Assassin's Creed Shadows delayed into early 2025 as pressure mounts Assassin's Creed Shadows has been delayed into early 2025 as Ubisoft faces growing pressure from investors over a poor PS5 generation.Opinion by Kes Eylers-Stephenson Published 26 Sep 2024 FollowtopicsUbisoftDelayedPlayStation 5Kes Eylers-Stephenson Assassin's Creed Shadows has been delayed to Friday, February 14, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It seems polish, refinement, and a new release strategy is responsible for delaying your Assassin's Creed Shadows trophies. Still, it comes as Ubisoft's investors have launched an investigation into poor share prices. If Shadows is one of the best Assassin's Creed games, could it prove a turning point?Ubisoft changes Assassin's Creed Shadows plans for PS5 as poor generation continuesAssassins' Creed Shadows is the 14th mainline entry taking place in 16th century JapanRelease date: Friday, February 14, 2025Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PCIn an open statement to fans, Ubisoft announced the delay to the once imminent Assassin's Creed Shadows after canceling all preview events at Tokyo Game Show. "We realize we need more time to polish and refine the experience, pushing further some of our key features," explains the announcement.The new release date brings the console and the Steam PC release to parity having previously been exclusive to Epic Games. "Additionally, preorders will be refunded and all future preorders will be granted the first expansion for free," the statement clarifies. The rest of the statement explains how disappointed the team is and mostly reiterates the new features in the game.Ubisoft's other tentpole release for 2024, Star Wars Outlaws (check out Lee's review), underperformed and the Ubisoft stock price nosedived to a recent low of €11.42 per share lately, too.The result is that as per Ubisoft's financial update: "the Executive Committee, under the supervision of the Board of Directors, is launching a review aimed at further improving our execution, notably in this player-centric approach, and accelerating our strategic path towards a higher performing model to the benefit of our stakeholders and shareholders."Frankly, you and I, dear reader, probably couldn't care less about the stakeholder benefits, but it looks like the precious decline in the value of Ubisoft has been a major factor in the thinking behind the delay to AC Shadows beyond the "polish" needed. As noted in the letter, Ubisoft is "departing from the traditional Season Pass model," as part of that change.Assassin's Creed Shadows needs to find success for UbisoftWith Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar Frontiers of Pandora underperforming compared to expectations, it's clear that Ubisoft is finding itself under serious internal pressure. In terms of what's wrong with its games, I think the betting on bringing big existing IP to the open-world genres the French company became famous for didn't pan out as expected.Given the success of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, I suspect that Ubisoft expected that using 'bigger' multimedia IP like Star Wars and Avatar would make them go stratospheric. In my opinion, Ubisoft overlooked one thing — everyone was barely tolerating their unchanging open-world game structure in the first place.Assassin's Creed Shadows needs to come in and stop the negative momentum with actual change. I feel like I've said it so often in my last few Assassin's Creed reviews, like my Valhalla review, but the checkmark open-world formula that Ubisoft pioneered in the PS3 era and semi-evolved into an RPG structure over the PS4 generation is simply too shallow. In a world where Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Elden Ring exist to show how deep open worlds can get, it's no longer enough to simply plot us down in a big open space and hope we'll have fun. Even in the 'checklist' open-world style of video games, Ubisoft's titles have generally been outmatched by Sony's titles: Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Ghost of Tsushima.Ubisoft needs to focus on depth, not scale, to bring players back into the fold. How deep can Ubisoft's games get with all of its 16,000 employees working on it? One would imagine they could carve a hole into the center of the earth. Gameplay systems and exploration have been too stagnant for me (and many others) for a whole generation and Ubisoft needs to start looking at meaningful changes.Can Assassin's Creed Shadows deliver that change? I won't know until we get hands-on next year, but there are promising signs with small details like changing seasons. Other aspects, like how interactive the world could get, how much variety the conversations could have, and how reactive the contextual environment is, need to be massively improved. As a baseline, please fix the terrible writing we've had of late, Ubisoft!Those are just my thoughts, though. I've ranked Ubisoft's latest games among the best open-world games on PS5. So, let me know what you think in the comments below and I'll see you down there, TrueTrophies assassins. DelayedPlayStation 5Upcoming Release Written by Kes Eylers-StephensonEditor Kes is our resident expert in PlayStation and Sony news. He writes about PS5 games like LEGO Horizon Adventures, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Concord, and Death Stranding 2 using experience from years of PlayStation gaming. He also covers PS Plus news, as well as his favorite games — The Witcher 3, God of War, and The Last of Us — before an evening swim.