Ubisoft reportedly canceled King Arthur fantasy RPG helmed by Dragon Age's Mike Laidlaw

When Mike Laidlaw left BioWare in 2022, it was after 14 years with the company and an impressive resume of work on some of the company's most well-known titles. Specifically, he was the creative director on the Dragon Age serial but also worked on Mass Effect.

In 2022, it was announced that Laidlaw would exist joining Ubisoft Quebec, best known for its piece of work on recent Assassin's Creed games, to work on an unannounced project, although he ended up leaving in 2022 without caption.

Now, a new report in Bloomberg states that Laidlaw was developing a role-playing game based on the adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, codenamed Avalon. However, the game was canceled by Ubisoft'due south old master artistic officer Serge Hascoët, who wasn't a fan of fantasy and put force per unit area on the team, saying that it needed to be "better than Tolkien."

The study contains some details about the canceled project. An early version was going to have co-op multiplayer like to Monster Hunter, for example. To salvage the projection, the squad pitched other settings, including a sci-fi one and another based on Greek mythology (worth noting that Ubisoft'due south Assassinator's Creed serial tackled this in Odyssey). However, Hascoët declined to become with whatsoever of those ideas.

This all comes from sources close to the project, just neither Laidlaw or a Ubisoft spokesperson commented.

However, people on Twitter have given credence to the report. Hashemite kingdom of jordan Lemos, who was a scriptwriter on Assassinator's Creed: Odyssey, said that the team was "crushed by Serge."

"I worked on the project twice for brusk periods of time. I loved the narrative of the game and nosotros had a super strong writing team early. The entire team was nifty and driven by passion which was then crushed past Serge," he wrote on Twitter. Olivia Alexander, who also used to piece of work at Ubisoft Quebec, said that working there was similar "being bullied in middle school, except bullies in middle school don't wield an Hr department like a club with nails."

Hascoët was also in the news recently. He was one of multiple Ubisoft executives that left the company earlier this month afterward multiple sexual misconduct and workplace abuse allegations. Yves Guillemot stepped into the role of main creative officer. Multiple spokespeople, including Guillemot, promised that Ubisoft was fix to change its workplace culture and implement new processes for dealing with toxic behavior.

Andrée Cossette, managing director of Ubisoft Quebec, as well just left the company only a company spokesperson said it wasn't tied to the recent allegations.

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