Ubisoft Apologizes for Perpetuating Albeism
Assasin’s Creed Valhalla recently released and fans are tearing it apart, with one particular eagle-eyed gamer noticing a big issue with the backstory of a primary character. In Valhalla, there’s a powerful enemy that will hunt Eivor and their backstory suggests that being left disfigured from a fire accident caused them to become violent and angry. Victims of Ableism have inspired Ubisoft to apologize for the character’s insensitive backstory. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is available right now for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Google Stadia, and PC.
Ableism is when someone suffers discrimination due to scars left by being horribly burnt and Ubisoft isn’t the first developer or entertainment company to use such scars in backstories. We can emphathize with enemies who were discriminated against for how they look, making the character more morally ambiguous, but perpetuating any form of discrimination is wrong and Ubisoft has apologized for including this aspect of a character’s backstory.
One Assassin’s Creed Valhalla fan named Courtney Craven quickly took to Twitter to tell Ubisoft, “I didn’t include this in my Assassins Creed Valhalla impressions piece but it’s equally important to address. This is a character description in the game. It’s absolutely unacceptable to talk about facial differences this way. Writers for games and otherwise need to do better.” The specific description of the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla character in question reads: “horribly burned in a childhood accident, Eorforwine is terrified someone will see her disfigured face. She relives her fury with bursts of violence.”
Ubisoft quickly took to the official Assassin’s Creed Twitter account to respond by saying, “Thank you so much for pointing this out, we apologize for unintentionally reinforcing ableism through this language. We will remove this language in an upcoming update.” Have you ever suffered from Ableism? Let us know in the comments below!