Report: Ubisoft's Ex-Creative Officer Cancelled Dragon Age Director's King Arthur Game

A report has surfaced that claims Ubisoft was working on a King Arthur fantasy RPG directed by Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw, which was ultimately cancelled by Ubisoft's former Chief Creative Officer, Serge Hascoët. According to Bloomberg, Dragon Age's Mike Laidlaw was hired to direct the development of a new Ubisoft RPG known as Avalon, a "big-budget adventure involving stories of King Arthur and his Round Table in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world full of knights and legends." Alas, according to Bloomberg sources familiar with the project, Avalon was cancelled by Ubisoft's then-Chief Creative Officer, Serge Hascoët. Hascoët was apparently suspicious of the fantasy genre, telling the team that, if it was to be a fantasy game, Avalon had to be "better than Tolkien," referring to the hallowed Lord of The Rings franchise. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/07/21/multiple-assassins-creed-games-reportedly-scrapped-or-minimised-female-lead-roles-before-release-ign-news"] The report's sources noted that Avalon was "progressing well" ahead of its cancellation and that it featured a "cooperative multiplayer world similar to Capcom Co.'s popular Monster Hunter series." In an effort to save the project, the setting was reshaped into science fiction and Greek mythology, but Hascoët was still unwilling to approve it, and it was cancelled in 2019, with Laidlaw leaving the company shortly after. This isn't not the first story we've heard about Hascoët's involvement in rejecting pitched projects - the executive was also allegedly at the centre of scrapping or minimising female roles in multiple Assassin's Creed games. Hascoët recently resigned from Ubisoft following sexual misconduct and toxic culture allegations at the company and was named as "playing a central role in the company's culture problems" in a report from the French newspaper Liberation. Ubisoft recently chose not to directly address the aforementioned abuse allegations during its Ubisoft Forward conference earlier this month, but has committed to "major changes" following multiple reports of abuse and harassment within the developers' studios. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

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