Assassin's Creed Shadows (15th November 2024)

[Julius]

Codename Red has become Shadows and samurai, ninjas and Japan mean it might be my first Assassin's Creed...ever? Outside of a few sessions at friend's houses growing up. 

In fact, I don't think I've ever bought a AAA Ubisoft game before - for a few reasons - so to have Outlaws and Shadows just a few days apart...well, when it rains, it pours 

Should be a nice stop-gap during the wait for the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima if nothing else 

Edited May 15 by Julius

[Julius]

Gameplay from today's Ubisoft Forward:

Yep, this is definitely going to scratch that samurai itch while Sucker Punch are still hard at work 

[Hero-of-Time]

News came out this morning that the Ubisoft event at TGS was to be cancelled and now this has surfaced...

Possible delay on the cards?

[Julius]

37 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

News came out this morning that the Ubisoft event at TGS was to be cancelled and now this has surfaced...

Possible delay on the cards?

That's pretty mental.

It definitely sounds like it must be related to a delay, just from reading that headline – very curious to see what we hear in the next week or two, it would be very strange for a game to be ~7 weeks away, not turn up to an event, and then release smoothly. 

Makes me think this might be a reaction to the state Outlaws launched in. 

That or maybe they caught wind of the Tsushima sequel being announced tonight and have gone into hiding 

[Dcubed]

I hope they're not going to cave into pressure from the racists hounding them over having a black samurai in their game and delay the game to whitewash the protagonist...

[Hero-of-Time]

4 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

I hope they're not going to cave into pressure from the racists hounding them over having a black samurai in their game and delay the game to whitewash the protagonist...

I hope they do, purely to read the meltdowns on Era.

[sumo73]

It looks like Ubisoft Quebec did a bit more research into things and consulted with Ubisoft Japan and more historians than I had originally thought. That's good however there are still areas that need to be fixed before the game releases. Even if the game was pushed back to early 2025, it would be for the better personally.

Assassin's Creed Shadows - An Update for the Japanese Community (ubisoft.com)

INTERVIEW | Yasuke and Assassin's Creed Shadows: A Japanese Historian's Perspective | JAPAN Forward (japan-forward.com)

Edited September 25 by sumo73

[Hero-of-Time]

Delayed.

 

 

[Dcubed]

That's pretty brutal for them.  Ubisoft are really hurting for a hit right now, and missing the Xmas period is gonna really sting; especially since they have no other major titles in the tank that really have the potential to turn the company's fortunes around in a meaningful way within the short-medium term.

If this game fails to take off in a big way and really reverse the series' sales decline? Ubisoft may well be done for...

Edited September 25 by Dcubed

[Julius]

8 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Delayed.

 

It was totally because of them catching wind of Yōtei, I totally called it 

On 9/24/2024 at 6:43 PM, Julius said:

That or maybe they caught wind of the Tsushima sequel being announced tonight and have gone into hiding 

Anyways, I think it's a huge shame, and Ubisoft rightly have a lot of introspection to do right now. They're just a mess. 

The discourse over Assassin's Creed since pivoting into this new age following the huge open worlds of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, known to be mammoths of games and even coming with their own educational modes, then shifting back to Mirage and now this...I'm not saying a lot of what is being said about this game is right, but I think Ubisoft has done a terrible job of communicating the scale and goals of this game. I feel like people might've skipped Mirage to wait for this thinking it would be another Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla, putting historical accuracy and scale at the forefront, but that doesn't seem to entirely be the case – even though it does look like they've shifted to improve where they can. Then there's having two massive licensed games in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws both seemingly not live up to expectations? 

Thanks @sumo73 for sharing those links, I was under the impression that there was much less collaboration, like you say it seems like there's still a lot more they can do though. 

On 9/24/2024 at 9:04 PM, Dcubed said:

I hope they're not going to cave into pressure from the racists hounding them over having a black samurai in their game and delay the game to whitewash the protagonist...

Sticking my neck out here but I'll just say it – I'm one of those left questioning why Ubisoft went with the first and one of very few, if only, black Samurai. 

I don't care for "oh look at Ubisoft they're being so woke" - I absolutely DESPISE the term, it's so reductive and just sounds silly - and I will not for a second tolerate any racism, but it comes across incredibly poorly and very gross when you have to absolutely go out of your way to make the protagonist a person of a certain colour. Being diverse for the sake of diversity marginalises more natural creative choices – like, come on, you end up with the poster child of university campus posters here with two protags of minority backgrounds, an African male and an Asian female. Let's not pretend that including the first and potentially only black Samurai wasn't a move made with profits at the back of Ubi's collective minds, or at least from those at the top signing off on the game's expenses. 

