The best warriors know patience, as do the team behind Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it seems. As one of 2024’s most anticipated titles, it was delayed first to February 14th of this year, then to March 20th just two weeks ago. While fans were disappointed in the delays that pushed the game into 2025, we spoke with some of the creatives behind the game who told us that this longer development time, in fact, helped a ton with refinement and balance.
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Speaking with ComicBook during an Assassin’s Creed Shadows preview event, creative director Jonathan Dumont commented on the delays. While those inevitably meant a longer wait for the game, he said Assassin’s Creed Shadows ultimately benefited from them.
“Across the board, it benefitted,” he said. “The team was pretty happy to get a little bit of extra time to polish and debug and tweak our combat. Some of the windows of opportunity, the readability of the combat needed some work, stealth, AI, parkour. Parkour is complex for a game like Assassin’s Creed because you can climb on everything. There’s rulesets. So, making sure we tweak that, make it a little more fluid. It was a little sticky.”
The game director of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Chris Benoit, also spoke on the game’s recent delay, particularly on what was fixed in the interim.
“I think what we worked on the most with the extra time is progression,” Benoit said. “We reshuffled a couple of things to make it more engaging and clearer, and also balancing it because it takes a long time to balance a game like that. So it was really useful for that.”
Dumont also told ComicBook that the team made changes according to feedback from players like individuals saying what would or wouldn’t go in a shrine for accuracy’s sake. Benoit echoed Dumont’s comments about parkour as the team had to make it so that navigating Japanese architecture felt “super fluid” which involved working on collision/animations. As Benoit mentioned, parkour is at the heart of the series, so the more refined, the better.
Delays in the video game industry are a bit commonplace, though not as often in recent years. Still, while they can be quite disappointing for fans anticipating the title, the extra time used to shape, refine, and perfect some of the rough edges the game may have at the moment. Some notable titles that experienced delays include The Last of Us Part 2, God of War, Halo Infinite, and Elden Ring. Of course, they can be a double-edged sword, as hype can decline or the game just wasn’t ready to be released. Cases like that include Cyberpunk 2077, Saints Row Remake, Battlefield 2042, and Fast & Furious Crossroads.
However, based on the comments made by the developers, it seems like the changes made to Assassin’s Creed Shadows would hit a lot of the points fans had mentioned as necessary fixes. For example, combat was seen as a bit of a controversial topic, given both protagonists have different gameplay styles, with Naoe stealth-based and Yasuke action-based. While we’ll have to wait to see more of the refinements made, the gameplay deep dive from December was more well-received by fans than its initial reveal, which was seen by some as sluggish.
All will be revealed when Assassin’s Creed Shadows emerges onto PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on March 20th.
