‘Assassin’s Creed’ Multiplayer Title ‘AC League’ Revealed As One Of Ubisoft’s Six Recently Cancelled Games
While the exact identities of five of the six games Ubisoft scrapped as part of their recent “quality”-focused restructuring were initially unknown, the lone exception being The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, a new report has unmasked two more, including a multiplayer Assassin’s Creed spin-off.
According to “half a dozen Ubisoft employees” who reportedly spoke to Origami‘s Gauthier Andres (machine translated via DeepL), roughly a quarter of the Ubisoft Annecy team had recently found themselves without any assignments after the company’s recent “quality”-focused restructuring saw cancellation orders handed down for both their unofficially announced PvE title, codenamed Pathfinder, and AC League, the latter of which was “being worked on by 85 people”.
Having previously developed multiplayer modes featured in Brotherhood, Unity, and Black Flag, Ubisoft Annecy had spent recent years attempting to revive the franchise’s online offerings, with their first shot at doing so being scrapped in 2022 and their second, made in collaboration with Ubisoft Bordeaux, being greenlit and eventually cancelled shortly thereafter.
From there, the studio would produce another multiplayer prototype, this one a slapped-together using “visual elements” from Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which in a break from tradition would actually receive the green-light as AC League.
Originally planned as DLC for Shadows and intended to bring back the option to tackle the game’s story alone or with friends, the extra mode would have allowed for up to four assassins to work together in service of taking down various targets, with the game’s Season Pass at one point concluding with a selection of “story-driven” co-op miussions.
But according to Andres’ sources, 2025 saw studio management beginning to raise questions about the DLC’s viability, as they felt it was taking far too long for the extra content to achieve the “desired quality.”
After considering several possible solutions, Ubisoft Annecy ultimately chose to reduce the scope of AC League‘s narrative, borrow heavily from Shadows’ already-developed open-world, and thus release it as a “small” standalone title, with an invite-only alpha test having once been planned for May 2026.
Then came the launch of Vantage, the first of Ubisoft’s new Tencent-collaborative “creative houses”, the formation of which prompted a late 2025 review of the developer’s current projects in service of making major cuts as part of their aforementioned reset.
And it was as a result of one such review that Vantage’s “top brass” decided to put an end to Ubisoft Annecy’s AC League ambitions – but perhaps not those of the game overall, as several of Andres’ sources noted that “Ubisoft Vantage intends to continue the game’s legacy, thanks to a small team that has been detached since the cancellation.”
As of publication, it remains unclear just how Vantage is approaching their ‘continuation’ of AC League‘s legacy, nor how much of a priority it is amidst their more pressing ‘save the franchise’s sinking ship’ plans.
