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Shadows?’ (A Deep Dive) – Twitchy

March 19, 2025
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Shadows?’ (A Deep Dive) – Twitchy
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The game company Ubisoft is about to release one of its ‘biggest’ games in a while, ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.’ The Assassin’s Creed series, which has been going on for over a decade, is more or less about a secret society that kills to protect freedom in a secret war against another secret society that tries to destroy freedom for the greater good.





(That’s a gross oversimplification but we think that is enough to get you through this article if you don’t know about the series.) Because this secret war has been going on for at least two millennia, throughout the series you play multiple characters in multiple historical periods and meet famous historical figures. And kill them.

Fans of the series had been calling for a game to take place in feudal Japan for years, because when you are talking about assassins, ninjas almost immediately spring to mind and that is what ‘Shadows’ is offering. Here’s a trailer for the game:

The game has also been one of their most controversial significantly because of one of the lead characters named Yasuke. That would be the black samurai dude co-starring in the trailer, looking extremely cool. Mind you, there are two protagonists in this game and both are playable, the other one being the woman called Naoe, who is acting more like a traditional assassin. But Yasuke is unique because this is the first time in the series history where one of the protagonists/playable characters is based on a real person. There are many real historical figures you interact with (and kill) in the series, but until now you always played as a fictional character.

And the problem is that there is a dispute over whether Yasuke was a samurai at all. We don’t pretend to know (we like history but we don’t pretend to be an expert on everything in human history), but apparently Japanese fans are particularly angry about this depiction arguing that he was a warrior but not a samurai. And that is not the only historical inaccuracy that critics alleged but that seems like the largest sticking point.

Thus, Ubisoft is also expecting backlash and that’s where the accusation of anti-free speech thuggery is coming in:

For context, ‘Grummz’ describes himself as

Mark Kern, CEO & Designer. Former Team Lead for OG World of Warcraft. Producer, Diablo 2, Starcraft. Em-8ER lead, Firefall creator.

Naturally, he is doing that irritating thing when Twitter/X users show a picture of a post, rather than just linking to the post. Come on, dude, whoever wrote it is probably paid by the click. Be nice and give readers a chance to click on it.

In any case, here’s the post he was referring to:

Now, let us back up and put our cards on the table, here. This author is a video game geek. This author is a history geek. So, do we have to tell you that we are a fan of the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ series of games from Ubisoft, a game series that is basically historical fiction? We are basically in their target audeince.

But you know what we are an even bigger fan of? Freedom of expression. And as much as we like the series and hope that this entry is good, we can’t support suppression of freedom of expression to promote it.

But is that what is happening? That’s where we start to dive more deeply into this subject. This is what the 80 Level article says:

The game’s developer, Ubisoft – whose disastrous 2024 is widely regarded as the worst year in its history and whose future might depend on the success of the new Assassin’s Creed installment – is also gearing up for the release, reportedly enlisting a special team to shield Shadows’ developers from the imminent wave of criticism by any means necessary, including taking legal action.

In an interview with the French media outlet BFMTV, a Ubisoft employee whose identity remained undisclosed revealed that the company has an ‘anti-online harassment plan’ prepared for Shadows’ release.

Reportedly, the company has a dedicated team on standby, monitoring networks such as Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, and ready to act quickly in case of a targeted attack, offering psychological and legal support to employees who may be targeted. Apparently, Ubisoft is so concerned about backlash that it has even advised developers not to post on social media that they work at Ubisoft to avoid harassment.

Perhaps the most surprising detail, however, is the employee’s claim that ‘lawyers are already prepared to file complaints in the event of confirmed harassment situations,’ and as is often the case with statements like this, the wording raises questions about what Ubisoft actually considers to be ‘harassment.’

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Of course, the first red flag on all of this is that this is all based on article written in French, which we all know is Satan’s language.

(With apologies for his language, but it’s too funny a scene not to include it.)

Jokes aside, while it is not confirmed to be the language of the Beast, it isn’t English, either, so you have to wonder if anything is being lost in translation. So is it possible we are getting a bad translation.

