So Many Samurai Games —
It will now launch the same year as another, maybe better, open-world samurai game.
Enlarge / The dual protagonists of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Ubisoft
Assassin's Creed Shadows, the long-anticipated next major release in the popular historical, open-world game franchise, has been moved back from its previously announced November 15, 2024 release date.
The new date is February 14, 2025, according to an open letter posted to X by franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté. "We realize we need more time to polish and refine the experience, pushing further some of our key features," Côté wrote. "As such, we've made the decision to postpone the release date."
He went on to promise a same-day launch on Steam as well as the console platforms for that date.
Côté wrote the note to players, but a letter from publisher Ubisoft to investors went into more detail. "While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," it says. "This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles." (It was previously announced that the game allows players to play as two characters: a samurai warrior and a stealthy assassin.)
The investor note also says that "the game will mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1," so that's a silver lining for PC players.
A precarious position
The massive-budget Star Wars Outlaws was positioned as an "Assassin's Creed, but in the Star Wars universe" game and was released on August 30. However, it was met with a mixed reception. Players, reviewers, and streamers praised its meticulous, high-fidelity presentation of Star Wars locales and characters, but they criticized its stealth gameplay as repetitive and frustrating.
Among other things, the game involved lengthy stealth sequences that forced the player to start over if they were discovered, but it didn't do a very good job of giving players the information and tools they needed to complete these sequences without resorting to trial and error. Shortly after the launch, one of the game's creative leads promised a patch (which arrived) that would fix one of the earlier missions, but his suggestion in an interview that the problem was simply with a single mission early in the game rather than something more fundamental rang hollow for many players.
Ubisoft acknowledged publicly that Star Wars Outlaws did not meet expectations in terms of either sales or critical reception.
It's unclear exactly which lessons Ubisoft intends to take from the misfire of Star Wars Outlaws. But Assassin's Creed is its most vital franchise, so after a big failure like that, the company can't afford anything other than an enthusiastic reception for Shadows from players. It's the first tentpole release in the storied franchise in four years.
Of course, this delay now means that Ubisoft's big-budget open-world samurai game will launch in the same year as Ghost of Yōtei, a sequel to the Sony exclusive big-budget open-world samurai game called Ghost of Tsushima that many players felt did the Assassin's Creed formula more justice than most Ubisoft titles. Shadows will also launch just a few months before the planned release of Grand Theft Auto VI, which is likely to suck all the oxygen out of the room in gaming spaces for some time. There remains some possibility that GTA6 will be delayed, though.
This is the first time an Assassin's Creed game from the main franchise has been delayed in a decade; the last delay was Assassin's Creed Unity, which saw its release date bump from October 28, 2014, to November 11. Despite the delay, that game launched with significant technical problems, which were mostly fixed in later updates.