Assassin's Creed Shadows Took Longer To Make Than Any Previous Game In The Series

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the next main entry in Ubisoft’s long-running open-world historical stab-a-thon series. The big game arrives later this year, and when it does, it will have had the longest development cycle in the franchise’s nearly 20-year history.

Announced in 2022 as “Assassin’s Creed Red”, Shadows is the first main entry in the franchise to be set in Japan—something fans have wanted for some time now—and stars two protagonists. (You’ve probably heard about that as a small but angry portion of the internet has yelled online about it recently.) Ubisoft Quebec, the same studio behind 2018's Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and 2015's Syndicate, started working on Shadows in 2020. That means when it arrives in November it will have been in development for four years, which is longer than normal.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée explained that developing games for extended periods of time like this is all about balance between “time and costs.” And that the real path to success is via iteration, something that takes time.

“The more time you have, the more you can iterate,” said Onnée. “Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in a shorter time, but that doesn’t give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get the feedback from your players, your team… and then see what works and what doesn’t and how to improve it.”

According to the producer, four years offers “the right balance to go from conception to production and get the feedback necessary to adapt.”