According to a French website called Origami, Ubisoft have canceled an unannounced multiplayer game connected to Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Codenamed AC League, this side game would have had up to four players team up to complete cooperative missions together in what was believed to be the same era that featured Naoe and Yasuke in Shadows.
The report states that AC League had 85 developers working on it, and that the project originally started out as a DLC for Assassin’s Creed Shadows before breaking off into its own thing. It was under development at Ubisoft Annecy, and was supposed to be the first big push to bring multiplayer back to the series, which has been absent since Assassin’s Creed Unity had its own cooperative multiplayer mode.
It’s important to note, while AC League was one multiplayer game in development at Ubisoft, it is a different project from Assassin’s Creed Invictus, which, at least as of this writing, is believed to still be in development, though may be having development issues itself.
Why Was AC League Canceled?
According to Origami, AC League appeared to become too ambitious in development. As stated above, it was originally intended to be a DLC offering to finish off Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ season pass, but development was taking too long. There were talks about reducing its scope, particularly in the narrative section, before deciding to make it a small standalone game using “fragments” of Shadows map. Alpha testing for the game would have begun in May.
As is very well known, Ubisoft is going through about as tumultuous a time as any publisher right now. After recently canceling multiple other projects, including the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, many are unsure what the future holds for the company, with employees inside fearing big layoffs on the way.
