Ubisoft announced this game in September 2022 with a thirty second teaser and a promise that it would be “a very different type of Assassin’s Creed game.” Then it went silent for four years. I opened the file. There is almost nothing in the file, and that is exactly why this article exists.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint, November 1, 2026
I cover rumors for a living on this site, so let me do the thing rumor coverage almost never does: separate the pile into what is actually confirmed, what is reported by people with track records, and what is floating around the internet wearing a trench coat. Hexe is the perfect case, because the confirmed pile is tiny, the reported pile is interesting, and the rumored pile has started inventing names for a protagonist Ubisoft has never shown. If you finish this article knowing less than you thought you knew, it worked.
CONFIRMED: The Entire Official File
Here is everything Ubisoft has put its own name on. All of it. Take your time, it will not take long.
Codename Hexe is a real game, announced on September 10, 2022, during the Assassin’s Creed showcase at Ubisoft Forward, on the same stage that revealed Codename Red, the game that became Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the studio behind Origins and Valhalla. It is part of the platform Ubisoft called Infinity and now ships as the Animus Hub. Hexe is a codename, not a final title. Ubisoft has never announced a release date, a release year, or a platform list. Not once, not anywhere, in four years.
On the record, the most important official words belong to Marc-Alexis Côté, then the boss of the franchise, who called Hexe “a new flagship title” and “a very different type of Assassin’s Creed game.” In an interview with IGN published right after the showcase, he went one step further, and it remains the single most useful sentence ever spoken about this project: “What I can confirm to you is that Hexe is not an RPG. When I say it is a different type of game, I want people to go beyond the expectations of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.” He added that not everything has to be a 150 hour RPG. That is CONFIRMED, straight from the man running the series at the time: whatever Hexe is, it is not another giant open world RPG.
The teaser itself is thirty seconds of a camera drifting down through a dark forest, dogs barking somewhere off screen, settling on the Assassin insignia woven out of twigs and hanging like a folk charm. Ubisoft’s entire official comment at the time was one post: “We work in the dark… That is all we can say for now about Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe.” Côté also said he could not wait for fans to tear the trailer apart and find its secrets, and fans, being fans, did. The ring around the insignia is written in the Alphabet of the Magi, an occult script from the 16th century, and the fan site Access the Animus translated it: the outer circle spells the Creed’s own maxim in Old German, “we work in the dark to serve the light,” and the inner spiral reads, loosely, “Mephisto, avenge this house.” That translation is fan work, not a Ubisoft statement, but Ubisoft designed the puzzle and never corrected the solution, so file it under all but announced.
Now the part almost every article about this game gets wrong, so I am putting it in its own paragraph. Ubisoft has never, officially, said the words “witch trials,” “Germany” or “Holy Roman Empire” about Hexe. Not in the teaser, not in a press release, not in an interview. The teaser screams it, the codename is literally the German word for witch, and the setting is about as confirmed as a thing can be without a logo on it. But on paper, in the confirmed column, the setting of the next flagship Assassin’s Creed game is blank. Hold on to that, because everything in the next two sections lives downstream of reporting, not announcements.
Two more confirmed items, both from 2026, both about people rather than the game. In February 2026, Ubisoft confirmed that Clint Hocking, the creative director announced with the project in 2022, had left the company, and that Jean Guesdon would step in as creative director. Guesdon is not a caretaker hire: he was the creative director of Black Flag and Origins, and he now also runs content for the whole franchise. Ubisoft’s statement said development continues with a seasoned team and that the game “will deliver something distinctive” within the series. And on October 29, 2026, three days before this article, Ubisoft published a franchise update in which Guesdon gave the first official status line on Hexe in years, and here it is in full: “We are making steady progress on this darker Assassin’s Creed experience, though there is still work ahead of us.” He also said the next major update on the game will come in 2027. That is the freshest official word in existence. Steady progress, work ahead, see you in 2027.
