Assassin’s Creed Shadows developers talk Animus, Yasuke backlash and more

"I just hope and wish that people can keep an open mind about this and see the game for what it is."

Assassin’s Creed Shadows protagonists Naoe and Yasuke. Image: Ubisoft

I wanted to learn a lot about the little things in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, when I interviewed two of the people behind the game in Los Angeles earlier this week.

I’d just watched an hour-long demo of the open-world action-adventure game. I had questions about Shadows’ parkour system, about its new weather-changing seasons, and about how this adventure set in feudal Japan would incorporate the series’ famously divisive meta-story.

I got answers to all of that. (Scoop: AC Infinity will now be known as the Animus hub.)

But I also had one bigger question. 

I wanted to know how the developers felt about the blowback the game was getting, from people who were mad that one of Shadows’ two lead characters is an African samurai. 

That outrage might not have been worth paying attention to, if not for how loud it had gotten and how it’s been amplified by the likes of Elon Musk, who last month replied to a Tweet about the game’s supposed “injection of DEI”—that’s diversity, equity and inclusion—with a pithy “DEI kills art.”

They had something to say about that, too.