Assassin's Creed Shadows boss explains why he ignored Elon Musk after backlash over African samurai Yasuke

Assassin’s Creed boss Marc-Alexis Côté has spoken on the discourse surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ co-lead character Yasuke, an African samurai.

When Ubisoft unveiled Assassin’s Creed Shadows in May, there was backlash directed at the inclusion of this historical character, with many overly-vocal individuals on the internet affronted by the game’s supposed ‘wokeness’.

This discussion was amplified when controversial owner of social media platform X Elon Musk joined in. Replying to one user suggesting Ubisoft should delay its release of Shadows “in response to widespread backlash over the game’s injection of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion]”, Musk quipped: “DEI kills art.”

Of course, this exchange was not missed by the Assassin’s Creed team. However, Côté chose not to rise to Musk’s post, and instead ignored it.

“That tweet generated emotions, that…the first thing I wanted to do was go back on X – that I had deleted – and just tweet back,” Côté told Stephen Totilo’s Game File. “And I just took a step back. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. And I did a bit of mindfulness to try to explore the emotions that this tweet created.

“For me, Elon, it’s sad, he’s just feeding hatred. I had a lot of three word replies that came to mind.”

Côté said he knew that replying to Musk at that moment would not help Ubisoft’s case. “By attacking someone like Elon… I will not convince people about our point of view as a team,” he said, before adding: “Yasuke is very, very grounded in the history of the franchise and how we make our choices.”