Fans are celebrating the final update for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which they say finally fixes plot holes and gives the game a proper ending, as Ubisoft admits some elements of the base game missed the mark.
Black Tides, a set of new missions added for free yesterday, serves as the final story chapter for Shadows, Ubisoft’s feudal Japan-set game that launched last year to a mostly positive response.
But while the game’s visuals and world drew praise, long-term Assassin’s Creed fans felt let down by some elements of its story. The blockbuster game’s narrative also ends rather abruptly — seemingly setting up plans for future expansions (of which only one ultimately released).
Now, over a year on, Shadows has been sent into the sunset — but fans seem happy with the work Ubisoft has done to cap off the game’s story and characters. Without delving too far into spoilers, this week’s update features a powerful new Templar threat, directly discusses the franchise’s mysterious precursor Isu race, and features numerous Easter eggs and references to other games in the series. There’s also a direct link here to Black Flag — setting up next month’s arrival of souped up remake Assassins’ Creed Black Flag Resynced.
For Shadows, Ubisoft deliberately sidelined the series’ usual focus on Isu, presumably to avoid alienating new players and to treat the game’s setting with more of a straight face than other entries (Odyssey and Valhalla got proper weird, but enjoyably so).
At this point, though, Ubisoft clearly understands that any fans still playing Shadows a year later want to finally see more of this stuff — but also that it course-corrected too much to begin with.
“We acknowledge some story elements from the main game that the community didn’t resonate with as much as we hoped,” said associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois, the public face of Shadows’ post-launch updates, in a revealing new blog post. “So we’re taking those elements and that feedback and trying to put them to good use and address them in this final chapter. I hope the community is satisfied with where we leave our two protagonists – and hopefully get even more excited for Black Flag Resynced in the process.
“I’m a player too, and very often I agree with the sentiment of the community,” Lemay-Comtois continued, “so when they say things like ‘give us more Templar stuff!’ or ‘give us more reasons to craft equipment builds!’ it’s not hard for me to agree and try to fix, add, or tweak things to meet their feedback. So Black Tides, which is our final story mission for Naoe and Yasuke, is how we kick that door wide open and add more Templar-focused story content to wrap things up. If you are craving Templar content and deep lore connections, you won’t want to skip this one.”
In a thread on reddit discussing the update, fans have praised its story discussing more about the Japanese regalia, locations and characters from previous games, and a persistent fan complaint that Shadows had retconned established lore around the Assassin’s Creed brotherhood’s Japanese origins. There’s positive comments, too, about the difficulty of the update’s final boss — which is as challenging to beat as fans believe is appropriate for the character.
Shadows’ post-launch support has ended on a high note, then, as fans bid what seems like a final farewell to Naoe and Yasuke.
“I know these characters and the Japanese setting have much more left in the tank and I’ll always advocate for doing more with them,” Lemay-Comtois concluded, “but for now, this is the end of their story.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social