Ubisoft must be desperate. If it wasn't, there is no chance it would have delayed a game as big as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The company hasn’t had a bonafide hit in years, with the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Mirage, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and now 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Outlaws all failing to set the wo♌rld on fire. With each of these games costing millions and taking years to make🍒, Ubisoft can’t afford for any of them not to be unrivalled blockbusters.
But the gaming landscape has changed. You can’t throw an open world epic out into the world and expect the average gamer to eat it up like they did only a few short years ago. So many people are now immersed in live-service titles and will only dip into triple-A bangers if they tickle a particular fancy. Ubisoft used to be one of those exceptions, with both Odyssey and Valhalla becoming all-encompassing RPGs that were updated with massive expansions with no conceivable end in sight. You could keep on playing forever, and I bet Ubisoft wants Shadows to take over the world in much the same wa🃏y. So it needs to count.
Star Wars Outlaws has sent Ubisoft running scared though. I personally thought Massive’s open world title got a bad rap, and will be remembered more fondly than we’re giving it credit for right now. But after years of development, executives and shareholders are looking at the global response to Outlaws and panicking, wondering if Shadows will follow in its bleak footsteps to crash and burn. Not to mention that an Assassins Creed set in feudal Japan is already a little long in the tooth when 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima exists.
Ubisoft🥂 admits in the that it is well aware of its own failures, and doesn’t want to repeat what happened to Outlaws, Avatar, Mirage, and a laundry list of other games I’m neglecting to mention here. It needs a hit, and if that means pushing the biggest title in its calendar back a handful of months, then so be it. But will this make a difference, or will it only doom Shadows to its inevitable fate?
Given it's now launching in the same year as Ghost of Yotei, we’ll now have🔴 two massive open world titles set in Japan arriving in 2025, and I have a feeling Sony’s first-party exclusive has already won over all the hearts it needs to outside of fringe crowds complaining about wokeness. Is there a chance of your average gamer ignoring Shadows and just waiting for Yotei? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Ubisoft has also announced its board is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:reviewing the company in the wake of this delay, so it’s likely some other major changes are on the hori🤪zon.
Shadows is now launching on Steam on day o🍒ne, is giving away expansions for free to any who pre-order from now until February, and is seemingly doing away with the dated idea of its Gold and Ultimate editions that cost an obscene amount and hide post-launch content behind a needless paywall. This business doesn’t work anymore, and after myriad failures, Ubisoft has seemingly realised it needs to change or risk fading away.
꧃ Whether this will be enough remains to be seen, especially if Shadows is still the same old Assassin's Creed that puts quantity over quality each and every time. But hopefully, this isﷺ a lesson for the developer: Ultimate editions are scams that audiences won’t fall for if the game isn’t up to scratch.
The setting ജthat was previously a dream for Assassin’s Creed fans doesn’t have the same draw it once did, and Ubisoft is staring down the barrel of a very bleak future in Assassin’s Creed Infinity if it hopes to keep producing this series with some strange live-service spin when it seems obvious that the majority of gamers are tu✨rning against this approach.
It might need to change everything after Shadows, or rethink how Assassin’s Creed will be handled in the years to come. But this is Uꦉbisoft w✅e’re talking about, so there’s no telling if it has delayed Shadows out of genuine concern for its quality, or merely wants to save face in the wake of angered shareholders kicking off about its stock price.
We aren’t new to this situation. Watch Dogs Legion was initially set to launch in 2019, but was delayed indefinitely alongside two other titles as Ubisoft sought to improve its quality and better position them for financial success. We have no idea if that worked (certai😼nly its cultural impact was minor at best), and yet again, it felt like a premature response to financial panic.
This makes me worry that Ubisoft is going to repeat the same mistakes in pursuit of quick profits over quality, and doesn’t understand what it must do in order to better position Shadows for success. Either that, or it is already preparing to acknowledge its failure. What it seemingly fails to understand is that making a good ♏game will ensure profits follow, especially if said good game is a return to form for such an iconic franchise as Assassin’s Creed.
The majority of gamers won’t view this delay as the right decision either, instead deciding to frame it as a surefire sign of mediocrity. It’s not fair, but it is more than likely to be a point of conversation. Plus, delaying to February, the only month of 2025 that’s already abs𒆙olutely♕ stacked with releases, seems short-sighted at best. Let’s just hope the devs don’t have to crunch too hard in the next five months to get the game shipshape.
Delaying previews, res❀tricting its presence at SGF, Gamescom, and TGS to technical showcases, and ultimately delaying the game is crystal clear proof that Shadows isn’t ready, and Ubisoft realised at the eleventh hour that it had no choice but to announce a delay.
But I can’t help but feel we wouldn’t be in this predicament if development was handled with more grace or an 🌼acknowledgment of how long projects of this scale take to develop and polish. Ubisoft wanted it out of the door before Christmas to make as much profit as possible, and it sucks that it took several high profile failures of its own making to realise something had to change.
If Ubisoft doesn’t come out of the other end of this mess realising it needs 🦄to reinvent itself, I’m unsure if the company is fit for purpose anymore.
Assassin's Creed Shadows
- Top Critic Avg: 81/100 Critics Rec: 82%
- Released
- March 20, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Vio🌠lence, Language
- Developer(s)
- ღ Ubisoft Quebec ꦫ
- Publisher(s)
- Ubisoft
- Engine
- AnvilNext
Assassin's Creed Shadows is the fourteenth major installment in the Assassin's Creed Franchise and this time takes place in Feudal Japan. The release includes new mechanics like crawling and🌳 allows players to swap between characters to complete the main storyline.
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