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It isn’t a secret that gaming has a harassment problem at the moment. Ever since the toxic fan response to Abby in The Last of Us Part II, which prompted HBO to hire more security on the set of season two of the show, it doesn’t take much for gamers to get whipped into a frenzy. The signs are there that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will get the same reaction, which has prompted Ubisoft to pre-emptively plan for the possibility of their developers becoming the target of a harassment campaign.

A lot of the discourse around Assassin’s Creed Shadows has focused on the inclusion of Yasuke, the Black samurai who is one of the two playable characters in the game. Some people have taken umbrage with the fact that Ubisoft has put a Black man in feudal Japan, even though Yasuke was a real person with a documented history from the period the game takes place in.

To protect their staff from any potential harassment campaigns, Ubisoft has reportedly drafted an “anti-harassment plan” to protect their devs which includes guidelines to not post on social media that they have helped develop Assassin’s Creed Shadows and a team of lawyers ready to take action against the worst offenders. One Ubisoft employee described the measures as “unlike like what [they’ve] seen before. This is serious.”

It goes without saying that no one should be the subject of an online harassment campaign for simply working on a video game, but the lengths that Ubisoft seems to have gone to protect their devs from the potential backlash against Assassin’s Creed Shadows shows that it is a sad reality of the gaming industry at the moment. Even the inclusion of a Black man who, again, was documented to have lived in Japan at the time that Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes place, seems to be enough to spark some people to throw a fit.

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