I wonder if this game will be DOA or it'll be shilled into oblivion while normies buy it in droves. Remember, Valhalla supposedly made one billion dollars in a single year and that game was...well, it ain't Assassin's Creed. Mirage was the third best selling game in Japan the week it came out so I wonder if Shadows will be much lower or if it'll still sell very well, not to mention that it was incredibly successful to begin with by people who never played the original Assassin's Creed games pretending they're long time fans. This outrage will be a whole lotta nothing in the end sadly, because normies are normies and don't give a shit. I wish the port of Ghosts was released later so people can compare them more directly and normies would realize which is the better Japanese Assassin game.
It will still sell well despite the outrage I believe. AC as a franchise is schlop that prints money. Valhalla had a lot of issues but it did REALLY well. People mention how there was other viking media out there that got people hyped, like the Vikings show having its 6th and final season that year or Vinland Saga. People forget that Shogun has got a lot of hype as well, so we're likely going to see a similar phenomenon for AC Shadows. The game will likely sell worse than Valhalla in Japan because even though Nips love to gorge themselves on anything about their Samurai days, they were obsessed with Valhalla because Nips love Vikings (hence Vinland Saga, an anime about Vikings, being super popular).
The game portray christians as bad/evil and islam as freedom fighters/good/justified killing. In AC1 AC2 AC brotherhood and espiecially in Revelations with how the byzantines were viewed as the evil antagonist and the ottomans were the good guys.
That wasn't really the case in the first game. The mentor sends you to assassinate both Christians and Muslims throughout the game, who were all Templars. The whole twist of the game is that your Mentor was also a secret Templar that ordered you to kill all the other Templars that knew of the Apple so he could have it to himself. The leader of the Christians, King Richard, is also not painted as evil and actually a reasonable person.
I think if I remember correctly Valhalla had some extremely stupid shit about Odin secretly being an alien or something?
He was Isu. All of the pantheons of Gods are Isu, which were an advanced race that created humans as slave labor, as
@Snekposter mentioned. The Isu stuff has been hinted at since the 1st game and it got explained in 2 or Brotherhood I think. The Isu/Gods put trace amounts of their DNA into the human genepool and on occasion will reincarnate as humans when someone is born with enough of the DNA matching up. The reincarnations will have their memories but it will be locked away. The main antagonist of Black Flag and Unity in particular is actually just one of the Gods (Juno's husband) that reincarnated like 4 times and he doesn't even know that, he just has visions of his past lives and he sees it as prophecies so he goes psycho. A bunch of the characters in Valhalla are all reincarnations of the Norse pantheon.
You have Ubisoft's reaction to the Unity female character controversy wrong. It's not that they "didn't back down", but were rather completely blindsided by the absurd outrage during E3 2014 with nothing they could do about it, the game being very late in development with only a handful of months until release in the holiday season. In fact, Ubisoft was so traumatized by the outrage that they've been doing their best to stave off a repeat with an emphasis on gender-mixed/selectable protagonists ever since at the expense of historical believability and having a well-defined central character to the story like Ezio or Connor.
It's a shame that Ubisoft took all the wrong criticism from the backlash to Unity. Despite the god awful story, Unity had some of the best parkour, customization, and combat in the series. It took Ubisoft 4 games until they ever considered anything similar to that concept like with Mirage but Mirage was fucked at its core because it was just Valhalla DLC scaled up into a standalone game using Valhalla's shitty framework.
Don't know how Mirage did but I heard it made like $250 million, which is pretty good considering it was so cheaply made. I wonder if we'll ever get another one. I could see them designing a new release schedule where they release their "full-scale openworld RPG" garbage and then use that entire framework to make a smaller scale "old-style" game from now on.
