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. 

Today, Ubisoft revealed its Year 1 Post Launch Roadmap for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, highlighting a series of regular updates that will expand the live game experience over time. These updates will contain free content for all players, including additional story content, special collaborations, updates made in response to community feedback, new rewards, and more.

The roadmap outlines specific details for the first few updates coming in May and June, introducing exciting additions to the game such as highly anticipated parkour improvements based on community feedback.

Beyond the usual stability and balancing updates, we plan on dropping free updates on the regular with the goal of continually enrich the experience. Along with the ever-changing Animus content, you can expect new immersion customization options, new difficulty settings, new modes, the highly requested New Game+, free quests showcasing fan-favorite characters, a few very special collaborations, and we are at hard at work on community-driven improvements.

1. New Ally, abilities, activities, and additional backstory that will permanently impact the game
2. Optional paid content
3. Free if pre-ordered the game

CLAWS OF AWAJI 

First and foremost, we have our first expansion - the Claws of Awaji - coming later this year. Free to all players who pre-ordered AC Shadows, this expansion opens up the island of Awaji - a brand-new region for you to explore which continues Naoe and Yasuke's story right after the end of Shadows' epilogue. You can expect new enemies, new abilities for both characters, and a new weapon specific to Naoe - the Bo staff. Stay tuned as we reveal more! Until then, let's have a look at what else you can expect! 

NEW STORY DROPS

The coming months of post-launch will also include multiple free content additions we're calling Story Drops. These new free quests will introduce new player abilities, new allies, new world activities, and provide deeper looks and backstories for some of your favorite characters, each new piece of content expanding on the main game. Our first story drop will be part of the Early May update and is called "The Works of Luis Frois": it will give you a deeper look at the titular historical Jesuit scholar who's work about the Sengoku period of Japan endures to this day. 

PARKOUR UPDATES 

For all you deep parkour enthusiasts, we'll be adding new parkour interactions and optimization, with the first update coming later in May. In this first update, we'll be adding the often-requested height-gaining back-ejects, fully re-animated height-gaining side-ejects, and a brand-new parkour move called the Vertical Ledge Jump, allowing both characters to jump and grab onto awnings and lower overhangs - a move that is particularly handy when wall-runs are not an option. We'll be adding more little parkour tricks and improvements over the course of the year as we perfect them to keep you on your toes!

PHOTO MODE UPDATE

Alongside Parkour, we're expanding the Photo Mode with new filters and stickers, new character poses and facial expressions, and even adding ambient music for you to enjoy. All targeted at giving you more options and comfort when it comes to capturing the beauty of Feudal Japan.

COMMUNITY FEEDBACK UPDATES  

Community feedback has been a core focus of the team throughout development and that's not stopping now that Shadows is released. On April 8, we have deployed our first major patch, which has fixed many bugs and brought numerous quality-of-life improvements, such as Horse-auto follow, urban speed improvements, single mastery nodes reset, and multi-item selection at merchants and at your forge. See the full patch notes here: AC Shadows Title Update 1.0.2 - Release Notes. 

We'll be dropping our second Community Feedback Update in June, which will allow you to toggle your Head Gear on during dialogues and cutscenes, as well as customize your immersion further: you'll be free to disable individual visual effects such as weapon glints during combat, black-and-white (and red) ability filters, target assassination celebration effects, and disabling stealth outlines when your characters is vanished. We are also expanding the Alarm System and are bringing it to the Open-World to give you even more challenge! 

MORE TO COME ON THE REGULAR 

Future updates will bring more free Animus Hub content, a pretty fleshed-out New Game + mode, which will also raise the level cap, and for those of you looking for a challenge, we are hard at work on an even tougher difficulty setting for both combat and stealth that should leave none of you unscathed...

Our plan is to drop these free updates on a regular basis, keeping the experience fresh, enjoyable, and always improving. Not to be coy, but we're also keeping a bunch of surprises under wraps and will be revealing special collaborations and other cool updates soon.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is available for 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) at $69.99.