Assassin’s Creed is one of gaming’s biggest and most prolific franchises, with 13 main games released over the last 18 years. And, throughout that time, many fans of the historical fiction franchise have been asking for one thing; an entry set in feudal Japan. Next month, they’ll get their wish.
But Assassin’s Creed Shadows represents more than just a long-awaited entry. It’s a new era for a franchise that has reinvented itself multiple times but still struggles to strike a balance between attracting new fans and retaining the old ones. And for Ubisoft, it could be a make or break.
The French publishing group has been impacted by the changing shape of the video game industry, shedding thousands of employees over the last two years as the rising cost and scope of high-end development has led to a period of financial underperformance for the publicly listed company. Its attempts to move into multiplayer and service-based games have fallen mostly flat, and sales of both new games in existing franchises (like Prince of Persia) and licensed games based on movies (like Avatar) have failed to meet Ubisoft’s high expectations.
Players and commentators have pointed to several contributing factors, from Ubisoft’s enormous multi-continent size to its attempts to monetise games with microtransactions and its own proprietary platforms and subscriptions. Assassin’s Creed is seen as its most dependable property, with 2020’s Valhalla pulling in about $US1 billion ($1.6 billion) in revenue in its first year, and Shadows – which will also introduce a new “hub” that connects all recent games in the series – will need to prove that’s still the case.
Having played a preview build of the game for around four hours, a drive to evolve the series is clearly felt. It’s a blend of the parkour-and-assassinations gameplay of the original games with the wide-open RPG design of Odyssey and Valhalla. The designers have clearly been working down a list of common bugbears to address, though I think with mixed success. New systems minimise the number of points that appear on your map directing you straight to objectives, but still ultimately feel like busywork. Yet, the weapons-based character growth system seems exciting, and there’s a great solution to having both sneaking and heavy combat capabilities at your fingertips: dual protagonists.
