Summary
Assassin’s Creed Shadowsgame director Charles Benoit has revealed that the game’s recent last-minute delay was done so that the team could polish the parkour, and not to change the story like some suspected.
2025 is absolutely packed with massive releases,but none are quite as important to a company as Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Ubisoft has been in dire straits over the past few years thanks to a fewunderperforming titles like Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, putting a lot of pressure on Shadows to deliver as much as it can.
The weight on Assassin’s Creed Shadows' shoulders is so big that Ubisoft even did the unthinkable and delayed it out of 2024 and thenrecently pushed it back even further to March of this year. While it’s clear this was done to make the game as good as possible, the game’s director has recently confirmed the specifics of why it was done.
No, Ubisoft Didn’t Change Assassin’s Creed Shadows' Story During The Delay
As reported by IGN, Assassin’s Creed Shadows' director, Charles Benoit, was recently asked about the game’s delay during a preview session (you can check out TheGamer’s thoughts here), which caused him to reveal the main reason - roofs. That’s right, Shadows was pushed back a month so that the game’s parkour on complex roofs could be polished up.
Benoit confirmed that, while a few other changes to progression and balancing were made, the main thing holding Shadows back from a February release date is how complex Japanese architecture is. More coding and animations were needed to verify the movement was as fluid as possible, resulting in a month’s delay.
During an interview with Eurogamer, Benoit also debunked the theories and rumours that Shadows was pushed back so that Ubisoft could change the story.Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been the focal point for accusations of DEI and “wokeness” in gamingever since it was announced,which led to some assuming it was pushed back to change this.
As we can see from the recently released story trailer, however, that isn’t the case at all, as Yasuke is front and centre along with Naoe. We also see that Yasuke’s position as a black samurai is part of the game’s plot and likely to be focused on, which will hopefully put those wild rumours to rest.
