Ubisoft Admits ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Use Of Dual Protagonists Was “Divisive” And “Split Our Fanbase”
In reflecting on the ups and downs of the controversial Ubisoft release, Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois has come to realize that the dev team severely underestimated the “divisive” potential of their decision to split the game’s narrative between two protagonists.
Offering this look back on Naoe and Yasuke’s wild ride during a recent conversation with GamesRadar‘s Jasmine Gould-Wilson, Lemay-Comtois began with a brief overview of how Ubisoft Québec’s Shadows dev goals differed from those of past entries:
“The differences between Evie and Jacob [in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate] were mostly cosmetic. It’s more like a ‘which one do you prefer?’ kind of deal. They play very, very similarly, except with very few select skills. And with Odyssey, it’s much more of a deep RPG progression [system]. So for Shadows, we wanted to take some of these elements from those two games and tweak it.”
“It’s an exercise in contrast, which Syndicate wasn’t. And then go maybe not as deep as Odyssey in terms of RPG [systems], pulling it back a little bit, but deep enough with it to try to find a middle ground where we could still have the RPG fans be happy with it, but then perhaps bring a couple of the old-school fans that are not so much into RPGs, and have them dip their toes a little bit.”
This contrast, said the director, could also be seen in Naoe and Yasuke’s playstyles, with the former “embodying the classic assassin feel” and the latter intended to be “much more of a closer character to [Valhalla’s] Eivor or [Odyssey‘s] Cassandra”.
And though the pair’s playstyles were developed towards different ends, Lemay-Comtois confirmed that elements from both were likely to be applied to each of the franchise’s future protagonists:
“They have very different physicalities in how they move. I think any future assassin that we embody, if they are male, if they’re slightly bigger, all these things can and should affect a little bit of how their physicality translates in the world.”
“[Naoe] flips all the time. She does all these things. It’s very specific to her. I would say the flips are something that is very unique to Naoe, but her agility, you can expect future assassins to still be very agile going forward.”
Offering a look at the franchise’s horizon, Lemay-Comtois ultimately admitted that when it came to the concept of dual protagonists, Shadows had left them with some very stark lessons regarding its execution:
“Dual protagonists can be divisive along very strange lines, right? It’s not just a ‘well, I prefer a war, therefore I prefer Yasuke.’ Some people just don’t like one character over the other, and they don’t like to spend time with one. It was true with Evie and Jacob, but with Naoe and Yasuke it’s more divisive. And we knew this. We knew going into it, but I think it can split our fan base a little too.”
“I think the learning for us is that, yes, we could do more dual-protagonist games in the future – if we have a good reason to do it narratively and for the setting.”
Of particular note is the director’s closing reveal that Ubisoft Québec will now be, at least in part, deferring their Assassin’s Creed creative decisions to the series’ setting and story, as the most common criticism against the game from both casual fans and diehards was its jarring decision to center a good portion of its story on a fictional version of the historical Yasuke.
In other words, that’s about as close as Ubisoft will ever come to publicly admitting ‘Yeah, maybe we didn’t handle that situation in the best of ways’.
