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2024 was a disastrous year for Ubisoft. Back-to-back failures of Price of Persia: The Lost Crown, Skull and Bones, Invincible: Guarding the Globe, Star Wars Outlaws and XDefiant have taken down the company to touch the bottom line. In this critical situation, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is coming with a new ray of hope for this French video game developer company.
Initially, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was scheduled to come on November 15, 2024. However, Ubisoft wasn’t ready to take any risk with this game. So, the date was first postponed to February 14, 2025. Once again to analyze and implement players’ feedback, the team has delayed the release date to March 20, 2025.
After the latest event, feedback from players is worth the wait, as this game is constantly pushing the boundaries with new features and shaping a new future for the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
Compared to its predecessors, the upcoming Assassin’s Creed game is expanding its accessibility features like subtitles, colorblind modes, audio descriptions, and HUD customization. Let’s start with the visual additions. This section includes significant updates like colorblind settings, toggle screen shakes, and HUD customization elements.
These features allow players to add a background for in-game subtitles for better readability, resize the images and texts, and adjust the brightness to make it suitable for every gamer. Additionally, the game has time-sensitive cues to ensure no important information goes unnoticed.
Coming to the audio settings, the game is going to bring audio descriptions for players during cinematics and exploration scenes. Different sounds and audio cues make the exploration more accessible. However, listening to all these sounds isn’t necessary. Players can easily separate audio sliders to get rid of certain sounds.
After frequent failures in the last few years, Ubisoft is now more careful with its core gameplay mechanisms. Ubisoft games are often reported to be complicated, but the French developer company previously never took it seriously. However, coming to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft has changed the core features of the gameplay with the introduction of two new modes: Guided Mode and Canon Mode, to improve the gameplay.
While Guided Mode reduces manual navigation, Canon Mode introduces a new mechanic that will automatically decide how to progress through the game's main storyline to eliminate the headache of decision-making. Even the parkour option of the game has simplified inputs to make it more understandable for new players.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has been running for years, and several hugely successful games are on the list. Therefore, creating fresh things wasn’t easy for the developers, but they did it. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, players will encounter two protagonists, Shinobi Naoe Fujibayashi, and Samurai Yasuke, as they start working together in the Sengoku period in feudal Japan.
Shinobi Naoe is a sneaky protagonist who stays and attacks from the shadows. She turns off lanterns, throws smoke bombs, or hides behind bushes to eliminate enemies. The best addition to this game is her grappling hook. This newly added grappling hook has added a new angle to this parkour-based game, as it can literally hold onto any surface to make the progress path easier.
On the other hand, Samurai Yasuke relies more on physical power. He is a brutal slayer holding a naginata and kanabo that can chop off enemies with a single hit. He climbs slower than his partner. He can’t even access some of the elevated parts of the game. Therefore, rather than sneakily climbing on buildings to attack enemies from behind, his style is to enter through the front door and chop them off with his power and fighting skills. Yasuke is perfect for breaking enemy armor that often Naoe finds tough.
The wait for this game won’t be wasted. Instead, this game is about to bring a spectacular open world with attention to detail in portraying the beauty of 16th-century Japan. Everything has been designed with minute precision from the trees to the building to bring an authentic vibe.
Unlike the other games of the series, this upcoming game focuses more on exploration. The exploration is not only necessary to unfold the hidden mysteries of the world but also to acquire rewards. As players keep progressing through the story and exploring different locations, sometimes, they will encounter question marks on the map. This requires them to check those locations for something important. These are actually the POIs that shouldn’t be missed.
The latest closed-door event only offered six hours of gameplay, and that has already won the attention of gamers. Especially, the perfect blend of classic stealth-focused combat and modern-heavy combat has attracted the attention. These six hours of gameplay hint at Ubisoft going to bring something magnificent in March 2025.
