Assassin's Creed Shadows Hit With 4-Month Delay, Will Launch in 2025

Many longtime fans of the series and those intrigued by the concept of Assassin's Creed Shadows have been eagerly keeping their eye on November since the game was formally announced back on May 15 of this year. It's the first major installment since late 2020, and as always they're continuing to push the boundaries of what new technology can bring to the game. Unfortunately, the Assassin's Creed Shadows release date will be a bit later than originally expected.

Assassin's Creed Shadows delayed to February 2025

Ubisoft originally planned to have a presence at this year's Tokyo Games Show, which presumably would've had a heavy focus on the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows, but that appearance was recently cancelled without explanation. Today, Ubisoft released a statement officially delaying the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows by four months.

Marc-Alexis Côté, on behalf of the development teams, revealed that they "need more time to polish and refine the experience, pushing further on some of our key features." With a new release date of February 14, 2025, this appears to give Assassin's Creed Shadows their longest development time for the franchise in years.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey was in development for about three years until being released in late 2018, and the subsequent Assassin's Creed Valhalla also had roughly three years of development before dropping in late 2020. The outlier was the recent release of Assassin's Creed Mirage, which was originally developed as an expansion to Valhalla and had a few years of development before releasing as a smaller than usual standalone title in late 2023.

Assassin's Creed Shadows began development shortly after the release of Valhalla, but it's likely that parts of the team shifting focus to turn Mirage into a full release impacted the ongoing development of Shadows. If the new February 14, 2025 release date sticks without any further delays, this new release will have taken about four and a half years to develop.

Whether that delay was largely Mirage or simply the challenges of perfecting certain new features they're working on, it's not really bad news that the studio is waiting to make it better at launch. Valhalla probably could've been helped by a delay, as it launched as a bug-riddled mess that crashed on PS4 about once every few hours. It was ultimately a fantastic game, but they went ahead with launch despite the existing issues which then had to be addressed in post-launch updates.

Hopefully, the extra development time for Assassin's Creed Shadows will prove worthwhile and the game will drop without the same struggles Valhalla faced. The statement released today also clarified that "preorders will be refunded and all future preorders will be given the first expansion for free." If there aren't any further delays, Ubisoft will likely relaunch preorders and provide an update within the next few months.