Cancelled Assassin’s Creed Destiny Footage Reveals a Qin Dynasty Mission

A palace mission in the Qin Dynasty

Ubisoft and Tencent had a second Assassin’s Creed project planned for China alongside the mobile game Jade: a console and PC title called Assassin’s Creed Destiny. The game was cancelled early, but leaked prototype footage offers a glimpse of its setting and combat. That glimpse is useful, though limited: prototype clips can show what a team was trying to build without telling us how the finished game would have played, or how far its systems had progressed.

A palace mission in the Qin Dynasty

Details and footage were reported by MP1st. TiMi Studio Group, Tencent’s subsidiary and a team also involved with Jade, led development. Destiny was set during the Qin Dynasty, a few years after Jade’s timeline. Most of the leaked material comes from a February 2025 prototype. Those details place the project within a broader effort to build Assassin’s Creed stories around Chinese history, while also making clear that the two games weren’t described as the same experience or format.

The footage follows a female assassin entering a sacred palace under attack by Xiang Yu and his forces. It also shows early work on a boss fight against the historical figure. Stealth kills, parkour takedowns and the series’ leap of faith appear in other clips. These are familiar ingredients, but their presence tells us something about the intended design: Destiny seems to have been built around the series’ established mix of infiltration, traversal and direct confrontation, adapted to a new historical setting.

A palace under assault offers a compact way to show those elements working together. An entry route can establish stealth; a chase or takedown can put movement in focus; a boss encounter can shift the player toward combat. The clips don’t establish how open the mission was, how many routes it offered, or whether the combat had distinctive mechanics. That’s the limit of a small set of prototype footage. Still, seeing multiple parts of the series’ formula in one project makes the material more revealing than a character model or environment shot alone.

The Qin setting also gives the project a clear point of distinction from Jade, whose timeline comes earlier. The available information doesn’t explain how Destiny would have connected its story to the mobile game, or whether players would have needed to know Jade to follow it. For now, the safest reading is that the projects shared a broad historical focus while pursuing separate releases and stories.

What the prototype can—and can’t—tell us

Prototype footage is evidence of work in progress, not a preview of a nearly finished game. Animations can be incomplete, environments may be placeholders, and a scene can change substantially before release. The clips offer a record of ideas under development, but they don’t establish the final quality, scope or intended launch plans for Destiny. That distinction matters because leaked gameplay often invites viewers to judge a cancelled project as if it were a finished product.

There’s also a difference between recognizing Assassin’s Creed features and seeing what made a particular game distinct. A leap of faith and stealth takedowns identify the franchise, but they don’t tell us whether Destiny had a strong story, satisfying mission design or a compelling interpretation of its period. The footage gives us a premise and a handful of mechanics. The rest remains unknown.

This is more significant than it looks: a cancelled project can still reveal how a publisher and its development partners were thinking about a series’ reach. Here, the reported plan involved a mobile game and a separate console and PC game, with a shared broad destination in China. That suggests an attempt to serve different kinds of players through distinct projects. It doesn’t prove that the games were part of a coordinated commercial strategy, but the pairing is notable.

Cancellation amid studio changes

Destiny’s cancellation appears to have overlapped with TiMi’s early 2025 restructuring, when the studio was divided into multiple teams. MP1st reports that other projects were cancelled around the same time, including Athena, a Greek mythology action game, and Invictus, a stylised cyberpunk open world title led by Assassin’s Creed veteran Ashraf Ismail at TiMi’s Montreal division. The reported cancellations point to a period of change across the studio, though the available account doesn’t establish the individual reasons each project ended.

That context can help explain why Destiny disappeared, but it can’t settle the question. Studio restructuring can affect staffing, priorities and a project’s future; the report’s timing alone doesn’t show which factors drove this particular cancellation. And this is the part most people overlook: a game can be cancelled because its direction, resources or place in a portfolio no longer fits, even when footage suggests that development had produced playable material.

Prototype footage this detailed is unusual for a cancelled, unannounced game. Destiny appears to be gone, while Jade remains the planned route for Assassin’s Creed’s return to China. If you’re working in this space, the practical lesson is that a shared setting can support very different projects, but it doesn’t guarantee that both will survive development. For players, the footage offers a tantalizing look at a game they won’t get to assess firsthand. A glimpse, not a verdict.

What comes next for the China setting

Jade’s continued status gives the broader effort a remaining path, but the report provides no release details or account of how its development may have changed. Its existence doesn’t mean it will inherit Destiny’s ideas, characters or design. The two projects may have shared a historical backdrop and a studio connection while remaining independent in the ways that matter to players.

For now, Destiny is best understood as a discarded branch of the franchise: a console and PC project with a recognizable Assassin’s Creed structure, a Qin-era setting and at least one mission built around a palace attack. The footage adds texture to that outline. It doesn’t answer the larger questions about the game’s story or ambitions, and that uncertainty is part of what makes the leak compelling.

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