REPORTED: The Insider Gaming File
The strongest reported material comes from Insider Gaming, Tom Henderson’s outlet, which reported in April 2024 that it had been shown early footage of Hexe under the condition that the footage itself never be published. According to that report, the game has a single female protagonist, named Elsa in the material they saw, and at one point she uses a spell to possess a cat and distract German soldiers hunting her, in a dark, cobbled city street. The same report describes Hexe as a more linear experience with some open world elements, closer in structure to the older games than to Valhalla, and says the team planned a fear system inspired by the Jack the Ripper expansion for Syndicate. Status check on all of that: REPORTED, from one outlet with a strong record on this franchise, describing footage none of us can watch. I believe Insider Gaming saw something real. I also note that “planned” is doing heavy lifting in the fear system sentence, and that games change shape over years of production, especially years like the ones this project has had.
The setting itself sits in this tier too. Before the 2022 showcase even aired, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that the second Infinity game would be set during the witch trials in the era of the Holy Roman Empire, in Central Europe. Schreier is about as reliable as this business gets, and the teaser Ubisoft then released, twigs, German text, occult alphabet and all, fits his report like a glove. So: REPORTED, heavily corroborated by vibes, still never confirmed by Ubisoft. Precision matters on this site, so there it is.
On timing, the reporting points one way and then argues with itself. Insider Gaming originally had Hexe targeting 2026. Later reporting from the same orbit moved it, and the current consensus of the rumor mill, including later Insider Gaming reporting and comments attributed to NateTheHate, is late 2027 at the earliest. Ubisoft, say it with me, has announced nothing. A game announced in 2022 with no date, whose publisher is now promising news in 2027, is a 2027 or 2028 game until proven otherwise, and anyone who tells you a month is guessing with extra steps.
RUMORED: Three Names for One Woman
And now the trench coat section. In May 2026, a newer wave of leaks, mainly from leakers going by Rogue and j0nathan and rounded up by GameRant, claimed that the protagonist is not called Elsa at all: Elsa was an internal placeholder, her real name is Anika, and the game is set specifically during the Würzburg witch trials of 1625 to 1631, one of the largest witch trials in European history. The same wave added a mentor named Wolfgang, blood pacts, poison, and the claim that Anika is a descendant of Claudia Auditore, Ezio’s sister, guided by Ezio himself in some ghostly form. Then, in October 2026, a separate report built on casting calls, rounded up by KeenGamer, named the lead character Petra and listed a family around her: parents, siblings, a village healer. Three names. Elsa, Anika, Petra. Zero confirmations, and at most one of them can be the final answer, if any of them is.
I am not printing this section to mock it. I am printing it because this is what a four year information vacuum does. When a publisher says nothing, the internet does not stay quiet, it just starts writing the game itself, one plausible leak at a time, until the fan wiki reads better than the press kit. Some of these details may turn out to be true; the Würzburg trials are a genuinely perfect setting for this series, which is exactly why you should be suspicious of how perfect they sound. Until Ubisoft speaks, all of it is RUMORED, and the honest price of a rumor is the label on the tin.
The Troubled Middle: What the Departures Actually Mean
Between the teaser and today, this project lost its entire original leadership layer, and pretending that is not part of the story would be its own kind of dishonesty. Côté, the executive who announced Hexe and defined it in that IGN interview, left Ubisoft in October 2025 as the franchise moved into the new Tencent backed subsidiary, Vantage Studios. Hocking followed in February 2026. The game’s director, Benoit Richer, left in April 2026 to co-found an independent studio. By August 2026, Ubisoft was announcing yet another layer of franchise leadership above the project, with Eric Baptizat named game director for the whole brand.
