Something Strange Appears To Be Going On With ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ [Update: Delayed]

Update (12 PM): Yes, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has indeed been delayed to February 14, 2025, three months after its initial release date. Original article follows:

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set to come out about a month and a half from now on November 12, 2024. But now there are strange things happening that Ubisoft is not really explaining very well in regard to previews of the game ahead of launch, brining into question whether it will actually hit that date.

First, Ubisoft announced that it would not in fact showcase Assassin’s Creed Shadows at the Tokyo Game Show as previously planned. This is the statement they made on Twitter:

“We regret to inform you that due to various circumstances, we have decided to cancel our online participation in Tokyo Game Show 2024 which was scheduled to start at 3:00 PM on September 26th.”

“We apologize for the short notice. We sincerely apologize to everyone who was looking forward to the broadcast.”

“Various circumstances” is extremely vague, and now Insider Gaming is reporting that previously scheduled press previews have also been cancelled.

The situation comes in the wake of some level of turmoil at Ubisoft with Star Wars Outlaws not exactly being the megahit they hoped it would be, and multiplayer project XDefiant appearing to not be panning out all that well. This, among other issues, has caused a stock slide of 7% the past week and 44% over three months. Going back a full year, it’s down 60%.

Ubisoft’s market cap is now only $1.7 billion, compared to the $68 billion Microsoft paid for Activision Blizzard, or even the $3.5 billion Sony paid for Bungie, a studio which had a single game at the time. Ubisoft, meanwhile, has many franchises but appears to be having trouble wrangling them all.

With these recent Shadows developments, it does not seem impossible that Assassin’s Creed Shadows may end up delayed into 2025, as it is decidedly odd this is happening this close to release, and there must be some sort of issue in place. I’ve reached out to Ubisoft and will update if I hear back, but considering how vague these statements purposefully are, I’m not expecting anything clarifying.

The game has drawn fire from the “DEI” crowd saying that featuring Yasuke, a black samurai is “woke,” though that likely has little to do with anything going on here. Ubisoft did apologize to the Japanese community about “promotional materials” for the game, and also called Yasuke a “matter of debate and discussion” in terms of him being a samurai, citing the fact that the games take “creative license.” This was back in July and I do not imagine they are uh, patching Yasuke out here, and these problems have to be on the development side as something may be wrong or the game needs more time to cook and polish, as it is a very important title to Ubisoft in this precarious moment. But you can bet it will be out before the fiscal year ends in March. I’d expect to hear more from them soon.

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