From the earliest days of the Assassin’s Creed series, certain elements of the fanbase have been insufferable with their ideas — and demands — for new settings and time periods for the games to take place in.
This piece originally appeared on Kotaku Australia on April 12, 2022. It has been retimed as a weekend read.
Calls for a game to be set in Japan quickly became (and remains) exhausting, as did cries of “do a viking Assassin’s Creed!” until, well, Ubisoft actually did. There have been pitches for everything from Ancient Rome (which Origins kinda touched on) to the First World War (which, again, Syndicate dabbled in), but one place the series has been strangely steering clear of has also been one of the most obvious for a tale of historical combat and intrigue: China.
While the franchise made a brief stop with the first episode of the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles series, we’re yet to see the main games set themselves anywhere further East than the Mediterranean, which is a bit of a shame seeing as the series is now nearly 15 years old.
Were Assassin’s Creed to ever finally make that jump, you’d expect the game to be set in some era of Imperial China, hundreds or even thousands of years ago. That’s what I like about this idea by Ubisoft’s Li Chunlei, though; it’s set in China, but in 1937, with players taking on the role of an Assassin battling against the occupying Japanese forces.
It would be largely centred around the Battle of Shanghai, the first major battle in Japan’s invasion of China and an event that’s being seen by more and more historians as the true starting point of the Second World War. Li’s pieces here show the hero’s outfit, based on Chinese uniforms of the time, along with a Japanese villain (who looks like Tojo) and an action shot.
You can see more of Li’s stuff at his ArtStation page.
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