The Assassin’s Creed series is still set to return to China for the first time since its modest 2.5D spinoff in 2015, now with the mobile-exclusive title Assassin’s Creed Jade.
First announced in 2022 as a collaboration between Ubisoft and Level Infinite (Tencent’s publishing arm), Jade takes players to the Qin Dynasty period. However, after a series of beta tests, the project’s updates have calmed down. That changed in March of this year, when Ubisoft confirmed that Jade was still in development.
But Jade wasn’t Ubisoft and Tencent’s only project for China. We’ve learned that the two companies had also quietly planned another major Assassin’s Creed game for current platforms, but the project was abandoned before it could get off the ground.
Gameplay and details for Assassin’s Creed Destiny
This previously unknown project was led by TiMi Studio Group, the Tencent subsidiary which also worked on Jade. It’s unclear when development began, but from what we could gather, it appears to have been abandoned early on, since most of the hardware we’ve seen comes from a February 2025 prototype.
Working under the title Assassin’s Creed Destiny, the game was set to take place in the Qin Dynasty, just like Jade, but a few years later: Jade is set in 215 BCE, while Destiny is set in 206 BCE.
The following images are from the portfolios of various developers who worked on the project. It mainly features a mission in which a female assassin must reach a mysterious artifact located inside a sacred palace under siege by the historical figure Xiang Yu and his troops. We also get to briefly see early work on a boss fight involving the Chinese warlord.
Besides this mission, the footage gives a glimpse of other gameplay elements, such as the series’ regular stealth attacks and the iconic leap of faith. A clip shows the player wielding an umbrella-shaped spinning weapon in a mock testing environment, with inkbrush-shaped ability icons, a health bar, and an ornate bar with a yin-yang emblem visible on screen.
Other animations show a male character using parkour to eliminate enemies. As is typical of the series, this suggests that players could choose their character’s gender, unless it was simply a placeholder.
Additionally, the released material includes detailed close-ups of the weapons featured in the footage, ranging from the player’s unique rotating umbrella to enemy weapons like Xiang Yu’s imposing halberd..
A month before the prototype was produced, TiMi announced its restructuring, dividing the studio into four teams managing different projects. The destiny was canceled shortly after.
Several other projects have been canceled over time. Athena, a third-person action game based on Greek mythology, was in development between 2024 and 2026. Another was Invictus, a stylized open-world cyberpunk game made by Assassin’s Creed veteran Ashraf Ismail at TiMi’s Montreal division, whose development ended after the branch closed earlier in February.
The cancellations also came after a change already underway at Tencent. In 2024, Reuters reported that the company was moving away from Western franchises, which generated lower profit margins than domestic Chinese versions, and repurposing developers toward casual board games. Jade herself has felt the effects, with hundreds of developers apparently switching to the DreamStar board game.
Unlike Destiny, however, Jade was delayed rather than canceled, and it remains in development. Ubisoft hasn’t disclosed a release date, so we’ll have to wait a little longer to return to ancient China as a member of the Creed.
In other franchise news, we also shared some information on the story of Assassin’s Creed Hexe, the darker entry set in Germany during the witch trials.
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