It’s rather clear that things aren’t going well for Ubisoft right now. 2024 alone has been full of disappointments and broken promises, not the least of which is in the three AAA titles that they released this year. Two of them were hyped up by the publisher, especially its CEO, and both didn’t meet expectations in the worst of ways. A certain pirate title that kicked things off was a tragedy, then a certain title from far, far away didn’t sell well and was met with mediocre response, and even the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows had issues. The only game that didn’t have a “bad thing” happen to it wasn’t promoted a lot by Ubisoft, and thus didn’t sell well, and its team was disbanded.
Going back to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the game was originally supposed to be out next month but has since been pushed back to February. One of the things that was part of this delay was the dissolving of the “traditional season pass model,” which would’ve granted players early access to certain content. However, with that gone, Ubisoft has decided to lower the price of the game’s Collector’s Edition by $50, as noted by VGC. That means you can get the special edition with numerous additions for just $230. If you don’t know, the Collector’s Edition comes with special statues of the dual protagonists, Yasuke and Naoe, a steel book, an artbook, a life-size katana tsuba, the world map of the game, and more.
As for why the game was delayed, there were numerous stated reasons. Ubisoft will tell you it’s because of the “failure of expectations” with certain recent releases, but those within the dev team and the fans will tell you otherwise. For example, it was reported that the dev team begged Ubisoft to delay the game months before the announcement was actually made.
Then, there are the “historical accuracies” within the title that weren’t caught until trailers were shown off. Some of them were small, such as how the Japanese held chopsticks, while others were huge, like a monument being shown in both the game AND the Collector’s Edition that featured a monument…from World War II! Yeah, that’s not something you’d find in Feudal Japan.
This highlights a very familiar story of Ubisoft putting “getting the game out quickly” so they can “bring in the money” before trying to make the game as polished and refined as possible. Only time will tell if this delay is enough to fix things.
