Ubisoft CEO Says Remakes Will Modernize Old Assassin’s Creed Games

Video Games

Ubisoft isn’t done fiddling with Assassin’s Creed. In a recent interview with Ubisoft’s communications director, Lucy O’Brien, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot talked about the video game developer’s plans for one of their premier franchises. In addition to having “Assassin’s Creed games come out more regularly,” Guillemot told gamers to expect remakes of the old games in the series, which would “modernize” the classics on which the franchise was built.

“Firstly, players can be excited about some remakes, which will allow us to revisit some of the games we’ve created in the past and modernize them; there are worlds in some of our older Assassin’s Creed games that are still extremely rich.”

O’Brien didn’t follow up on the “modernize” comment, so what exactly Guillemot means by that is unclear. He could mean that he’s going to update the graphics and, considering the “extremely rich” description of the worlds in those games, expand the lore and maybe throw in some extra content. But this promise to modernize the old Assassin’s Creed games comes on the heels of the controversy over Assassin’s Creed Shadows, where Ubisoft set a game in feudal Japan for the first time and decided to make the male samurai protagonist a historical black man who likely wasn’t a samurai. In this same interview, Guillemot says the thing that dismays him about the video game industry is “the malicious and personal online attacks that have been directed at some of our team members and partners,” after which he called on “the rest of the industry and players” to call them out. This is a guy who thinks the worst thing about video games is gamers voicing their displeasure at his company; I know he specifies “malicious and personal attacks,” but he follows it up with a plea to “celebrate the hard work and talent that goes into making videogames.” In other words, shut up and buy our games.

These aspects of Ubisoft’s current climate make people think the company will “modernize” the old Assassin’s Creed games by injecting more DEI and woke, identity politics nonsense into them. Assassin’s Creed has always been a fairly diverse game series in terms of the characters’ ethnic backgrounds; it’s had Middle Easterners (which makes sense, given where the term “assassin” came from), Italians, Native Americans, Vikings, Britons, and more, but it’s never enough for the diversity crusaders. I wouldn’t put it past the Ubisoft team to institute race, gender, or sexuality swaps for the previous games’ heroes, and to accuse their fans of hate if they don’t like it. And if you think that’s farfetched, look what Bruce Timm is doing to his own character on Batman: Caped Crusader. It’s a different medium but the same principle, “modernizing” the past. A lot of this may have to do with how well Assassin’s Creed Shadows does when it’s released; if it’s a big success, they’ll see no reason not to “fix” the past. However, if it bombs, they may just do a proper remake of the older games with a warning similar to the one on Tomb Raider I-III Remastered.