Two readings of this are available and I will give you both. The dark reading: a game four years from announcement that loses its franchise boss, its creative director and its game director in ten months, while its publisher repeatedly declines to show anything, is a game being rebuilt, and games being rebuilt do not usually keep their original promises. Hocking mattered specifically because his name was the guarantee of weird: the man directed Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and a horror tinged, systems driven Assassin’s Creed had his fingerprints all over the concept. He is gone. The steadier reading: Ubisoft handed the project to Jean Guesdon, who has shipped two of the most loved games in this series, stated publicly in October 2026 that the team is making steady progress toward “the unique vision at the heart of this project,” and put a date on the next real update. Companies do not usually schedule victory laps for games they are quietly cancelling, and Assassin’s Creed is now the crown jewel of the Vantage subsidiary. Hexe is too important to kill and too strange to rush. Both readings agree on the only fact that matters: the Hexe that eventually ships will be, at least in part, a different team’s interpretation of the 2022 idea.
My Take: The Most Exciting Unknown in the Series
Here is my honest position. Shadows was the game the fans ordered, and Hexe is the game nobody ordered, and that is why it is the most interesting thing Ubisoft has in production. A shorter, darker, linear Assassin’s Creed about fear and persecution, made by the studio that built the modern series, with no RPG bloat and a promise on the record that it is not an RPG: if even half of that survives to release, it is the freshest this franchise has been since 2009.
But my excitement has a meter running. A promise made by a man who left, for a game directed by two men who left, described by footage one outlet saw in 2024, is not a product. It is a story we have all agreed to keep telling. Ubisoft’s October update bought the project credibility and time, and pointing at 2027 for the next update was the smartest thing they could have done, because it finally matches the message to the evidence. I am not preordering a codename. I am doing something rarer for me: waiting, quietly, with the file open, ready to move things between columns the moment Ubisoft finally gives us something real to grade. When the 2027 update lands, this page gets rewritten, and I hope it gets a lot longer. More upcoming games live in the Coming Soon hub, and Hexe will sit at the top of my watch list until it gives me a reason to move it.
The File, On One Page
CONFIRMED: announced September 10, 2022; codename only; Ubisoft Montreal; a flagship title; not an RPG; part of the Animus Hub; Jean Guesdon now creative director; steady progress per Ubisoft, October 29, 2026; next major update in 2027.
REPORTED: witch trials setting in the Holy Roman Empire (Bloomberg, 2022); a female lead seen possessing a cat in leaked footage, a more linear structure and a planned fear system (Insider Gaming, 2024); a late 2027 window at the earliest (current insider consensus).
RUMORED: her name, take your pick between Elsa, Anika and Petra; Würzburg, 1625 to 1631; an Auditore family connection; everything else you have read on social media.
Sources
The announcement and official wording: Ubisoft Forward Assassin’s Creed showcase, September 10, 2022, and the official Assassin’s Creed account post of the same day (“We work in the dark…”).
The “not an RPG” confirmation and the flagship framing: Marc-Alexis Côté’s interview with IGN, September 2022, with additional framing from his VGC interview the same month.
The teaser decode: Access the Animus’s translation of the Alphabet of the Magi inscriptions, as documented by the Assassin’s Creed Wiki and NME’s September 2022 coverage of the teaser.
The setting reporting: Bloomberg, Jason Schreier, September 2022, reported before the official reveal.
The footage report (Elsa, the cat, the fear system, the linear structure): Insider Gaming, April 2024, as covered by Notebookcheck and GameRant’s rumor roundups.
The 2026 leak wave (Anika, Würzburg, the Auditore claims): GameRant, May 2026. The casting call report (Petra and family): KeenGamer’s leak roundup, October 2026.
Leadership changes: Ubisoft’s confirmation of Clint Hocking’s departure and Jean Guesdon’s appointment, February 2026, reported by VGC and PC Gamer; Benoit Richer’s April 2026 departure, reported by WN Hub; Eric Baptizat’s brand appointment, August 2026, reported by Tech Times.
The latest official status: Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise update, October 29, 2026 (Jean Guesdon: “steady progress,” next major update in 2027), covered by Kotaku.