One of the highly anticipated titles of the year, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been through multiple delays before it’s release and the most recent delay saw the game’s release window pushed further around a month. And according to the Game Director of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the delay was only to help make the game’s parkour mechanics even more robust and fluid when it finally releases in March 2025.
At a recent Preview event for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, game director Charles Benoit, confirmed to IGN that the one month delay was only for polishing the game’s parkour mechanics, and not for making any big or fundamental changes to the game’s systems. However he added that the development team also did “a couple of things in progression” to make the gameplay a bit more engaging and balanced. It’s pretty much implied that aside from polishing up the parkour, the rest of the changes are far more minimal but nonetheless impactful to the gameplay in many ways.
“The Japanese architecture, the roofs [are] super complex,” he said. “Probably the most complex thing that I ever worked with if we compared to Odyssey and Syndicate. We needed specific codes and specific animations to support something super fluid, changing the transition of the parkour to make it even more fluid. So that’s one of the specific feedback that we heard that we wanted to address, and it really improved since the last few months.”
The parkour mechanics is one of the key gameplay elements in the long running Assassin’s Creed series and at this point have become symbolic to the core identity of the franchise so any development time spend on honing the mechanics and making sure it’s as smooth and sublime as it can be on release day is always a great news for the game. This ensures a much more bug-free and stable gameplay experience on release date which has not been the case for multiple titles of the series in the past, for example Assassin’s Creed Unity was plagued with all kinds of bugs and other issues during it’s release window which had negatively affected the game in the long run.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set to arrive on March 20 for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and the PC platform. Ubisoft has also released the game’s Official Story Trailer that focuses on the backstory of the two playable characters in the game, and you can check it out here.
