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Assassin's Creed Shadows Has Been Delayed Until February 2025

Preorders have been refunded -- and future preorders will get the first DLC for free.

Headshot of David Lumb
Headshot of David Lumb
David Lumb Senior Reporter
David Lumb is a senior reporter covering mobile and gaming spaces. Over the last decade, he's reviewed phones for TechRadar as well as covered tech, gaming, and culture for Engadget, Popular Mechanics, NBC Asian America, Increment, Fast Company and others. As a true Californian, he lives for coffee, beaches and burritos.
Expertise Smartphones | Gaming | Telecom industry | Mobile semiconductors | Mobile gaming
David Lumb
2 min read
A samurai, Yasuke, smashes into another warrior.
Ubisoft

Ubisoft has delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows until Feb. 14, 2025, stating the team needs more time to refine the game.

Assassin's Creed Shadows, the eagerly anticipated next game in the franchise set in feudal Japan, was set to come out on Nov. 15, 2024. But the company needs more time "to polish and refine the experience, pushing further some of our key features," according to a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) attributed to the game's executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté.

Ubisoft will refund all preorders for the game, and those who choose to preorder the game in the future will be given the first expansion for free. 

Journalist Stephen Totilo posted a quote on X attributed to an Ubisoft financial update that says while the game is actually feature complete, lessons the company learned from the Star Wars Outlaws release led them to give the game additional time for further polish. Totilo also noted that the game will launch on Steam on day one.

Fans of the series have been excited for Assassin's Creed Shadows to finally get to play as both samurai and shinobi, as the two main characters Yasuke and Naoe respectively. This is also the first Assassin's Creed built for the current generation of PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles, resulting in some technological leaps in environmental rendering, as Ubisoft told CNET at Gamescom. 

Read more: Assassin's Creed Shadows Upgrades the AC Engine by Leaving PS4, Xbox One Behind

Assassin's Creed Shadows was also important for another set of platforms not commonly known for gaming: Apple's ecosystem. Côté himself appeared during the tech company's WWDC 2024 presentation in June stating the game would arrive on Mac and iPad on the same Nov. 15 launch date. 

Watch this: Assassin's Creed: Shadows Is the Class of Ubisoft's Iconic Game Franchise