Assassin’s Creed Shadows was the subject of both heated fan debate and gross toxicity from online culture war warriors, but associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois recently said all the drama hasn’t scared Ubisoft away from making a game with dual protagonists in the future if it makes sense to do so.
“Dual protagonists can be divisive along very strange lines, right?” Lemay-Comtois said of the discourse around Naoe and Yasuke in an interview with GamesRadar+. “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 [Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s] 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.”
What Lemay-Comtois doesn’t specifically name is the racist backlash toward co-protagonist Yasuke, Japan’s first ever black samurai who actually existed in history. Series executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté previously said the backlash around Yasuke’s existence in the game were “attacks driven by intolerance.”
Still, it’s encouraging to hear the studio doesn’t regret its decision and it’s also not shying away from dual protagonists either. “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,” Lemay-Comtois added.
