Ubisoft Has Learned Nothing In The Last 11 Years

Depending on what you read and where you read it, you may have heard that the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows has been controversial. That it's been plagued by one cultural faux pas after another, from iffy concept art to an ill-advised statue through to sincere apologies to fans over lapses in historical accuracy. This has all now culminated in the game, made primarily by Westerners but set in Japan, being spoken about in Japanese parliament.

Specifically, questions about the way the game allows players to destroy religious sites were recently put to Japan’s Prime Minister by representative Kada Hiroyuki; the Prime Minister’s seemingly stern reply, stripped of all context, sounded pretty bad for Ubisoft and the game! So bad that, in an attempt to smooth things over, Ubisoft have since patched Shadows, removing the player's ability to smash up historic Japanese temples.

Reading some headlines, you'd think the game had made its biggest cultural misstep yet, and that this patch was a much-needed fix, alongside every other much-needed fix that has followed every other cultural misstep made by Ubisoft in the leadup to Shadows' release.

The thing is, though, it's all bullshit. Ubisoft didn’t have to patch this. You could smash up a temple in Shadows the same way you can smash up any room in the game, because the game lets you break every table and splinter every wooden door. There's also important context to be had concerning the exchange in Japanese parliament–mostly how unimportant it actually was–some of which can be found in this IGN story, and more of which is covered in this thread by Jeffrey Hall, Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies:

Or, for a more succinct version of events, there's:

If the vibes of this sound at all familiar, it's because that sound you're hearing is Ubisoft walking into the same rake the company has been walking into for almost the entire public life of this video game. Thanks to a multitude of confluent factors--the game stars a woman, the game stars a black man and is set in Japan--there’s been an excruciatingly public "controversy" over the game for what feels like years now, not for normal people or for normal reasons, but simply because a subset of frothing-mouth internet weirdos don't like it, have convinced enough others to report on the idea that their opinion somehow matters, and Ubisoft just keeps on responding to them.

I can't believe Ubisoft keeps falling for the same old shit! Assassin's Creed has had religion in its sights, across multiple cultures and continents, for as long as it's been around, whether you're burning monasteries or fighting the Pope. And like I've said, the ability to "destroy" a temple in this game isn't an act of religious violence, it's simply an accidental, meaningless consequence of letting the player climb anything and sometimes break some tables.

These are absolute non-issues that require four seconds of context to dispel, but because there are some weebs out there who hate black people just as much as they love a particular idea of Japan, and at least one of them has written an email to a Japanese politician, suddenly this is an issue? And rather than explain it, Ubisoft just folds? Like I said last time:

The perfect response to dealing with shitheads like this is to simply live your life pretending they don't exist. Their opinions are ill-formed, bigoted and unsuitable for mainstream consumption, and so should be ignored at all costs. Let them howl at the moon all they want, let their furious emails wash against the walls of your inbox, these people simply are not worth your time.

Every word of that still applies. You do not need to apologise, or make changes for, these people! It would not have taken an exhaustive knowledge of Japanese parliamentary politics, or reactionary letter-writing, to know what was up here. Removing the ability to smash some stuff in one type of place but not all the others, in stark contrast to the rest of your series' decades-long stance on this, is just the weirdest line to draw. As is discouraging players from climbing over a Torii (a Japanese temple gate) because someone is worried copycat tourists might try it; are there legitimate worries they’re going to climb over every historic castle, home and temple in the game as well?

It's embarrassing, and just like last time, I feel for everyone who actually worked on this game, to have it thrust once again--now, right as it's basking in positive review scores--into the spotlight of the culture wars by spineless company leadership.