Players will experience the intertwined stories of Naoe, an adept shinobi Assassin from the Iga Province, and Yasuke, the powerful samurai of historical legend. Discover their personal stories, meet pivotal historical figures, and shape the duo’s common destiny as they usher in a new era for Japan.
As Naoe and Yasuke, players can master two complementary playstyles, with each character featuring their own progression paths, skills, weapon options, and stats. Whether they embrace Naoe’s stealth skills or Yasuke’s combat prowess, players will have plenty of ways to approach objectives. With Naoe, they will experience refined infiltration mechanics using light, noise, shadows, and changing surroundings to avoid detection from enemies. With Yasuke, they will be able to take on larger groups of enemies with brutal precision.
The game will let players explore a vast open world with a variety of landscapes evolving through weather and seasons. From spectacular castle towns and bustling ports to peaceful shrines and pastoral landscapes, feudal Japan comes to life with unprecedented dynamism built from the ground up with the latest version of Anvil engine and the power of new-gen consoles.
In this troubled period, information is key and will be at the heart of the renewed exploration mechanics. Players will build their own spies’ network to unveil new areas and hunt down targets. Allies with highly specialized skills and abilities can also be recruited to help during missions. The creation of their own customizable hideout will enable players to enhance their network and train their new crew. From base building and layout to decorations and accessories, they will be able to craft a unique place to call home.
No matter who you're playing as, the development team wanted to ensure that as many people as possible are able to enjoy everything that Assassin's Creed Shadows has to offer.
ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES LIST
Visual
- Colorblind options - Ability to change colors for certain gameplay elements from a list of presets
- Screen Narration - Not only most menu items, but also many HUD modules and time-sensitive elements can be narrated
- HUD Customization - Ability to turn all HUD elements on or off either all at once, or individually, either with shortcut or using presets - increase opacity, resize text, resize Icons or add background to increase readability
- Screen shake on/off toggle
Audio
- Subtitles - Better color modifications, speaker directions and speaker emotions
- Gameplay Captions - Surfacing stimuli and points to their origins
- Audio Description for Cinematics - Cinematic will be audio descripted
- Audio Cues/Audio Glossary - New signs and feedback allowing navigation and path finding with non-visual cues
- Separate, isolated audio sliders
Navigation and Guidance
- FTUE - First time user experience flow is back, offering first-access critical options
- Guided Mode - Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
- Tutorials Section - Tutorials can be found in the Codex section at any time
- Menu Tutorials - Always alerts when there are new menu functions
- Conversation Log - Every line can be perused from the start to the end of a dialogue
Controls
- Control Remapping - Remap gameplay inputs, and their action (hold, press, double-press)
- Many inputs devices - Mouse and keyboard, controllers, combinations
- Lock-On Camera - Lock the camera on an enemy
- X and Y axis inversion - Ability to invert the axis for aiming actions
- Stick inversion - Invert the analog-stick behavior
Gameplay
- Stealth and combat each have four separate difficulty settings
- Guided Mode - Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
- Canon Mode - Enable automatic selection of narrative decisions for the "canon" story to unfold
- Melee Attack Mode - Simplifies the combat by using a single input instead of multiple buttons or complex combinations
- Quick Timed Events - Type of input required to complete Quick Time Events can be simplified, or skipped entirely
- Aim Assistance - Four levels of aim assistance are offered (off, light, moderate, full)
Ubisoft UX Director Jonathan Bedard explains more
Assassin's Creed Shadows is an evolution for the franchise, with many elements being rebuilt from the ground up. In what ways did that allow you to change your approach to accessibility?
Jonathan Bedard: Having changed the way we built the game, we had to redo many things, and it allowed us to revisit some elements that weren't working as well as we'd hoped. Certain features benefited from this by being retooled or by simply changing the interface itself - or in some cases, the functionalities - to elevate our offer and our experience to higher standards. One example of that is our input remapping. Not only can you adjust the inputs of any of the buttons, but you can adjust the action of that input, whether you want it to be a hold or a press.
What was the collaboration like with the development team at Ubisoft Quebec?
JB: With every project, we have more and more people interested and invested in the different topics related to accessibility. This was especially true for Shadows; for instance, the audio team was really invested and proposed ways to innovate and push the boundaries of what we do in accessibility. The unflinching involvement of our dedicated accessibility teams in Ukraine, mixed with the enthusiasm in our different studios, made it so we were able to propose new innovative features like audio descriptions for in-game cinematics, which is something not often seen in games.
Are there any new features you're particularly proud of? Or that the community has been requesting for a while?
JB: Audio descriptions for cinematics is something that really made me happy to see come to the game.
Fun fact, while in a director meeting, reviewing the game, we ended up encountering that feature, in a scene that was used as a benchmark for this. It was not supposed to be enabled for that meeting, but we ended up really impressed by how many emotions and actions were transposed through it. It helped me project how this could change the perception of many motivational levers for many of our players needing this because of how well it came out, and how good of a job it did to express the events in the game in a way that really conveys the emotions and subtleties of our scenes.
It also made me happy to see an initiative coming from the team's passion and making its way into the game. This shows how far we've come along in the last few years, in terms of people being aware of and caring about accessibility at Ubisoft. I am proud to see this evolution, awareness, and care spreading and making our games more accessible every time.
Fans pre-ordering Assassin’s Creed Shadows will receive an additional quest for any pre-ordered edition. The Gold, Ultimate, and Collector’s Editions of Assassin’s Creed Shadows were announced as well:
- The Gold Edition will include the base game, the Season Pass (including a bonus quest with additional unlockable content as well as two upcoming expansions) and 3 days early access to the game.
- The Ultimate Edition will include the base game, the Season Pass, the Ultimate Pack and 3 days early access to the game. The Ultimate Pack will contain the Sekiryu Character Pack (Naoe and Yasuke outfit and weapon, trinket and mount), the Sekiryu Hideout Pack, 5 Skill points and a Red and black photo mode filter.
- The Collector’s Edition will include the base game, the Season Pass, the Ultimate Pack, physical content and 3 days early access to the game. The physical content will be a Steelbook, the World map, Naoe & Yasuke Figurine, life-size Naoe's Katana Tsuba, a Wall Creed Scroll, an 84 pages collector's artbook and 2 sumi-e lithographs.
Assassin's Creed Shadows is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store as well as PC (Steam, Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store) on March 20, 2025 at $69.99.
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