Following a several month delay to Assassin's Creed Shadows in 2024, we've now starting off 2025 with news of yet another delay. The game will no longer be coming out in February as planned and will instead drop in March ahead of Ubisoft's end-of-year earnings call.
In a new announcement this month, Ubisoft's Marc-Alexis Côté revealed that Assassin's Creed Shadows has been pushed again, this time to March. The move is in order to give the development team “additional weeks” to implement changes based on feedback from recent playtests.
“Since November, we’ve been thrilled to share our progress through Gameplay Overviews, and the overwhelming excitement has truly inspired us. Each week has brought valuable feedback from our community. While we’ve already made remarkable strides, we believe a few additional weeks are needed to implement that feedback and ensure an even more ambitious and engaging day-one experience.”
In an additional statement sent out via press release, Ubisoft CEO, Yves Guillemot, stated that the delay is part of the company's “renewed focus on quality and engaging Day-1 experiences”.
Ubisoft has been in crisis mode for months, after facing a number of high-profile flops with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull & Bones and Star Wars Outlaws. In the case of Outlaws, a very promising game was hampered by day-one bugs and other issues. Ubisoft is now being very careful with Assassin's Creed Shadows in an effort to avoid any major negative headlines on day-one.
Ubisoft's stock price has tanked during that time period as well, leading to talks of a potential buyout between Ubisoft and Tencent. So far though, nothing has come from those talks.
KitGuru Says: I started Star Wars Outlaws for the first time just recently. Based on the version of the game available now, a lot of the day-one criticisms no longer seem to apply. Hopefully Assassin's Creed Shadows can avoid an awkward launch entirely, although you are still going to have a loud group online endlessly taking about Yasuke.