Assassin's Creed boss discusses "devastating" impact of Shadows' diversity and inclusivity backlash
Assassin's Creed boss discusses "devastating" impact of Shadows' diversity and inclusivity backlash
Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté has addressed the online backlash which has swirled around the main ch…
Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté has addressed the online backlash which has swirled around the main characters of Assassin's Creed Shadows, the subsequent impact it has had on the game's development staff, and the attempts by bad faith commenters to disrupt and dissuade creative teams from telling stories featuring diverse and inclusive characters in general...
The game would have been a lot better received if a male Japanese protagonist wasn't erased to slot in a black man into a Japanese story. Im not even Japanese and it makes me upset that they did that, I can't imagine how disappointed Japanese men are going to feel playing a game about the history of their own country and they can only play as a Japanese woman or a foreigner.
AC has historically never had playable main characters that are based on real world people. Except this one. Makes it feel really not genuine.
I don't know much about this game so far other than the very base stuff I've read about, but I know one of the things that disappointed me when I played Odyssey was that they had taken so much of the history out of it and also it wasn't really telling a coherent story anymore. There was too much Choice involved. The first few Assassin's Creed games you were being told a single coherent story. It was the story of Ezio or Altair, when you add multiple characters and allow choice I no longer feel like I'm living history. Which was kind of the whole concept behind the franchise. It's what was so interesting.
I know when I played Syndicate my biggest thought afterwards was wow they should have just had the girl be the main character she was more interesting and it watered it down by making the guy a character too.
The sister was undoubtedly the better protagonist, but given the backlash to women and non-white people in leading roles even now in 2024, imagine what it would have been like back then. Ubisoft was playing it safe, and even now with Shadows they are trying to play both sides both in the rhetoric and probably in the choice of having two protagonists.
Nah there are plenty of games with female protagonist that don't get huge backlash. In fact I think it's the both sides actually makes it worse. I think it's the implied option that sets off the loonies. At the end of the day a strong and coherent story is going to overwhelm a lot of craziness. But when the story is just blah because it has no touchstones to it it allows nonsense like said loonies to overwhelm the narrative.
Everyone is pissed because they took huge historical liberties when it isn't needed.
Diversity doesn't mean black samurais. This seems very two faced, it's as if they are trying to imply the anti-woke brigade is after them when the choices they made were just dumb.
All they had to do was not white wash everything and aim for historical accuracy. Instead they made insane choices and dumped a bunch of other cultures into it (mainly china).