Braveheart, you have some competition. I’ve been playing my way through Assassin’s Creed Rogue on PC, and for the most part have been loving it! I was stopped dead in my tracks by this performance, though, which is wrong on multiple levels.
First, the obvious: that’s terrible. I’ve got Scottish family, friends and an unnatural obsession with Neil Oliver (it’s his magnificent hair). I’ve spent time in Scotland. I watch a lot of British TV. I like to think I know what a good Scottish accent sounds like.
That sounds like the accent of a Grand Theft Auto IV villain.
Just to be sure, though, I played this video to Kotaku’s resident Actual Scottish Human Mark Serrels, and all he could say was “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”
So, not a very good Scottish accent, then.
The second problem, though, is a weird one for Ubisoft, a studio that’s normally pretty good with its historical stuff: the man in question wasn’t even Scottish.
That’s supposed to be Rogue’s version of Captain James Cook, navigator and explorer, most famous for being the first white guy to stumble upon Hawaii and the Eastern (i.e. the habitable) side of Australia. James Cook had a Scottish father, but his mother was English, he was born in England and raised in England.
Bizarrely, another of the game’s main characters, George Munro, has the opposite problem. A British army officer who was Scottish but raised in Ireland (and made kinda famous through his depiction in Last of the Mohicans), Munro is given a toff English accent in the game.
Here’s one last thing though: this is kinda funny. I like to think it’s almost intentional, a joke on the part of a development team that’s very French-Canadian; English-speakers wouldn’t recognise or care about the difference between French French and Belgian French, so why should they bother about English?
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