I was talking to a friend about this today and think there are so many other great choices they could've made to include Yasuke, especially with the creative liberties they seem to be taking anyways. You could have him be a recurring character throughout the game before you get to control him for some missions and see just how powerful he is, maybe make him the eventual character you play as in DLC (you also then get to perhaps kill the protagonist, which would be dope! Not many games do that anymore!), or maybe you tweak it so that he ends up with a spin-off game of his own and we actually dive into HIS story (or whatever creative liberties they take in telling his story), and put him at the forefront.

Right now, I think it just feels like they've gone out of their way to include another minority race (in the West, where let's be honest, Ubisoft is aiming most of their marketing for Assassin's Creed games) for the sake of it – like I said, you literally have to go so entirely far out of your way to include Yasuke in this game as a protagonist, and I think any importance of that character is potentially diminished by not giving him and his tale the proper care it deserves. It feels to me like such a weird step following just how well received some of the protagonists of the likes of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla were received, and I think maybe that's the difference here compared with, say, something like Nioh which I know uses a white guy as its protag in kind of a similar situation to Yasuke, William Adams, because that's a brand new IP – and then obviously developed by a Japanese company so there's a whole different goal there, but also it just doesn't have that background already of trying to do characters native to the land being explored done right like AC seemed to have not too long ago, which similar to the historical accuracy controversies, is rooted in comparisons to work they've already done. 

Also, I think it'd be ridiculous to think they'd change their plans now - I think pivoting would be and look SO MUCH worse than staying the course they're already on - but I just think there were more tasteful ways to have Yasuke included which go beyond diversity for the sake of diversity. Hell, you could totally have put more effort in and if you really wanted Yasuke playable, maybe also make the option to play as a Japanese Samurai available too, and you get to choose who you play as. I don't think it'd be whitewashing to have had a Japanese main character, but hey, honestly, maybe they avoided that because of how successful Jin was in Ghost of Tsushima and not wanting to compete with his level of marketability – or even Rise of Ronin, which again, bringing marketability up when talking about the protag's race, just feels all kinds of gross. 

 

As an aside, it's mental to me that these big open world games set in Japan by AAA Western studios keep running into backlash. It feels like it mostly comes about as a result of virtue signalling clashing with overt racism in the West. 

Ghost of Tsushima, if you'll remember back at launch, was accused of cultural appropriation, things were being thrown around along the lines of "what does a Western studios know about Japan, anyways?"; Japanese devs and the Japanese audience LOOOOOOVED that game. 

And now we've got the backlash to this game, as well as Ghost of Yōtei, who has a female lead played by the genderfluid Erika Ishii (saw some of the reactions to her casting, and yep, they were as gross as you'd expect). A lot of controversy and keyboard fights going on over these Eastern shores, that's for sure. 

4 hours ago, Dcubed said:

If this game fails to take off in a big way and really reverse the series' sales decline? Ubisoft may well be done for...

Origins sold over 10 million copies; Odyssey sold over 10 million copies; Valhalla we don't have unit sales (so it's unlikely it sold 10 million copies), but thanks to heavy MTX inclusion, was the first game in franchise history to generate over $1 billion in revenue; Mirage is the first one in a while which I think there can be genuine concern over, and obviously now there's this delay, but I'm not really seeing any evidence of the decline you mention. 

I don't know about Ubisoft being done for, but they do keep making dumb decisions and are acting like a company that wants to go under at times – the still crazy level of MTX and season pass inclusion in their games, the fact that they keep squandering licensed OP (come on, open world Star Wars should be the biggest and easiest home run, and yet you give it to the guys who made Division, who also just had another licensed game of theirs in Avatar launch last year? Seriously?), and now they've moved this to mid-Feb 2025.

This game will still find its audience, I'm sure, but it's launching now in the same month as Civ VII (which releases 3 days before Shadows) and Monster Hunter Wilds (which releases 2 weeks after Shadows), two absolute titans in the industry. There are other games too, like Avowed, but these two in particular are gargantuan games you prioritise at launch to dig your teeth into, and are also two of the earliest big releases next year.

It feels a little (a lot) like Ubisoft are sending this game out to die. 

Edited September 26 by Julius