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Agence France-Presse

Packing familiar formulas into an all-new Japanese setting, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest big-budget game from developer Ubisoft, which is staking its future on the title.
Released on March 20 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, this new chapter in the nearly 20-year-old Assassin’s Creed action-adventure saga allows players to freely explore 16th-century feudal Japan.
Inspired by real historical events and samurai films, developers have crafted an immersive world with lush vegetation buffeted by wind and doused with rain under a dynamic weather system and ultra-detailed recreations of temples and walled cities.
As seasons change, players will be slowed down by deep snowdrifts or be able to find hiding spots in tall summer grass.


Ubisoft gave developers at its Quebec studio and 16 others around the world months longer than originally planned to polish the game.
The French gaming giant, which is struggling financially and facing rumours of a takeover, will have an even more uncertain future if its cash-cow series fails to deliver.
Its budget for Assassin’s Creed Shadows may have stretched into the hundreds of millions of US dollars, based on CEO Yves Guillemot’s statement that the game’s first three-month delay would cost US$20 million.
“Obviously we’ve felt enormous pressure,” said Marc-Alexis Cote, executive producer for the Assassin’s Creed series, a few days before launch.
He described an “extremely intense” final few months of work on the game, which has developed by hundreds of staff over five years.
Today’s intense competition means that “we have to be outstanding from the very first day”, Cote said, rather than relying on gradual downloadable updates as Ubisoft has in the past.
Many of these comments have been hurtful and demoralising
Marc-Alexis Cote on social media users accusing Ubisoft of pandering to inclusive sensibilities
With stories in which players relive the experiences of ancestors through a DNA-reading machine, locations of Assassin’s Creed games have ranged from ancient Greece to the French Revolution.
Cote, who has worked on the series for 16 years, pointed out that feudal Japan had been a long-standing request from fans, some of whom had begun to tire of familiar gameplay formulas.
“We’re hoping to shake things up with Shadows,” he said.
The new game stays true to the model established by Assassin’s Creed Origins in 2017 but with some tweaks, like encouraging players to explore to find characters and objectives rather than being steered to a point on a map.
With two playable protagonists, Assassin’s Creed Shadows offers different approaches to its challenges: violent frontal assaults with black samurai Yasuke or stealthy infiltration with shinobi (ninja) Fujibayashi Naoe.
Players will have to put in a solid 10 hours before unlocking both characters, however.
Beyond delays, further setbacks hitting Assassin’s Creed Shadows even before March 20 have included copies of the game leaking a month before release and Japanese gamers posting angrily about the fact that players can destroy the interiors of venerated temples.

Most controversial of all has been the inclusion of Yasuke, a historically documented African man in the service of warlord Oda Nobunaga.
Some historians have contested whether the real Yasuke was a samurai at all, while many social media users have accused Ubisoft of pandering to inclusive sensibilities.
“Many of these comments have been hurtful and demoralising,” Cote said.
A report from the European Video Games Observatory found that many of the most virulent attacks stemmed from a small clutch of posters surfing on the game to score culture-war points during the US presidential campaign.
Several follow-up titles in the Assassin’s Creed series are already in development, including Assassin’s Creed Hexe, themed around 16th-century witch hunts, and a possible remake of piratical episode Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
With the franchise’s future seemingly assured, the question remains whether Ubisoft will still be the ones making it happen.


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Lifestyle

Entertainment

The struggling French gaming giant is staking its future on the latest title in the Assassin’s Creed historical action-adventure franchise


The struggling French gaming giant is staking its future on the latest title in the Assassin’s Creed historical action-adventure franchise.


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