Update:

A Ubisoft spokesperson provided IGN with the following statement in response:

"History is our playground in Assassin’s Creed. Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag is a work of fiction that depicts the real events during the Golden Era of Pirates. We do not condone illegal whaling, just as we don’t condone a pirate lifestyle of poor hygiene, plundering, hijacking ships, and over the legal limit drunken debauchery."

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Animal rights group PETA has hit out at the supposed depiction of whaling in Ubisoft’s recently-announced Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag “Whaling – that is, shooting whales with harpoons and leaving them to struggle for an hour or more before they die or are hacked apart while they are still alive – may seem like something out of the history books, but this bloody industry still goes on today in the face of international condemnation, and it’s disgraceful for any game to glorify it,” reads a statement provided to VentureBeat “PETA encourages video game companies to create games that celebrate animals – not games that promote hurting and killing them.”PETA has a history of capitalising on video games to increase awareness for animal rights and have attacked titles including Super Meat Boy and Call of Duty: World at War in the past. PETA has also targeted both Mario and Cooking Mama Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, set prior to the American Revolution, takes place in the earlier half of the 18th Century. Throughout the 1700s whaling exploded in the American colonies and quickly became a highly-lucrative industry.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.