But 80 Level is still getting at an important question. Can a criticism or even potentially a bad review count as ‘harassment?’ 

Well, from a legal perspective it is possible that Ubisoft and the law in several jurisdictions would answer in the affirmative. Seriously, anyone who says this is impossible should crack open their statute books and actually read some harassment statutes. We have yet to read one that doesn’t significantly infringe on First Amendment freedoms. For instance, here’s Maryland Code. Crim. L. § 3-803 dealing with harassment that this author happens to know very well:

(a) A person may not follow another in or about a public place or maliciously engage in a course of conduct that alarms or seriously annoys the other:

(1) with the intent to harass, alarm, or annoy the other;

(2) after receiving a reasonable warning or request to stop by or on behalf of the other; and

(3) without a legal purpose.

(b) This section does not apply to a peaceable activity intended to express a political view or provide information to others.

This criminal statute goes on to lay out various punishments for breaking it, but you get the idea. Please note that you can trigger this statute by following a person around or through any other course of conduct. Furthermore, Maryland courts have interpreted this statute so that expression is considered conduct.

Do you want to know how flagrantly unconstitutional this law is? The Supreme Court has previously said that prohibiting a person from annoying others is unconstitutionally vague. As the Supreme Court said in Coates v. Cincinnati, 402 US 611 (1971):

Conduct that annoys some people does not annoy others. Thus, the ordinance is vague, not in the sense that it requires a person to conform his conduct to an imprecise but comprehensible normative standard, but rather in the sense that no standard of conduct is specified at all. As a result, men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning.

(Citations and quotation marks removed). That is not just a problem under the First Amendment but under the Fifth Amendment, too, because even when we aren’t talking about expression, people have a right to know what exact behavior they are being told not to do. But naturally, that goes double in the First Amendment context—because if you don’t know what you can safely say, then many people might be afraid to engage in protected speech, because they are afraid of the hassle of having to deal with this law.

Now, read over this statute. Can you see any language that excludes a bad review? Not to put too fine a point on it, but many people do find criticism to be annoying. And even if the word ‘annoy’ wasn’t there, the word ‘harass’ is. What does that mean? Well, the Cornell Law School website gives one definition:

Harassment refers to words or behavior that threatens, intimidates, or demeans a person . Harassment is unwanted, uninvited, and unwelcome and causes nuisance, alarm, or substantial emotional distress without any legitimate purpose.

But that is just one definition. We have never seen a definitive, universally accepted definition which means that this attorney can’t actually tell you what the word means. Thus we can say that ‘People of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning’ and we just quoted to you a Supreme Court case where they said that this wasn’t good enough under the Fifth Amendment, let alone the First. But even the Cornell definition would seem to cover criticism. For instance, the definition covers demeaning a person, and wouldn’t you say that a person telling you that you did shoddy work is demeaning? And naturally, it can be seen by some as a nuisance and can cause people emotional distress—especially if that person is fragile soul to start with. So there are multiple ways that criticism can be considered harassment under this definition.





Further, all of this amounts to viewpoint discrimination. It is theoretically possible for praise to annoy a person or for such praise to be used to harass them, but most people find praise less annoying and less demeaning than criticism. In other words, it might take twenty statements or posts praising a person or their work to make a person feel annoyed or harassed, while it might take only two insults to reach that threshold. Indeed, it would be hard for praise to ever become demeaning. And the First Amendment does not allow prosecutions to occur based on viewpoints (which is one of the reasons why Trump was correct to pardon most of the January Sixers). For the same reason, the statute is not saved by the fact that the alleged victim has to warn a person to stop—a person is more likely to ask a person who is criticizing them to stop, rather than someone who is praising them.

Now, sharp eyed readers might have noticed this part toward the end:

(b) This section does not apply to a peaceable activity intended to express a political view or provide information to others.

