AC Shadows
Ubisoft had a very rough 2024, and nine days into 2025 well, it’s not exactly starting off with good news. In one announcement to shareholders and one to fans, Ubisoft has announced that Assassin’s Creed Shadows, already delayed out of 2024 to February 2025, would be delayed another month, now arriving on March 20, 2025.
Both statements gave reasons for this in one form or another:
Corporate statement: “This additional time will allow the team to better incorporate the player feedback gathered over the past three months and help create the best conditions for launch by continuing to engage with the increasingly positive Assassin’s Creed community.”
Fan statement: “Each week has brought valuable feedback from our community. While we’ve already made remarkable strides, we believe a few additional weeks are needed to implement that feedback and ensure an even more ambitious and engaging day one experience.”
The commonality there is “community feedback” but it raises questions about just how much feedback you can implement in a massive game like this in a single month. Such small delays are generally used for polish or bug fixing (which I’m sure will also happen).
There’s something about “create the best conditions for launch” that may hint at what is more likely to be the larger reason that Ubisoft cannot say outright, it doesn’t want to release in the same month as a bunch of other big games, hence the move to March. It was in fact an…intimidating list:
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (February 4)
- Civilization VII (February 11)
- Assassins’ Creed Shadows (formerly February 14)
- Avowed (February 18)
- Monster Hunter Wilds (February 28)
Of those, it’s likely that Monster Hunter Wilds will be the biggest, and as you can see, sharing a very important release month with four other large games is less than ideal, given how important Shadows is to Ubisoft. So the new March schedule is more “friendly” with the biggest game of that month probably being Xenoblade Chronicles X Remastered, and not all that much else it will compete with.
I get that Ubisoft is not going to say “We don’t want Shadows to drown in a bunch of other games people will probably like,” but clearly that is a huge factor here, not purely just an extra month for “player feedback,” whatever that might be.
As for Shadows, there’s a good amount of pessimism about it, but updated previews have shown improvement, and I would not count out Assassin’s Creed. Despite supposed “fatigue” of the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a massive seller back in 2020. But five years later? Is the market the same? Is this the game AC fans, existing, new or lapsed, actually want? I guess we’ll find out. In March.
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Paul Tassi