Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the next main entry in Ubisoft’s long-running open-world historical stab-a-thon series. The big game arrives later this year, and when it does, it will have had the longest development cycle in the franchise’s nearly 20-year history.
Announced in 2022 as “Assassin’s Creed Red”, Shadows is the first main entry in the franchise to be set in Japan—something fans have wanted for some time now—and stars two protagonists. (You’ve probably heard about that as a small but angry portion of the internet has yelled online about it recently.) Ubisoft Quebec, the same studio behind 2018's Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and 2015's Syndicate, started working on Shadows in 2020. That means when it arrives in November it will have been in development for four years, which is longer than normal.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée explained that developing games for extended periods of time like this is all about balance between “time and costs.” And that the real path to success is via iteration, something that takes time.
“The more time you have, the more you can iterate,” said Onnée. “Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in a shorter time, but that doesn’t give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get the feedback from your players, your team… and then see what works and what doesn’t and how to improve it.”
According to the producer, four years offers “the right balance to go from conception to production and get the feedback necessary to adapt.”
How Assassin’s Creed Mirage Helped Shadows
Onnée explained that one example of iteration on Shadows involved last year’s smaller, well-received Assassin’s Creed Mirage. That game took the series back to being a more stealth-focused adventure, something the devs working on Shadows took note of and built upon.
“During production we do playtests with people from different places at different stages,” he explains. “We look at what works and what doesn’t, and we also look at the playtests with Mirage and see what people like. We knew we were going in the direction of stealth with Shadows, and so we saw what they were doing and learned from that. We said ‘Let’s use what they’ve done and build on top of it,’ rather than going our own way.”
The Ubisoft producer added that all of the teams working on various Assassin’s Creed games are “part of the brand” and it’s important that all the studios are talking to each other to avoid “redoing work.”
“Making games is difficult, it takes a lot of time and passion, and you want to avoid doing the same things but differently,” said Onnée.
“You want to build on top of work and improve on it. We have a lot of discussions with other teams to make sure if we’re doing similar things, we can collaborate and so if they want to do something afterward, we can take that into account. That’s what we do with our new Anvil pipeline, which is the tech teams working together. When we build new features, we make sure those features are available for all projects. We are continuing to build and improve all the time.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on November 15.
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