There are several problems with that provision. The most basic problem is that it is an affirmative defense. That means if you are on trial for your freedom you have to prove this exception applies, as opposed to the state having to prove that it doesn’t apply beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, judges don’t consider affirmative defenses when deciding whether to allow charges to go forward or to even authorize an arrest warrant. So even if you would easily win based on this defense, you still might be arrested and put on trial and many people will not be willing to go through that hassle and keep their mouths shut.

Furthermore, while that would typically apply to a bad review in a publication—it is obviously providing information to others—it is dubious whether or not it would apply to a person writing a message to one of the developers on Twitter/X that ‘ur game sux’ or just ‘ur stupid.’ And yet, that is 100% speech protected by the First Amendment. You’re allowed to tell a person their game stinks or that they are stupid, even if you aren’t sharing your opinion with any third party.

And none of this is theoretical. We have seen this exact harassment law be used to support criminal charges and petitions for a special kind of restraining order called a ‘peace order,’ in Maryland. Christina Pushaw has been subject to an abusive peace order and false charges that Ms. Pushaw violated that order in Maryland by Rebekah Jones, and we covered how that lawfare failed here and here. The use of this statute to go after people who disagree with them is something that can and does happen under these awful harassment laws.

Of course, we don’t pretend to know the laws of every state, let alone every country. But we will say that we have never seen a harassment statute that didn’t infringe on freedom of expression, either by actually criminalizing expression that shouldn’t be criminalized, or by being so vague a person can’t figure out what is actually legal.

So, even if you don’t think that Ubisoft is saying they will go after mere criticism, this creates an ambiguous situation where people might be afraid of having suits filed against them—of even being prosecuted—for criticism. That creates what is known as a chilling effect, silencing people who might ordinarily speak up.

Still, to be fair to Ubisoft, this is not an official statement. This is an employee speaking anonymously. Ubisoft might never have intended to create a chilling effect and maybe in their minds ‘harassment’ is limited to truly atrocious behavior that can be rightfully limited under the law like real threats and SWATting. We would take this opportunity to say that Ubisoft should issue a statement clarifying that they will not go after anyone for merely criticizing their games—even if that criticism is downright ugly.





The cut off text:

For people who are assuming that thus means they’ll sue players for criticism, do you really think any court will take a harmless criticism into consideration, let alone Ubisoft spending on lawyers for countless cases of benign criticism from all around the world of which 99% won’t amount to anything?

This is clearly about about cases where ‘criticism’ escalates to death threats and personal attacks, and not criticism of the game itself, which has zero grounds to stand on in any court.

So … why not say that? Why not clear up any misconceptions? Why use the amorphous and hopelessly vague term ‘harassment.’

‘I hope you die of a heart attack’ is speech protected by the First Amendment. It’s not actually a threat, just a hope and you are allowed to hope for anything you want—including pretty awful things. And doxxing can be protected, too, depending on what you are doing—as vile as it can be—in part because the definition of the term is so vague. For instance, while we sympathized with Musk for nuking the account that kept track of his movements by private plane, that was public information. We support his decision to remove it from his platform, but we don’t think criminal charges can be valid.

Actually, we are hearing good things and for the record, we hope the game is good. For our money, the most reliable ‘reviews’ of video games are from Gameranx (they call this recurring feature ‘Before You Buy’ but it is functionally a review). They basically seem to put aside the controversies and just judge the gameplay and storytelling and they don’t seem to be subject to the corruption of ‘access media.’ Here’s what they say about this game:

Indeed, the reviews are generally saying that the gameplay is good, but the story is weak or even terrible. And allegedly this is some of the voice acting in the game:

But storytelling has never been a strong suit in the series in our opinion (although it definitely had its moments). And as for voice acting, we recently replayed a game containing this scene:





And despite that absolutely atrocious voice acting, ‘Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’ is rightly considered one of the best games ever made.

But even racist criticism is free expression.

That’s another controversy that has dogged the game. It appears that you are able to essentially trash at least one sacred temple in the game and some people were upset about that.

