Assassin's Creed Shadows dev slams Elon Musk for 'feeding hatred'

After a post from Elon Musk complained about one of Assassin's Creed Shadow's main playable characters appeared online, a developer on the title has responded.

Musk, the owner of social media platform X (formerly Twitter), tweeted out that "DEI [Diversity, equity and inclusion] kills art" in response to a post complaining about Yasuke, an African samurai, being playable in the game.

"That tweet generated emotions that... the first thing I wanted to do was go back on X - that I had deleted - and just tweet back. And I just took a step back. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. And I did a bit of mindfulness to try to explore the emotions that this tweet created. For me, Elon, it's sad, he's just feeding hatred. I had a lot of three word replies that came to mind," Assassin's Creed vice president and executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote said in the interview with Game File (initially reported on by VGC).

Take a look at Assassin's Creed Shadows in action below.

"What Elon says is not the game that we're building. People will have to play the game for themselves. And if, within the first 11 minutes and 47 seconds, they are not convinced of what we're doing, we can have the discussion."

Last month, a selection of series 'fans' started to vandalise the Wikipedia page for Yasuke, one of the two playable protagonists for the game, and a real historical figure. This mass vandalisation and brigading of the Wikipedia page came after popular online agitator and former game developer Mark Kern, known online as 'Grummz', tweeted out that he had heard that Ubisoft had changed the story of the game to make Yasuke a main playable character. Later, however, he acknowledged that he may have been fed false information, essentially admitting that what was said in the initial tweet was unverified at the time he tweeted it, and that he actually doesn't know exactly what happened behind the scenes with the game.