Assassin's Creed Shadows announces more difficulties, more immersion options, more Jesuits, and a bo staff in its year 1 roadmap

Assassin's Creed Shadows: Year 1 Roadmap Update - YouTube

Assassin's Creed Shadows is the tale of Oda Nobunaga's quest to defrag Japan, and in tribute to the daimyō's relentless ambition, Ubisoft has announced its post-launch roadmap for the game consisting of patches, feature drops, and "height-gaining back ejects," which videogames need more of as a general rule.

It looks like Shadows is set for a pretty stuffed year, all told. This month alone it's meant to get a new free quest focusing on Yasuke's Portuguese Jesuit pal Luis Frois, vaguely defined "quality-of-life improvements," a photo-mode update, a "special collaboration" which I'm guessing is some kind of co-marketing thing like that Final Fantasy mission in Origins, and that tweak to the game's parkour.

These tweaks will add the aforementioned back ejects alongside "height-gaining side ejects" and a "vertical ledge jump." You can get a better idea of what on Earth that means in the video up top, but in essence, it's just a few extra ways to make Naoe go up.

I'm curious about the quality of life changes, more than anything. I suspect Ubi will patch back in the multi-sell feature it had to yank out because it kept crashing people's games (mine included), but I'm hoping for a little more, too. It'd be good if horses could move at a full gallop while you're auto-following a road to your destination, for instance, but I also wouldn't mind seeing stuff like being able to easily switch characters in shops (for some reason, Japanese merchants have different items in store depending on which character you're playing) and some kind of quicksave option.

Once May's out of the way, Ubisoft is pledging a new free quest, a new ally, new difficulty settings (which is great news—I've leveled to the point where I'm a human Cuisinart even on Expert mode), and vaguely defined stuff like "gameplay immersion options" alongside an "open world alarm system". Perhaps one of those immersion options will include the upcoming option to show your headgear in cutscenes, but I'm not sure how an open-world alarm system would be different from the game's already-existing alarm system.

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Updates for AC Shadows coming in 2025. — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

Anyway, Ubisoft rounds things off with its plans for some unspecified point in the future. Those include new story stuff, new collabs, new daft Animus gear for the game's weird fake battle-pass system, and—most important of all—the Claws of Awaji expansion, which will add a whole new region to Shadows' already mega-huge map. If you're wanting a date on that, though, you'll be disappointed.

Also, Naoe's gonna get a bo staff at some point, which I have to admit is cool as hell.

And that's it! Sounds good to me. I've got my qualms, but I've had a better time with AC Shadows than I've had since pretty much any AC since Unity (although I reckon Origins is still the narrative stand-out of the recent games). More stuff for it sounds good to me.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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