And, of course, some people supported Ubisoft’s potential litigiousness:

We think you meant to spell ‘anonymity,’ there, champ.

And we think people should always be comfortable speaking their minds.

In fact, there were several who said similar things, but put naughty, naughty words in their posts so we didn’t bother to put them in this article.

That was another controversy—allegations that this historical Japanese setting had Chinese elements in there that didn’t belong.

Except ‘Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry’ and ‘Assassin’s Creed: Liberation’ featured black protagonists, and arguably Bayek, the protagonist of ‘Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ was black as well and those games didn’t get nearly the same controversy. Indeed, Liberation featured a black woman! Oh my!

Exactly.

The cut off text:

On the other hand, if this is meant to stifle criticism of the game itself or even how Ubisoft is run as a company, then this might just be the worst PR-move they’ve ever made, and that’s saying a lot.





And as long as they don’t clarify what they mean, that is bad, too.

Heh.

Finally, on the topic of historical accuracy, we want to share an open letter we wrote to Ubisoft, when they announced that ‘Shadows’ was being delayed last year to make the game better:

The cut off text reads (with many unmarked edits):

The moment I realized that something had gone horribly wrong with ‘Assassin’s Creed: Vahalla’ was when I was fighting a guy and I accidentally killed a civilian, and the game told me if I kept doing that I would be desynchronized.

To break in for a moment, that’s the equivalent of ‘dying’ in the game. They were saying that if we killed enough civilians we would ‘die,’ in the game because your character didn’t kill civilians.

Like what the hell? You have me playing as a Viking raider. Killing civilians is what they were all about. In fact, the civilians they killed quickly probably got the good end of it. Because they often did worse to the ones who survived.

Now I get that maybe you guys don’t want to create a realistic Viking raider simulator. But the way you deal with that isn’t by essentially lying about history. Maybe you explain that your character is different and more honorable and is disgusted by what other Vikings do.

Or maybe don’t make the main character a Viking at all but maybe an Englishman resisting their encroachment? 

But you really need to stop altering history for your story. I mean it’s one thing to talk about the Assassins and Templars and the aliens and all that. But don’t tell me the Viking Raiders were not what they were. It’s gross. They were evil f******g barbarians and that’s how they should be portrayed. Go look at ‘The Northman’ for an unflinching portrayal of what the Vikings really were.

And stop with the insertion of women into men’s roles. 

And stop doing things like making Sparta into a sea power. 🙄

Just every time you find yourself saying ‘hey, let’s ignore history,’ maybe reconsider.

And yes, as you take a few months with ‘AC Shadows,’ maybe re-dedicate yourself to following history.

The reality is most of history doesn’t line up with what you would call progressive values. You shouldn’t ignore that or pretend it didn’t happen. If you really feel it’s important to promote your values then condemn them for not following them but don’t pretend they did follow them.

But honestly, the fans are just sick and tired of you guys promoting your agenda over storytelling. The reason why I fell in love with the series was because it was a chance to go back in time and see what it was like to live in those times, and when you whitewash those times it takes away from that experience.

Thus as you can guess, the series has been departing from history for a while now. Some of it is baked in. The conceit of the series is that this is a secret history that has been hidden from the public by the two secret societies that are killing each other, and that can explain away small alterations in history, like your character having a fist fight with a pope (yes, this really happens in ‘Assassin’s Creed II’). They could claim that the pope covered up that fight because he was humiliated. That works within their lore.

But that doesn’t really work to explain how Sparta suddenly becomes a sea power in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,’ how suddenly women enjoy equal opportunity in Athens or how Vikings strive to avoid hurting Civilians in Valhalla. And indeed, sometimes the coolest moments in the series is when you see a real historical event play out, and you sense that they were attempting to approximate how it played out, such as in Assassin’s Creed III when you help in the Revolutionary War.





So, we don’t expect ‘Shadows’ to be completely accurate to history. But we hope it is more accurate than the more recent entries have been and we hope that future entries re-dedicate themselves to historical accuracy.

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