Assassin's Creed Shadow Dev Responds To Backlash Over Yasuke

Summary

• Assassin's Creed producer Marc-Alexis Côté has hit back at backlash surrounding Yasuke.
• Following a remark from Twitter owner Elon Musk that "DEI kills art," Côté claims are "sad" and "feeding hatred."
• Côté hopes that people can "play the game for themselves" and "keep an open mind" when playing the title later this year.

Assassin's Creed producer Marc-Alexis Côté has hit back at the backlash surrounding Shadows protagonist Yasuke, claiming that it's "sad" that Twitter owner Elon Musk felt the need to "feed hatred" with his remarks.

Assassin's Creed Shadows has been somewhat controversial since its release, and not because the game itself looks bad. For the past couple of weeks, the game's protagonist Yasuke - the first recorded black samurai - has caused a stir among gamers, with many labeling the game as "woke" and "disrespectful" to Japanese culture. All the complaints became so difficult to ignore that Twitter owner Elon Musk got in on the act by claiming "DEI kills art," which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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Ubisoft never really acknowledged the backlash, probably due to the fact that it was ridiculous and had absolutely no weight to it, but one of the developers behind the title recently spoke out against the hate, and Elon Musk's tweet in particular in a recent interview with Game File. Assassin's Creed producer Marc-Alexis Côté said that seeing the tweet from Musk "generated emotions," and that he was tempted to redownload Twitter just to respond, as he had "a lot of three word replies that came to mind."

Assassin's Creed Shadows Dev Responds To Yasuke Backlash

Thankfully, he managed to keep his cool thanks to a mindfullness app on his phone, and now just thinks that the Twitter owner is "sad" for "feeding hatred" on the platform, and that clapping back at Musk would "not convince people about our point of view as a team."

On that front, Côté hopes that people will "play the game for themselves" and "keep an open mind" to form their own opinion, and that if they're still not satisfied after the game's opening hours, then they can start having a rational discussion about problems with the title.

Thankfully, we won't have to wait too long to get our hands on Assassin's Creed Shadows, as the game launches on November 15 later this year. If you want to know what our initial impressions are of the game after a few hours at Summer Game Fest, you can check that out here too.

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