers involved weren’t given enough information or direction about the Isu language, hence the mistakes and frustration.
Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft, the comic book writer, and the artists.
While some fans had a good laugh at this angry Easter egg, others were upset that the creators behind the comic book didn’t consult fan guides and translation tools before working on the book. However, it should be noted that it would be very weird for an official Ubisoft-approved Assassin’s Creed comic to rely on fan translations, assuming the people behind the comic even knew of that work. (Which would explain why they included this Isu Easter egg at all: Maybe they didn’t expect anyone else to read it!)
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Personally, as a big fan of Assassin’s Creed and its wild lore, I totally get how frustrating it must be to try and tell stories within that universe. It’s fun to experience the mess from the outside looking in, but working on it is likely a pain in the ass at times and I don’t begrudge an artist for sneaking in a little jab at how annoying and absurd it must be.
